S1E2: 002 Louisa Burwood-Taylor - The Biggest Challenges Facing Indoor Agriculture

[0:00:00] Harry Duran: Special thanks to our title sponsor. This season Igs founded in 2013, Igs develops industry 4.0 solutions in the global AG tech and commercial lighting markets. As an industry innovator, they make revolutionary controlled environment growth products. For more information, visit Intelligent Growthsolutions.com.

[0:00:17] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: So I think now it's got to be about the responsible use of these genetic technologies. If it's being genetically modified to express more pro, I'm sure consumers can get on board with that.

[0:00:28] Harry Duran: Welcome to the vertical Farming Podcast. Weekly conversations with fascinating CEOs, founders, and ad tech visionaries. Join us every week as we dive deep into the world of vertical farming with your host, Harry Duran.

[0:00:43] Harry Duran: Welcome back to the Vertical Farming Podcast. In case you missed last week's episode, we kicked off season one with David Farkar of Igs. The episode has been getting a lot of positive feedback, so if you haven't listened to it, make sure you do that. David was the first interview I had after the COVID crisis, and it was a very timely discussion about the opportunities David sees in the marketplace for his organization and for vertical farming as a whole. He's really keen on how the technologies can really impact the future of our society and talks in detail about the impact that weather, handling and ventilation can have on vertical farming and how Igs is providing solutions to meet those needs. This week's guest is Louisa Burwoodtaylor. She's a journalist and editor of AG Funder News, a very popular site and where I spent a lot of time. In researching the beginnings of this podcast, louisa talks about how she became passionate about this specific topic and the origin story behind agfunder News. We discuss her thoughts on the developments being made in vertical farming, the emergence of competition, and how other players in the indoor agriculture industry are responding. Louisa shares why the timing is right for our society to embrace vertical farming and the current best practices companies are putting into place. We dive into the concerns that I raise about genetically modified organisms, and Louisa discusses the three biggest challenges facing indoor agriculture at this time. Enjoy this conversation.

[0:02:03] Harry Duran: So, Louisa Burwoodtaylor, thank you so much for joining us on the Vertical Farming Podcast.

[0:02:09] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Thank you so much for having me.

[0:02:11] Harry Duran: So we had a bit of discussion in the pre chat about providing an overview for vertical farming. It's obviously the subject of this podcast, and as a result of starting my research into this industry and getting connected with players in the space, obviously your name kept popping up a lot. So I'm wondering, obviously there's going to be people here that are very familiar with you, but people that are also learning about the vertical farming industry. So to provide a little bit of context, can you give a bit of background into how you got started in AG tech and specifically with agfunder?

[0:02:46] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yeah, of course. So I'm a financial journalist by background. I've covered various different financial markets over the years, from the exciting world of structured bonds to equity capital markets out in Asia, which was definitely a bit more exciting. And then I started focusing on the financial times and I was looking at institutional investment and where, you know, all the large pension funds of the world and the insurance companies, how they invest and how they allocate those assets into different asset classes. And one of those areas that was really interesting was alternative assets, and that includes real estate and infrastructure and real assets. You would call it things that are much more tangible and understandable to friends and family and people on the street. So I was excited to look more into that as an area. And when I moved back to the UK, this was about five or six years ago now, an opportunity came up to be the founding editor of a publication called Agri Investor. And it was focused on investment in agriculture across all of it. So it's investing in farmland, it's investing in agribusinesses in the supply chain, and it was investing in AG tech. But at that point, AG tech was this very small piece of the overall investment pie.

[0:03:57] Harry Duran: What year was this?

[0:03:59] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: This was the end of 2013.

[0:04:01] Harry Duran: Okay.

[0:04:02] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: And 2013 was actually a breakout year for AG tech overall because there was this acquisition of a software company called the Climate Corporation by Monsanto, one of the large agribusinesses, for a billion dollars. So that was the first unicorn and really put AG tech on the map. But it took another couple of years for AG tech, really, to see the investment volumes get on the map. And that was in 2015. There was a bit of a breakout year and in 2015 I joined Agfunder.

[0:04:33] Harry Duran: How much had you known about the space as you were getting involved? Were you just learning as you were going? So in this everything AG tech related, was it sort of a trial by fire in terms of what was happening in the industry?

[0:04:45] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yes, I think that's probably fair to say. And I think with journalists, when they take on a new beat, you're very much learning on the job. The great thing about being a journalist is you are allowed to ask a lot of questions. That is the job. So when I first got into it and when I was interviewing for that first job in Agri Investor, I was immediately just so excited about this potential. All those statistics that people have now probably heard till they're blue in the face about feeding a growing population and needing to improve food production. That was really exciting five, six years ago. It was something that it's such a huge industry, it's such an important industry for everyone on the planet, but yet somehow it's been siloed. Agriculture is something that people imagine takes place often miles away from them if they live in the city. I grew up in London a lot of my friends don't sort of see the connection necessary between agriculture and food. So it was really exciting to start seeing that people were wanting to invest in this space and do so to improve the quality of food and to improve the environmental impact of our food.

[0:05:49] Harry Duran: Why is that specifically? Or that cause something that's important or something that resonated with you?

[0:05:55] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: I think I hope it resonates with a lot of people of my age and older as well. I think it's hard to ignore the impacts of climate change and the impacts that humans have on this planet. I'm a big wildlife lover and I'm also a big food lover. And it seems to me that not only and having worked in the financial world and covered financial investments, sustainability was increasingly becoming ESG this term. Environmental social governance was increasingly something I was hearing investors talking about. It actually has taken quite a few years for it to be something that they're taking seriously. But I think something we can talk about maybe a bit later is a lot of large public companies are being very serious about their sustainability initiatives as of last year, pretty much. But I was hearing a lot more talk about that as a concept and I found that very interesting and exciting. But it also seemed to just make sense for companies if they want to be sustainable into the future, they need to think about where they're sourcing their products from, who their clients are, what they care about. So it seemed to be a great time and I think for me, I was very lucky that that opportunity came up at that moment because I'll never look back.

[0:07:10] Harry Duran: Yeah. So when you got started with AG Funder, was there a vision for what it was going to be? And did it look a lot like it looks now in terms of all the different parts of it? And I know there's a focus on investing in the space as well. So what did it look like when you first joined and what it is now, what the vision was from the founders?

[0:07:30] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yes, the vision has always been to bring more investment into the agriculture industry and also bring more technology to the space. So our two cofounders, Rob Leclaire, Michael Dean, were working on an agriculture project in West Africa and they were trying to raise funding for that, fighting that hard, but at the same time were realizing how technology could have improved. That the project that they were working on. So they wanted to do something about that and they thought that a key way of doing that would be to help bring more investment into the space. But before they could do that, it was about educating the industry, telling people, as I said, this idea of investing in agriculture, agriculture was something so removed from some of these mainstream markets that we really needed to start with education. And so they launched AG Funding News, which I came on board to manage from 2015 as like a tech crunch for agriculture and we hope that's still kind of what we are. And it really took a life of its own. So, as I mentioned, there was an acquisition by Monsanto in 2013. And that's when more and more VCs started to take note of this space as somewhere that they could make some money. But equally, for entrepreneurs looking for the next industry for them to work in and take some of the technologies being developed elsewhere into this sector, it really started to grab attention. And then a couple of years ago we built this network. There was probably around 50,000 to 60,000 members of subscribers globally at that time. And we had all this expertise, we had these experts in our network, we had all these investors we're speaking to all the time. We thought it was time for us to start investing ourselves, so we started launching our own funds. Our funds are open to individuals all the way through to large institutions.

[0:09:19] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Our investors range from high net worth individuals to funds of funds impact funds corporates, some of the food and agriculture corporates too. And we've raised three funds so far and we have a fund out at the moment which is focused on the alternative protein space. So we're an investor, but we also have media and research as well.

[0:09:39] Harry Duran: So now moving into specifically like indoor AG tech, as much as I would love to go into the alternative meats and the plant based meats as well, because I find that really fascinating with what's happening there. When did you start to see a specific focus or people paying more attention to what was happening, not just obviously with all things act related, but specifically with what was happening with vertical farming and a lot of the developments happening in terms of improvements in Led lights, hydroponics, aeroponics. Has that always been on your radar or when did you start to catch your attention more?

[0:10:12] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yeah, that's been on the radar from the beginning and a nice way that I try to think about how it's changed over the years is thinking about our readership. So when I joined Agfront in 2015, if I wrote any article about indoor agriculture, I knew it was going to be the best read that week. People were so excited. People thought it was something cool, something different, a little bit Sci-Fi, this concept that you could be growing in your backyard or inside your basement. So it was always something that was very popular from the beginning. I will say that we saw a little bit of a dip in popularity of those articles, probably around 2018, I think, because there was this realization that this was a lot harder than everyone thought it was going to be. And it was interesting that the readership you picked up on those challenges and seemed to take some of the excitement and the hype with a grain of salt. I will say now that that's changed again. And last year some of our best read articles were those about indoor agriculture. Probably also because some of our guest contributors were really delving into the economics of the industry and showing people how it can work and how some of the different models compare to each other, whether that's full vertical farming or greenhouses and so on. And the importance of using technology in that. I think that the use of software programs, robotics, all of that technology which has in itself improved over the last couple of years, it's now come to a point where I think it's becoming effective indoors, and that's making it a much more viable business model.

[0:11:51] Harry Duran: And it's creating this entirely new ecosystem of technologies specifically targeted at the industry. I'm thinking about soft robotics, for example, creating the ability to pick fruit, fruit that's ripening. That technology wasn't a need before for something like that, but now with the idea of trying to automate as much of this as possible, obviously Led lights that are only using certain spectrums of light to increase, like the Viability, I think Let US Grow just had a post or just received additional funding for their aeroponic systems. So I think the fact that these companies are niching down within the industry, do you see this as just another ecosystem that's developing as a result of people trying to address and obviously bring down the cost of producing within a vertical farm?

[0:12:35] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yeah, I think the first wave of companies will be some of those larger names that, you'll know, Aero Farms, Plenty, Bowery was a little bit newer, but you had some of the more established players. They were doing everything themselves and they were learning as they went and that's given them a first mover advantage, but it's also cost them a lot of money. So I think what's interesting now is you'll see this next wave and it includes one of our portfolio companies actually, which is called Intelligent Growth Solutions. They're now becoming a provider to the industry. So it could be that I decide I want to become a farmer tomorrow and I have some space, I can then go and ask them to provide me with the tools I need. In the instance of Igs, they will provide me with the actual full complete kit that I need, which includes the growing towers, which includes the software, even the electronics to get me going. And I think that's a much more realistic model in many ways because the job of being the technical person that's running all the software and knowing how to build a farm, then knowing how to grow the produce and monitor it and then know how to sell it, remember, there's that whole other portion. And of course, this is what farmers do every day, which makes their job very hard. But for a new industry trying to find people that can mix all of those skills together and find the labor is very hard. So I think it makes sense for people to focus on certain portions of that process.

[0:14:02] Harry Duran: It seems like there would be an entirely new skill set required for the workforce that's going to be coming into this industry, because it's no longer the you have the visions of the farms in California, for example, and the migrant workers coming in to pick the strawberries. But that's not really what the future is going to be, because even if you just look at the Plenty promo videos, it's folks in like, super covered with gloves and like, infrared glasses. So it's very futuristic looking. But I would imagine it's an entirely new skill set that I would imagine some folks are preparing for in terms of getting people trained for the jobs that are going to be required.

[0:14:37] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yes, it's interesting you say that, and I think to some extent that's true. But I was speaking to Irving Fein, the CEO of Bowery, and I talked exactly about this problem. What is this issue around finding the right people to hire? And he said increasingly it's looking more like manufacturing plant inside an indoor farm or it could be like a food factory. And so he says that they're able to find people that might have had a previous career in another manufacturing industry, which has maybe nothing to do with food, that should be able to start to operate some of this machinery. I think in the early days you did need a level of that agronomic knowledge, but perhaps now with these software tools that can do a lot of the monitoring and measurement, we might be able to move away from that and then it's just people who understand how to use technology.

[0:15:28] Harry Duran: What are your thoughts about some of the bigger players coming into this space? And I don't know if this is a concern yet or whether it's just so big that there's plenty of room for everyone, but I read recently, obviously, that Plenty is going to be going into Compton, for example, and they're building a whole complex there to support that neighborhood. But do you see just really big players like the Aero Farms, like the Plenty, like the Boweries coming in and just sort of dominating the space because they have the funds. They've recently received a lot of funding as well and they're just going to start having pockets? Or is there an opportunity for a mixed environment where folks like Freight Farms, for example, are helping people with the container farms? And is there just sort of a hybrid approach depending on the market that they're entering?

[0:16:09] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yeah, I think it would be that hybrid approach. I think the Plenty and Aero Farms of the world would have liked to have been your first thought. As we mentioned, it's been a lot more challenging to scale than people realized. I certainly think there'll be leaders and there'll be folks that will have the largest massive plant factories. But I think there's definitely, absolutely potential for people to build new farms in smaller locations in more kind of niche areas or niche products. We find it really interesting when you speak to Henry Gordon Smith, he will talk about software that he's building at the moment, which is to help folks to if they have an idea that they want to build a farm somewhere, he can help maybe a city to understand which locations within that city might make sense. And then there's plenty of potential for it to be all sorts of different people building these farms and have different scales.

[0:17:01] Harry Duran: I thought it was interesting. I don't know if maybe it was something that you mentioned or when I was doing a bit of research, I heard a quote from David Rosenberg of Aero Farms. He said 90% of indoor agriculture players out there will go out of business. So I'm wondering if what your thoughts are about that. Obviously, when there is a bit of a gold rush mindset, a lot of players want to get in and they may not be prepared to be in it or have the investment to be in it for the long haul.

[0:17:26] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: I think that David is probably right, or was probably right. I think increasingly the sector is getting de risked and people are becoming more comfortable with it. I think local governments and local cities are going to want to put money into this space. I don't know where we stand on things like grants and that sort of thing, but I think increasingly failures hopefully will decrease. But again, of course, in the early days, and especially if people can't afford to have the best equipment and the best technology there, it's very hard.

[0:18:00] Harry Duran: Do you see the potential for more unicorns coming up in this space?

[0:18:08] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: I hope so. Definitely across AG tech, we need to have some more exits for investors to bring more in. It's very, very hard to know. Valuations actually can be all over the place. A lot of times a valuation of a company is dependent on their access to capital and not necessarily the stage at which their company is in terms of bringing in revenues and being a sustainable business. So there could be some that have unicorn valuation at some point soon. But whether or not that actually translates into billion dollars worth of value, I'm not sure.

[0:18:42] Harry Duran: And do you see it? I spoke with Stephen Pankerst, who did a really, really interesting series on YouTube a couple of years ago about vertical farming, which is where I was able to get a lot of research. And he talked about it in phases, how it's obviously the leafy greens would be the first phase and then it's more of the fruits like the strawberries. But he said at some point there's an opportunity for crops that are really water intensive. If you think about almonds as an example, there's people having those discussions and I'm wondering if you've heard anything or conversations with people interested in pursuing that specific niche because obviously everyone has started focusing on the leafy greens for the indoor space. If you've heard anything about these other.

[0:19:20] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Types of crops I haven't specifically. I mean, almonds, that sounds like a great idea. I know that there are of course, challenges in terms of that almonds being grown trees and some crops being very large. But what I will say is that there was an interesting development last year for what was called the Precision Indoor Plants Consortium. And this is a grouping of companies. I believe it includes Aero Farms, but also BASF, which is the large agrochemicals company, benson Hill which is the crop genomics platform. And then there's an Led lighting group. There's Intrexon and so on. And what's interesting there is that they're looking at varieties of crops that might make sense to grow indoors. And I think potentially you would create different varieties of outdoor crops that are suitable for being grown indoors and maybe that's how it would work with some of these other crops. But that's great to hear. I think everyone does get a little bit fatigued around leafy greens and you always hear people saying the world can't be fed on leafy greens. So it's refreshing to hear those new ideas. Would love to see them.

[0:20:32] Harry Duran: I think one of the things you mentioned in your interview on Rubber Bank was this idea of millennials wanting to do good. And I think this concept of the timing is right for people to open themselves up for new alternatives for how we are consuming our food and to be concerned about things like distance that food travels to get to our plate. But even things like I know that Plenty is working on a compostable container because obviously one of the not so secret secrets of the leafy green world is obviously all this plastic that's being generated in all these supermarkets. So it's refreshing to see that Plenty is thinking about those things as well.

[0:21:07] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: That's brilliant. Yeah. And I think all of those ancillary services to this industry will be really interesting. We'd love to see more startups who are in that packaging space. Innovative packaging. It's surprisingly a small segment overall of food tech and AG tech, considering it's something that we're all thinking about all the time. We're all very concerned about our use of plastic. So that's fantastic. And I think leaders like plenty. It's great if they're going to take a leading role there and potentially front some of the early costs of research in that space too.

[0:21:38] Harry Duran: I wonder if there's opportunities to maybe open source. We've seen some examples of that in the technology world, obviously with things like Linux maybe. But I'm wondering if something like putting in best practices for how to do some of this compostable packaging is something that, to your point, the whole industry could benefit from. And you mentioned a couple of organizations that are consortiums or that are looking to share resources or research. Are there other organizations where they're looking to sort of put best practices forward?

[0:22:05] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: There was the Vertical Farming Association that was set up a few years ago. I'm not quite sure the status of them right now, but there are several. And what I will say about is about AG tech overall is I noticed an increasing propensity to collaborate amongst startups, which is great. I think initially, every app, every fencer, et cetera, was going to save the world on their own. And as soon as people dug in, they realized this is an incredibly complex industry and no one's going to be able to do it alone. So there's a lot of collaboration between tools, whether they're integrating through APIs, whether they're actually researching the potential for how to monitor a certain nutrient in the soil. Together, there's various different ways that companies are working together, and I think we'll continue to see that.

[0:22:55] Harry Duran: Probably soon after you joined Agfunder, you put together an article that said, the three Big Challenges for Indoor agriculture, and I'm just looking through them now. A lot of the technology involved is still very early stage availability of funding and finding experienced talent. Do you still think those have been addressed by now or is there still some work to be done there?

[0:23:14] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: I think the technology piece is being increasingly addressed and rapidly too, which is fantastic. I think availability of capital is just always a challenge, however much investment is increasing. And we had 10 billion of investment across Wetch and agtech last year. That sounds like a lot, but it's still a very small portion of overall venture capital investment. For instance, it's still less in health care. Technology and healthcare and agriculture both represent the same amount of global GDP. So we've still got some catching up to do, but it is always improving. And if we can see more successful indoor farms, that's going to make that capital more readily available.

[0:23:56] Harry Duran: What are you seeing happening in your own backyard? Are you seeing any innovations or companies or are you seeing examples of it in London, for example?

[0:24:04] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: I'm actually not in London. I'm from London. Yes, I'm British. I based in New York.

[0:24:10] Harry Duran: Home is in New York?

[0:24:12] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yes.

[0:24:12] Harry Duran: Okay, so the question would be, are you seeing any or have you heard of any innovations happening back home in London or even where you live now?

[0:24:21] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: So, back in London, there is a group called Growing Underground in Liverpool.

[0:24:30] Harry Duran: Was it the Liverpool?

[0:24:31] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: No, it's actually in London and it's in old Train underground. The Underground. It's in some of the old lines and the old train stations there. And my colleague Richard, he went to go and visit that. That's very cool. There's quite a bit of indoor agriculture back in the UK. Actually, you mentioned lettuce grow earlier, that they're based in the UK too, and then here in New York is definitely a hub for indoor farming. Again, Henry Gordon Smith has probably been responsible for growing quite a lot of that. He has a great event that they do every year, AG Tech Week here. And that really ranges from whether they're the equipment providers, the technology providers, or actual indoor farms as well.

[0:25:10] Harry Duran: And farm one as well, right?

[0:25:13] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yes, exactly. And Farm One, I think, since he.

[0:25:16] Harry Duran: Covers different cities on his podcast, the one that I brought up with was a conversation with the CEO of Farm One as well.

[0:25:23] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Fantastic. Yeah.

[0:25:25] Harry Duran: So, as you think about what's happening and what you've seen so far from the time you've been at AG Funder, what has you excited about the space specifically related to indoor AG tech?

[0:25:35] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Not to repeat myself, but I am very excited about that potential for looking at the genetics of crops that could be grown indoors and really optimizing on that. I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think you could get some great efficiencies in that. And it's exciting because it brings other players in from the industry to bring their technological prowess into it. I'm thinking of Benson Hill particularly. I'm a big fan of what they do.

[0:26:01] Harry Duran: What are they focused on?

[0:26:03] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Benson Hill, so they have a computational platform that helps to look into genetics of crops and find different varieties. They also do gene editing as well to improve certain characteristics of crops and using that natural biodiversity. So these aren't GMO, these are crops that they are editing in a way that would have happened through natural breeding, but just over much quicker timescale. I was very excited about the potential for companies like Igs and this way of enabling, maybe not anyone, but enabling people to set up farms in any location by using their technology. They're doing some really smart things around electronics and around energy and bringing those costs down around energy. I think that's something that people didn't think a huge amount in the beginning. That the cost of all that lighting, the cost of all that HVAC, the cost of all that climate control, and the energy involved in that, the carbon footprint. There's a lot of focus on the saving of water, which is fantastic, but I think that fossil fuel consumption essentially still had a lot of work to do. So very excited about the potential for that. And actually, now I'm thinking about it, going back to that idea around the crop varieties, growing more nutritionally dense food, something I'm thinking a lot about at the moment. I think we've had this first wave or maybe second wave of AG tech, and a lot of it's been focused on growing more with less, using less water, using less pesticides and so on. But now I think we've proved that we do have enough food. To feed the world. It's not necessarily reaching the right places and the right people. But even people that are getting enough food are suffering from chronic disease and things like obesity and diabetes, particularly here in the US.

[0:27:46] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Looking at how we can use food and the way that we grow it or what we grow, and how that can be nutritionally improved to be better for people and actually potentially cure or at least alleviate some of those ailments I mentioned. I think that's really exciting, and I think indoor agriculture can absolutely play a big role there.

[0:28:04] Harry Duran: Are you seeing or hearing of anyone expressing any concerns about GMO foods? Because once you start mentioning genetic modification, people may just not be educated enough on the concept or the definition of it. But I'm wondering what you've heard.

[0:28:20] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yeah, it's a really tricky one, GMO. I know that a few years ago, before I got into this industry, I probably was against it and wouldn't want to eat it. I probably still wouldn't love to give something that's clearly labeled GMO to my son. But the main reason for the backlash against GMO has been how it's being used. And one of the most common ways it's been used is to have resistance to pesticides so that you can apply even more to kill even more weeds, for sure. But then, of course, there's those residues that are left in the crops. So I think now it's got to be about the responsible use of these genetic technologies. There needs to be transparency. We need to tell consumers exactly how this crop has been genetically modified. If it's being genetically modified to express more protein or to express more vitamins, I'm sure consumers can get on board with that. There needs to be a lot of ReTrust, that sort of word. We need to bring more trust into the space. I hope that people are pragmatic. I think millennials are very keen to be doing the right thing, environmentally and socially. So hopefully, if things can be communicated in the right way and have an open dialogue, I would hope and foresee the use of genetic tools, whether it's modification, which involves inserting foreign genes, or whether it's editing, where you're working within the same genetic profile of a plant.

[0:29:46] Harry Duran: Yeah, I think it's just a matter of educating the consumer as to the source and the nature of the changes and also the benefits as to why it's done and for increasing the yields and things like that. I think if people can get on board and there's some transparency with what's happening, I think people will feel more comfortable about the mention of the word.

[0:30:06] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Right, exactly. And I think the role that indoor agriculture can play is because you can be growing every day of the year. You don't have to wait for crop seasons to do trials and to test and to grow these crops. They could really play a role in actually advancing this even faster than ever before.

[0:30:23] Harry Duran: Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of inroads being made in terms of the data science and the business intelligence aspects of it, because there's a lot of computational power that's going to be needed to sort of go through these iterations. To your point, because the crop cycles are shorter, I think you're seeing what's working and what's not faster.

[0:30:41] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Exactly. And be able to monitor the climate to that very specific degree and be able to feedback that data to the breeders will be very exciting.

[0:30:51] Harry Duran: Well, Louisa, I want to be conscious of the time. I want to thank you for coming on and educating our audience a little bit and also getting us up to speed what's happening specifically in indoor AG tech and vertical farming space. So I appreciate you for taking the time to come on.

[0:31:05] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Thank you so much for having me.

[0:31:07] Harry Duran: Where's the best place for folks to get more information, to learn more about AG, funder news and to connect with you as well?

[0:31:14] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: Yes. Well, please check out Agfundernews.com for our media arm and then AgFunder.com is our investment space.

[0:31:22] Harry Duran: Okay, thanks again.

[0:31:24] Harry Duran: Thanks again to Louisa for sharing her story on the show. Tune in next week from a conversation with Stephen Pankhurst. Stephen is one of the first people that I researched. He created a really elaborate three part series on YouTube about the entire vertical farming industry, and it was very helpful for me as I was putting together the outline for what would be this podcast. So I'm really excited to share his story and have him tell you about his passion for vertical farming on episode three. Once again, thanks to our title sponsor, intelligent Growth Solutions. To learn more about their indoor farming and intelligent Growth products, visit Intelligent Growthsolutions.com.

[0:32:01] Harry Duran: Thanks for listening to hear all past episodes and read the episodes summaries, which includes any links mentioned in the episode, as well as a full show transcription vertical farming Podcast.com.

[0:32:13] Louisa Burwood-Taylor: There.

[0:32:13] Harry Duran: You can sign up for our email list to be notified when new episodes are published.