Featured Founder: Upward Farms Co-Founder and CEO Jason Green

Prime Movers Lab spoke to Upward Farms Co-Founder and CEO Jason Green this month about how we are going to feed 9 billion people on Earth by 2050, the critical role of microbiomes, and how “truth suffers from too much analysis.” Here is the full conversation:

Tell me a bit about your background?

Today, I’m CEO and Cofounder at Upward Farms. Upward Farms brings together some of the things I cherish most — food, science, and building things with people I’m grateful to spend time with.

I love everything about food — eating, cooking, growing, talking about food, breaking bread. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a peek into someone’s fridge is a glimpse into their soul. And spending a day in someone’s kitchen or being at their table has created life changing, worldview expanding experiences for me. Food is my love language.

I’m also a deeply nerdy dude. I want to know how things work at fundamental, mechanistic levels. I’m awed by the elegance of biology to create and transform. And I want to understand the chemistry behind the biology, the physics behind the chemistry, and the math that explains the physics.

I like to work. I’m not happy idle. And the things I want to work on are big, hairy, meaningful problems. The great honor of my life has been and continues to be leading people in addressing grand challenges. My style of leadership is to be the coach, not the star athlete. I want my colleagues and my team to be the heroes, and I’d prefer to be the guide.

How I got here I think is more good fortune, kismet, mazel (in the words of my people) than anything.

For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to become a doctor. I took every opportunity I could to practice the smallest amount of medicine. My first job was lifeguarding so I could learn CPR and practice first aid, though most of what I did were pool deck cuts and scrapes. As soon as I was old enough, I joined the local volunteer ambulance corps and became an EMT. It was thrilling — the uncertainty, the stakes, and urgency with which we needed to act.

I received my BS in Physiology and Neurobiology at University of Maryland. I joined a neuroscience lab as an undergrad and learned how to do science — not follow a recipe, like we did in classroom labs, but do blank page, where we’re going we don’t need roads, great unknown inquiry. I had an extraordinary mentor as a young scientist, Dr. John Jeka. As an undergrad, I earned a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellowship, which funded my own studies in John’s lab. I recruited some additional undergrads to help run those studies. John helped me kindle that leadership spark, and nominated me as the Undergraduate Researcher of the Year. It was more my leadership that was recognized with that award than my science chops.

After college, I moved to a prominent neuroscience lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. It was there that I became disillusioned with becoming a physician-scientist. I saw what success looked like — a large, well- published, and well- funded lab, but the tradeoff of that success was that it felt like we were a paper mill — we ran virtually the same experiment over and over, making tiny tweaks so that it was a “new” inquiry, so that we could publish, so that we could get another grant. Bold exploration had little incentive, and the most important and impactful work we could do, providing solutions to patients, had no path or infrastructure for commercialization. It felt like success would come from scientific theater, not vision, novelty, invention, or impact.

And then I didn’t get into medical school. Not a single one of the 10 or 20 I applied to. I still remember being in a room of interviewees at a particular medical school and being the only person in the room who had practiced frontline medicine — had patients live and die under their care — and the only person who had published peer-reviewed science.

My whole worldview kinda came crashing down. As a scientist, I saw how fundamentally broken the incentive structure was, that I could be very successful as an academic without ever moving the needle on human lives. And as a wannabe physician, I had a chip on my shoulder — peers who had .1 higher GPA or 1 point higher MCAT scores were becoming doctors, and already-practicing-medicine-and-science me didn’t get one invitation to the club.

This fueled an already present independent streak. That chip on my shoulder grew into an iceberg, and I decided that I was never going to let anyone else determine my future and what I could achieve. I was going to build.

About six months after leaving that lab at Einstein, I started Upward Farms.

What inspired you to start Upward Farms?

I don’t know that there was a single “I’m going to start a company” moment. The early days were very much a project — a fun thing we were doing without expectations of what it would, or could, become.

Indoor agriculture was just beginning to come into the American food-tech zeitgeist, and a lot of the language mirrored the computational biology / control theory world that I had come from as a researcher — discussion of measuring what plants need and using controlled environments to deliver it when they needed it. In the computational biology world, a key focus is understanding how signals from the environment are filtered, processed, or attenuated, but in indoor agriculture, the focus was on the signals (light, climate, etc.) rather than how they were being processed — the biology.

Beyond indoor agriculture, in the medical field and the emerging regenerative agriculture industry, the critical role of the microbiome was becoming clearer. New words, like the metagenome — all of the genes around the big biology you can see, the primary organisms, like humans and plants — gained significance. And those primary organisms were increasingly understood to be superorganisms, composed of the millions or trillions of microbes they host.

So while soil ecology and regenerative agriculture were just emerging as key themes, indoor agriculture seemed to be looking to repeat indoors what didn’t work on the broad acre — trying to concoct the perfect recipe of synthetic chemistry. That didn’t make sense to me. Aquaponics did make sense to me. It married the best of controlled environment agriculture — a scalable and repeatable manufacturing process — with ecology and the soil food web (i.e. the microbiome).

I started working with Matt La Rosa and Ben Silverman in 2013. Our purpose at founding is the same as it is today — to nourish ecosystems from nature to grow better food, and to share fresh food in abundance. Our tools for achieving that purpose have evolved considerably, but the basic thesis of a repeatable manufacturing process and a biodiverse ecosystem remains.

The world’s population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Explain the impact that indoor vertical farming could have on our diets and agricultural practices to make this possible?

Vertical farming addresses many of the problems across climate, supply chain, and food security. All of those issues are only magnified when the world’s population reaches 9 billion — crop output will need to double. Agriculture accounts for 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, 70% of freshwater usage, and 38% of global land surface.

Today, Upward Farms is constructing the largest vertical farm in North America, the largest organic vertical farm in the world. This is our third facility overall, and our first hyperscale facility — large enough to serve grocery retailers across the US Northeast and Mid-Atlantic with fresh, nutritious, and delicious USDA Organic Certified leafy greens and Best Aquaculture Practices Certified hybrid striped bass. We call this facility Regional Farm 1 because we intend to build a portfolio of these facilities to serve major markets across the US and beyond. The image here is massive. Compared to the catastrophic water shortages that you see in the American West where 98% of leafy greens are grown today, we’ll conserve 100 million gallons of water per year. Regional Farm 1 is located on a former coal scar — the legacy of open pit coal mining. We’ve converted that space into an organic indoor farm, and surrounding our facility are rehabilitated wetlands. With the 5 acres that we occupy indoors, we’ll preserve 120 acres of farmland with traditional field production. By growing adjacent to the markets we serve, we’ll mitigate 1.7 million food transportation miles. And we’ll take 487 Metric Tons of CO2 emissions out of the supply chain by electrifying agriculture instead of relying on diesel.

While Upward Farms is exclusively in the vertical farming business today, what we’re learning about the interaction of plants, microbiome, and climate has global implications. What we know is that farmers everywhere are struggling with soil fertility, adapting to climate change. Soil is disappearing and crop yields are falling all over the world. Being able to rebuild soil through microbial solutions that support healthy plant growth is one of the most important opportunities this century.

Why should consumers be eager to try produce grown in an indoor vertical farm?

Freshness, quality, and safety. The produce that comes from vertical farms is fresh and local. Instead of growing crops designed to last a journey that may take thousands of miles from farm to plate, we’re able to concentrate on other things, growing more flavorful and nutritious cultivars in exactly the climate they need to thrive. And because we’re farming indoors, we have a huge advantage in eliminating foodborne pathogen and crop disease risk.

Who inspires you?

My colleagues and my kids. I’m constantly blown away by the level of investment and capability that my colleagues bring. It’s really an honor to work together. My kids remind me to be present. Really, truly present. And to let joy happen as an all consuming, full body experience.

Have you read anything lately that inspired you?

The Dune series is the most compelling story of ecology I’ve ever read. It’s 5,000+ years of planetary transformation. It’s also got some great one liners. Next to my desk I have two quotes from Dune in beautiful large format prints.

One is the Litany Against Fear:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

The other is an Ancient Fremen Saying (the people who are the closest thing to “native” to the planet Dune in a future where humans occupy thousands of planets across star systems):

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

These have become mantras for me.

Where do you see indoor vertical farming in the next 5 years? 10 years?

Climate change is expected to significantly disrupt crop yields throughout the country and the world. Nearly the entire US supply of leafy greens comes from Salinas, California and Yuma, Arizona. What we’ve seen over the past few years, and none of the forecasts are suggest this will get better, is an explosion of climate catastrophes. Years of drought, extreme heat, wildfires, critical lakes and rivers run dry. Leafy greens are a temperature sensitive, water intensive crop. Today, indoor farmed leafy greens area bit less than 2% of the US market, and the only thing holding that back is scale and cost. What you’re seeing outdoors is that costs are rising for all of the reasons mentioned, combined with issues like the aging farm labor force, wage inflation, and rising fuel costs. Meanwhile indoor farms are on a downward cost curve, with deflating automation costs and rising levels of productivity. As indoor farms hit that critical threshold of lower cost of production than fields, there’s no going back. With our high levels of productivity because of our work around the microbiome, we think we’re ahead of the pack on reaching that tipping point. And in the meantime, the certainty and quality that indoor farms offer is a significant advantage over the volatility and risks of outdoor farmed leafy greens.

Speaking specifically about Upward Farms, our five-year ambition is to become the #1 organic packaged salad brand behind category-defining elevated organic leafy greens offerings and consumer-driven innovation. Over the long-term, we intend to open up our platform to accelerate the world’s transition to regenerative agriculture, addressing the $225B that’s spent on agrochemicals today. Our differentiated platform delivers a new level of sustainability, productivity, disease resistance, and safety by optimizing the plant microbiome — an approach we refer to as Ecological Intelligence. We see important applications of these technologies to the broad acre to address the myriad challenges across climate, supply chain, and food security.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

Sign up here to subscribe to our blog