(exciting music) - [Reporter] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(upbeat exciting music) - A hundred years ago, there was a one in three chance that you lived or worked on a farm.

Today, the odds are one in a hundred.

The closest most of us come to providing food for our families is visiting the local supermarket.

Farming has become agribusiness, mass production and distribution of food for a growing population.

But there's a shift underway from large scale agribusiness to hyper-local technology-driven farming that's revolutionizing how and where we get fresh food.

You're about to meet a Tampa Bay entrepreneur who's bet the farm on eco-friendly agriculture, next on the "Suncoast Business Forum."

- [Narrator] "Suncoast Business Forum," brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking, and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial wellbeing first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

(dreamy music) (exciting music) - What if I told you you could grow as much fresh produce on one third of an acre indoors as you could produce on 60 acres outdoors?

Curious?

Well, that's what Brick Street Farms in St. Petersburg, Florida is doing.

They've developed a proprietary growing system using controlled environment agriculture that has transformed shipping containers into an eco-friendly urban farm.

Shannon O'Malley is CEO and co-founder of Brick Street Farms.

Shannon, welcome to the "Suncoast Business Forum."

- Thank you so much, I'm happy to be here today.

- Good to have you.

Now, Brick Street Farms is not a household word yet, but it's not exactly what most people think of when they think of as a farm.

Explain your vision for this urban farming venture.

- Brick Street Farms is an indoor hydroponic farming facility that is made out of upcycled shipping containers.

So, not only are we stacked inside the shipping container, but the shipping containers themselves are then vertical.

This is what allows us to grow a tremendous amount of product on a very small square footage.

- Why shipping containers?

Is there some advantage to using shipping containers?

- We chose shipping containers.

It started with reason because we didn't have the money to buy a warehouse, which we originally thought we wanted to do.

But because we started by self-funding, we had to start with a smaller, much more financially-attainable environment, hence, shipping containers.

However, they do provide a lot of advantages.

A couple key advantages are that they do provide for very controlled environments, no pun intended.

However, each shipping container is specifically designed and tailored to fit the crop that is inside of it.

So, each container is like its own grow room.

It's also a huge risk mitigation factor for us because think about it, if you have the flu, and you're locked in the room with a bunch of people, it's likely that they would get the flu as well.

However, in shipping containers, it reduces, if we should have any sort of health or environmental issue, it keeps it contained to just that one shipping container.

So, it allows us advanced control.

And then also, finally, they're very portable.

So, it allows us to grow an extraordinary amount of produce in very small locations like densely populated urban areas.

- Brick Street Farms uses controlled environment agriculture, and there are a variety of different types.

What are those different types?

- So, within controlled environment agriculture, there are warehouses which use complete artificial light.

So, indoor growing, climate-controlled LED lighting.

There's also high efficiency, high technology-based greenhouses, which do use the sun primarily as their source.

However, they may use some artificial lighting as supplements.

And then finally, there's the shipping container method, which is a much more condensed or smaller version of warehouse growing, but allows for that portability and stacking capabilities.

And it's actually much cheaper to cool a smaller space than a larger space.

So, it does allow for a lot of energy efficiencies.

- Now, Brick Street Farms is capable of producing 60 acres worth of produce in one third of an acre in an urban area, St. Petersburg?

- [Shannon] Yes.

- [Geoffrey] How do you do that?

- It's actually every 28 days.

So, shortest month of the year.

So, we cycle our entire farm every 28 days.

We do that, not only, we're talking about square footage, but in vertical farming, we look at cubic feet.

Our shipping containers have six levels of crops inside of them, six rows.

And not only that, but we have two containers stacked on top of each other.

So, the density of the plant sites within our shipping containers and the density of the containers on the lot is what allows us to achieve those 60 acres.

- Brick Street Farms is also very eco-friendly and energy efficient.

Tell us about that- - Yes.

So, we thought about that, myself and my co-founder, Brad Doyle, started Brick Street Farms with environmental sustainability in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and carbon fuel as a source from day one.

So, when we designed Brick Street Farms, not only did we design the shipping container farms themselves, but we designed what you see in St. Petersburg, The Hub.

And The Hub is inclusive of an energy management system and a water management system, that allows us to use between 25 and 30% less energy and 90% less water than traditional soil-based farming.

- How do you do that?

Because plants need water to grow.

- Yes, there's a misconception that because you use hydroponics, you're using an extraordinary amount of water.

It's actually quite the opposite.

Each one of our farm containers by plant site is between two and three acres, and that is what we harvest every 28 days per farm container.

Each shipping container uses an average of 25 gallons of fresh water per day for that two to three acres.

However, if you look at the USDA, according to them, the average soil-based acre uses about a thousand gallons of fresh water per day, that is then absorbed by the soil, and ultimately lost.

With our 25 gallons per day, it's actually reclaimed, refiltered, and reused.

So, the only water loss is what the plants themselves drink or what we lose through evaporation.

So, we reclaim all of our water, and it goes into these very large storage tanks that we have.

And in addition to that, we reclaim the condensate that comes out of our HVACs.

And all of that goes into these storage tanks, then ultimately flows through a proprietary four-part water management system and filtration.

And the end result is a highly-oxygenated reverse osmosis water that then goes into the farms.

- What does Brick Street farms grow, and are some crops better suited for controlled environment agriculture than others?

- Absolutely, some crops are better suited for hydroponics.

The hydroponics industry or indoor farming has expanded to all types of crops, and they're even experimenting with fruit trees, and all different types of crops.

But Brick Street Farms, at this point in time, we started by focusing on leafy greens, microgreens, flowers, and we've just recently expanded into strawberries.

- And who do you serve?

- We might look small, but we are a commercial scale grower.

We put out over 20,000 pounds of fresh produce every 28 days.

And we're still working on increasing that.

We service several different areas.

We have a relationship with Publix, so we do service Publix.

We service primarily though, the wholesale hospitality industry, hotels and restaurants.

And then, finally, we also service direct to consumer.

So, we come to Brook Street Farms, we actually do have an onsite market where the public can shop and help themselves to our produce.

And you can shop online.

And if you happen to live in the city of St. Petersburg, we do home delivery, which we're hoping to expand over the next year.

- How do you see technology influencing agriculture and the future of agriculture?

- Oh, tremendously.

It already has.

It already has.

When Brad and I started Brick Street Farms, we were both employed at Duke Energy at the time, which was a phenomenal company, and very forward-thinking when it comes to grid modernization.

I had the opportunity to work in the grid modernization program, which the mission was to make the grid smarter, and reduce generation needs.

We took that kind of that same vision and approach, and applied it to controlled environment agriculture.

With my electrical sciences background, and Bradley's software architecture background, we designed a system that is as much technology as it is farming.

Each one of our containers has over 120 different sensors.

We're taking data readings every 60 seconds, such as air temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, wind speed, DLI or light spectrum, light intensity, sunrise, sunset.

We also control all of the nutrient elements that are in the water.

We take that information, and we make smart technology-based decisions.

So, we look at our historical usage, and we're able to come up with forecasts to help us grow the healthiest, prettiest, tastiest-looking plants in the shortest amount of time.

- Let's talk about your formative years.

About growing up, your family.

- Grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Born and raised, and my entire family still lives up there.

My parents, my siblings.

A lot of my childhood friends are still very much up there.

And I lived there until I was 26.

Growing up, I was very close with my father.

His name is Jim James, Jim O'Malley.

I was very much a daddy's girl growing up At a very young age, my parents put me in gymnastics.

I was a very active child, and so my parents put me in gymnastics, and it's something that kind of stuck.

And it kind of became this father-daughter thing that we did.

He would take me to my classes and to my meets.

And after that, I actually continued gymnastics all the way through division one, University of Pittsburgh.

And it was a great experience for me.

I think playing a sport gives you a great foundation for following instruction, taking constructive criticism, and I just thoroughly enjoyed it.

- After you graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, you went on to graduate school?

- I did.

So, I chose to go to Carlow University.

There was a great opportunity there for an executive MBA program.

So, I did go to Carlow for a dual executive MBA-MIS program.

So, I did both degrees in a three-year time span while I was working.

And then, after that is when I decided to take a little bit of a break, and ended up relocating to Florida.

And I woke up one morning on Siesta Key on vacation, and I essentially never left.

I came home, packed up my things, packed up my dog, drove down to Florida.

I didn't have any friends or family, or a job.

My father thought I had lost my mind, but he was very supportive.

I remember what he told me, he said, "You need to go, you need to do it."

And he said, "If it doesn't work out, if you don't love it and you need to come home, call me.

I'll wire you the gas money.

Just drive on home and you can have your old room back."

And that's what I remember what he said to me as I was pulling away.

I never had to make that phone call.

So, after spending some time in Siesta Key enjoying my youth, I decided that it was time to put my degrees to good use.

So, I ended up moving up to Tampa.

I had the opportunity to work as both a business analyst, an IT project manager, business intelligence principal.

I had worked my way through several different industries and technology roles, which ultimately led me to Duke Energy.

I started on, as part of the grid modernization program, and ultimately worked my way up through that organization to a senior program director there working on grid mod.

And it was an absolutely incredible experience.

- In 2012, you met your future husband to be.

- [Shannon] Yes.

- Brad Doyle, who was also working at Duke Energy.

- Yes.

- Tell us about Brad.

- So, I actually married a local Florida boy.

Brad is born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida where his mother still lives, and a lot of his family.

He went to FSU.

So, I always say I married into the FSU family.

Southern football was something I wasn't really prepared for when I moved from the north.

And after going to Florida State, he relocated to the Tampa area and worked his way through.

He mostly worked as a consultant for Accenture for many years.

And traveled around, really honed his technology skills.

And then, he found a home at at Duke Energy a little before I did.

And he's just really excelled in his career there.

He's really emerged as a great solution architect.

- [Geoffrey] So together, you and Brad developed Brick Street Farms.

Tell us how that collaboration evolved.

- Well, I have to back up a little bit to tell you how Brick Street Farms started.

Well, actually, I'm a master gardener.

And I was a master gardener in Pennsylvania.

I did backyard hobby type gardening, raised garden beds.

When I moved to Florida, once we purchased our home in St. Petersburg, I got back into gardening, put some garden beds in.

And I can admit this, it was a failure.

I just tried to take the same approaches that I had up north.

And I wasn't prepared for the extraordinary soil amendments that were needed.

Pest management is tough.

I had never had to deal with heat in the same way.

And I started consuming as much information as I could.

Reading all about it, why I wasn't having the success.

And I got really frustrated.

And a lot of those paths lead you to herbicides, pesticides, genetically-modified seeds, and just to deal with that.

And I didn't want to do that in my own home garden.

So, through my research, I saw this hydroponic thing.

And I was like, "Well, I think, why don't I give that a try?"

And so, I converted our two garage into a hydroponic grow room.

And it took off.

It was an area that I could climate control, didn't have the yucky pests and bugs to deal with, but it was a completely new methodology.

And it was very manual.

And after I'd built these systems, this is where Brad started to step in, and he said, "You know, instead of having to run out and see if the water's flowing every day, why don't we put a water sensor in?

Why don't we look at a dashboard or an app on your phone that you can remotely monitor the garage?

So, you're not up in the middle of the night, or if we're on vacation, you're not stressing about it?"

And that was the birthplace of Brick Street Farms.

- What started as a hydroponic garden in your garage, then became a business.

How did you make that leap?

- Farming, whether it be traditional or indoor-controlled environment agriculture, CEA, is it requires an extraordinary amount of capital.

It's very capital intensive.

And just like traditional farms, you have a huge outlay of capital before you start to get your return.

Weeks, even months down the road.

And if you're in fruit, I mean it could be years down the road before you get a return.

Well, I think that I was a bit ignorant when I started.

And so, when we looked at this, and I started looking at the cost to take it out of our garage, we wanted to buy a warehouse.

But we didn't have the funds.

We were entirely self-funded to start.

We remortgaged our home.

We had a couple of rental properties that we sold.

I drained my 401(k).

So, I literally bet the farm that this was going to work.

But all of that still would not have allowed us to invest, 10 million plus into a warehouse when you start looking at the complexity and cost of lighting, HVAC water systems.

And so, we bought a shipping container.

They were readily available.

This was pre-pandemic, so they were more affordable than they are today.

But we didn't only buy a regular shipping container, we bought a what's called a reefer container, which is pre-insulated.

So, those are the containers that are used to ship frozen products across the ocean.

And with that, we started building, we started building our own.

I look back at our first couple of containers, and I can't believe they worked, but they did.

In 2018, we brought on our first investor.

Brought in a family office out of Sarasota, came on board with a debt and equity deal.

So, we brought them on first, which is what really allowed us to advance our models.

So, at that point in time, we were still just building farms for ourselves, and it allowed us to invest in some strategic hardware and software that was needed to develop it, and really start us down our own patents.

So that was in 2018.

And then, in 2019, we actually did a full seed round that was fully subscribed to by Lykes Brothers Corporation out of Tampa.

And that was absolutely incredible.

I do believe you've interviewed Johnny James, a current CEO.

He really went out on a limb and gave Brick Street Farms a chance.

Lykes Brothers is an amazing long living traditional agriculture company.

And they have a real history of thinking strategically, and thinking a hundred years down the road.

And a lot of folks think new school ag and old school ag might be at odds, or might not be compatible, but I couldn't disagree with that more.

I think it shows, it gave us a certain level of validity, and it gave us a certain level of clout within the industry, and particularly within the state of Florida.

So, they invested 5 million with us in 2019, which was the birth of The Hub that we have today.

So, with them investing in us, we were able to advance our systems even further, make some pretty significant upgrades, but then also design The Hub that you see today in downtown St. Petersburg.

The tricky part was, we broke ground in February of 2020.

And then, the world shut down in March of 2020.

So, a project ended up costing us 50% more, and taking two times twice as long.

In that month of February, we broke ground, and we were 95% of our revenue, was wholesale hospitality.

And March came, the world shut down, which included 95% of our business.

We lost 95% of our business inside of 10 days, and we had nowhere to sell our product.

So, we had to pivot, and this is something that indoor agriculture can do very well, is pivot.

Luckily, grocery stores were experiencing quite the boom.

And I remember reaching out and calling Publix, and saying, "So, how would you like to buy some greens?"

(chuckling) They were struggling with supply chain.

Trucks were shut down.

farmers couldn't get workers.

They were struggling with supply chain.

But I think it's a testament to bringing production to the point of consumption.

Here we are in St. Petersburg, within 100 hundred miles of a distribution center.

Picked up the phone and said, "How would you like to do business with us?"

And within 30 days, we went from bulk wholesale to resale or grocery relationship.

And we were 100%, 95 to 100% grocery for the next 18 months.

It gave us the reputation that we could deliver.

It also was, not only are we living through a pandemic, but I had to learn to work with the grocery industry, which was an animal that I was entirely unprepared for at the time.

Their regulations, standards, distribution, learning to work with that, I had to learn an entirely new industry inside of weeks, packaging requirements, barcodes, everything.

But it made us grow up.

It took us from this small family kind of startup, go-getter community of kind of ragtag individuals.

And we came out the other side with a PhD in produce supply chain.

The pandemic was the best, worst thing that ever happened to us.

As the world started to open up again, we actually did start to divert some product back into the wholesale hospitality industry.

And so, once again, we're back to about where we were pre-pandemic.

We're at about 80 to 85% wholesale hospitality, 10 to 15% grocery.

And the remainder is direct to consumer, which is an area that we very much look at focusing on increasing over the next 12 months.

- With all the lessons learned by Brick Street Farms through good and bad times, do you have a process and a model that's scalable to other cities?

- Think of it as Legos.

And we've designed this to be copy, paste in very densely populated urban areas.

So, we started in the warehouse Arts District of St. Petersburg.

We are looking forward to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and other areas, perhaps customer-facing, as well as hubs that may not be customer-facing, that might feed directly into our wholesale food supply chain.

What is extraordinary about this is that the shipping containers are built in one location.

And you can prep your site wherever that might be, which allows you to open faster and scale faster.

You asked early on about one of the advantages to shipping containers.

Our shipping containers allow us to rightsize the capital investment for the area and population that we're going into.

Meaning, we don't have to build a hundred thousand square foot facility and hope we sell it out.

Hope is not a business tactic.

What we can do is we can start with what we know our sell-through rate is going to be.

We can build a foundation, and then add shipping containers as demand grows.

That is a very smart model that we plan to replicate throughout the state of Florida.

- There are some communities that have a shortage or lack of fresh produce.

Access to fresh produce.

I know that Brick Street Farms has focused on this.

This is part of your mission.

Explain that.

- Yes.

So, when I started Brick Street Farms, as I mentioned earlier, being part of the community and serving every aspect of the community was important to us.

It wasn't just for certain neighborhoods.

So, not only are we in South St. Pete, but South St. Pete is one of the largest food deserts in the United States, certainly in the state of Florida.

And this is a term that's come to rise over the last decade or so.

And an urban desert is defined as an area without access to fresh, nutritious food.

It can be urban, it can be rural.

So, it's not density-based.

It's about access to food, and nutritious food.

We're not talking convenience store food.

So, I started a foundation called Desert Farms Foundation.

And the mission statement for Desert Farms is "Nutritional Wellness for All."

So, our goal through Desert Farms Foundation is to work with individuals that make donations, private corporations, organizations, family fund offices, and other nonprofits.

We work together, and Brick Street Farms provides fresh produce to food, Desert.

So, we work with a number of partnerships.

Duke Energy was a great contributor to us, very, very thankful for that.

They were our first and largest corporate donation.

And with that, we work with Boys and Girls Club, reached St. Pete Feeding Tampa Bay, and the YMCA.

And we actually provide fresh produce to families through those organizations.

So, we delivered to them, and they deliver Brick Street Farms produce to needed families and needed communities.

So, we also work with a couple of food pantries locally in our area.

But Desert Farms Foundation is not only supported by outside donations from individuals and companies, private organizations, but Brick Street Farms has a farm membership.

So, even though we're open to the public, and anybody can shop there anytime, we do have a farm membership that is $9 a month, but that $9 a month is actually a charitable contribution to Desert Farms Foundation.

- Well Shannon, I'd like to thank you so much for being our guest today.

- Thank you so much.

I could talk about this all day.

(Geoffrey chuckling) It's absolutely wonderful.

- Thank you.

(exciting music) If you'd like to see this or any of the CEO profiles in our "Suncoast Business Forum" archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the "Suncoast Business Forum."

(triumphant music)