S1E3: 003 Stephen Pankhurst - Analyzing the Evolution and Profitability of Vertical Farming

[0:00:00] Harry Duran: Special thanks to our title sponsor.

[0:00:01] Harry Duran: 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.

[0:00:18] Stephen Pankhurst: There were plenty of early stage vertical farming companies that went out of business. They were just, I wouldn't say ahead of the curve, but they were certainly at the point of the curve where it's so risky.

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

[0:00:44] Harry Duran: Welcome back. Episode Three Vertical farming podcast. If you are new to the show, a brand new series kicked off in grand fashion with great interviews with the likes of David Farcor of Igs Intelligent Growth Solutions and Louisa Burwood Taylor of AG Funder News.

[0:01:02] Harry Duran: This episode is special as it's one.

[0:01:03] Harry Duran: Of the first interviews I had as I was learning and educating myself more about the vertical farming industry. Today's guest, Stephen Pankhurst provided a really interesting overview of the vertical farming industry via a YouTube series on his Exacognition channel. As I was learning more about the potentials for this industry, the challenges, all the different ways to look at the information and decide just how big this is going to be, this was really invaluable for me, and I was able to track Stephen down, and we had a really great discussion, and I feel like it provided a lot of context for the interviews that were to follow. We go in depth on all the technology, the barriers of entry, the profitability and the evolution of the vertical farming industry. Steven shares his origin story and how he became originally interested in vertical farming, and he talks about the time and.

[0:01:55] Harry Duran: The energy that went into his YouTube.

[0:01:57] Harry Duran: Channel dedicated entirely to vertical farming. He outlines how much time and energy went into the series on vertical farming on his YouTube channel. Through his research, we break down the progress of technological advances in the industry and the profitability of vertical farms. And Stephen speaks to the challenges, barriers to entry, and also the importance of light energy, which is something that's a consistent theme in some of the future conversations as well. Enjoy my conversation with Stephen Pankhurst.

[0:02:24] Harry Duran: So, Stephen Pankhurst, thank you for joining us on the vertical Farming podcast.

[0:02:31] Stephen Pankhurst: Thank you. Glad for having me.

[0:02:33] Harry Duran: So we were chatting a little bit in the green room, so to speak, about how I got started, so I want to dig into that on your end as well. But as I was doing a lot of preliminary research for getting this show off the ground naturally, as with all things YouTube, I ended up down several rabbit holes and I found the Exacognition site, and I found your fantastic three part series on vertical farming, which I've now watched a couple of times. And I thought it was an amazing introduction into what's happening in the industry. I was fascinated by the level of research you've done. I even geeked out on your Google Sheet spreadsheet a little bit. So I'm wondering if we could start with your interest in vertical farming and then we'll dig a little bit into your background. But can you tell me, like, where this started and where you for some reason, you were drawn to create a specific series on vertical farming? So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the origins of that.

[0:03:30] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, sure. And it's actually quite interesting because it's surprisingly similar to your introduction, really. I mean, I've always been interested in technology, business, those sort of things. And I got into listening to audiobooks on the way to Work, and I came across the book Abundance and Bold, also by Peter Diamandis back in about 2015. And when I came across it, that was when it first I was first exposed to the idea and the potential power of it. After that, I found Desponder's book because I wanted to find out more about the topic. And I listened to that and I thought, great, this is a technology that seems like it might have the potential to really impact the world in a positive way. And I'm generally interested in all sorts of technologies. And that one sort of was sat quite high on the list. But I actually forgot about it for, say, about two years, I was farming on looking at more technologies, and I'd read the occasional article and back in about, I think, 2017 sometime, I thought, let's check up on how vertical farming is getting on. You know, there were some, you know, promises, predictions, what have you. I want to see where this industry has got to. And when I looked into it, I thought, wow, you know, some of the things that people said were going to happen have happened. And I came across some articles that were saying, this is a fantasy. This isn't going to work.

[0:05:01] Stephen Pankhurst: And I was kind of confused. I've seen lots of articles saying, this is great. This is the future of agriculture. Some saying, this is never going to work. And I thought, I've got to get to the bottom of this. I've got to understand this. Why is it so hard to understand? Because I know the information is all there. It's just not necessarily in a format that's easy to appreciate. And that's when the idea of making a YouTube series about it really came about. So I had a previous YouTube channel which didn't work out. I scrapped the idea. And I'd been looking to make an entertainment channel about future technology because I would say it's the thing I would do in my spare time to relax is to read about technology. So I thought, well, why don't I use that knowledge and actually put it towards something. So I'd identified vertical farming was a complicated one with a lot of potential.

[0:05:59] Stephen Pankhurst: And I thought, why don't I put my research into this series so that other people can essentially follow my journey as I discover it? Now, the video series itself, it doesn't follow as if I'm discovering it, but I do try and take the viewer through the journey that I went through as I sort of discovered the viability. And one of the strange things about it is I went into it without trying to prove it's going to work or disprove it's going to work. I just wanted to see and I was probably a few months into the research and I still hadn't decided what the viability was in terms of the future, the farce future. It's very clear that it does work and it's working right now and there's a lot of companies having success with it. And the question I wanted to answer was, can it really scale to the global level? And it took a long time for me to really get my head around what are the things you really need to understand to be able to actually model and predict the future going forward for that technology.

[0:07:06] Harry Duran: I'm curious how you thought about it.

[0:07:09] Harry Duran: And maybe if you could speak a little bit about what your background was. Because to take something on like this, I get the sense that you have a bit of maybe project management or production background, because I imagine you were thinking about all the different pieces and you put some thought into the different chapters or the three part series, like how you were going to organize it because you talked about will it work? Or the future of it. Does agriculture need to change? So I'm wondering what you had done previously up until that point, which is sort of preparing you to kind of put content like this together.

[0:07:43] Stephen Pankhurst: Right? So you were quite close, really. I'm a mechanical engineer by degree. I went into manufacturing, production process engineering, so really looking at either manufacturing or business processes and really sort of trying to find the issues and streamline them. So it's a lot of digging into the details, coming up with ideas, testing them, that sort of thing. And I guess that approach came across in the video series. So you're right in the sense that when I did my research, I started with some quite basic questions. What is it and what are all the parts of it? That mindset of optimization becomes a key theme in the series? Something like I would do with a protest. So I've done my research. I've got to the point where I said, take the rice. So the future vertical farm. One of the big challenges is how do you grow our staple crops, our wheat, rice, what have you. And I've got some books and research papers and they sort of came to a conclusion that if you wanted to grow rice in a vertical farm, it's going to take 50 times the energy that it takes to grow lettuce.

[0:08:59] Stephen Pankhurst: And when I first saw that, I thought, wow, that's a crazy amount of energy. And I guess that this industry is going to stick to vegetables. I don't really see how we're going to overcome that. But that's never a satisfactory answer for me. I thought, what if we did a bit of tweaking here and there and really looked into all the parameters to see what opportunities there might be? I broke it down into the components. Some of that is your input energy. What's your cost of energy going into it? How can you make that cheaper? What's your light efficiency, the photons going in? Can we streamline that process? And then you start looking into the plant biology, which I have no background in, realistically speaking. And it was a case of digging through papers to see what parameters affect plant's growth, all sorts of things, light, period, CO2 levels, all that sort of stuff. And for me, I just had to know it at that point. It was just the case.

[0:09:56] Stephen Pankhurst: I have to know the answer to this and I have to see if it's at least somewhat possible. And as I sort of dug through it, I realized, you know what, it's going to be really difficult, but this could actually be possible. And as I say, I wasn't really trying to prove that, but I had to try and understand if it could be possible.

[0:10:16] Harry Duran: Get the sense that that's part of your personality.

[0:10:18] Harry Duran: Like you said, I have to know the answer to this. Is that a common thread for you when you find something that you're naturally curious about, that if it's something that interests you, that you have that impulse, that you want to dig deeper?

[0:10:31] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, that is absolutely true. I guess you could say I get obsessive about certain topics and I kind of go all in on them. It's a lot more research than I was initially planning to do, but as you said, I had to know, and I just went down the rabbit hole. And if you do that, in my experience, you tend to get results you couldn't initially expect. You can really be surprised if you really dig into any area. I mean, not just research, any task you put your mind to. If you really go in for it, you can get all sorts of great results.

[0:11:07] Harry Duran: Talk a little bit about how much time went into all of this, because that's one of the first things that I thought about when I saw it, both from maybe and talk about it.

[0:11:15] Harry Duran: To different phases, but from the research.

[0:11:18] Harry Duran: And you mentioned some of the books you read, and based on, obviously what's in the series, there's a lot of charts and a lot of data. So can you talk a little bit about how much time went into the research and then how much time went into the actual video production of it as well.

[0:11:34] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah. So I started it in, I would say, October 2017. That's when I was going to start the channel. And I said to myself, right, I'll make this video in four weeks, which turned out to be a ridiculous prediction. I'd already made YouTube videos, so I sort of thought, oh, it's all right, I roughly know what goes on. But four weeks in and I felt like I didn't have a satisfactory answer to most of the questions I wanted to answer. So that research phase was supposed to be about two weeks. It ended up taking about six months, which is not sustainable now, to be clear. It could have been done in less time if I'd taken a less circuitous route. And, you know, whenever I had an interesting question, I went and investigated it, even if it was only vaguely related to vertical farming. So the stuff on the solar, when I wanted to get to the bottom of energy costs, had to really dig into solar and how it worked. And I was looking at all sorts of you can get sort of calculators and it's all like, what's the local solar radiance? What's the losses in the system? I probably went way too far, but I must have spent about six months on the research phase. But within the first sort of few weeks, the one thing I'd done which I think set me up really well was I'd ask the right questions, or at least what I believed was the right questions, the interesting ones.

[0:13:03] Stephen Pankhurst: So once you get from what is it is like, why do we need this? Why are people saying it's this? Why are people saying it's the other? And I really wanted to understand why. There were just seemingly two camps of people at the opposite end of the spectrum. One says, yeah, future, it'll all be solved. Don't worry, it'll all work. On the other hand, people are like, well, no, it's ridiculous. Look, here's the numbers. And I'm an engineer, so I'm drawn to the numbers argument. On the other hand, as you're familiar, if you've listened to Peter Diamandis, is we tend to get a very static viewpoint of the world. This is how it is now, and it's static and it's local. And say you have a lot of experience with greenhouses. Your mindset is of this is I'm applying the greenhouse mindset to this vertical farm, for example. You're not necessarily looking at other fields and how they could influence it.

[0:14:01] Stephen Pankhurst: I'm not saying people don't, but I think there's a tendency, as I say to you, run the calculations from your perspective, and that's that. So it took me to really try and pit those two ideas against each other. In the end, that's what it was. I built a model, a crude model. I wouldn't publish it in a journal, but it's something that you could reasonably use to check going forward. So you said you were looking through the Excel document. Now, that's not complete. There's a story behind that. But the idea is, I have a model that I could look in, say, 2021, and say, oh, Solar's improved at this rate. And I said it would be this. How does that affect the timeline for Ice? And all that sort of stuff, I think is valuable going forward. So I'd love to do a follow up video and say, what's the state in vertical farming in 2021? What's changed? What did it get wrong in the first video?

[0:14:58] Stephen Pankhurst: What did it get right? Do we update the conclusions on new data? I think that would be quite an interesting thing to do going forward.

[0:15:06] Harry Duran: Yeah, and it's almost like the information that's available in the Google Sheet, I think of it almost like open source. Like if people wanted to use it and others contribute to it or leverage it for other deeper analysis. And I think what's great is that everything is documented so you can see what assumptions you made. And if you think about it almost like Moore's Law, like how the processing power increases. I forgot what it was, but the amount of information on the chip or the chips get smaller or something like that, I think that's what's going to happen. There's going to be some exponential growth that you may not even be able to predict in terms of how the efficiencies are improving. Because one of the biggest challenges with vertical farms is this idea of trading energy for density. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you were finding as you were looking into that. I think you said lighting accounts for 80% of the energy used in vertical farms.

[0:15:58] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, that's right. So in terms of progress in technology, I was saying before that it's being viewed as static. I'd seen a particular video that done some calculations. There were a few issues with it as it was, but one of them was like, solar is 14% efficient, or what have you. And having modeled that out, you can get a good idea that actually going forward. The things really do change. And you said 80% lighting, and that was the source I used, and that was in 2015. So that is now changed because the progress in LEDs has been quite dramatic, really. So it was 80% lighting then, it's less now. I don't have an exact figure. I'd like to see an updated one, but it really has changed. And you were saying exponential. The key thing about vertical farming, certainly the plant factory type with the artificial lighting, there's kind of three drivers that really that are all exponential, that add together. So your input of lighting, LEDs, are getting exponentially cheaper in terms of cost, but also in terms of the efficiencies going up at exponential rates and the.

[0:17:16] Harry Duran: Ability to understand that certain plants respond differently to certain spectrums of light. So now they're actually creating the light that only emit those specific light frequencies to make them even more efficient, which I thought was fascinating.

[0:17:31] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, that's right. And the other part of that is, I said solar is improving exponentially. Led is and tied to that is the yield of the plant. And that's really how much edible mass are we getting from a fixed amount of photons of light? And as you say, those Led recipes, they make a huge difference because what you can do with those light recipes is you can sort of send signals to the plant to say, oh, don't grow your roots as much flower earlier. I'm simplifying a bit. But plants respond to sunlight and seasonal changes, and they take those cues in changing light levels. And essentially, the LEDs, you can kind of replicate that. But rather than be tied to the seasons, you can do that whenever you want. So that's a huge part of it. And in fact, you don't need to stick to 24 hours growing cycles. You could make your day, say, 16 hours, and have, I don't know, say, 10 hours of light, 6 hours of dark, that kind of thing. So you're not even following the normal days then. But that's really powerful. And tied to that is improvements in AI computation, sensors getting exponentially cheaper too.

[0:18:50] Stephen Pankhurst: So what you're seeing is the amount of information you can get from plants. You can really go a really high resolution of feedback. The amount of experiments you can run is really high because you can control this particular bay and have it with these conditions. And this bay has got something else, and this bay is something else. You feed that information to an AI. And it looks at, you know, leaf growth, all sorts of parameters, and it can learn from that, oh, this particular type of plant we want to run at this nutrients at this time of its growth phase and this light recipe at this growth phase, and it can test thousands, tens of thousands even. And there's examples of that already happening, which is I think that's another input which is potentially going to show exponential growth.

[0:19:44] Harry Duran: One of the challenges that you mentioned as you started the series was obviously the profitability of vertical farms. And there's countries that have taken the lead on this. I think at the time of the report, you said that Japan was leading, I think 1% of lettuce production in Japan in 2014 was coming from vertical farms. I don't know how much you continue to follow what's happening in the different countries, but do you see that obviously, I would imagine that that'd be a benefit because what they're learning and because they've been so far ahead of the curve, you can see what's working and what's not. And future vertical farms, I imagine, and companies are taking advantage of that or learning from that information.

[0:20:29] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I use Japan as quite a lot, partly because there's a really good book called The Plant Factory, which is I say most of the data is from 2015, but I got a lot of good information from that book and that's linked to papers that are published by Japanese researchers. And essentially they got that start because of the Fukushima disaster. Well, not Fukushima, but the earthquake and tsunami that led to that disaster. There was a lot of farmland that was sort of taken out by the tsunami and Japan was looking at ways to improve its food security, so they actually invested in accelerating their technology. So that's kind of why those companies got an early lead. But as you say, that technology. There is some proprietary stuff, but those papers, everyone's got access to that. So, as you say, that's spread out. And now I would say the UK, the US, in fact, lots of countries, they are really quite advanced now and they've got some very impressive stuff. I couldn't believe how many vertical farms have cropped up in the UK. I was looking to do a follow up video where I'd go and visit a plant factory or a vertical farm, and I looked in 2017 at the time and I found a few and I looked a few weeks ago and there's loads that is not unique to the UK that's happening all over the place. It's a terrible pun, but the vertical farming industry really is growing.

[0:22:11] Harry Duran: Yeah, it's interesting because when you look at some of the market reports, I think they projected it to be a $3 billion industry by 2024. And I'm sure that number just probably just keeps on changing every year as more players enter the space. And there's also been folks that entered early and had a go at it, but failed already. We're starting to see that. As with any nascent startup industry, I think one of the conferences that I saw, they actually had a panel and they had several of the folks who had a vertical farm or a container farm, something similar, and they went out of business. I think Podponix was on that panel. So I think people already figuring out what works and what doesn't. People were bemoaning the use of scissor lifts in some of these. Because while it sounds and looks cool in terms of efficiency and it's something you reference a lot in your series, you really have to look at every aspect of the production from how water is used, where it's sourced, from how it's recycled, how energy comes in, how much energy is used in the actual process of the growth, and how labor is used and how while the automation sounds nice and sounds cool, I mean, that's an added cost. And then the teaching people how to farm in this new way because you can't come in off of the old way we think of farms and have a farmer in his overalls show up at a vertical farm and immediately take to it like he would know what to do. It's almost like you have to learn a different skill set. So I think people are learning, making mistakes, and some people are learning from those mistakes, but others may unfortunately go out of business. So I think what you continue to stress is probably lends itself to the way you look at a problem or a challenge like this, is you have to measure each piece of the chain and optimize each part of it.

[0:24:01] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, I think that's the key thing. You're right. There were plenty of early stage vertical farming companies that went out of business. And as you said, they were just, I wouldn't say ahead of the curve, but they were certainly at the point of the curve where it's so risky. They had to invest so much in R and D. They had lighting that wasn't efficient enough. And it becomes very hard to sell such a premium. The early vertical farms had really high premiums. Some still do have a decent premium, largely for profit. But that learning. It happens. When you find out that vertical farm A failed for this, this and this reason, you go and ask them Why? And say, what do you think happened? And as you say, well, this cherry picker, this was a terrible idea, harvesting was a nightmare. All those sort of things, all those mistakes, they inform the future approach.

[0:24:57] Stephen Pankhurst: And some of it is sort of organic and evolutionary as some stuff tries, some stuff fails, the stuff that works gets carried forward. And some of them, as you say, is a very specific investigation into the minute details of what really matters and what doesn't and how you can improve them. And there's a lot of bright people in the industry now, and with sufficient money and sufficient incentive, those problems get solved quite quickly. You said 3 billion. It wouldn't surprise me if it's going to actually grow a little bit ahead of that.

[0:25:34] Harry Duran: As you were putting this information together.

[0:25:36] Harry Duran: And you mentioned how you were inspired by some of those books of the book by abundance and by Dixon Despamier's book, was there anything that you were surprised by, even after having done that initial research, as you were then, digging in and starting to do your own research and putting together some of these tables and charts and fantastic visuals that are in the series. What were some of the things or maybe one thing that actually even you were surprised by as you were digging further in?

[0:26:01] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, I mean, there were all sorts of things at the time. Some of them were hard to remember. A lot of things that really surprised me when I was doing the research is just how absolutely massive agriculture is. I mean, it is truly vast. Of all habitable land, 50% of its agriculture. And when you really think about it, you know, the vast majority, certainly from a land perspective, it that's happened in the last 100 years or so. And you know, that's that's a massive change. And it really when I was going through the numbers, I had to really take a step back and say, is this right? When you're looking at billions of kilograms of this and trillions of liters of water, you can't wrap your head around those figures. So the scale of agriculture was a big one. And that's on the one hand, you can use that and say, well, it's so big, it's going to take a long time to replace. And I definitely agree with that. I don't think traditional agriculture is going away quickly. That certainly doesn't seem to be the case. But also to the point on agriculture that land disappearing so quickly when we need to do something and there's the incentive to do it, humans can really do a huge amount of things, and food is so important to how we live.

[0:27:20] Stephen Pankhurst: So that side of it was surprising. I mentioned how surprised it was, how much energy it takes to make rice work, and that really blew me away. When I first looked at the sheer quantity of energy you would need, that really surprised me.

[0:27:37] Harry Duran: Well, what's interesting there, and you mentioned the rice, is you actually broke out the different phases and how the vertical farming would progress. And you talked about it in three phases. One would be the leafy greens that we're obviously seeing now, but then second would be fruits and root vegetables. And then you do talk about the staple crops in phase three. Was that a breakout that you had seen in your research, or is that something, as you were putting the data together, that you saw made sense in terms of categorizing it that way?

[0:28:09] Stephen Pankhurst: I never saw that those phases used directly, but when I was looking at, what, say, the critics were saying, a lot of them are saying, okay, well, it works for lettuce, but it's not going to work for wheat, say. And there was also a question mark about vegetables, I should say. It's a big category, it's very general, but it doesn't make sense to talk about one specific product. But breaking it into those three categories sort of makes sense in terms of there's no specific point and time where vertical farming is viable, it's not. And that's, I think at first I was just trying to answer is it viable or not? But it's much better to understand it in terms of this specific plant in this specific region is going to be viable around this time. And if we change the region, that changes the timeline. If we change the plant, it changes the timeline. So I wanted to help the viewer to really build the mental model of whenever I'm thinking about what could be done, I want to. Be thinking about what region are we talking about, what sort of plant are we talking about? And that informed the decision. So they're broad categories, but I think they're quite good. You can just think of my staple crops, my vegetables, my leafy greens, and you've got three levels of difficulty there. Yeah.

[0:29:32] Harry Duran: What was interesting is that on some of the challenges you mentioned how, let's say if we continue with the rice example, how much energy it would take to make that in a vertical farm. And then what you suggested was, let's not make it in a region where the energy cost is high. Let's find a place because even something like rice, which stores well, let's find a place where we can put a vertical farm where the energy costs are really low. And then you start to make a case where the numbers are. And what I loved is how your grass would change the animation to make those, which made it very interesting. It's very fun to watch because you can say you would indicate, okay, if we change this metric, then the efficiency increases, therefore the yield increases. And you could see how the numbers were getting closer and closer to what the cost is now. And with every change in either the source of the energy or the efficiencies with the production, you could see that we were getting closer and closer to having it be a feasible option.

[0:30:32] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, you reminded me of something else that surprised me, and it's related to the location. You see often when you're hearing about vertical farming, a lot of the benefits talked about are related to the distance traveled, or we're saving this transport emissions. But when you look into it, it's not a huge amount unless you're air freighting perishables. That's a big one. So it is good that you can locate your product close to the consumer, but it's not a massive factor. And that's something I didn't realize when I was investigating it, but I had that mindset of, right, we need this plant factory next to the consumer, and that is generally a good idea for perishables. But of course, staple crops aren't perishables. And initially I had the mindset of you're going to have this local rice farm, and that doesn't make sense. In the case of staple crop, you could slow freight it by boat. That's not going to be big on emissions. Your real emissions challenge for your rice farm is your light energy. So put it somewhere the best place for I had a lot of people saying, well, why not nuclear energy? Why not this, that and the other? And they're good comments if you're looking globally. But this was just where's the first place it's going to be plausible, and that is the place with the high solar radiance, low seasonal variation, close to the equator.

[0:31:58] Stephen Pankhurst: But it was an interesting process going through that, guessing from that 50 times bigger, because you're talking over a magnitude and a half of reduction.

[0:32:12] Harry Duran: Yeah, it almost seems insurmountable when you first look at it, but then when you start to just break it down into its components, it does look like it's attainable.

[0:32:22] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah. And it's every element. It was like, how was the study conducted? What were the parameters they used? Oh, I see that they compared it with Lettuce, but lettuce was using quite an advanced setup, and the rice one was just we just grew some rice indoors. Being a bit unfair there, but it's all those kind of things. And it is interesting. As it was going through and taking 5% off here, 20% off here, there was a point where suddenly thought, oh, this is starting to look like this. This could work. And I'd say I wasn't trying to prove it could work. I just wanted to be clear that I'd given it a go to try and answer it. And I'm glad that sort of came across to the viewer with the graphs. The graphs came after I'd recorded and scripted all that, and I thought, this is going to be a nightmare to show it. But it does sort of take them on that journey. If you just gradually get through percent to get to such a high order of magnitude, it's a big effort, but when you multiply lots of small percents together, that makes a big difference.

[0:33:30] Stephen Pankhurst: If anyone's played video games, those sort of RPGs, it's like, well, 10% doesn't sound like a lot until you get 10% times, 10% times, 5% times, and suddenly it's mega. So that was quite a surprise for me when I sort of got to the point where I said, actually, we're not talking 100 years here. Realistically. You're probably talking a decade minimum, and you might be talking two decades maximum, say. But it's in a window that's tangible. I didn't want to come at a conclusion that was quite woolly. When I was researching, I think I talked about the frustration of not knowing what the real answer was. I'd read lots of articles, and they'd start with, here's all these big problems with agriculture and vertical farming. It's got all these benefits and they all sound nice. And then I came across the negatives, and I just couldn't weigh them against each other until it came into this full system. I forgot where I was originally going with that.

[0:34:34] Harry Duran: That's okay. Yeah. I get reminded of Henry Ford because I think the quote goes something along the lines of, if I had given people what they had been asking for, I think it's something along the lines of, like, I would have given them more horses, or something like that. They didn't know they needed, like, an automobile or a faster buggy. I forgot what the something along the lines of, like, people don't know what they want and what they need until someone thinks outside the box. And Roger Bannister breaking the four minute mile, like nobody did it. And then the minute he does it, within six months, like another dozen people had done it. So I think someone needs to pave the way to show that it's possible. And then that's where you start to see exponential light bulbs going off everywhere and people getting excited about the potential.

[0:35:26] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah. I think the quote is something along lines. If I asked people what they wanted, they would have told me they wanted faster horses.

[0:35:32] Harry Duran: Exactly. Yeah.

[0:35:33] Stephen Pankhurst: And I have to say, I see this in a lot of the technologies I research now. There's an exposure barrier. When you first hear something crazy for the first time, you say no, and then the more you start to hear about it, at some point it doesn't matter that much about the data you provide. At some point, once you've been exposed to idea enough, people tend to go, yeah, of course, of course. That was always going to happen. And yeah, that certainly was the case with vertical farming. And there is a lot written about it, which means people are getting exposed to this. So I do come across a lot of people who are like, yeah, of course, vertical farming, that makes sense. So it's definitely changed since I first heard about it, the amount of people that sort of accept that as a good idea. But I really wanted to get that crystallized conclusion into the video of I can't give a full answer of this exact thing is going to be viable on this exact day. But hopefully the viewers now got the tools to say this is a reasonable model for how it's going to unfold and here's a reasonable conclusion beyond well, you know, let's see how it works. Let's see what happens.

[0:36:42] Harry Duran: Yeah. What was the response to the series when it when it first came out?

[0:36:47] Stephen Pankhurst: Well, so I remember saying, what was the timeline? So I took spent six months on research and I spent another six months making the rest of the videos. So it took me a year to launch the video. And because I had to learn a lot about video editing, I do cringe a bit about my video quality, but I'm still quite happy with how that one turned out. But I had to learn all that video editing from scratch, so that was another big thing. And then when I launched it, it's like, well, I've spent a year on this and very few people watched it. That's the reality. And I was well aware that that was likely to happen. I thought, it's a shame I've put so much time into this and so few people have watched it. The people that do were like, oh, this is really cool, this channel is going to grow a lot. And I was thinking, I hope so. But it was steady growth for about a year and then the YouTube algorithm back in November just went, yeah, people really like this. So we're just going to, you know, push this out to loads of people. And I had a year's worth of views in about four days.

[0:37:58] Harry Duran: Wow.

[0:37:59] Stephen Pankhurst: You know, it just it just exploded. It was 8000 views at the start of November. I think it's got about 140,000 views now.

[0:38:07] Harry Duran: This past November?

[0:38:08] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah. Just a month and a half ago it was like 8000 views. And then it just it just really exploded. And it's a good feeling now. I sort of accepted that it was not going to take off and I was like, well, it's okay. You know, people have seen it and some people have learned and some people had value. I've had people who are doing Masters in Horticulture saying, your series was a really great help in my essay on this. And it took me a while to get the sources out and that's still not complete, but I've been emailing people data and sources and calculations and stuff. But, you know, it's I'd say it's really blown up the last month or so, so that's been quite exciting.

[0:38:51] Harry Duran: And you've got a couple of other series on there on flying cars and innovation. So how do you decide which topics you want to cover or what else do you have planned for the channel?

[0:39:05] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, so that's an interesting one. There are some things that I have to answer, so there's some things there's questions I have and I have to answer it. And I do the research. I'm like, right, I'm turning this into a video. That was the thing about the innovation video is I wanted to really crystallize my own thoughts on how innovation works. And that's supposed to be a series, but I'm so harry about making the videos because I spend ages researching and learning how to put more and more into it. The flying car one, it was supposed to be just the one off video because I'd seen some progress in Evtols, which is electric vertical take off and landing vehicles. And I was curious myself, is this a pipe dream? Is this as an overhyped technology, similar principle to vertical farming? And I had to sort of get to the bottom of it. And I've done the research, I've got multiple scripts on that. And while I'm not happy with what I did with that series, there is actually some really interesting and similar comparisons you can make. And it's another one where it just seems kind of ridiculous and infeasible, but when you crunch the numbers, I can't really find any big barrier. The only barrier I can see is really regulation and people's perception. But again, this is similar to the vertical farm where you've got to think about it as global and distributed.

[0:40:31] Stephen Pankhurst: If the US says, no, we're not going to touch this technology, but Dubai is already they're already trialing it and if it's successful there, some other city is going to say, yeah, we'll do it too, and there's actually a few. And as long as they're successful and you can look to another country that's doing something and it's not been a disaster, suddenly everyone can go, oh, yeah, let's adopt it now that we've seen it. That's another one I was probably even more skeptical of, to be honest. But having looked into it, it's looking more and more plausible. One more thing you said about how do I choose them? It is a bit of a mix, some stuff I have to know the answer to. And I've got a lot of requests for can you do it on this? So I've had a lot of requests for lab grown meat, sort of cultured meat, synthetic meat, many names, a bit like vertical farming. You got to be specific about what you're talking about.

[0:41:31] Harry Duran: But yeah, plant based meat versus lab based grown in the lab versus yeah, even there, there's a couple of different ways you can you can slice that yeah.

[0:41:42] Stephen Pankhurst: Supplementation, you know, some, you know, 20% insects in your meat, you know, that kind of thing. So that's something that is going to be a series. And the other one, which I was going to do and requested like crazy, is energy, the future of energy. And I feel like that's a good one, because I talked about in the vertical farming series, it has a big impact on vertical farming. It has a big impact on all sorts of things. So what's the current state so kind of a similar idea. What's the current state of energy? What are the problems? What do we need to solve? What's the future look like for solar? What does it look like for nuclear fission? Maybe Thorium? People talk about that a lot. Fusion, various types. And again, I'm not really trying to say that technology X is going to be a big thing if I find that it's not viable, I'll say that.

[0:42:36] Stephen Pankhurst: But that's the next big series. So I've got a video coming out in the next few weeks tied to innovation. But the series I really want to get started is Energy, and I want to get a few videos out on that in 2020 and some stuff on lab grown meats that would be quite interesting. Yeah.

[0:42:53] Harry Duran: There's such a connection between the efficiencies in energy and the and the potential for vertical farming. Like you said, they do go hand in hand. When you do do that energy series, maybe you can save one of the chapters for free energy, which is I've been fascinated always by the work of Nikola Tesla. That might have to be its own series. But if you crack that puzzle and you solve that one, then with abundant energy, there really is no limits then on what we're capable of, especially with something like vertical farming.

[0:43:29] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah. I mean, if you can get to energy where it's to the point where it's so abundant it's almost free, like say, for example, high Q factor, nuclear fusion. It becomes very hard to predict. And you were talking about Moore's Law and stuff like that. One of the things that makes it so complicated is if you look at technology in one technology in isolation, then you can sort of predict it. But how does the change in energy affect other industries? How does that affect, say, computing? What knock on effect might that have on, say, AI? And what effect will computing have on, say, genomics and biology? And that could feedback into vertical farming. You see, you know, the as you all have heard from Peter Diamandis about, you know, the cost of genome sequencing is just, you know, plummeted. The first one was I forget the figure off the top of my head, something like 150,000,000. And now it's below $100 thousand, I think.

[0:44:27] Harry Duran: Yeah, 1000 or $100. Yeah.

[0:44:28] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, it was below 1000. I think it's getting towards 100. I have to have to catch up on that. But, you know, how does that affect vertical farming? You know, some vertical farms use GMOs, some don't. Some are certified organic. There's a whole host. There's so many ways that there's so many different types. Actually, that's something I feel I didn't do a great job of getting across so well in my series, is I said there's four types of vertical farm, which in itself is a simplification. There's so many ways to do it. So it would be interesting, as you're speaking to your many guests on this podcast, they'll all have a slightly different perspective of what the optimal type of farmer is, what the best market is. It's a very interesting area. There's a lot of nuance, a lot of different types.

[0:45:21] Harry Duran: You continue to follow what's happening in the industry now that it's been probably a bit of time since the series was published.

[0:45:31] Stephen Pankhurst: Yes, I do. So I have this general approach to technologies where I read lots of sources. In some cases it's news articles, in some cases it's journals and stuff. And because I've spent so much time researching vertical farming, I naturally am drawn to any article or news stories about that. If you were to ask what the current state is now, I don't feel I could answer that as confidently as I could have. When I'd done six months of research, there's some stuff I will have missed. And that's why I want to do that follow up video. I want to do the sort of vertical farming in 2020 or 2021, and I just want to keep updating that. And actually, you mentioned something before about open sourcing, which I never got back to my initial idea for the channel. I was doing a lot of research, but what I really wanted to do is I wanted to take the evangelists of the technology and the critics and pit them together against each other, so to speak. Not in a battle, just if I come up with a figure. Let's say I'm saying Solar is going to have this efficiency and a critic might say, well, no, actually I found this paper that says this, and then the person that supports this, well actually I found this paper that says this. What I wanted to do at some point is have this open source research where I could say I'm working on the future of energy and people, whatever they believe, whether they think it's going to be now, never, whatever, they can input their information and knowledge into that and that can inform the models. And I think that's a very powerful model. It's something I'd still oversee.

[0:47:24] Stephen Pankhurst: I'd like to check the sources and make sure they're valid. But I think that kind of crowd source knowledge is much better than I could do. I spent a lot of time on research, but I could still pick plenty of holes in my own videos. And the more people that sort of brought together that and synthesized that information, the more powerful it could be. So in that case I would be, I guess you could say, a guide. I'd ask certain questions I'd put in my model for what I think it is and some of my research and have people just tear apart better, worse, whatever. I think that would be a really interesting way to model future technologies. It would be an incredible resource to be able to have that much knowledge put to the task of modeling all sorts of future technologies and that could be useful for all sorts of industries.

[0:48:21] Harry Duran: It lends itself to. I believe Tesla opened up or released the patents or some patents that he's for Tesla are available in the public domain. Obviously. It sounds a lot like what was done with Wikipedia and even diamonds, talks about it with the X Prize right the minute they made it as something as available with a big enough lure immediately. Like there's so many great minds that are just willing to work on this type of work. And I think this idea of and you see it with the open source software movement as well. So it sounds like that what you talked about is sort of a little bit of a mix of all those things. Sort of the rising tide lifts all boats aspect where if we all put our minds to these challenges and we learn from each other and that bit of research is now going to clarify a point that I was struggling with and now it'll help me figure out how to make this thing more efficient. I think that's fascinating and I think creating a platform for that is something that's really interesting and exciting.

[0:49:21] Stephen Pankhurst: Yeah, I'm very excited for where that sort of model goes forward because there are websites where people predict various outcomes, whether it's political or technological. And again, people weigh on either side and you can see their arguments. And again, it's supposed to be a kind of gravitates towards the truth. I think the more of that, the better. One of the things that's quite frustrating is come across an article or I'd come across some information, you say a journal paper, and it would have the information inside it, but I can't access it, it's behind a paywall. Maybe I need certain subscriptions and hopefully that kind of model is getting outdated to the point where it's essentially people who are interested in the stuff, they read about it for fun, they can add their insight and they've read this, that and the other, and they can just bring that.

[0:50:18] Harry Duran: This has been a fascinating conversation and I'm happy we've had it. I want to applaud you on all the work you've done. I think to your point, you see some of these research and market papers they're charging $5,000 for and I think they probably don't even come close to what you've been able to do in this video series on YouTube and I definitely encourage listener to check it out. We'll have links to the series in the show notes. And so I just want to thank you for taking the time to come on in the early days of the Vertical Farming podcast to reminisce about something that probably wasn't top of mind for you since you had just had it done and probably weren't even aware of, that you were going to be speaking further on this topic. So I appreciate you taking the time, Stephen.

[0:51:00] Stephen Pankhurst: Not a problem at all. Thanks very much for having me. It's been an interesting conversation.

[0:51:04] Harry Duran: I wanted to learn more about the series or there's a way to engage with you. Are there any other sites you want to share?

[0:51:12] Stephen Pankhurst: Currently I have the YouTube channel. I do have a Reddit and a Discord, but I'm not actively using those. It's something I want to use in the future for the reasons I mentioned just before. But for now, I would say if you want to speak to me, you can reach me through my email. That's on my YouTube channel, that's extra cognition at Gmail.

[0:51:34] Harry Duran: And we'll have links to the YouTube channel and to the email and we'll put those in the show notes as well. And hopefully we'll increase the visits to the website as a result. So thanks again for your time, Stephen.

[0:51:46] Stephen Pankhurst: No problem at all. Great speaking to you.

[0:51:49] Harry Duran: Thanks for listening. That was a really insightful conversation with Stephen and I really want to thank him because he really helped me validate the importance of understanding and speaking to the major players in this industry and it's why I've been active in searching out who are the best folks to be speaking to. So if there's anyone that comes to mind as you listen to these early episodes, please by all means send me an email. Vertical Farming Podcast.com if you enjoyed this episode or past episodes, please leave us a rating and review@ratethispodcast.com VFP. We're really making a concerted effort to collect as many ratings and reviews as they indicate to new listeners the popularity of the podcast, and since we are in early days, those would help a lot.

[0:52:39] Harry Duran: Really excited for next week's episode.

[0:52:41] Harry Duran: It's with Henry Gordon Smith of Agriculture.

[0:52:43] Harry Duran: Those familiar with the vertical farming space.

[0:52:45] Harry Duran: Will know Henry's name really well and we have a very insightful conversation about some of the work that Agriculture has done, their upcoming projects, their insights into the industry, their podcast and all things AG tech and Henry is a great storyteller. So please stay tuned for that episode four. We appreciate the buzz being generated with these early episodes, and if you could share this with at least one person in the vertical farming world, that would be greatly appreciated. Have a fantastic day. Podcast Production and Marketing provided by Podcast sign up for a free consultation at podcast co chat 15 Special thanks to our episode sponsor, Intelligent Growth Solutions. If you enjoyed this episode or past episodes, you can support the show by leaving a rating@ratedispodcast.com VFP and you'll be given instructions for how to leave a review there.

[0:53:45] Harry Duran: Thanks for listening to hear all past episodes and read the episode summaries, which includes any links mentioned in the episode as well as a full show transcription, visit Vertical Farming Podcast.com. There you can sign up for our email list to be notified when new episodes are published.