The Future Farm
I grew up an hour and a half outside of San Francisco in the San Joaquin Valley, the epicenter of California’s agricultural industry. When your backyard is known as “the food basket of the world,” you live and eat differently than others. I spent the majority of my childhood eating local produce (which we just called “produce”). My next door neighbor was an asparagus farmer, and in the spring there was a crate of asparagus on our doorstep, freshly cut that morning, every other week. It was a luxury to have access to such healthy and tasty seasonal food — and for years it remained the freshest, most delicious produce I’d had in my life.
That was until I tasted Bowery’s first crop.
As an investor, I’m interested in how technology can transform any traditional industry, but given where I grew up, agriculture is one I have always watched carefully. Specialty crops especially have been done the same way for decades and it is one of the few sectors that has not been transformed by software (yet). It’s also an industry that’s in dire need of innovation. According to the UN, the world’s population is expected to grow to 9 or 10 billion people by 2050. In order to feed a population of that magnitude, we’ll need to produce 70% more food than we currently produce today. Not only that, but our current agricultural practices are destroying our planet. We use way too much of the world’s accessible water — all the while adding millions of pounds of pesticides to obtain target yields. And don’t get me started on topsoil. The only way we are going to increase food production safely and sustainably is by completely re-thinking our current agricultural systems and investing in technologies that will transform it.
That’s why I couldn’t be more excited to announce our investment in Bowery. Founded and led by serial entrepreneur Irving Fain along with his cofounders David Golden and Brian Falther, Bowery is re-building the farm from the ground up. They grow the purest produce imaginable by owning the entire process from seed to store. Bowery produce is grown indoors in vertical rows, using the most advanced technologies to ensure that it’s the most efficient farming operation on the planet. They’ve built FarmOS, a fully-integrated software system that uses data from multiple sources to monitor plants from germination to harvest. All it takes is one visit to their farm in Kearny, New Jersey, to understand that the future of the agriculture industry has finally arrived.
We hope that this investment will be the first of many in the space. There are so many areas ripe (pun intended) for innovation in agriculture — from sensors to farm management, from aerial imagery to technologies that better predict yield. If you’re currently working on a project focused on agriculture tech, we’d love to hear from you, because it doesn’t take an asparagus farmer to know that we’re at the tip of the spear.
