Zale Tabakman discusses Indoor Vertical Farming

PAUL

Welcome to today's Rethink What Matters podcast, the podcast dedicated to aligning the economy with the ecology and everyone for improved business performance, stronger families, and a greener, cooler climate.

And today, I'm joined by Zale Tabakman of Local Grown Salads in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the US. And we're going to be speaking about indoor vertical farming.

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.

ZALE

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

PAUL

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

ZALE

Okay. So I will 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 licence them. So it's kind of whole business thing.

But essentially, Paul says, hey, I want to get into 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 your technology. It'll be turnkey. You'll never really learn how to grow basil in your backyard, but you'll know how to grow Local Grown Salad's 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 fifteen minutes from the consumer. Meaning that your farm will be wherever consumers are living. There'll be no virtually no trans competition, or you can even deliver via bicycle from the farm to the people.

It's 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 is United States. They're separate states.

So you have California, Arizona, and Mexico as a key - well, Mexico is a different country. (So) Arizona, Mexico, and even Texas. They grow the vegetables, and it gets shipped to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. You're shipping actually farther than Spain is from England. You know, for Spain to England, you think it’s a big thing.

But, you know, so a tremendous amount of the growth of the transplants of the carbon footprint of farming, and we're talking in vegetable space, is all just a movement of the vegetables from one place to another. If you can get rid of that movement, you can do an immediate fifty percent reduction in the carbon footprint.

PAUL

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 in the business.

ZALE

Oh, okay. This is like, I'll tell you the short story, not the long story.

The short story is I am first a father with five kids, and they were all teenagers. And I was very big. I'm not a vegetarian or anything. I'm just like a normal guy, but 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, 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 (were) these kids, right? At same time, I was riding my bicycle. Now as I mentioned earlier, I'm 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, has big huge buildings.

At the same time, I was doing this technology consulting that's specific to Canadian -- Canada, and I had two different interesting customers. I had one that was a company that would manufacture three thousand sandwiches a day. So they would actually be manufacturing salads 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 have to swapping and swapping out. And I learnt that in Canada, we import about eighty-five percent 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 would have another client who was putting air into water, which is called 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 three 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 another 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 this 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. Right.

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 I'm 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 three dollars 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, and I started searching.

And I realised, 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 a million dollars of R and D later, we figured out how to do it. Now we have pending on our technology in Canada, the United States.

And we're now rolling out farms (in) Philadelphia, South Carolina, Calgary, Jamaica, a whole bunch of other places as well.

PAUL

What's the need that you're meeting where you are studying with? Is it that there's a lack of space or not enough food? Or why are your customers buying it?

ZALE

I mean -- oh, because 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, the juices or the water inside the vegetable starts to leak out, and you have problems.

So a fresh vegetable and a three-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 that is going to take three to four 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 it's going to go to some things that your listeners care about, is everything in California, Arizona, are covered in pesticides. Even if it's organic, it's still going to use an organic - it's going to 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 pure vegetable.

So the freshness, meaning that we can harvest and deliver within two hours, means that that the product tastes better. The shelf life is that much longer and extended.

And the other very big thing is we have a wide variety of products that we can sell and grow that aren’t typically available in the stores.

PAUL

Okay. Alright. That's another differentiator then, isn't it? They can get a variety of foods that otherwise they won't 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, they want to listen to organic and local and fresh.

ZALE

People talk about organic, but they really-- So let's break down what “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, in the vegetable market, you need to understand what organic is.

First thing is, you know, the big bugaloo 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 stamp, don't worry about it.

The second thing is that seeds, of course, need to be not having the pesticides and the herbicides and the 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.

This just-- but I'm a practical guy. You need that because if you don't have those things, you're going to-- people don't want to eat vegetables that have holes in it that are eaten by insects. Right? Right. Okay. So that's kinda -- and the fungicides and so you need them.

And then the next level of organic is, of course, where the seeds came from. Where they (are) grown. Where the seeds (are) grown in that the plant was grown from an organic field. So that's another level of organic, which practically doesn't really make a lot of sense - 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 fertilisers that are being used for growing the plant. And you could talk about there's eight major ones, and there's eight 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.

PAUL

Nitrogen. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

ZALE

Yeah. So Nitrogen is-- there's organic sourced Nitrogen, and there's non organic sourced Nitrogen.

Non organic sourced 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 in into a form that the plants can use.

Fifteen percent of the world's natural gas is used to create nitrogen. So you burn natural gas, fifteen percent. So if we move so forget everything else.

Right? For two 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 fifteen percent of the natural gas of the world's usage.

If you grow soy, process 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 soil 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 from the soy, you lose all the pesticides and everything else.

PAUL

You know, talking about nitrogen, though. I understand that one of the issues with nitrogen is that some of these fertilisers have too much nitrogen. It just leaches out into the waterways and gets into everyone's water and –

ZALE

So 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 fertilise it. Right? So I know I have this field and it needs x amount of pounds of fertiliser. Right?

At nitrogen - let's just focus in on the nitrogen. It needs x pounds of nitrogen for it to grow, I wanted to generate a hundred pounds of a plant matter, I need, you know, half a pound of fertile nitrogen to get that hundred-pound plant matter. Great. Nice simple number.

And so I can just spread a hundred pounds. But then all of a sudden, it rains. Right? The nitrogen doesn't get spread properly. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. So I don't get enough nitrogen.

I don't -- 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 - a weed takes part of it, you know, all of those stuff.

So he is a farmer. I need to-- I only make the money if I sell the hundred pounds of plant matter. I then put two pounds of nitrogen in there. To make sure I get the half a pound of nitrogen, which means that then it soaks in and of course then the nitrogen flows into water table (and from) the water table, it eventually gets into lake, and you get those things called algae blooms, so 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.

PAUL

Yeah. Sometimes you do these podcasts and there's so many great wins of what people are doing, and this sounds like another one of those actually. Ticks a lot of boxes. And you've got year round production as well because it's like a greenhouse, I guess, isn't it?

ZALE

So No. God forbid. No.

PAUL

That's a swear word in your world.

ZALE

That's a swear word. Yeah.

Okay. So a greenhouse which we all know and have actually invented in England and, you know, was an English invention. What it does is it includes it closes the environment and 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 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 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. United States had, you know, had its great industrial play eighteen you know, 1880s to about the 1950s. Right? Or 1970s. And then stuff started going off share.

So you have all these old buildings that were great factories, they're totally in 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 in 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 them up and stuff like that. You can rip out all the old stuff and use the core of the building for an indoor vertical farm. Another win for indoor vertical farming.

PAUL

Brilliant. I haven't appreciated that.

ZALE

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

PAUL

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

ZALE

Oh, well. I think - So we break our indoor vertical farms into the way I look at the world of indoor vertical farming. I look at I have a daughter, and she lives in a condo, and she ordered some lights from Amazon. And she ordered some seeds, and ordered some trays, and grows in her condo, in her house. Without a problem, you know, waters by hand, no automation, no nothing.

So I tuned to her 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 at Google. So we could it's not a big if you want to do that in your home, no brainer, really easy to do.

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 to 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 out that requires some engineering not an engineering degree, a level of engineering, but some level of understanding of water, heat, hydro, you know, all 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 I - at my level is we just give you 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 or 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.

PAUL

Got you. 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?

ZALE

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

PAUL

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

ZALE

For sure, 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 why don't you put solar panels on your roof?

PAUL

So can you grow all types crops like this or already to certain types of crops?

ZALE

So, we focus on micro greens, 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.

Micro greens have the biggest, largest margins. We're talking margins of, you know, eighty, ninety percent. Herbs have margins around forty to sixty percent. Greens have a margins of twenty-five to forty percent, and then small vegetables have a margins around five to ten percent.

PAUL

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

ZALE

For pollination, we use a toothbrush. And anybody who was a gardener knows about taking a little toothbrush and just moving. And then, of course, some of many of the only things you worry about pollination for are the small vegetable cucumbers the beans to create, you know, those kinds of things. And some types are self-pollinating and some aren't. So (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 but you have to be careful. But people do use bees or other types of insects for pollination.

PAUL

It is possible then to have year round production of any type of --?

ZALE

Exactly. That is one hundred percent what we do. That's another selling (point). I remember at the beginning; I was listing all those selling (point) things. I know, at some point, I had to stop.

PAUL

Yeah. But that’s a good pull out. Let's put all the benefits out there, you know. More efficient with water?

ZALE

Yep. Ninety-eight percent of the water. So when you bring water into our systems, you bring water in, plants are eighty-five percent 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 a cultural place, you know, you feel the humidity in that, and that's the sweating. So we capture the water in the dehumidifier and just feed it right back into the system?

PAUL

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

ZALE

Our particular technology physically could be used outside. But as soon as you go outside, you'd have the pests. 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. We don't need herbicides. Soon you go outside, you got to keep - how do you get rid of all those insects on your vegetables and eating your crop?

PAUL

Who generally are the customers that are buying the products from the indoor vertical farms? Are they the supermarkets or they tend to be smaller?

ZALE

So I break the market into-- The big ones are the distributors and the regular distributors. Right? So the the Ciscos, the GFS, all the big players

PAUL

Wholesalers, aren’t they?

ZALE

The normal infrastructure sells to that. The retailers, a lot of them are now having-- are setting them aside, because a lot of my competitors are much more expensive than I am. So they're a higher premium product, they’re considered a premium product.

We, as a company, like to go through the existing infrastructure. So we go through the existing distributors.

I personally, Zale, 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's potato farm, puts it all in the box, starts delivering once a week to people's homes. I believe that CSA will be the future of farming. Because, again, the less people in the value chain that you take out of the chain, the better the carbon footprint. So CSA is the future.

But in a simple answer to your question is it's just the regular distributors and the regular stores and the regular people are buying.

PAUL

And the people that are buying these, the entrepreneurs that are taking you up on this business, what sort of backgrounds do they have to be tend to have an interest in gardening and –

ZALE

One guy, our guy in South Carolina, Hardy Greens, he's an electrical engineer. He's an entrepreneur, an electrical engineer, and that's his whole-- he doesn't care about the farming part of it. He just looks at it as a business, and he sees it - 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. Not that neither guys have no technology-- Well, the electrical engineer, but that's, you know, electrical engineering kind of idea.

PAUL

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

ZALE

Most of it runs itself. It is like any other “factory” 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 seeds to customers play. 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, a 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 and you have insects get in, you have to deal with it.

But most of the work is really just harvesting. And we use this thing 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, the sorry, the herbs, you know, these cartridges replaced every two years. Our goal is to replace them every two years. When you're doing something like greens, like, lettuces, a kale, or something like that, they get replaced every six months.

And then when you're doing the small vegetables, you grow the vegetables, you harvest them, and then you have to replace the cartridge. So that'd be every two to three months. Okay. So there's that kind of work.

But that - no more work or (more) complicated than running McDonald's franchise?

PAUL

Because it comes with a manual by the centre to some description?

ZALE

Oh, a couple manual(s) and training. And one of our things is, remember we talked about having an unlimited number of vegetables? Right? So each one has its own story. The way you harvest basil is not the way you harvest dill, which is not the way you harvest parsley. Even though you have to harvest them and use a pair of scissors, how you go about it is quite a bit different. And then you get the packaging piece and, you know, it's all that other kind of regular business stuff.

PAUL

I know from doing a previous podcast on food waste that, yeah, something like twenty or thirty-five percent of food waste is actually with the farmer on the farmer side of things?

ZALE

Yeah. We essentially have zero food waste. We at Local Grown Salads, we use primarily a cut and come again process, which any gardener will know what I'm talking about. For the non-gardeners, that means, you grow the lettuce, you plant the lettuce seed, you grow it, you harvest the canopy, the lettuce leaves, and then you come back two weeks later, and they regrow and you harvest again and harvest again. Typical so I'm getting actually the food waste in a way that you probably did weren't thinking about it. You were just thinking that, you know, you harvest the lettuce and it just gets so it doesn't get ever sold or eaten by anybody. But we grow for what the customer wants, so there's virtually no waste, and we can let it grow a little bit bigger, a little bit longer for the customers.

But another way we reduce the waste is on the root system of the plant. So a typical lettuce in a field farm or a greenhouse they'll harvest the whole thing. They don't do cut and come again. So what we do is, by using cut and come again, all the energy that's used to build the root matter which is usually around fifty percent of a plant gets to be reused with the second harvest.

So -  I get complicated. To make it simple, you put x energy into building the root system, and then when you harvest the entire plant, fifty percent of the energy to grow that plant is wasted when you harvest the roots. But if you plant it, you grow the plant, and then you harvest it again and again and again. All that energy that's used for the root matter is not wasted, and it becomes a less part of the of the entire growing system. (It) was a very long conflict for something that's pretty simple.

PAUL

Yeah. Quicker to grow, you know, food the way that you're doing it with these indoor vertical farms.

ZALE

Typically half the length of time with that would be in a field or a greenhouse.

PAUL

Right. Amazing.

ZALE

So more cycles, more cycles, and as we develop our technology and we get better and better at controlling the environment, we expect it to get back. Think about the cut and come again is same as being you got a lawn. Right? They know in the summertime, you know, in May, they're cutting it once a month. They cut it once a month in June. And then in August, they're probably - they could be cutting their lawn once a week. Right? That's the same concept of cut and come again.

PAUL

And are there any, you know, do you - are there any regulations and laws and policies and ?

ZALE

Yes. Tons and tons and tons. You have food handling. You have the core of -- There's one policy that's very interesting that people aren't aware of is called recall.

We have to build our entire system so that we can make an instant recall within twenty-four hours of any products we have.

In general, you never use the recall system. Right? Like Cheerios has a recall if there was a bad box of Cheerios, but probably nobody in their entire life have ever thought about having their Cheerios recalled. But Cheerios has an entire system to allow you to that involves from all the way from general - I think General Mills makes Cheerios. General Mills to the distributors, to the retailers, to even you. And so that you can-- And every box has a little number on it that says this lot number needs to be recalled. If you think about recalls, the kind of the essence of the whole thing, and there's a whole ton of stuff that fits around that.

PAUL

That's a lot of work to get that all done as you say. And to go and implemented and passed it?

ZALE

And hopefully, never used.

PAUL

Horrible.

What I'm trying to do now, Zale, is relate what we're talking about in these podcasts to the sustainable development goals. And this seems to fit very well with SDG12, responsible consumption and production.

ZALE

When you really get into the SDGs, they have a whole bunch of very detailed requirements of what it means when you contribute to them. So let's just-- indoor vertical farming hits so many of them. First of all, by being local, it means that you totally reduced the amount of carbon footprint of transporting the food from one place to another.

When you think about the food supply chain, what happens is if farmers grow things, anticipating what the market will be. And there's actually something like twenty-five to thirty percent of food waste that happens at the farmer level. You know, again, it's very much dependant on the particular crop we're talking about, but there can be up over of ten to forty percent waste of product that just doesn't meet the market requirement to reducing waste at that point.

Indoor vertical farming actually reduces the cycle time for growing. So something that may take six weeks to grow in a field will take three weeks in an indoor vertical farm. So we can actually grow for what the customer anticipates and wants. And, of course, we'll grow a little bit more in case, you know, demand is higher. But if a customer doesn't want our product, we can just let it grow a little longer. So the base will get a little taller. And then when we have a customer for her, we can harvest it at that point. So we have a much better control on product that's going to actually make it to the marketplace. And there's lots less waste because no pesticides, there's no insects inviting it. We don't have to worry about weather patterns and whole bunch of other stuff.

And, of course, so it's just some examples of how we contribute to SDG12. I actually have a whole paper on how we contribute to fourteen of the seventeen SDGs.

PAUL

Zale, I really want to thank you very much for your time, you know, on this podcast and sharing your insights and your knowledge. On what is going to be, has to be a real growth market ahead.

If people want to get a hold of you, get in contact with you, what's the best way if you want to learn more about what it is you're doing?

ZALE

Well, I have one of those names that are really unusual. So I recommend simply going on to LinkedIn.

If you're in the United States, Z A L E. And if you're in the rest of the world, it's Zed A L E for us, Canadians, English, Australian and normal English speakers.

PAUL

Brilliant. Okay. Thanks again. Really appreciate it.

ZALE

Thank you.

PAUL

Thanks. Bye.

ZALE

Bye bye.

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