(soft music) - Nate story of Plenty Unlimited was a graduate student at the University of Wyoming when he came up with the idea to improve the world of vertical farming.

Now it's being expanded to industrial scale.

His goal one day, to help feed the world with strawberries as one of the key crops in these early stages.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS, and this is Wyoming Chronicle.

- [Narrator] Funding for Wyoming Chronicle is made possible in part by Wyoming humanities, enhancing the Wyoming narrative to promote engaged communities and improve our quality of life.

And by the members of Wyoming PBS.

Thank you for your support.

- [Steve] Imagine a farm where the crops typically grown on 350 acres, could be raised on just one acre.

Now, imagine a farm where crops that normally required 100 gallons of water could be grown just as well with one gallon.

And imagine a farm where those same crops required no pesticides, no washing after harvest, and were packaged for retail stores seconds after being picked.

And one more thing, imagine that farm being developed, tested, and perfected in Wyoming.

It turns out you don't have to imagine.

Just meet Nate's story instead.

He's doing every one of those things right now.

Nate Story.

Welcome to Wyoming Chronicle.

Thanks for hosting us here in your spectacular facility in Laramie.

Not the only one that you have.

We'll talk more about that as we go along.

Your specialty, and I'm putting it very, very generally, is vertical farming, non-scientist here across from you.

I think I have a general idea of what is meant by vertical farming.

What's your definition?

- Yeah, so there are a lot of definitions out there, but it's basically saying, hey, can we grow plants in three dimensional space?

And when you start growing plants in three dimensional space, instead of just a single layer, it means you have to start doing some special things like controlling the environment much more tightly and putting more energy into that environment in the form of lights.

And so when you see our farms, you see plants in three dimensions.

They're packed into these very condensed growing areas.

And you see a lot of equipment managing that environment to very tight tolerances.

- My son is a faculty member at the University of Iowa.

I drive back to see him once in a while, and we drive east from Wyoming through Nebraska and Iowa, and we see farm country like you just can't believe.

And you see corn where the plants are this far apart and they're exactly the same height, and the ears are in the same spot on each stock.

So, and there's not a weed in sight.

And it's about the most efficient kind of traditional farmland that you can see, which is representing, I'm sure you'd agree, a tremendous amount of advancement and innovation and technology.

But with what you're talking about and what you're doing here is productivity on another many magnified scale.

- I mean, when you look at that cornfield, what you're seeing is an attempt to use three dimensional space, right?

So it is very, very dense in a shallow layer.

And that density in that shallow layer has delivered unbelievable yields compared to, say, 50 years ago or a hundred years ago for that crop.

And what we've said is, hey, what if we take that three dimensional space utilization and expand it up to 40 feet to 50 feet higher?

And what does that mean for crops that traditionally are very short, like lettuce crops, like even tall crops like tomatoes?

What does it look like to change their shape and pack them into space in really unique ways and in ways that we've designed the crop to fit in?

So it's basically taking some old ideas and then just taking them to completely different level.

- Yes, 'cause farm and food engineering is not new at all.

What did you bring to it that you felt was gonna be different?

- We looked out at the space, this is something that people have been trying to do in many different ways for quite a while, and none of them have really found success.

And so, one of the first questions I started asking was like, is that the optimal way to arrange plants in space?

IS that the optimal way to take these tiny little plants and arrange them in three dimensional space so that we get the most productivity out of a given space?

We use energy as efficiently as possible, all of these things.

And it turns out that the way that other people were approaching it was just wrong.

Well, maybe not wrong, just suboptimal with very severe restrictions on how productive they could be.

And so my approach was to say, well, what happens if we orient plants on a single plane, vertical plane, and then we put those planes back to back and then we deliver light from the middle of those aisles that are formed.

And how efficient can we get.

In turns out that's much more efficient than the other ways of arranging plants in space?

- Tell us about your days as a a UW student that was the germ of what we're seeing now.

- I graduated from high school in Wyoming.

- [Steve] Where was that?

- Cheyenne, Cheyenne Central.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So graduated from Central and ended up doing a few things for a few years.

Came back to University of Wyoming for my degrees and ultimately did my bachelor's, master's and PhD in agronomy and agroecology.

- So I take that from that to mean that you must have been a farm kid, right?

4H projects and county fair and FFA, that kind of thing.

- I wasn't a farm kid.

- [Steve] No?

- I was an Air Force brat, but my father, his father had been a rancher and there was kind of this historical family tie to ranching and agriculture.

I went to community college over in Cheyenne for a little bit and then I ended up actually traveling quite, not bit.

And I ended up in China.

I was living in China overlooking this threshing floor.

And while I was there I kind of realized food is fundamental, it's global, everyone eats and it's kind of like the thing that binds a lot of people together.

That was true for my family.

And then as I traveled, I saw that it was true for everyone.

So I came back and said, hey, food is the thing I wanna work on.

- These ideas began to occur to you as a college student, is that fair to say?

- Yeah, so I was working on my master's and I was working with an organic hydroponic system at the time, and I had these towers in there and they really underperformed on a per plant basis.

But when I looked at the spatial data, it was undeniable that this was a more efficient way to manage plants in a couple of square feet.

And so for my PhD I went back and for part of it I redesigned towers the way I thought they should work for these spaces.

And started to look at productivity in my own tower designs.

- You came to the point where you participated in sort of a business ready kind of a program that the university was involved in?

- The first thing was a business competition, a UW business competition.

They call it the 50K now.

And there's some great businesses that go through there.

We went through the program a long time ago.

- Wasn't the 50K then?

- It was a 10K, so it didn't sound as impressive, but it was a great program and it helped kind of get us started, get us encouraged and get us manufacturing and selling equipment from here in Laramie.

And then, we started a business on the back of that competition called Bright Agritech.

We built it here in town.

And then Bright Agritech actually worked closely with the city and the state to build this facility here, that we're sitting in for Bright Agritech.

And then I left Bright Agritech and help start Plenty.

And then we folded Bright Agritech into Plenty a little bit later.

- My very elementary analysis of what you've done tells me perhaps that Bright Agro, that you were doing with talked about the innovations that you'd thought of, but with Plenty, what you've been able to do is scale it up on sort of a more.

- Bright Agritech, I would say was a failed business premise in a sense.

- I see.

- Right, the idea was saying, hey, if we build grade equipment, we give small growers education, give them access to this equipment, help them raise money, help them manage their business, all of these different things, then we can kind of start this local food revolution.

And what we learned after doing it for a few years is there's a lot of great people that mean very well out there that are capable of doing some great work, but the really great business people are few and far between.

So you'd set up all of these businesses and five years later, 50% of 'em had gone out of business.

And so it was kind of this revolving door of people coming in and people leaving.

And I realized like, that's not the way that we change the world.

When I look to the future 50 years from now, we haven't made the impact that that I want to make.

And so that's really kind of what drove Plenty was this idea, okay, well if we take the great equipment and we take the business acumen, we take the capital, we concentrate it in one business with a really intense focus on scaling and economies of scale, can we change the equation, right?

And can 50 years from now the world look fundamentally different than the way the world looks today.

- This was how many years ago?

- [Nate] Plenty was about 10 years, almost 10 years ago, yeah.

- [Steve] Let's project 50 years out.

What are you hoping for?

- I think, when I look at the world, I see a number of problems with food, but one of the big ones is fresh healthy food isn't available to everyone everywhere.

And you know, in Wyoming, Wyoming is a food desert or wherever you're living, the likelihood that by the time lettuce gets to your supermarket, it's maybe a little wilty, it doesn't look great, it doesn't last very long in your fridge.

Very, very high.

And that's not unusual when you look around the world.

Most places around the world, the access to fresh food is really limited to what's basically produced locally.

And if you live in environments where there's a lot of seasonality, it means there's a big portion of the earth where you don't eat fresh food.

And so one of the things we started off to try and solve was, number one, how do we make fresh food available to everyone?

And then number two, when we start looking to the future, I think the future is pretty uncertain in terms of what the climate is doing and how that impacts agriculture.

And one thing that folks don't understand is that agriculture has been on this very intense journey from the beginning days when it was a human out sowing some seed that he gathered when he was out hunting that day.

And you come back to that camp a year later and there's a crop growing there and making that connection in your mind.

I put the seed in the ground, the seed grows to where we're at today.

Central California laser leveled, nice sandy soils where you can control the water, the nutrition.

The climate historically has been super predictable.

So it's a de-risked as controllable as you can get outside kind of production system.

And what we're seeing now is a destabilization of these historically stable production systems in ways that I think threaten the food supply.

And so kind of one of the secondary things that we're focused on is saying, well, how do we not just make fresh food available to everyone everywhere, but how do we also make sure that we have a production method in our back pocket, we call it the third platform for agriculture.

The first being the field, the second being the greenhouse, the third being completely enclosed, vertical farming, whatever you wanna call it.

But how do we have this in our back pocket for a future where agricultural production is less stable, less predictable, and more expensive?

- I think, am I right in saying the biggest vertical farm that Plenty has operating now is in California?

- Correct.

- [Steve] And it's in the city of Compton.

- Yep.

- My guess is that once upon a time Compton was orange groves or lemon groves or something like that.

- Yeah, that's right.

- [Steve] But I think the modern perception of Compton, California is not farm country.

- Right.

- But what you're saying is, what you're trying to do, hoping to do and demonstrating now, anywhere could be farm country.

- That's right.

Parts of the globe where you see the most population growth, the most concentration of people, they're not in areas that are always the best farmland or the most productive, especially after you've built a city on top of it.

So you rewind 200 years and most people lived in the country, 98% of the population was rural, 2% was urban.

And you fast forward to where we're at today in developed and developing countries, it's almost completely switched.

You've got 98% of the population in cities, 2% of the population rural.

That introduces some fundamental food security problems to the way food is grown and distributed and consumed.

And so I really view what we're doing as building a solution for that inevitable problem, right?

People moving to cities and being farther away from the productive areas, more supply chain risk, more productivity risk, and fewer farmers, frankly, to be growing the food for the people that need it.

- A lot of the uncertainty in farm work, I should say, my father grew up on a farm, my mother grew up on a cattle ranch, tremendous uncertainty for them all the time.

So you're controlling the climate, you can control the water, so that you can get to the product, the food.

so that you can get to the product, the food.

- That's right.

- Yeah, and as you say, people like the idea of it, obviously, and I want to get nutritious food locally if I can.

So far the methods for doing that are more along the lines of a guy who grows these great tomatoes in his greenhouse, a bushel at a time.

- Yeah.

I mean, you're kind of faced with like the commodity mass producing food system or like the super precious local, super seasonal, very expensive food system.

And there's not a whole lot in between.

And so I think, the objective of this business is to take the quality that you see at that local, super precious, super seasonal, scale and take it to that mass production scale, making that type of quality available to people year round.

So that is pretty hard to do.

You've gotta invent a lot of new things.

You've gotta raise a lot of money to invent those new things, to build the teams, to do the work, to build these types of businesses.

But once they're built, they have the potential to run at the cost of field production.

There's all sorts of interesting things that you can do when you're producing locally.

The other thing is we have complete control.

So the product coming out is more like a, it's closer to when you think of like a manufactured good, right, you're looking for everything to kind of be the same when it comes off the end of the line, there's no variability.

Two heads of lettuce in the same field could have two totally different qualities depending on the time of day that they're picked.

And you as a consumer don't get to control that.

And so what we really want to do is produce the absolute top quality product, take it to market, sell it at the same price.

Today we're selling at this median organic, so basically the average organic price for the product.

- A little more, but.

- Yep.

And we're bringing that down.

Our main customer right now is actually Walmart.

So that tells you kind of what we're capable of doing in terms of mass market.

- There's some technical advances that you have made and are making that are setting you apart in agriculture in general and in your field in particular.

- This business was founded on a lot of patents that were generated during my work at UW.

They're licensed from the university, and the architecture that we use is fundamentally different than anyone else in the space.

And we realized that the advantages of that architecture early on, and then what we did differently is we went out and we raised at this point, it is almost a billion dollars and we put the vast majority of that research funding into developing that IP.

And so we've got a spatially superior way of organizing plants in space, which sounds super boring, but at the end of the day, that's what makes you or breaks you in this industry, is how efficient can you be on a square foot basis.

- And the equivalent of one acre of vertical farm, as you do it, you can get the amount of produce in a particular crop.

And you'll tell me which one it might be, of 350 acres of traditional farmland.

Is that what the ratio is?

- That's correct.

So if you're growing the crops that we're growing today, say in the Compton Farm, it would take almost 700 acres to grow what we're growing in the equivalent of two acres.

Two acres contains processing, it contains a lot of other things that are non-productive spaces.

So we have this massive multiplier effect by moving things indoors.

- It seems to me that harvesting the crop would be a harder thing or at least a different thing.

And I don't have a great idea of how that's done.

I mean, obviously you're working on those solutions and are finding them.

- With greens, everything is harvested automatically.

The tower comes in, a robot grabs it, lays it down flat, runs it through a series of blades, spinning blades, they cut the product onto conveyors that take it off to be packaged.

- So I go to the store now, for example, and I see a bag of lettuce.

- So we cut the whole leaf off of the tower with a single pass.

- But essentially getting it more or less package ready right at that harvest plant.

- That's right.

- So there's no, it doesn't go into crates and then go on a truck and then travel for a hundred miles to a packing plant and then get washed and then get packaged and then get torn apart and repackaged from bulk to smaller sizes.

Like there's none of that.

We minimize the handling and it shows in the quality and the flavor.

- Now there's much, much bigger money involved in the company.

We'll just put it that way.

You mentioned Walmart as a big customer.

I think anyone wants to find out, can look at some of the investors that you have, which shows, here's some people that really look things over carefully.

- Yep.

- And they think you're onto something here.

But one thing amid all of that that you've insisted upon is maintaining a link to Wyoming.

We're here in one of your original structures here now, which you said the city of Laramie helped you do.

And you have another much larger facility than this plant in Laramie, right?

- Yep, that's right.

- What's that gonna be?

- So that's a result of a $25 million basically grant from the state, working closely with the city, with the LCBA to make, to build a new research center here in Laramie.

So today we're kind of split between two buildings.

We're going to be able to move all of our research into a single, a single building, and be able to do basically cutting edge world class plant science in this indoor Ag space here in Laramie.

- You're a private company, but it's a one of these private public partnerships, at least at the beginning that Wyoming considering what its reputation might be around the country, has shown a decent willingness to do, hasn't it?

- Yeah, I mean the, the state has been pretty darn visionary, pretty darn gutsy when it says to, I know who we are as a state, I know what historical industries have looked like, those historical industries are threatened.

What do we want the future to look like?

What do we need to start training people on?

What are the jobs we need to move young people into.

The state has said, hey, this area of vertical farming indoor Ag combines energy and agriculture.

Two things that Wyoming has a deep history and a strong culture around.

And let's double down on this.

- We've talked about and heard in Wyoming for at least 20 years, we must diversify the economy.

What's your employment in Laramie, for example, now?

- Yeah, so we've got almost a hundred people here in Laramie.

- And it started with one, you.

- Yeah, started with, yeah, a handful of people and we're around a hundred.

- And there is no community in Wyoming that wouldn't love any business that brought a hundred jobs to town.

It would be huge.

Whether we're talking about Laramie or Cheyenne or talking about Douglas or Dubois, that would be tremendously valuable and welcome.

- Absolutely.

And there are ripple effects in the local economy.

We put millions of dollars into the local economy through payroll, through other services that we use here.

And so yeah, it's a positive thing for everyone, yeah.

- What's the labor force, for example, at your farm in Compton?

No one's on a tractor there.

- No, they're on robots.

The equivalent, our indoor equivalent of tractors, right?

Where we're like tractors.

Tractors are actually a great example.

So prior to a tractor, he used draft animals.

And so the tractor comes along and all of a sudden a guy who has a hundred acres, he's got 60% just growing feed for his oxen or for his mules.

Now he can farm a hundred acres and sell a hundred acres worth of crop.

So this was a massive thing for reducing the labor demands and the weird resource mix on farms.

And what we've done is on this third platform for Ag, we've taken the tractors outta the mix and we put robots into the mix.

So now instead of riding a tractor around a field, we have folks standing in a nice air conditioned building, maybe listening to some tunes as they run the robots and make sure the robots don't crash.

Yeah, I view what we're doing is we're trying to de-risk Ag, right?

So there's a lot of business models that are very high risk.

You have a high risk industry and one way that you can help make that industry more sustainable, get better jobs, pay people better, do better things, is by coming in and de-risking it, saying how do we make the future more and more and more predictable.

In the field, some of the unpredictability arises around climate.

What's gonna happen?

Do we get rain or do we not get rain?

Is it gonna be early frost, late frost, drought?

You don't know these things, you can't control the weather.

We can control the weather in our farm, their inputs, will my water rights hold up?

You know, the Colorado River, the fight over the Colorado River right now is heating up.

There's a lot of people that rely on that water.

Will they have it next year?

I don't know.

The year after?

A little less.

Five years, 10 years, 20 years from now.

Who knows?

And that raises the cost of production.

So what we're doing is we're saying, hey listen, we can grow this stuff basically in a completely controlled, enclosed environment.

We use the theoretical minimum for the amount of water that we use in comparison to the fields is around 1%.

- Is that right?

- So we're around 10%, we're under 10% today and we're driving down towards that 1% mark.

All of a sudden when you can grow the same amount of produce for 1% of the water, the fight over water is not the driver of risk in the future of your business, right?

All of a sudden when you can control the heat, the humidity, the climate, the light, all these things, the drought next year, the rains, the frost, none of that becomes the risk driver in your business.

And so really what we're doing is we're taking all of that risk out.

Now we're trading some inputs for others, so we use like a lot of electricity.

But what we're saying is there are external factors driving the cost of renewable power down, down, down, that's predictable.

It's on a technology cost curve, it's getting cheaper every day.

Water is the opposite.

It's getting more expensive every day.

The cost of climate getting more expensive every single day.

All of these other factors getting more unpredictable, riskier and more expensive every day.

- Is there a single crop that you're best at growing in Plenty right now?

Or some crops that are better suited for it, at least here at the beginning than others?

- Yeah.

- So we've focused on greens.

So we've got like 13 different kinds of greens that we have or are growing in our farms.

And that's kinda where we started because it's a relatively simple crop.

We're working on strawberries.

So we're building a strawberry farm today in Virginia.

And most likely we're gonna build a lot of strawberry farms 'cause people seem to really like strawberries that are non-seasonal and really high quality.

- I'm always interested in talking to people that began with something smaller that has become or is becoming or will become something much, much bigger.

That's the undoing of some business models.

Are you ready for that?

How do you account for it, to compensate for it in your own thinking?

- There's always risk to taking something small and trying to make it big and there's a lot of difficulty.

It's a really hard thing to do, to take something really small and make it big and it's also somewhat sacrificial.

You have to give up a lot.

Figuring out how you get comfortable with less control over the outcome.

Figuring out how you get comfortable with working with other people that might have differing visions or differing objectives for the business.

That's all part of the process of letting go and letting something small grow into the big thing that it wants to be.

And you know, the world wants this, the world needs this.

The world is gonna make this big, whether it's this business or some other business, this is going to happen.

It's inevitable.

It has to happen.

So the question is just do you want to be part of that or not?

- You still live in Wyoming, don't you?

- I live here.

- And you plan to do that as far as you know?

- As far as I know, I plan to do that.

My kids are here.

I've got a flock of sheep that's here, and moving kids in sheep is hard so.

- So about a hundred people, you say employed locally, these are good jobs that you're providing as well.

What kinds of jobs are they?

This is an employment possibility for people with different kinds of backgrounds.

- The big categories are like, engineering jobs focused on like keeping machines running and improving the farm.

We have technician jobs, managing machines.

So instead of going out there with a knife and cutting lettuce, now you're watching a machine that's cutting lettuce and you're making sure the machine doesn't stop for whatever reason.

There's sanitation jobs.

Making sure that the plant is clean all of the time.

That everything is up to our standards.

And then management jobs.

How do we manage this complex dance of all of these different functions within this production space?

Nate Story, This has really been a fascinating stop for us on Wyoming Chronicle.

I enjoyed it very much.

I wish you well.

Congratulate you on what you've done and what you're going to do.

And thanks for sticking with Wyoming.

- My pleasure, yeah, thanks for the chat.

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