Consumers are coming face-to-face with one of the climate’s most significant impact on the environment – the food we eat. More frequent extreme weather events are disrupting agricultural production. Crop yields are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, droughts, floods, and pests, leading to reduced harvests and lower food availability, ultimately affecting the entire supply chain.
One solution to the growing uncertainties of food security is vertical farming. Through advancements in technology, robotics, and AI, we have the ability to develop, grow, and harvest crops vertically in warehouses.
I recently spoke with Irving Fain, the Founder and CEO of Bowery, the largest vertical farming company in the USA, about his journey into vertical farming and the innovative strategies his company employs to tackle food security challenges. Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation, where Irving shares insights into Bowery’s mission, the benefits of vertical farming, and the future of agriculture.
Christopher Marquis: Let’s start at the beginning, what was your inspiration for founding Bowery and in general your inspiration for pursuing vertical farming?
Irving Fain, the Founder and CEO of Bowery
Irving Fain: I’m from a family of entrepreneurs. From a young age, I witnessed the excitement of building and creating and felt a strong connection to that path. From eight years old, I constantly was getting involved in side hustles and my own entrepreneurial endeavors; some were more successful than others. I started my post-grad career in investment banking and raising capital for late-stage companies – the type of companies I eventually wanted to start. I wanted to build something that addressed a complex societal challenge, but I hadn’t quite put my finger on what that “something” could be until I founded Bowery.
My first real exposure to the power of digital transformation started during my time at Clear Channel, where I was part of a small team helping an old-school radio company move into the digital age. While there, my team and I pushed the company to embrace the shift to mobile with the launch of the iHeartRadio app – a product I helped build and run. From there, I founded my first company, CrowdTwist, a loyalty and analytics SaaS provider for large brands like PepsiCo and Nestlé. There is nothing like actually building and running a company to teach you how hard and difficult the journey truly is. I never would have been able to build Bowery without this experience. We were fortunate to sell the company to Oracle in a great outcome for everyone.
Before founding Bowery, as I was thinking about what was next, I started exploring some of the most pressing and difficult problems facing the world today. I spent time on waste, recycling, plastics, and of course, the world of agriculture immediately attracted my attention. Agriculture is arguably the oldest and largest industry in the world, yet compared to other industries, it has had less focus on digitization. Transforming our agriculture and food system to work for the new climate realities we face today (and the ones that are coming tomorrow) felt like an urgent challenge. The more time I spent in this broader area, the more excited I got. While I started looking at the broader agricultural system, I was particularly interested in how to help rebuild the fresh food supply chain to be more sustainable and efficient. On top of the climate challenges, over the next 30 years, 70-80% of the world’s population is going to be living in and around cities. We must rethink how our agriculture supply chains, particularly in fresh, perishable foods, are going to function. Vertical farming and the broader controlled environmental agriculture (CEA) industry is an exciting step in this direction.
Marquis: How is vertical farming a more sustainable alternative to traditional agriculture?
Fain: For the last 10,000 years agriculture has been focused on solving for variables outside of our control like rain and weather. We’re flipping that equation on its head. We’re able to control the variables such as climate by growing crops in commercial-scale indoor farms, vertically stacked under lights that mimic the spectrum of the sun. Since our produce is grown independent of weather and seasonality, our smart farm environments are 140+ times more productive than traditional agriculture and grow food efficiently and reliably as a proven alternative to field-grown agriculture.
A key proposition to Bowery’s farms is our water use. As it stands, 70% of global freshwater goes to agriculture. That number is three times larger than 50 years ago and is rising fast as demand spikes with a growing population. We use 95% less water than traditional farming, and our farm network continues to decrease our water use as a result of successful water efficiency and recirculation strategies.
We’ve also improved energy efficiency by more than 40% since 2021 across all of our farms, and our entire network is powered with 100% renewable energy. And our work is never done; we’re constantly improving our technology and reporting new sustainability gains every year.
Marquis: Now that we have vertical farming and the technology to grow more sustainably, why do you think this approach hasn’t been widely adopted into the current food system?
Fain: Agriculture is undergoing a quiet technological revolution. Taking a step back from vertical farming alone, traditional farmers are looking to robotics and automation, while machine learning and artificial intelligence are now used to monitor soil, control pests, and improve overall yield. Drones, sensors, and satellite imaging systems all help farms manage crops more effectively with more information and knowledge than ever before.
Vertical farms and the technological advancement of traditional farming can and should coexist. There is work being done on a national scale to integrate these and other advances as a means to rethink how we grow, what we grow, and how we transport what we grow. This is about a portfolio of solutions and not one single technology or approach.
On a farm, growing successful crops is a matter of inputs: good seeds, light, water, and nutrients. So too with the wide-scale adoption of a new food paradigm. We need the right inputs to grow: great ideas, upfront capital, and a commitment at all levels of government to enable businesses to thrive. For a cutting-edge industry to flourish – to have a national and even a global impact – national investments in R&D, infrastructure, appropriate tax incentives, workforce training, and manufacturing are essential. However, existing federal programs are not well suited to help deploy innovative farming technologies whether they are used indoors or in the field. The federal government has a key role to play as an accelerator of innovation.
Technology can be used to reimagine the fresh food supply chain, and the broader movement of CEA is demonstrating this potential every day.
Marquis: Is there a difference in product quality and flavor of vertically-farmed produce?
Fain: Absolutely. Vertical farming gives us the ability to control and guarantee our product quality and output. At Bowery, we select our seeds for quality and taste, rather than yield and long-haul transportation. Most U.S. produce travels an average of six days and 1,500 to 2,000 miles to reach store shelves, only to arrive laced with chemicals and lacking in flavor and freshness. Nutrition is also compromised — up to 45% of the nutritional value of produce is lost during transport.
Since we can build our farms anywhere, (near the cities we serve year-round) we can harvest pesticide-free produce at peak freshness, and deliver to stores within a day or two, setting a new standard for quality, taste, and flavor that is unmatched by traditional agriculture. With the BoweryOS, our proprietary supply chain management system, we’re also able to collect real-time data on our crops to understand what environmental conditions each crop needs to thrive, optimizing for the attributes that matter most to our customers and consumers. Our produce is the purest expression of the seed; pesticide-free, reliable, consistent, and always fresh.
Marquis: Both food and tech are challenging industries. How do you handle market challenges and think about innovation?
Fain: I’d argue that it’s not easy being an entrepreneur and leader in any industry – but solving hard problems is always a worthy goal, especially when something like our food and agriculture system is at stake.
On handling market challenges, I believe that it’s important to be agile. Both a company and a market evolve over time. What is right at one moment or phase may no longer be right at another. I am a strong believer in continuous evaluation to adapt both products and processes in order to ensure growth.
Innovation is inherent in changing and evolving any system. The key is to maintain a balance of focus and intention while also innovating and re-evaluating your product, technology, and to some extent the strategy in front of you. Innovation has always been at Bowery’s core, however, we also maintain a healthy respect and appreciation for the industry we operate in and the incumbent knowledge and practices. It’s a mistake to assume that there’s nothing to learn from the past.
Overall, at Bowery, we’re reimagining the entire fresh food supply chain to be simpler, shorter, and safer and to provide more surety of supply. The traditional agriculture model and food supply chain are overloaded with middlemen and a multitude of steps before the product reaches the consumer, requiring enormous resources, time, distance, and producing substantial waste along the way. Bowery is providing a streamlined alternative.
Whether it’s automation in our farms or the BoweryOS which manages, monitors and maintains the entirety of our operations, we leverage technology to think about growing, but also downstream processing in a new way. This allows us not only to grow anywhere, but to grow our produce much closer to its final destination. Bowery is collapsing a complex supply chain into a single building – delivering fresh produce faster, more efficiently, and with much less waste. With materially better efficiency and drastically reduced food miles, the impact is surety of supply and a more sustainable, resilient supply chain; this is more important now than ever before as the changing climate continues to expose the vulnerabilities of a fragile food system.
Source: forbes.com
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