Rodrigo on R&D, the future of vertical farming, and more.
Can you tell us a bit about your background? What led you to work in indoor vertical farming? And here at Bowery?
I started working right out of school in the lighting industry. I spent time doing R&D in different types of light sources and eventually started doing work on LEDs. Horticultural lighting started popping up as an area of interest – not necessarily a new application for lighting, but something that had so much potential. I did a few projects in controlled environment agriculture and honestly it piqued my interest in the field.
I did that until 2020, then worked for a year at a startup doing product management for software and sensors aimed at cannabis cultivation. Then, in 2021, Bowery came calling. And here I am. Funny enough, as part of my lighting days, I actually went to Farm 0 to do a light installation. I remember leaving and saying “this would be a really cool place to work.”
How do you and the team decide what varieties of leafy greens and herbs to grow?
One of the first things that we’ll look at is existing crops. What is the upside of growing a new variety? How does it perform against our incumbent cultivars? And then, is there differentiation? Not only in terms of the yield that we’re getting out of the system, but also other characteristics, like its sensory profile or shelf life.
For net new products, we have to look at it from many different perspectives. Can we grow it in our system? There might be things that we want to grow that might be challenging. What are the changes that we would need to do to make it work?
A really good example of that is spinach. We looked at growing it in different ways and kept running up against challenges. Then we took a step back and looked at what allowed us to grow spinach successfully in R&D and then translated that into our production system in collaboration with our engineering team.
How much trial goes into different varietals for something like spinach?
It’s usually a good amount of work – depending on the crop a full grow cycle can take up to a month. Then you want to make sure that the growing characteristics that you’ve seen aren’t a one off. So then you repeat it and we start increasing the number of crops through which we gain confidence in our results. And then ultimately, the last step before we go into full production, is to do a pre-production test in our production farms.
What are some of the unique challenges that you face and see when growing plants indoors, and how do you overcome them?
This is going to sound very, very simplistic, but sometimes, the hardest challenges are not doing the basics right. Those basics right are like 90% of the battle.
There are also the environmental conditions in which you test plants versus that we productionize them in. What we thought would be a really successful recipe or growth condition in R&D may need adjustments in production. One of the things that we’re always striving to do is also understand what are the conditions in our production farms? How can we best emulate them here in R&D, so we can anticipate how they might grow in production.
We’re also very lucky to have an extraordinary group of scientists and operations team in R&D, that come up with creative solutions that allow us to answer the questions around these unique challenges.
What is going on in the R&D farm vs. one of the larger scale farms?
In a very practical way, we just have smaller, more customizable systems in our R&D farms. We drive to get both directional and at times very precise answers to how our plants grow. . If you have 2 treatments, how does treatment A differ from treatment B? And then what does that tell us about its potential use in production? We’ll do a number of cycles and once we’re convinced that there is significance to the findings between treatments, then we give recommendations.
Our spinach R&D is a really good example in which we looked at a system and processes different from how we typically grow in the farm and made recommendations on how to productionize.
What are the most interesting or surprising things you’ve learned about plant growth in an indoor setting?
How complicated it is. Even though I said that sometimes just getting the basics is 90% of battle, it’s that last 10% that’s really nuanced and challenging. It’s given me an appreciation for how complex plants are. What you initially think is the factor that’s driving something, it turns out it might be something completely different. You always have to put on different lenses and ask the question, okay, well, what if…?
How do you manage things like lighting, temperature, humidity, etc.? If everything depends!
We have set points which exist in industry and academic literature. For example, they tell you these are the bands for temperature that you want to be in to grow leafy greens, this is the humidity, this is the light level, this is the water flow, etc. We can always go back to the literature to give us some guidance.
Then, our job in some ways is to tweak those to get you to the 90%. That’s really where our collaboration and work with our agricultural operations team comes into play. What if we tweak grow length by one day? What if we change light levels by this amount? What if we extend germination? All of these little tweaks allow us to make the farm more agriculturally productive.
What are some misconceptions that you think people have about indoor vertical farming?
From a very, very personal perspective, there’s been a lot of emphasis on the tech side of things within vertical farming, and the promise of tech. What it enables us to do in the farm is amazing. One of the misconceptions is that tech, by itself, can solve all issues. We still have to think that what we are doing is fundamentally an agricultural process. We have to apply sound agricultural techniques and processes to what we’re doing. People think vertical farming can be cold and mechanistic, but I think there is an art to what we’re doing.
How do you see the future of indoor vertical farming evolving over the next 5, 10 years?
If you step back and look at the challenges we’re seeing in the agricultural world – they’re very real. It’s only going to continue to get more challenging. A good example is what we’ve seen happen with lettuce production in California. There’s been disease, flooding, droughts. It’s led to an instability of supply that’s not sustainable in the long term. So the opportunity we have is to provide stability to a food system that will become less predictable and have more extremes.
We’re not a replacement for traditional agriculture, as Irving says. We’re going to be part of the overall agricultural ecosystem. The question is how?
Can you share any upcoming projects or any new crops that people can look forward to in the future?
After our commercial test with strawberries, we continue to do great work on strawberries on our quest to find the Bowery Berry. How can we grow the most tasty, most beautiful berry? It’s nothing like you’ve eaten before.
We’re always on the strawberry side. We’re constantly striving to find the Bowery Berry. How can we find the most tasty, most beautiful berry? It’s nothing like you’ve eaten before.
What is your favorite Bowery product and why?
Our strawberries are insanely good. It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t had one of our berries.The best endorsement I could think of is my kids asking if I brought strawberries almost every other day I come back from the farm.
On the leafy green side, I love our arugula. I love the pepperiness and depth of flavor.
