This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Henry Gordon-Smith, Founder and CEO at Agritecture, the world's leading urban agriculture blog, consultancy, and now farm planning Software as a Service. In this episode, Henry talks about all things vertical farming, the inevitable hybridization of agriculture, and the founding stories of his company, Agritecture.
This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Henry Gordon-Smith, Founder and CEO at Agritecture, the world's leading urban agriculture blog, consultancy, and now farm planning Software as a Service.
With over 11 years of experience in the field, Henry is a trusted advisor to corporations, investors, and new farmers on vertical farming feasibility, design, marketing, and due diligence. He is also a strategic advisor to several AgTech startups, including Smallhold, and Foodshed.io, and a board member of Indoor Ag-Con, EFUA, and previously Teens for Food Justice.
Henry holds an MSc in Sustainability Management from Columbia University, a BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, and coursework in Food Security and Urban Agriculture from Ryerson University.
In this episode, Henry talks about all things vertical farming, the inevitable hybridization of agriculture, and the founding stories of his company, Agritecture.
“I think most people simply have just been disconnected. As we've urbanized our society, we've been able to do that because of this greed revolution which has allowed us to centralize agriculture and lands far, far away. And the sophisticated supply chain that lets it bring us to anywhere we want in the world. Many of us can eat something from anywhere in the world. That system has led to us and both been part of us moving to cities and becoming more urbanized. And so, food and cities, agriculture and cities became separated when before that they were actually more integrated. Long story short, people don't have that connection to agriculture anymore.” - Henry Gordon Smith
(01:50) Henry’s background
(11:28) Agritecture’s mission
(25:34) The hybridization of agriculture
(28:42) Vertical farming
(42:33) Quick hit questions
(45:34) Final thoughts
[00:00:00] Phil Dillard: Hello, and welcome to Thruline to the Fourth Sector, where we're exploring fourth sector capitalism and impact investing as an invitation to innovation and changing the world. This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, founder of Thruline Networks, and Henry Gordon-Smith, Founder and CEO of Agritecture, the world's leading urban agriculture blog, consultancy, and now farm planning Software as a Service.
With over 11 years of experience in the field, Henry is a trusted advisor to corporations, investors, and new farmers on vertical farming feasibility, design, marketing, and due diligence. He's also a strategic advisor to several ag tech startups, including Smallhold and Foodshed.io. He's also currently a board member of Indoor Ag Con. EFUA, and previously, Teens for Food Justice. Henry holds an MSc in Sustainability Management for Columbia University, a BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, and coursework in Food Security and Urban Agriculture from Ryerson University.
In this episode, Henry talks about all things vertical farming, the inevitable hybridization of agriculture, and the founding stories of his company, Agritecture.
Now please enjoy this interview between Phil Dillard and Henry Gordon-Smith.
Hello again everybody and welcome to another episode of Thruline to the Fourth Sector. I'm your host Phil Dillard here today with Henry Gordon-Smith from Agritecture. How are you doing today Henry?
[00:01:36] Henry Gordon-Smith: I'm pretty good. Thank you, Phil. How are you?
[00:01:37] Phil Dillard: I'm doing pretty good. Getting started. Thanks so much for making the time to be with us. I really appreciate you. You know, we always start with a pretty, what we like to think is a softball question.
So, let me just start with that one. When people ask you, what do you do? How do you describe what you do?
[00:01:54] Henry Gordon-Smith: I say I'm a consultant focused on climate smart agriculture, telling people that, you know, our work is about helping society and agriculture adapt to climate change through technology. And
[00:02:05] Phil Dillard: there's a lot embedded in that.
It's a very, it's a very concise description. I mean, where do people first start to question? Do they ask about the agriculture part, or the technology part, or the climate
[00:02:16] Henry Gordon-Smith: part? I think a lot of people are confused that a job like mine even really exists, partially because they don't know a lot about agriculture.
But sometimes they say something like, oh, you know, my grandfather had a wheat farm, or I actually lived in Iowa for a little while. Like they try to mention something that connects to agriculture, and they sort of don't understand what I do in relation to that. So then I sort of say, well, you know, let's say you want to plan a new kind of farm, a farm that was more modern.
More tech enabled, maybe more efficient, more sustainable. You would hire agriculture and we would guide you, I would guide you with my team through the steps to plan that business, to reduce risk by understanding what crop you should grow, what the yield of that crop will be, what the return on investment will be, what the technology is to enable that growth, who will finance that, et cetera.
Basically sort of accelerating and launching either the optimization of existing farms or more commonly new farms that go through agriculture to get launched. And generally
[00:03:12] Phil Dillard: speaking, do you find that people are, what's their perception of what farming is? Do they still think that it's a family farm in the Midwest of the U.
S. or is it, do they think it's a big corporation with these massive efficient operations? What do people think agriculture is today?
[00:03:28] Henry Gordon-Smith: We work globally and the perceptions of agriculture are vastly different around the world. And I think that often relates to the history of agriculture in that region, where were their parents associated with it?
What did they see when they were younger? What are the common products in that country? I think most people simply just, we've been disconnected. I mean, I talk about this a lot, but as we've urbanized our society, We've been able to do that because of this green revolution that allowed us to centralize agriculture and lands far, far away.
And the sophisticated supply chain that lets it bring us to anywhere we want in the world. Many of us can eat something from anywhere in the world. That system has, has, you know, led to us and both been part of us moving to cities and becoming more urbanized. And so food and cities, agriculture and cities became separated when before that they were actually more.
integrated. Long story short, people don't have that connection to agriculture anymore. I mean, less than 3 percent of the U. S. population is involved in agriculture now. If you looked 100 years ago, that would be over 50%. So that's a pretty big change in just how people are connected to the food system and thus how they value it and understand it.
So honestly, people get really interested in our work and what I do because it's, it's unique and not a lot of people go into agriculture these
[00:04:41] Phil Dillard: days. Yeah, sure. Um, it's an interesting statistic, that significant disconnection in urbanization. And I reflect on my own experience, like when I was a kid, I was born in Philadelphia, but then we moved to the suburbs.
And then, you know, we moved to what was closer to farmland, what was closer to more country. Right, but the sprawl of the suburbs took down the orchards and took down the farms. And there are still some small farms around, but it's a fraction of what it used to be. And people kept saying, you know, where is the food going to come from if we keep building all this stuff on top of what was farmland?
It's interesting now digging more into the supply chain and more into regenerative agriculture and more into how we've lost our way. But it's really tough, I think, for people to understand the disconnection and I really like the way you describe that, that story. It's an important one. So how did you get into this?
Your background is pretty, pretty deep and pretty, pretty focused in this area. How did you get started and what drew you here?
[00:05:41] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah, I definitely didn't come from an agricultural background, nor did I have a green thumb. My parents always liked gardening and they always liked sort of plants and nature, but we grew up, I grew up in big cities.
My dad's an engineer. He traveled around the world. I was born in Hong Kong. I lived in Hong Kong until I was six, in Tokyo until I was 10. So the first 10 years of my life were in some of the most densely populated places in the world. But that also is like where I got inspired by how gardens could be integrated into cities and smaller spaces.
I think also framed a little bit of my thinking of how we approach things in architecture now to sort of optimize space and utilize three dimensional space. But, you know, for me, I just had no interest or awareness of agriculture. It wasn't until my parents got a country house and I started to see them doing their own gardening.
My dad had his vegetable garden, my mom had her flower garden. I basically had to help renovate that house and participate in. Gardening. I became more aware of it and sort of how it works and the benefits of it, but I still wasn't really interested. As a college student, I studied political science. I became aware of the climate crisis and I thought, you know, this is something I need to dedicate my career to.
Like, I don't really understand how anybody can work on anything else. Maybe that's, maybe that's a lot of extreme reaction, but... You know, if the climate is changing and if you accept that humans are a part of it, I think we have a big responsibility to direct business and entrepreneurship in the direction of solving that problem.
And I felt that sort of moment. So I began looking for an intervention into climate change that would interest me. And I had experience blogging, so I started three blogs, and those blogs were a place for me to express my interest in the sustainability topic that I was exploring. And one of those blogs was agriculture, and it was about integrating agriculture back into cities.
Rooftops, basements, with the policies, the investment, the technologies. That really started for me looking across You know, my apartment across my balcony, and there was an empty roof on top of a supermarket. And I started trying to design a farm for that roof. And that's where I started learning about the technologies necessary for that.
How difficult it was to get the data for me to even answer that question. It just wasn't, there was no data available. And that was when the aha moment came that agriculture really. Became a big part of who I am, and I dedicated the next, you know, 10, 14 years to building that idea and sharing that idea.
[00:08:01] Phil Dillard: That's really awesome, and I can't wait to learn a whole lot more about how agritecture works. But I'm, I'm curious, you said, you know, political science, and then you get your master's in sustainability. Was there some event or trigger point or some aha moment on the political science component of this that triggered a shift for you?
[00:08:19] Henry Gordon-Smith: I was interested in political science because I grew up around the world. I speak multiple languages. I have a very global outlook to my life. It's just how it's always been. So being a diplomat was something that felt like a natural fit for me. And that was the direction I got into that. But within political science and international relations, there, you know, is environmental security, which is really about scarcity of resources and how political actors behave on the international stage related to that or various related topics to the environment.
And that really was my first sort of academic sort of analytical lens at climate change that was the connection to political science. And I was really interested in water and I had this visiting professor that really inspired me and I was really investigating Water wars between the U. S. and Canada and the U.
S. and Mexico, mostly U. S. and Canada, but I was interested in all of the sort of NAFTA and the history of those countries, how they fight over water. And it was just so incredible to learn about for how many decades the U. S. has been fighting with Mexico over water and Canada and the U. S., how they fight over water.
And you just don't know about it. And I thought that was like, so interesting to me, like unraveling this onion of what's happening behind the scenes. And how much more difficult that's going to get when there's less water, right? Like, we've been so close to so many conflicts, we've had conflicts over it, that I was getting really nervous about the stability of our global political systems in the context of that insecurity that is going to increase as a result of climate change.
So then I did an internship to explore that further with the International Organization for Migration, and in that sort of transition, I was looking at climate change and refugees. How do refugees that are escaping because of drought or environmental changes or climate change, they're not recognized by the international community, like it's not the same as if you're leaving a war zone.
And so the IOM was trying to figure out, and I think still is, how do we recognize people that are migrating just because of climate change? And how does climate change change the projections for migration? So anyway, that's going a little bit deep there, but that's, that was sort of the connection between the two for me.
And that's when I started shifting like Into climate change.
[00:10:25] Phil Dillard: Oh, it's super great and it's really helpful to see that, that, that lens on it. I think there's a, you know, there's a similar one coming from a military background who came for that. Do those things because we want to see safety and stability on the planet and predictability and the ability for people to live in a safe, environment.
And when you find different lessons about failures of policy or failures that lead to conflict, we go, why is that the case? And as you start to dig at root causes, and you look at something as simple as, well, people want a stable place. They want stable sources of food and water so they can. you know, raise their families and live a simple life where they've called home, it becomes really, really simple.
And then if you think about how much water is required for food and manufacturing processes, and it's the, this critical essence of like critical essence, source of life on the planet, you totally understand how this, we can say, well, gosh, let me look at an area where I have some interest. And I also have like the ability to, to drive some of the change.
Can you describe the mix of what you look at when you think about agriculture? You talk about bringing it into the urban spaces, but I understand there's a pretty broad...
[00:11:38] Henry Gordon-Smith: I started the Agriculture blog in 2011 and the consultancy began in 2014, so reaching 10 years of the consultancy coming up. At the beginning, it was very much about urban agriculture because the name agriculture and the things I was writing about were about growing food in the city.
So that typically is like basically gardens and small commercial farms on rooftops. vacant lots, greenhouses, you know, rooftop greenhouses, greenhouses, you know, in community areas, non profit work, schools. These are some of the projects we, we did. I mean, a high school that wanted to know how much of its food it could grow on sites, you know, things like that.
A special needs school that wanted to teach the youth. How to grow micro greeds and build their own business out of that. A rooftop farm that was struggling and needed some additional support. Uh, we did all kinds of really exciting projects from the very beginning around the world, but they were mostly focused on urban agriculture.
As the rise of urban agriculture in its current form sort of developed around this period, there were people like Dr. Dixon de Pommier who wrote about the vertical farm, and his book is called The Vertical Farm, and they wrote about like integrating actual high tech farming into buildings. And so if I go back to that supermarket rooftop I talked about earlier that inspired me to think about this, I can grow on that rooftop with soil, but I've got a number of challenges with the soil.
The weight of the soil, the fact that when winter comes I can't grow up there, various... You know, downsides, and then there's a greenhouse I could put on there instead, and technologies to control the environment, and then I can grow year round. And that technology play was really interesting to me in the context of the city because I said, if you're going to take advantage of unused space to create a business in a city where things are expensive, you're going to need to have a year round business.
So those technologies started becoming more popular. We started writing about them more in agriculture, and a lot of our work shifted into vertical farming. We became really the go to vertical farming consultants for a lot of planning of new projects. We worked with Kimball Musk, Elon Musk's brother, on their vertical farming business.
We worked on one of the first renewable powered vertical farms. These are typically in warehouses or... unused spaces, or sometimes they're new buildings. And over the 10 years, you know, our work has also included things like policy work, outdoor agriculture, in some cases, it's not hydroponic, where we use IOT and AI and sensors to help optimize how farmers can respond.
in outdoor agriculture. That's kind of precision agriculture. So we've broadened a bit. That's why I use the term climate smart agriculture now, which some people don't like that term, but for me, it is about using technology to adapt to the climate. That's why I like it. And I think it's like thinking in a smart way about the business and the technology necessary to adapt to climate change.
But really, anything that's more like resilient agriculture is what we get passionate about. Things that can withstand the shocks, you know, that agriculture is already facing will continue to face. So we do a lot of fruits and vegetables. We don't really do animals. To be that clear, our work is mostly fruits and vegetables and horticulture.
Sure.
[00:14:43] Phil Dillard: So a lot of conversations about agriculture talk about breaking the existing system or transitioning the existing system, as you described, right? You urbanize, you push these things out, you're disconnected. And then people said, well, let's bring some things in. Let's take care of these extra spaces.
We get green roofs, we get green gardens, we get local foods, so on and so forth. Right? And then the, the vertical and hydroponics, aquaponics, give you all sorts of variation there. Are there any. You know, key takeaways, rules of thumb that you've learned that says, here's how people should think about this for their city, for their level of engagement.
Because some people are like, okay, we've got to do all these backyard gardens, and that's going to help solve the problem. Then you have a problem of year round availability. You have the challenge of, if you have a blight, on whatever you're growing that you need to have trade with other places. There are like these friction points, then the concept of saying being closer and more connected to my food to actually implementing them in a system that provides food security and the ability for trade.
That's a, I think a big macro. discussion and trying to figure out how you frame that when you're talking with people in a macro sense as opposed to a specific project sense.
[00:15:56] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah, I think that's a great question, Phil. Even when we're talking now about agriculture, it's difficult to talk about in a consistent way for some of us because it's so broad.
Like agriculture means so many things. I think it's a really great question. How do you How do you frame that? How do you think about it? Where do you begin? What are the best practices? I think one of the places I like to really think and begin with is just design thinking, right? Where you say, okay, let's make a list of all the problems that relate to agriculture and food in our city.
If the question is a Again, you can do the same thing for a business person, but let's just say a city, right. Let's look at all the issues with agriculture in our city, okay. We've got 25 percent of our population that has food insecurity. That's not uncommon. So they have to walk a longer distance to get fresh food.
They're not educated about it. That's a pretty massive economic, social, racial problem, right? So that's often one that arises, but you want to list all the issues. We have heat waves. You know, we have when storms happen, our systems flood, right? And that costs X amount of dollars. So like we have to go through that list and imagine all those things.
And we say, okay, if we look at all of these, what is the most important existential threat to our communities? You know, if we had to break it down to one and you're never going to have just one, but try to distill it into one problem. And so, for example, if it is a place like. Like a lot of major cities like New York where there's a lot of rainfall.
I'm not saying this is their main problem, but there's a lot of rainfall, a lot of costs, so they've incentivized rooftop farms and green roofs to slow down the rainwater because they're trying to target that problem specifically. That process is very important. So what is the biggest issue and then go and make another list and make all the possible solutions.
Rooftop farms, vertical farms, school gardens, farms with supermarkets, like whatever your ideas are, list them out and then try to Discuss as a group, you know, what is the idea from there? That's the best. And then you have a sort of a framework of like, at least you're looking broadly. The second piece I like to look at is allow yourself to imagine what interventions, what actions you would do to respond to that, to solve that problem, like the last one you had.
But, you know, remember every single. Urban farm can have a different social, environmental, and economic impact. If you want to make money, you're probably going to go for a hydroponic or greenhouse or year round. If you want to improve access and equity, you're probably going to go for a lower tech, more open, volunteer based solution.
And there's just like a spectrum of different urban farms, right, from low tech to high tech. And across that spectrum, you have trade offs on those pros and cons. And that's why we're agritecture. Because we actually practice design thinking in the context of agriculture, which very few companies do, very few firms do.
And we remain agnostic. We don't say, Oh, it's always a greenhouse. It's always, we step back, we look at the bigger picture and we design, you know, we, we conceptualize what the right impact is. But I think that's the advice, the framework I sort of give people is use design thinking. And then also, you know, think about the spectrum of impact.
What is the impact you want to make? And I can give an example, you know in Paris they had a very popular urban agriculture competition where they worked with landlords to create access to spaces in the city where urban farming entrepreneurs and non profits could apply to get those spaces and get preferential lease rates or whatever.
They did that primarily because they had these heat waves where thousands of people died across France and they want to cool the buildings. Most of the winners, although there were some hydroponics, some mushrooms, some indoor, most of them were rooftop farms. You know, because that was what they wanted to achieve, right?
They wanted to cool the city. while producing food. So I think, you know, you need to focus on what the impact is and target it. And we've done this with our work, whether it's some of the work we've done to advise New York or Atlanta or Paris, we've worked with a number of cities advising them on how to think about that.
That's
[00:19:32] Phil Dillard: super. And it really helps showcase that challenge at its policy level, at a city level, right? Or at least, or a metro area level, right? Because you really need to say, what is it that we're trying to achieve and what What can we do through our incentives, our policy structures or incentives to deliver that result?
I really appreciate that. And I'm sure I know, especially now, it's more and more in demand at different places around the world. You know, the heat wave this summer across the U. S. has got a lot of people thinking. There's a whole bunch of ways to dig into that. I'm going to stay in talking about agriculture on land because there's another conversation going on, on ocean permaculture, but I don't know if you guys are, are digging that into that at all.
When you expand that out of the out of a city to a state level discussion. It also seems like one where you guys have a lot of relevant insights. I mean, if I think about the state of California and I compare versus the state of New York, right? I compare San Francisco and Sacramento and Oakland and LA and San Diego.
Very different cities, some are closer than others. You know, what I might do in the city or the Bay Area may not necessarily work the same for Sacramento. Have you guys had any experience in expanding that out to a broader food system, whether it's a regional food system or a statewide one? Because it seems that the policy incentives should be driving what's best for the health and welfare of the community, but also for like A stable food system economically outside of one city.
And it seems like that level of complexity just adds another layer to the discussion. What do you think about that?
[00:21:10] Henry Gordon-Smith: When we think about, you know, where the vast majority of our food is still going to come from, it's not going to come from cities, right? So it's very important that rural areas and agricultural areas are protected.
In fact, some of these areas actually experience food insecurity in this weird paradox because they're not in urban areas where they have access to all these food options. But anyway, most cases, these farms are in decline, you know, in most cases, you know, they're aging out, there's problems with the labor force, there's problems with the climate, there's problems with regulation affecting them.
It's really in crazy tough work. That's part of why we're having a renaissance in farms closer to the city and in cities as the newer generation says, you know, I think I want to do agriculture, but I want to do with a tech twist. I want to do something that's more marketing, which means closer to the consumer.
So that's part of the transition, but the biggest transition needs to happen is to help current farmers. be profitable and be more efficient with their use of the land and help them reduce their impact on the land because they want to, they really would like to, but they have so many difficulties. So I think, you know, federal policy or state policy is critical in that.
And in the context of states, you can actually bridge the urban and rural divide through urban agriculture and state agricultural policy. I don't think many places have done this well, but If you think about it, the urban farmers themselves have less experience, but they're more accustomed to making technology decisions.
They're more accustomed with dealing with money and raising money and creating innovation. And they're more accustomed typically with marketing and accessing customers. While rural farmers are more accustomed with scale, they're more accustomed with efficiency and operations, and they just have experience that's unparalleled.
If these two groups were talking to each other, the hybridization of the blurred lines between urban and rural, the blurred lines between a high tech farm and a low tech farm, also really interests us in agriculture because that's where you can Really have an interesting experience with design to find the right fit.
It doesn't have to be a vertical farm that's super fancy and roboticized and automated. It could be, I once saw a small vertical farm that was in an old washing station of a citrus farmer in Fresno, California, just so he had extra income on the weekends as he brought fresh lettuce to the farmer's market, as opposed to waiting for the harvest of his citrus, which takes a long time.
And I was like, okay, this is really cool. Like this is the blurred lines between what is a vertical farm doing out in the middle of nowhere in Fresno. And I think that that's because he thought about a problem he had. He's like, Oh, it would be great to have some cashflow, you know, but I don't want to take part of my field.
I don't want to deal with field agriculture. I want to do something small, something that's going to space efficient, and it's going to give me something every week. And he did it, you know, and I think that's really interesting.
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Yeah, I think that's really interesting too. I'm glad you went there. When you started talking about the blurred lens, I was going to ask, you know, for examples of that. Because like, I saw that at my local farmer's market. I live downtown San Francisco. I'm in North Beach. You know, it's a quaint old neighborhood.
We have a nice little farmer's market, block and athlong. Some people are regenerative and organic farms. Then there's this one group. They grow mushrooms in a warehouse. On the other side of town, like normal mushrooms, like mushrooms you eat, but like, they're like, yeah, this is, you know, urban agriculture that helps supply something into the food shed that they're really, really excited about.
And it just seemed like another one of those, one of those places. So for you guys to kind of connect the blurred lines, is this something you're seeing that's evolving and becoming part of a business that says, I want to help folks. figure out more of, more ways to drive revenue or more ways to share best practices.
You know, we, we spoke a little while back with a guy who was creating a communications platform for farmers globally. And his point was to, if I'm growing wheat and you're growing wheat, or I'm growing mushrooms and you're growing mushrooms, maybe we could share some things that we've seen about what to do when extreme heat wave happens, or when.
Certain other things happen or what to do with certain types of seeds in certain environments. And if we can share all that information, we can get smarter. It's similar like small landholder, rural farmers who were, you know, not big plays and didn't have a whole lot of access to, you know, experts like you.
I guess I'm trying to figure out what's evolving for you in terms of that model. And is it something that's intentional or something that's actually a trend that you're accelerating or a mix of something in between?
[00:26:52] Henry Gordon-Smith: We've written quite a bit about the hybridization of agriculture because we've sort of seen it spill over into our projects as we've been a bit more creative.
Like sometimes a client comes to us and they say, Oh, I want to build a vertical farm and we show them the economics. And it's like, looks better for a greenhouse than a vertical farm. We start to say, okay, where are the lines between this vertical farm and this greenhouse? And maybe we combine them. We end up with a project that has multiple different technology systems.
And in the end, it's like really the clients that take these risks to say, okay, I want to sort of pilot and push the boundaries of how these systems work together, or the farmers take that risk. And our job is to try to run as accurate. scenarios as possible and give them the data to make that choice.
Where we're seeing this happen a lot is in the Middle East because the Middle East, you know, really is on a very aggressive mission to become more food secure, all of the GCC countries overall, the Middle East itself and North Africa has large population growth and is also. Most of the water scarce countries in the world, like extreme water scarce countries in the world are in that region.
So they really are in for a lot of trouble. They don't have a very strong, with the exception of Egypt and some countries in the Middle East, but the GCC itself doesn't have a very strong history of agriculture. So whatever is being proposed there, even for us, when we propose ideas there, it's like, okay, but that hasn't really been proven in this market.
So we're doing a lot of projects now that are like, new cities, where your agriculture is like the theme of the city. And like, so the lines are already starting to blur because of the scale of the project, because how difficult the region is. So for example, working on a project right now where the client was basically like, you know, we thought we had water, but we actually have no water.
So they're like, what can we do with no water? And so we started looking at, well, what can we do with saltwater, where there's, there's a lot of saltwater. So we started looking at where we grow that, how we could turn that into biomass for energy to produce something else. And so that also becomes a hybridization of systems, you know, that are typically more monoculture are now being combined.
And I think that's a very exciting chapter because I think simultaneously you're going to see technology added to low tech solutions. And you're also going to see low tech solutions advance. Small technological innovations that will advance. I'm excited to get more into that, for sure, in our work in agriculture.
Yeah,
[00:29:12] Phil Dillard: that sounds really, really exciting. You said something earlier about, you know, there's only a certain percentage of food that can be grown in the city, right? And as you were talking about that, I was thinking at the end about the comparison of, like, San Francisco versus New York versus, say, Dubai.
Right. And I would expect that because of the profile, there is a much higher percentage of food that could be and likely would be grown to create a food secure Dubai, for example, than a food secure San Francisco because of the geography, because of the economics and those sorts of things. Have you found anything that gives you an indication of like what the tipping points are, what the balance points are?
By that I mean, like, I know that vertical farming is great at growing greens. And maybe some smaller fruits, but getting, you know, strawberries to blueberries to apples, that's a tougher thing, for example, for vertical farms. Have you found any sort of trends or key factors that would drive one or the other of these, of the mix of that capacity?
[00:30:14] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah, so typically when you have urban farms, they're limited to things that have pretty fast growth cycles. Because again, you're tend to be paying a lot more for your capital cost and your operational cost being in a city or being tech enabled. So you really want to get that cash flow a lot faster and there's not a lot of value at waiting for a pomegranate or an orange to grow in the city.
But yeah, if you can grow something that's specialty and high value, mushrooms. Things like that. You see some farms that are having cucumbers and tomatoes a little bit bigger. You see greenhouses. When you go into vertical farming and you replace the sun with artificial lights, you create a new obstacle to overcome.
Where, where, what is the amount of energy that's going to be worth it to grow when it's in this vertical farm? If I grow an avocado tree in a warehouse in Brooklyn, okay, it's going to take years before I get my fruit. And I've spent all that money. Not on free light, but on light I paid for. The biomass itself producing that doesn't make me money.
It's a fruit. So if I grow lettuce in that warehouse, I can grow a lot more. I can stack it. I can grow it quickly. So, you know, it's still pretty limited in its crop variety simply due to that. technological nature of it and the loss of efficiency from electricity into the planet, photosynthesis. So there's a huge benefit to free sunlight that allows us to grow the variety of things we grow and I don't think that can really fully be replaced.
Now, I want to talk about your question of, well, how can it actually make an impact, right? If it's, if it's just a few crops. There's a couple of ways to look at that, that impact, okay? In the United States, most of our leafy greens come from Yuma, Arizona or California, Central Valley, California. 95%, I think, of leafy greens come from that.
That doesn't really make sense either. Like we don't have that much water in those regions. Why are we growing lettuce when we can grow them in systems that can recirculate? Why are we growing lettuce that like goes bad very quickly when you ship it? Uh, why are we growing lettuce that is the second after, I think, sweet melons, the second most food unsafe product in the United States where you can get E.
coli on it? Why aren't we growing those things indoors, close to the consumers? That's how we think smart about the system, right? Some things make sense to grow closer to consumers, where the value of freshness, the security of, of the cleanliness matters. And some things don't matter. Like something should always be grown outdoors.
Wheat, wheat stores well, corn stores well, ships pretty well, you know, soy as well, we don't need to grow those things indoors. So I think when you think about the food system that we want, it's not that everything's urban, it's that urban farming complements and disrupts some very inefficient forms of agriculture that exists now.
And that's an addressable market, that's a viable business, that's an important potential sustainability and resilience impact, and it's very easy to be like, okay, we can't grow that much. Now, vertical farms are growing, to answer your other question, sorry, there was a lot of questions in there, but strawberries, verticals are growing strawberries, they're moving into other berries, we're seeing a lot of specialty crops, saffron is being experimented with, see people trying vanilla, different things, mushrooms are taking off, so there is a variety in there, but again, just to help people understand why what Why does it matter to grow some of those fresh products close to the consumer?
That's the reason why. And one more point is, if you take a step back and you look at urban agriculture globally, it already is estimated to provide about 10 percent of the food supply. If you go to a place like Bangkok, or if you go to a place, a city like Nairobi, it's not uncommon to see certain animals, chickens, goats, other things, being grown in the city, produced in the city, and traded.
And so, you know, on a global scale, urban agriculture in its more simplified form, its low tech form, actually does produce a pretty wide variety of products, especially if you look on the edges of the city where there's more vacant spaces, there is actually significant production happening. And if you just look at fruits and vegetables again, and more like a developed world perspective, like New York City or U.
S. cities, You just have to take a look at the past. You know, World War II, I think it's estimated that 40 percent of the fruits and vegetables were grown in cities at victory gardens that residents were asked to develop and manage to adapt to the supply chain challenges of the war. They were able in many ways to avoid rations that occurred in World War I.
I may be reversing those two years, but there's a history there that's fascinating where we know that urban agriculture itself makes us more resilient to shocks. It makes us more adaptable to it, and actually, 40 percent is really significant, and you know what, the outdoor farmers, they grew something else, because the cities were growing these fruits, and they grew other things, and the whole system improved.
Now, Phil, for me, the part where I get concerned now is, my parents could adapt and build a victory garden pretty easily, they had the skills, but my generation, and certainly the generation after me, They don't have the skills. We know how to use our phones, you know, so, you know, the new farms, the new urban farms, the new victory gardens need to have technology to be sexy.
We need to make farming sexy again. And I think urban agriculture is more sexy. It's more interesting. It's more exciting. It's more fun. It's more challenging. It's got so much potential. It's not fully figured out yet. So that all creates innovation and excitement. And that's part of what agriculture wants to promote is a next generation.
So that we can adapt to these inevitable shocks that are going to happen, that are happening.
[00:35:45] Phil Dillard: I think there's another part of it that there's, there's sexy in it. There's also potential for community in it. Like, um, I don't know what's attractive to people, you know, across different generations. But I, you know, I talked to somebody a little while ago, Gen Z.
They were a bee tracker, and somebody else who was a Gen Z mushroom forager, and I was like, what's a bee tracker? They're like, well, we go out and we like look for bees and we find them and then we like paint them so we could find, figure out where their hives are and like map them and it's a hobby.
Right? Same thing for the people who are foraging for mushrooms. Same thing for the Presidio says, come out and volunteer for the Presidio, help the Presidio be green, work in the nursery. Help us grow some more native plants to restore the beauty of the, of the wildlife. And people will get really excited about that.
And I think that's one way to touch it. I'm very curious about like, you know, the other ways that you're finding to make that sexy and to draw, draw people in, because it seems like to be part of the comprehensive story. One of the things we hear a lot is people are, they feel overwhelmed. There's nothing they can do.
Everything's going to hell in a handbasket and they just don't know where to start. And I think you point out a couple places where people can start. But I wanted to come back to something you said also about the supply chain. If I'm a local farmer or I'm a local, I aspire to be a local urban farmer, you know, I want to grow some of this.
Somebody else, I want to grow tomatoes because they should be close to the consumer. Somebody else who was growing tomatoes and shipping them in the city says, that's great. I want to grow something else. But there's got to be a mechanism for the supply chain to shift so that such that the balance comes out, right?
I don't want that person to grow a bunch of tomatoes and come to market and realize there's a glut of tomato and my economic model is now. You're screwed. Do you guys do something in helping people plan the shifts of those models? Because it's not like you want to plan the economy, but you do want to give people transparency of what the market's going to
[00:37:40] Henry Gordon-Smith: look like.
Yeah, I think in regards to our work, we work with our clients to understand the market, including quote unquote conventional farmers that may be producing something that they're going to displace or competing with. It's important to understand what that wider system is like. And we try our best to make our clients aware of that.
Same thing goes for cities that we're talking to when we're encouraging urban agriculture and working with them. You know, we take a look outside of the city as well and think about what's being produced there. I mean, what lens you can look is you can say, okay, well, it's capitalism, right? So you know, there's going to be winners and losers and there's transitions in the economy as technologies evolve.
That's a very like realistic sort of cold way of looking at it. You know, you could become more data driven and, you know, about it. And I think there is a case for. Cities themselves having databases about the food shed beyond their borders, ideally with some updates on, on how it's progressing and that bridging with what urban farmers could do to compliment that.
I think that you also want to create these pathways to rural farms. So if somebody is planning an urban farm and they have investments like, well, maybe we can convince you to invest in the farms upstate New York instead. And I think that's also good dialogue to have. A big problem is that the data is not great, you know, in agriculture.
I think what agriculture is doing a lot of is we strive to get good data for our clients, for individual projects. And more recently, we have built a software that allows people to do market research and model out their farms online. And we've spent a lot of time to develop that. And that is sort of our first step into scaling up our design thinking approach, our data driven approach.
and making it accessible to many more new and existing farmers around the world. So that's called agriculture designer. That's what the software does. I would love for it to go deeper. So I'd love to work with regions to, again, get data from the government level that can be fed into this so that people planning farms can be more informed, as you mentioned.
So I think, I think there's a lot of potential there. I think another point to make though is Again, it's, it's a capitalist society, but if we really look at a lot of the subsidies in agriculture are going to inefficient or environmentally damaging farms. So we do a lot to protect farmers, which I don't think is necessarily bad, but I think you have to give a lot of credit to urban farmers that it's easy to make fun of them.
You say, well, how are you going to be successful or your farm is so small or you're growing only this, but they build these farms typically without any incentives. You know, whether it's from the volunteer side, the nonprofit side, what it takes to get a piece of land in the city, what it takes to maintain it, what it takes to activate that, it's extremely difficult.
And I think, you know, should get just as much respect as someone who maintains farmland and agriculture land and gets loans and incentives and subsidies for just doing what they've always done, you know, so I think that is. Like not an even playing field, right? The tomato going back to your tomato example, that tomato grower may be getting huge subsidies to produce that product.
They may have huge amounts of waste when they transport that product to the city and that urban farmer, you know, I wouldn't, I don't feel bad for them competing with that. I don't think that's wrong at all. I think it's totally cool.
[00:40:59] Phil Dillard: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I love the idea of the designer product, right, to use technology to help people figure out what they can, what they can do and what its impacts would be.
It just makes a ton of sense. It goes back
[00:41:14] Henry Gordon-Smith: to that rooftop for me, right? Like I couldn't get the data to even create the closest thing to a business plan about my idea because there's no data on yields and agriculture. Like I can't go online in 2023 and be like, okay, if I'm growing a tomato in a greenhouse, in a vertical farm, in soil based, in this region, at this size.
What can it grow? There's no, no software, no database that can do that. Our database can do that. We've done that work. We've created that for the first time. And it goes back to solving the problems that I had as a young kid. I'm just a young student with big ideas. You know, I want people's ideas to be.
able to be developed, especially in the context of agriculture.
[00:41:53] Phil Dillard: And it seems like the more data you capture, the more incentive people have to share data. You know, if you build a coalition of urban, urban farmers, or a coalition of vertical farm companies saying, we're going to share different yield data for mutual benefit inside the industry.
[00:42:08] Henry Gordon-Smith: They don't really share, unfortunately, like we've had to come as like a third party group. Like I tried in my early parts of my career to create a lot of associations and collaboration. Yes, there were some companies that would collaborate, but any company that was really like succeeding and got investment.
They wouldn't share anything, you know, really. So you can create those communities to like influence policy together and collaborate together with policy, but they don't share data.
[00:42:33] Phil Dillard: Does it get a
[00:42:33] Henry Gordon-Smith: different model though? Yeah, I think that there are definitely incentives among smaller companies to share the data.
I think the incentive disappears when you raise significant amounts of money. I think the incentive changes where it's actually about. being more secretive after that. And so I think that's what's difficult because a lot of just a vertical farming in particular, as they've gotten bigger, they've become more secretive.
And now there's been a lot of failures. So I think what we've done is pretty revolutionary to even give Any access to data on what those farms perform like, I think is a pretty, yeah, again, one of a, one of a kind step that we did that I'm really proud of our team for doing, but it's not based on farmer sharing data.
It's based on our professional, our process, our methodology, our historical data, and our, our professional. Perspective on the data that people could ask, scenarios that we project for people and we allow them to manipulate.
[00:43:28] Phil Dillard: That's really, really impressive and sounds like super refreshing and very much needed.
So really, really excited to hear about that.
[00:43:36] Henry Gordon-Smith: Good. Everyone should sign up. Free trial.
[00:43:39] Phil Dillard: So we're getting towards the end and I want to get you with our quick hit questions. We have four questions. Well, three or four questions that we ask everybody. Rapid fire. So, um, the first one, um, 10 years from now, What does success look like to you?
[00:43:53] Henry Gordon-Smith: For me, ideally, the company is even more global than it is now. I want to be doing a lot more work in the developing world. I want to connect physical spaces where people can learn about this topic, agriculture, sort of training centers with the digital repository. So, a lot of that relationship between what's happening on the ground and the real data is feeding into a digital platform that everyone can benefit from.
That's where I want it to be. I want to be the go to Data source for planning farms globally.
[00:44:22] Phil Dillard: Outstanding. That's an awesome vision. So second question. Um, right now, outside of your company, is there a project or program that really inspires you? Outside
[00:44:32] Henry Gordon-Smith: of my company? It's like, well, uh, agriculture is like all I do sometimes.
No. Um, what inspires me outside of my company? That's a good question. I mean, I just have so many fewer hobbies than I did when I was younger because running a company, being a solo founder takes a lot. I don't know. I'm on a, I'm on a very. Peace. I don't want to say very strict, but I'm on a very intentional fitness regimen and I'm achieving my results.
That brings me a lot of pleasure. It's my fitness routine.
[00:45:02] Phil Dillard: That's great. I understand how it can be all consuming. You have a pretty ambitious endeavor. It's
[00:45:08] Henry Gordon-Smith: a warning to people. It's like, it becomes part of your entire life. Yeah. There's pros and cons
[00:45:13] Phil Dillard: to that. Exactly. What's the most important thing that individuals can do to influence governments or corporations for a better future in your
[00:45:23] Henry Gordon-Smith: space?
I think you can vote with your dollars. I mean, I think like spending your money and encouraging other people to spend money that are actually in a conscious way that's based on their values is probably the most important thing you can do in addition to. And this is for like the regular person, like something that's easy that everybody can do is just when you go to the store and you're buying something and you're buying food, just ask the question, where did this come from?
Who grew this? You know, try to give yourself a little bit more consciousness before you put down that money and give a vote. Says, I want more of these bananas that are sprayed with pesticides and grown by child labor.
[00:45:58] Phil Dillard: Right. Super. And then a corollary to that is what's the most important thing that governments and NGOs can do to lead to a better future in this space?
[00:46:07] Henry Gordon-Smith: Governments and NGOs are quite different, but I would say, um, I don't know, some of these organizations are just bureaucratic machines that just continue. So I've tried to, I would say, keep the data fresh that's guiding your actions. As long as they're like data driven and listening to the people or what's actually happening, I think that's probably the most important thing they can do is.
Is not be solving problems that are never going to be solved or already have been solved just because you're an organization and you exist. Yeah, I could see that. That really is what matters to me as a social or environmental entrepreneur. When I was transitioning from my political science studies into business, I had no idea.
So I started talking to successful business people that my parents knew. And they were like, Oh, Henry, business is just finding a problem and solving it better than anyone else. And I was like, that's. Sounds like really interesting. What problems do I want to solve? And I just wanted to solve a problem related to climate change, but you can choose whatever problem you want to solve.
Like, if you want to build a better beanbag or a better wheel or whatever, you can. Or you can look at society or the environment, your city, your community, and you can actually build businesses around solving those problems, which I think is just so cool that we can even do that. You know, that you can, you can monetize impact is really exciting and it's a different kind of business in many ways and how you run the culture of the company and what you experience.
But I think it's more fulfilling. Yeah,
[00:47:30] Phil Dillard: and the first part is trying to figure out what problems you want to solve, because you have to know yourself.
[00:47:34] Henry Gordon-Smith: That's hard for a lot of people. Yeah, and I always advise people to explore their options, right? Like, find low investment ways to Like, I started three blogs on Tumblr, experimented with it for six months, picked one.
So, like, you need to experiment to find out what you like. And I think I did that well. Yeah,
[00:47:51] Phil Dillard: that's a really, really neat way to get after it. I'm assuming that writing and communications were strengths for you and that, and that it gave you opportunity to test some things out and go, you know what, I think I can do this, which is great.
I really appreciate that and hope to highlight that in the, in the show notes for folks who are saying, how do I figure out which of these problems to solve because there are so many.
[00:48:11] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah, that is one specific way you can do it. I recommend it a lot. And like, yeah, I was maybe good at blogging, but some people are really good at other things.
And you can always find a way to apply your talent, whatever that talent is, to advancing your career.
[00:48:25] Phil Dillard: Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. I think that's a strong ending. So I want to thank you very, very much for your time. It was really great to speak with you and, um, you know, look forward to seeing the amazing things that you and your company do in the future.
[00:48:38] Henry Gordon-Smith: Thanks. I appreciate that, Bill. Take care. Enjoy your weekend.
[00:48:40] Phil Dillard: Definitely. Definitely. And thanks everyone for joining. We'll see you next time. Please take a moment to rate and review the show and join us each week for a new episode.
Phil Dillard: Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this episode of Thruline to the Fourth Sector. I'm your host. Phil Dillard. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a rating and tell a friend. To learn more about the four sector economy, visit ThrulineNetworks. com. That's T H R U L I N E networks.com. Thanks again, and we hope to have you with us in the next episode.