Investing in Upward Farms: Vertical Farming 2.0

Using Biology to Uplevel the Food Supply

Prime Movers Lab recently led a financing for Upward Farms (fka under their Edenworks and Seed & Roe brands). Upward Farms is an aquaponic indoor vertical farm producing microgreens and baby greens (and fish, but today’s post will focus on their first products, leafy greens) with a path at scale to be below the cost of conventional farming “in the field “ (ie Salinas Valley, California). That is what is really exciting here. A lot of money has gone into vertical farming 1.0 — the potential for the industry is there, but production costs remain unsustainably high. One of the things that really sets us apart at Prime Movers Lab is not only our focus on deep scientific breakthroughs but our emphasis on at scale unit economics. We aren’t looking to make a VC subsidized salad for the elites but rather uplevel the food supply for all of us! And Upward Farms can deliver exactly that. Upward Farms yields more than twice the industry average for vertical farming with a fraction of the fertilizer (and no synthetic fertilizers), eliminates plant diseases without pesticides, and prevents the growth of pathogens like E. coli without sanitizers.

Upward Farms cultivates a food supply that’s sustainable, scalable, and safe.

The magic is combining nature and nurture — aquaponic vertical farming. Aquaponics leverages biology to cultivate a healthy ecosystem, and vertical farming is a precise and scalable manufacturing process.

How healthy is their ecosystem? Upward Farms’ microbiome is up to a hundred thousand times more alive — dense with beneficial microorganisms — than chemically treated soil or synthetic hydroponic farms.

Aquaponics combines the cultivation of fish and plants in a complete ecosystem. Water coming off of the sustainably raised fish (no hormones, antibiotics, or mercury) feeds a rich microbiome — teeming populations of beneficial bacteria and fungi; and a rich microbiome is what is key to soil health and thus crop yield. You can see my partner Carly Anderson’s recent Medium post on the microbiome; the microbiome in this case is nature’s elegant solution for plant nutrition and immunity — no need for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or other toxic chemicals. This is the biological innovation that CEO & Cofounder Jason Green has been working on for 7 years since the founding of Upward Farms in Brooklyn in 2013.

Not only does advanced biology enable Upward Farms to achieve the industry’s highest yields, disease resistance, and food safety, but Upward Farms is learning things about the fundamental nature of plants and soil that have been un-studyable until now. While that 100,000x difference in microbiome (read: metagenomic) density in the plants and soils of healthy ecosystems vs chemically treated ones has been established, it’s been impossible to say why. In fact, only 1% of the soil microbiome has been cultured to date, because these microbiomes collapse when taken out of their native ecosystem.

Upward Farms core innovation is the ability to track and drive interactions between plants and microbes that have evolved over billions of years. VCs often look for 10x advantages — the potential here is far greater. The combination of aquaponic ecology and precision vertical farming opens up at least a 100x greater genomics data set, and potentially a 100,000x greater metagenomic data set. Considering that all of the crops we eat are the products of ~10,000 years of humans selecting and breeding crops for better genetics — improving characteristics like taste, hardiness, yield, disease resistance — Upward Farms represents a paradigm shift, a way of improving crops in a fundamentally different, previously impossible, and orders of magnitude more powerful way.

We invested in Upward Farms not only for the compelling initial opportunities in local food that is more nutritious, delicious, and safe, but in their ability to transform agriculture and heal the very earth around us.

As anyone who has read Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle in high school or watched recent Netflix series like Rotten or What the Health understands, Man has long been manipulating the production of food and that system is now at a breaking point. The uncertainty resulting from COVID-19 has further underscored (1) the need for more durable supply chains and (2) that people are investing in their health through the foods that they eat. Today, 95% of US leafy greens are grown on the West Coast and 90% of seafood is imported — this is uneconomical, not good for the environment, and unsafe for consumers. Looking at how consumers are investing in their health in response to COVID-19, sales of fresh produce are up more than 20% year-over-year, and this trend is even stronger in organic than conventional. Upward Farms reconnects eaters with flavorful and nutritious local food by returning to the natural principles of sustainable and ecological farming, upleveled with a scalable production platform and business model.

Upward Farms exemplifies everything we look for in an opportunity at Prime Movers Lab — with the bonus of some seriously tasty board meetings! Jason is a visionary leader, a Prime Mover on a life-long mission to share nutrition and deliciousness with billions of people, to celebrate the magical interplay of science and nature. Upward Farms has developed breakthrough scientific intellectual property on both the microbiome and the automation system; these innovations together enable a business model that at scale allows for phenomenal margins within a huge and growing market. And most importantly, their product creates customers who are raving fans — delivering a superior health experience and taste at a competitive price for all to enjoy.

We are thrilled to partner with Jason and the Upward Farms team to uplevel our food supply!

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

Sign up here if you are not already subscribed to our blog.