Transforming Urban Agriculture: Zale Tabakman on Indoor Vertical Farming with Local Grown Salads

We do two things. You go indoor vertical farming, you get rid of all the movement of the products from Spain to England or California to New York, right? All the movement. And you use an organic source nitrogen, you will instantly reduce the carbon footprint of the entire world. Imagine getting rid of 15% of the natural gas of the world's usage.

Hello and welcome to Rethink What Matters, the podcast dedicated to aligning the economy with the ecology and everyone for improved business performance, stronger families, and a greener, cooler planet. And today I'm joined by Zael Tabakman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US of A, from Local Grown Salads, and we're going to be discussing indoor vertical farming. Uh, Zael is the president of the Local Grown Salads, and their vision is to feed the world healthy food that is grown sustainably. So welcome, Zale.

Well, thank you for having me. It's very exciting.

So if actually, if you could just tell us a little bit about, to start off with, Local Grown Salads.

Okay, so I'll keep it very simple because I'm sure we're going to get into some of the details. But essentially, we are a technology company that has indoor vertical farming technology. So we create indoor vertical farms. We either private label them or license them. So it's kind of a whole business thing. But essentially, Paul says, hey, I want to get into indoor vertical farming. I don't want to be a farmer. I'm really just a businessman. I want to be in the business of food. So you'll buy our technology. It'll be turnkey. You'll never really learn how to grow— you'll never learn how to grow basil in your backyard, but you'll know how to grow local grown salads, basil, arugula, We sell microgreens, we sell herbs, we sell greens, we sell small vegetables. Our idea is to have indoor vertical farms everywhere so that we're 15 minutes from the consumer, meaning that your farm will be wherever consumers are living. There'll be virtually no transportation, or you can even deliver by a bicycle from the farm to the people. By moving everything local, you get rid of the shipping. In North America, you know, Americans tend— I'm a Canadian, so we can make fun of Americans today, but, As a kid in America, they think that they grow their own vegetables, but in reality, in the United States is United States. They're separate states. So you have California, Arizona, and Mexico as a key— well, Mexico's a different country, but Arizona, Mexico, and even Texas, they grow vegetables and it gets shipped to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. You're shipping as You're shipping actually farther from Spain than Spain is from England. If it's Spain to England, you think a big thing, but—

Yeah.

So, tremendous amounts of the growth of— tremendous amounts of the carbon footprint of farming, and we're talking in vegetable space, is all just the movement of the vegetables from one place to another. If you can get rid of that movement, you can do an immediate 50% reduction in the carbon footprint.

Brilliant. That's such an interesting insight, isn't it? So great. So if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself then, Zale, and how you came to be involved with indoor vertical farming and the business.

Uh, okay, this is like— I'll tell you the short story, not the long story. The short story is, um, I was a, uh— I am— I was a divorced father with 5 kids, and they were all teenagers. And I was very big— I'm not a vegetarian or anything, I'm still like a normal guy, but I would In our family, it was always big to have salads and vegetables always growing on our desk, on our table at dinner time. And so what happened was, you know, the kids would go back and forth between their mother and me, and it was back and forth half the time. All kind of normal kind of stuff. No big story there. There was these kids, right? At the same time, I was riding my bicycle. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a Canadian, and when I was riding my bicycle, I happened to notice all these large buildings in Toronto. Toronto looks like London, looks like New York. It's big huge buildings. At the same time, I was doing this technology consulting that's specific to Canada, and I had two different interesting customers. I had one that was a company that would manufacture 3,000 sandwiches a day. So they would actually be manufacturing sandwiches and sell them in hotels and stuff like that. And the chef there was telling me that the problem was they could not get certain vegetables at certain times of the year. So they always had to be swapping in, swapping out. And I learned that in Canada, we import about 85% of our food. Like we mentioned earlier in England, like New York, everybody else, every food, most food is imported. And then at the same time, I had another client who was putting air into water, which is called oxy— oxy— oxy— oxy— dissolved oxygen. And they were telling me the entire business of how much money was being made in the food business. So I had these 3 things. I had to feed my kids. Right? So it's a very personal thing. I had these two clients, one that wasn't getting vegetables and the other one that was telling me all about how much money there was in the vegetable business. And I'm riding my bicycle around, I'm seeing the city. I said, why the hell aren't we growing vegetables on the roof of our buildings? Right? Instead of importing. Obvious stuff, right? I'm not the first person to think of that. But then when I started to do the math, it turns out you couldn't make any money. So the next thing was, well, I could, but we did the math the way they— I'm always turning terms into dollars and cents. You couldn't make enough money because you couldn't get enough volume or yield on a per square foot basis on the roofs of the business. But what if I just said, oh, if I could make $3 a square foot, what if I could just go up high? I can make— and then, you know, we all have a friend at Google. I started searching and I realized, oh, I'm not the first guy to do it. We went out, we bought some technology, we tried the technology, and it was very expensive and it really didn't work very well. And I said, oh, I could do this easier. And about $1 million of R&D later, we figured out how to do it. Now we have a patent pending on our technology in Canada and the United States, and we're now rolling out farms, Philadelphia, South Carolina, Calgary, Jamaica, a whole bunch of other places as well.

What's the need that you're meeting and where you are selling them? Is it that there's a lack of space or not enough food, or why are your customers buying it? I mean, do they just—

Oh, because our our product is fresher, better. So let's take the American model or the— when you transport food, the instant you harvest a vegetable, it starts to die and the quality goes down. And there's a whole bunch of things that people do to adjust that. But the instant you do that cutting, what happens is water or the juices or the water inside the vegetable start to leak out and you have problems. So a fresh vegetable and a 3-day-old vegetable do not taste the same. But if you think to take the simple model of Philadelphia, stuff is coming from California, Arizona, Mexico, it's being shipped on a truck, it's going to take 3 or 4 days to get there. All of a sudden, the product we're selling is not nearly as fresh. The secondary thing, which is a very important thing, and I think We do two things. You go indoor vertical farming, you get rid of all the movement of the products from Spain to England or California to New York, right? All the movement. And you use an organic source nitrogen. You will instantly reduce the carbon footprint of the entire world. Imagine getting rid of 15% of the natural gas of the world's usage.

Hello and welcome to Rethink What Matters, the podcast dedicated to aligning the economy with the ecology and everyone for improved business performance, stronger families, and a greener, cooler planet. And today I'm joined by Zeyel Tabakman. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US of A, from Local Grown Salads. And we're going to be discussing indoor vertical farming. Uh, Zale is the president of the Local Grown Salads, and their vision is to feed the world healthy food that is grown sustainably. So welcome, Zale.

Well, thank you for having me. It's very exciting.

So if actually, if you could just tell us a little bit about, to start off with, Local Grown Salads.

Okay, so I'll keep it very simple because I'm sure we're going to get into some of the details, but essentially we are a technology company that has indoor vertical farming technology. So we create indoor vertical farms. We either private label them or license them. So it's kind of a whole business thing, but essentially Paul says, hey, I want to get into indoor vertical farming. I don't want to be a farmer. I'm really just a businessman. I want to be in the business of food. So you'll buy our technology. It'll be turnkey. You'll never really learn how to grow— you'll never learn how to grow basil in your backyard, but you'll know how to grow local grown salads, basil, arugula, We sell microgreens, we sell herbs, we sell greens, we sell small vegetables. Our idea is to have indoor vertical farms everywhere so that we're 15 minutes from the consumer, meaning that your farm will be wherever consumers are living. There'll be virtually no transportation, or you can even deliver by a bicycle from the farm to the people. By moving everything local, you get rid of the shipping. In North America, you know, Americans tend— I'm a Canadian, so we can make fun of Americans today, but in America, they think that they grow their own vegetables, but in reality, in the United States, it's United States, they're separate states. So you have California, Arizona, and Mexico as a key— well, Mexico's a different country, but Arizona, Mexico, and even Texas, they grow vegetables and it gets shipped to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. You're shipping as You're shipping actually farther from Spain than Spain is from England. For Spain to England, you think a big thing, but— Yeah. So, tremendous amounts of the growth of— tremendous amounts of the carbon footprint of farming, and we're talking in vegetable space, is all just the movement of the vegetables from one place to another. If you can get rid of that movement, you can do an immediate 50% reduction in the carbon footprint.

Brilliant, that's such an interesting insight, isn't it? So great. So if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself then, Zale, and how you came to be involved with indoor vertical farming and the business.

Uh, okay, this is like— I'll tell you the short story, not the long story. The short story is, um, I was a, uh— I am— I was a divorced father with 5 kids, and they were all teenagers. And I was very big— I'm not a vegetarian or anything, I'm still like a normal guy, but I would In our family, it was always big to have salads and vegetables always growing on our desk, on our table at dinnertime. And so what happened was, you know, the kids would go back and forth between their mother and me, and it was back and forth half the time. All kind of normal kind of stuff. No big story there. There was these kids, right? At the same time, I was riding my bicycle. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a Canadian, and when I was riding my bicycle, I happened to notice all these large buildings in Toronto. Toronto looks like London, looks like New York. It's big huge buildings. At the same time, I was doing this technology consulting that's specific to Canada, and I had two different interesting customers. I had one that was a company that would manufacture 3,000 sandwiches a day. So they would actually be manufacturing sandwiches and sell them in hotels and stuff like that. And the chef there was telling me that the problem was they could not get certain vegetables at certain times of the year. So they always had to swapping in, swapping out. And I learned that in Canada, we import about 85% of our food. Like we mentioned earlier in England, like New York, everybody else, every food, most food is imported. And then at the same time, I had another client who was putting air into water, which is called oxy— oxy— oxy— oxy— dissolved oxygen. And they were telling me the entire business of how much money was being made in the food business. So I had these 3 things. I had to feed my kids. Right? So it's a very personal thing. I had these two clients, one that wasn't getting vegetables and the other one that was telling me all about how much money there was in the vegetable business. And I'm riding my bicycle around, I'm seeing the city, I said, why the hell aren't we growing vegetables on the roof of our buildings? Right? Instead of importing. Obvious stuff, right? I'm not the first person to think of that. But then when I started to do the math, it turns out you couldn't make any money. So the next thing was, well, I could, but when you did the math, the way they— I'm always turning terms into dollars and cents. You couldn't make enough money because you couldn't get enough volume or yield on a per square foot basis on the roofs of the business. But what if I just said, oh, if I can make $3 a square foot, what if I could just go up high? I can make— and then, you know, we all have a friend at Google. I started searching and I realized, oh, I'm not the first guy to do it. We went out, we bought some technology, we tried the technology and it was very expensive and it really didn't work very well. And I said, oh, I could do this easier. And about $1 million of R&D later, we figured out how to do it. Now we have a patent pending on our technology in Canada and the United States, and we're now rolling out farms, Philadelphia, South Carolina, Calgary, Jamaica, a whole bunch of other places as well.

What's the need that you're meeting where you are selling them? Is it that there's a lack of space or not enough food or why are your customers buying it? I mean, do they just—

Oh, because our our product is fresher, better. So, okay, let's, let's take the American model, or the— when you transport food, the instant you harvest a vegetable, it starts to die and the quality goes down. And there's a whole bunch of things that people do to adjust that, but, but the instant you do that cutting, it— what happens is water, or the, the juices of the water inside the vegetables start to leak out, and, and you have problems. So a fresh vegetable and a 3-day-old vegetable do not taste the same. But if you think to take the simple model of Philadelphia, stuff is coming from California, Arizona, and Mexico. It's being shipped on a truck. It's gonna take 3 or 4 days to get there. All of a sudden, the product we're selling is not nearly as fresh. Okay. The secondary thing, which is a very important thing, and I think it's gonna go to some things that your listeners care about, is everything in California, Arizona, and Mexico are covered in pesticides. Even if it's organic, it's still gonna use an organic, it's gonna have some sort of pesticide. When we do indoor vertical farming, we don't use any pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides. There's nothing on it. It's just right. Pure vegetable. So the freshness, meaning that we can harvest and deliver within 2 hours, means that, that the product tastes better. The shelf life is that much longer and extended. Yeah. And the, the other very big things we We have a wide variety of products that we can sell and grow that you put— that typical— aren't typically available in the stores.

Okay. All right. That's another differentiator then, isn't it? They can get a variety of foods that otherwise they might not be able to, and it's fresher because it's closer. So yeah, I can absolutely see. Now, you mentioned organic there then. And is that what customers are wanting now? They, you know, you know, wanting this to be organic and local and fresh.

Talk about organic, but they really— so let's break down what, quote, organic is. Now, I'm a pro-organic guy in general, so let's— don't— anything I say, don't take it as a negative, but you need to understand in the fruit and in the vegetable market, you need to understand what organic is. First thing is, you know, the big, the big bugaboo is GMO, right? Genetically modified things. Most almost— there is virtually no GMO vegetables. There are wheat and the wheat, rice, pulses, you know, the big things. But like your tomatoes, there are a few GMO tomatoes, but generally it's not a common thing. Cucumbers, arugula, like it's not even an issue. But to be organic, you need to be GMO-free. Okay, so it's not a big thing, but if you ever see it on a— you ever see a stamp, don't worry about it. The second thing is that the seeds, of course, need to be not having the pesticides and herbicides and fungicides, the kinds that are used. When you're organic, they're organic-based, except if you can't get one, then you're allowed to use a chemical one and you're still allowed to have that organic stamp on it. So this just— but it practically, I'm a practical guy, you need that because if you don't have those things, you're gonna— people don't want to eat vegetables that have holes in it that are eaten by insects. right? So that's kind of neat. And the fungicides, and so you need them. And then the next level of organic is, of course, where the seeds came from. Were they grown— were the seeds grown in— that the plant was grown from, were they grown from an organic field? So that's another level of organic, which practically doesn't really make a lot of difference, but it's something that you need to care about. And the third— but Ultimately, the most important thing is what is the source of the nutrients or the fertilizers that are being used for growing the plant. And you could talk about— there's 8 major ones and there's 8 minor ones, but reality is the most important one, and this is one you're going to love, Paul, that people don't know about, is nitrogen.

Nitrogen. Yeah. Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. So nitrogen is— there's organic source nitrogen and there's non-organic source nitrogen. Non-organic source nitrogen comes from natural gas. What they do is they take natural gas, they burn natural gas, and that captures the nitrogen from the air and puts it into a form that the plants can use. 15% of the world's natural gas is used to create nitrogen. So you burn natural gas, 15%. So if we move— so forget everything else, Right? We do two things. You go indoor vertical farming. You get rid of all the movement of the products from Spain to England or California to New York, right? All the movement. And you use an organic source nitrogen. You will instantly reduce the carbon footprint of the entire world. Imagine getting rid of 15% of the natural gas of the world's usage. If you grow soy, processed soy, it becomes— it can be used as a nitrogen source. There are other natural sources, but that's the one that we particularly like. And it's easy. So you just grow soy. The soy can be grown organically or non-organically. It doesn't really matter, remember, because we're now taking the nitrogen. When you process it, you pull the nitrogen out of the soil, you lose all the pesticides and everything else.

You know, talking about nitrogen, I understand that one of the issues with nitrogen is that some of these fertilizers have too much nitrogen.

It just leaches out into the waterways and gets into everyone's water and So I'm— Zale the nerd is going to touch in on it. You said there's too much nitrogen. There isn't actually too much nitrogen. The problem is for your typical— first of all, I like to be a very positive guy. Okay, so I don't want to point fingers and say anybody's doing anything wrong. Okay, so please take it this way. I am a typical farmer. I'm not making a lot of money, right? Farmers do not make large amounts of money, no matter what you read. Okay, so I have a field and I need to fertilize it, right? So I know I have this field and it needs X amount of pounds of fertilizer, right? Let's just focus on the nitrogen. It needs X pounds of nitrogen for it to grow. If I wanted to generate 100 pounds of plant matter, I need, you know, half a pound of nitrogen to get that 100-pound plant matter. Great, nice simple number. And so I can just spread 100 pounds, but then all of a sudden it rains, right? The plant— the nitrogen doesn't get spread properly, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I don't get enough nitrogen. I put out nitrogen, but not enough nitrogen will get me the half pound I need for my plants. The plants don't get that half pound because of the rain. It washes it away. It gets whatever, uh, a weed takes part of it, you know, all that other stuff. So me as a farmer, I need to— I only make the money if I sell the 100 pounds of plant matter. I then put 2 pounds of nitrogen in there to make sure I get that half a pound of nitrogen, um, which means that then it soaks in, and of course then the nitrogen flows into the water table. The water table, it eventually gets into the lake, and you get those things called algae blooms, and you get all that other crazy stuff. Again, if we use indoor vertical farming, we don't have any loss of nitrogen. They, we put it into our system, it's a closed system. The nitrogen goes right into the plant. We don't get any of those other bad things.

You know, sometimes I do these podcasts and there's so many great wins on what people are doing and this sounds like another one of those actually.

Yeah.

Ticks, ticks a lot of boxes. And you've got year-round production as well 'cause it's, it's like a greenhouse I guess, isn't it?

No, God forbid.

No, that's a swear word in your world.

That's a swear word, yeah. Okay, so a greenhouse, which we all know and was actually invented in England and, you know, was an English invention. What it does is it encloses the environment, but it uses natural light. And so the greenhouse, it's called, it's green inside and it looks like a house. But, you know, we usually, the typical term is a glass house. Sometimes it's called because it used to be the panels of glass. But now they're a polycarbonate. But what happens is the light comes from the sun. In the indoor vertical farming, the light comes from LEDs. So we're in a basement. We're in an old— you have an old building that was built, let's say, in the 1940s. It's got very low ceilings. We reuse— we actually reuse buildings. So we're inside reusing buildings. So, I can speak to the United States. The United States had its great industrial play, 1880s to about the 1950s, right? Or 1970s. And then stuff started going offshore. So, you have all these old buildings that were great factories. They're totally in the core of many of the United States' old cities. They're sitting empty. Like, we're talking hundreds of thousands of square feet of buildings that are just abandoned. We can put indoor vertical farms in those old buildings and all of a sudden we can reuse the existing building. And the, you know, the buildings themselves have, you know, concrete and they're, the bones are very, very good. Yeah. They don't have any windows. You know, you need to fix 'em up and stuff like that. Yeah. You can rip out all the old stuff, but you can use the core of the building for an indoor vertical farm. Another win for indoor vertical farming.

Brilliant. I hadn't appreciated that.

That's, uh, in England actually, there's a few people that are using old, coal caves for indoor vertical farming or old tunnels that were used as part of the subway system, I think, in London. Some folks have done that as well.

It sounds like it might be quite a technical thing, though. I'd imagine the amount of expertise somebody has to have to run one of these.

Oh, well, so we break our indoor vertical farms into— the way I look at the world, of indoor vertical farming. I look at it, I have a daughter and she lives in a condo and she ordered some lights from Amazon and she ordered some seeds and some ordered some trays and grows in her condo in her house without a problem, you know, waters it by hand, no automation, no nothing. So that's indoor vertical farming and she's doing it and she has no expertise and she says, Daddy, blah, blah, blah, but you know, we all have a friend in Google, so we could— it's not a big— if you want to do that in your home, no-brainer, really easy to do. Um, the next level is people who want to go commercial. So at the commercial level, that's where we come in. There are two levels of commercial. Again, you go to, you know, Home Depot, you go to Amazon, you order— there's a whole bunch of great websites online where you can buy all the technology, you can figure everything out and learn how to figure out how to do it and use it. And that requires some engineering, not an engineering degree, a level of engineering, but some level of understanding of water, heat, hydro, you know, all the kind of— a person that knows how to put that kind of stuff together requires that. And then you need an expertise on agronomy, a little bit of, you know, more than your backyard gardening kind of level, but not much, right? So, um, I— at my level is we just give you a, a solution with a turnkey. We expect you to understand how to run a business, how to do marketing, how to do sales. We'll tell you how to do those, give you advice, but you need to know how to go out and make a customer, how to send an invoice, how to pick up an invoice, how to hire people, how to schedule people. From a technical point of view, you just follow our instructions.

Gotcha, gotcha. So you're inside, so you haven't got the sunlight. Does that imply that you're going to be using quite a bit of energy then?

Yeah, we do use energy. We're extremely effective with our energy usage. In reality, our biggest cost is people and it's use of hiring people and using people for harvesting and that kind of stuff.

I suppose I wasn't thinking so much about— I mean, obviously the expense is an issue because that will have to get passed on. But I was thinking more along the green side of things. But there is obviously green electricity about if you have a solar panel or two nearby?

Yeah, we don't— it's sort of thinking that at that level, I think you should think of us as like an electric car. If I have an electric car, you don't expect me to have solar. You may or may not expect— if I live in a condominium, you don't expect me to have solar panels on my roof, right? If I lived in a home, hey, you know, why don't you put solar panels on your roof?

So, can you grow all types of crops like this or any certain types of crops?

So, we focus on microgreens, greens, herbs, and small vegetables. We don't do watermelons, we don't do mushrooms, we don't do onions, but we could grow— well, mushrooms are a totally different thing, but we could grow onions, we could grow potatoes, but this is not it right now. We don't see it as profitable enough. To use our technology for that. Microgreens have the biggest, largest margins. We're talking margins of, you know, 80-90%. Herbs have margins around 40-60%. Greens have margins of 25-40%. And then small vegetables have margins around 5-10%.

And if you're inside, you haven't got all the bugs and the insects and the pests all wandering around. So In one way that's good, but is it bad in another way for pollination?

And, uh, for pollination we use a toothbrush. Anybody who's a gardener knows about taking, taking a little toothbrush and just moving. And then of course, some of— many of the, the only things you worry about pollination for are the small vegetables, so cucumbers, the beans, the green, you know, those kinds of things. And some, and some types are self-pollinating and some aren't. So he's but it's just really moving around. Some people use electric bees. Some people actually have a beehive in their facility. There's certain types of bees that you can have them and you just have to be careful, but people do use bees or other types of insects for pollination.

It's possible then to have year-round production of any type of—

Exactly, that is 100% what we do. Wait, wait, that's another selling point. Remember at the beginning I was listing all those selling things? So at some point I had to stop.

Yeah, no, you're just going to pull out. We want all the benefits out there, you know? Right. And it's more efficient with water?

Yep, 98% of the water. So when you bring water into our systems, you bring water in— plants are 85% water. In farming systems, the reason they use so much water is plants do a thing called transpiration. They basically sweat. And when they're sweating, they let off the water, but letting off that water sucks up the water from the root level and brings in the nutrients. So that's how the plants feed. They feed by their sweating. Anybody's walked into any kind of greenhouse or horticultural place, you know, you feel the humidity in that, and that's sweating. So it's— well, so we capture the water in the dehumidifier and just feed it right back into the system.

Is it an advantage to have it inside in these buildings? Could you do exactly the same thing but outside and use some sunlight as well, or is it the control that really makes it work?

Our particular technology physically could be used outside, but as soon as you go outside, you'd have to have the pest— you— inside, you mentioned something and you kind of said it very quickly, but it was a really important point. When you're inside, you keep out all the pests, you keep out the insects, you keep out the things. So we don't need pesticides, we don't need fungicides, and we don't need herbicides. As soon as you go outside, you got to keep— how do you get rid of all those insects on your vegetables and eating your crop?

So who are the— who generally are the customers that are buying the product from the indoor vertical farms? Are they the supermarkets or they tend to be smaller?

I break the market into the big ones are the distributors and the regular distributors. Right? So the, the Cisco's, the GFS's, all the big, big players, the normal, the normal infrastructure, um, uh, sells to that. The, the retailers, um, a lot of them are, are now having, are, are setting them aside because my comp— a lot of my competitors are much more expensive than I am. So they're a higher premium product. They consider a premium product. We as a company like to go through the existing infrastructure. So we go through the existing distributors. I personally, Zale, I'm an incredibly big believer in CSAs, community supported agriculture. So that means Paul sets up a business, he connects up with a whole bunch of different farms, he collects from local grown salads, he collects from Bob, Bob's potato farm, puts it all in a box and starts delivering once a week to people's homes. I believe that CSA will be the future of farming. Because again, the more, the less people in the value chain that you take out of the chain, the better the carbon footprint. Yeah, so CSA is the future. But the simple answer to your question is it's just the regular distributors and the regular stores and the regular people are buying.

And the people that are buying these, the entrepreneurs that are taking you up on this business, What sort of backgrounds do they have? Do they tend to have an interest in gardening?

And one guy, uh, uh, our guy in South Carolina, Hardy Greens, the guy is an elect— he's an electrical engineer, right? He's an entrepreneur, an electrical engineer, um, and that's his whole— he, he, he doesn't care about the farming part of it. He just looks at it as a business and he sees it He is a very, I mean, a very cool guy, but he sees it as the future. And he says, I want to be in this and I want to be the guy leading the future. We have another guy that we're working with in Calgary, Canada. And that particular guy was a sales guy. His whole background was sales and selling to restaurants and people like that. So he understood the market of restaurants and foods and retailers and stuff like that.

Right.

None of the guys have no technology. Well, the electrical engineer, but that's, you know, electrical engineer kind of idea.

What's the maintenance like in the day-to-day maintenance of one of these indoor vertical farms? Is it quite— yeah, I can't imagine whether I'd be very busy with it or it's really going to run itself.

Most of it runs itself. It is like any other, quote, factory, unquote. There's equipment that needs regular maintenance. Our equipment is integrated with an incredibly complex software system that actually captures data all the way from seed to customer's plate. So we rely heavily on software and engineering, but it's like any system, it needs to be maintained. There are sensors that say, hey, things are going great, but if, you know, pump breaks, you got to replace the pump. If, you know, a piece of electronics go down, you got to replace the electronics. If somebody left the door open, you have insects get in, you have to deal with it. But most of the work is really just harvesting, and we use these things called seed cartridges, which is— so our farmers don't ever actually do any seeding or planting. We provide them the seeds and the grow media, which is a soil-type thing, and the nutrients is in a physical cartridge, and they have to install that cartridge. So let's say, you know, things like the greens,