Meet The Man Putting Farms Into Shipping Containers

Manav: A local startup is getting attention for what it created in a busy parking lot. In this video, the founder of FarmPod, Mike Straight, will tell us the story behind founding FarmPod and the innovation behind these farms built inside shipping containers. Every FarmPod today is powered by solar energy and rainwater and can grow produce for up to 20 to 30 people — pretty much everything except root vegetables. Mike tells us all the stories behind founding FarmPod with his best friend, how he built the first prototype in under 35 days, how he took pre-orders, and how they've scaled the company over the last seven years. Stick around to the end, there are a lot of nuggets of wisdom in this one.

How are you doing today, Mike? I'm really excited to have you on the show.

Mike: Great, yeah, doing real well. We're really excited to be here.

Manav: How long has it been since you founded FarmPod?

Mike: I guess there are two parts to that. When I first had the idea, I woke up at 3 a.m. with this weird idea in my head and drew it on the big whiteboard I keep in my bedroom. From there, I spent probably a year just running it as a model in my brain, refining it, slowly getting to the point where I felt like we could actually build something. Then I told my best friend about it — he's a bit of an engineer and a builder — put him on an airplane, and we built the thing. At that point we didn't have an actual company yet, but we were starting to build the product, and that was probably nine years ago that we first started testing the idea out. The company itself has probably been in business for about seven years.

Manav: For someone seeing a FarmPod for the first time, how would you describe it and the technology behind it?

Mike: It's a 20-foot shipping container — we can build a larger one, but our standard is 20 feet because most businesses have a parking space, and this fits in a parking space. Unlike a lot of the other companies doing vertical hydroponics, we do aquaponics. A lot of those companies use 40-foot containers, which needs eight parking spaces, and they rely on artificial light. We felt a different approach was needed so we could actually be sustainable, running on solar and battery power.

We have a greenhouse on the second floor, with vertical grow towers, and all the water circulates from tanks below up to the towers, where healthy bacteria and the plants themselves clean the water. That's how the fish, which live on the lower level, stay happy and healthy — everything's working symbiotically. We're basically imitating nature, the way a pond can support a lot of plant growth around it, but controlling that whole system inside this box.

Manav: Can this entire system run completely off-grid, or do you still need Wi-Fi or internet access?

Mike: No, we designed it with the goal that it needs to be deliverable and operable anywhere in the world the environment allows — which means we might use these for aid relief, in places without access to things like cranes or even a forklift. We built the whole thing so all the parts pack inside the second floor — the towers, the solar panels, everything packs into the pod — and it can be set up by two people fairly quickly without any heavy machinery.

The other reason we designed it this way is that, in our experience, the best grow light in the world is the sun — it eliminates the cost of artificial lighting and all the power needed to run it. That efficiency is really why we went with a shipping container topped with a greenhouse.

Manav: Is your current approach more B2B, or will you eventually target consumers directly too?

Mike: If you're a consumer who wants one for your house, it's about as affordable as we can make it, but you still need to be able to write a fairly sizable check to get one installed. It produces such a high volume of food that it's really geared toward small-scale commercial applications. You could use it at home, but you'd probably want to get your neighbors or extended family involved — a FarmPod can feed about 25 people, so for a household of three, it's overkill unless you want a nice little side business.

Most of our customers buying them for personal use are actually running a small home business — they put it in the backyard or driveway, eat what they want from it, and sell the other 90% of the food — premium organic produce — to local restaurants, or get it into farm-to-school programs for kids. There are a lot of options. It's genuinely hard to make it any smaller and still keep it this efficient — this size is about the most cost-effective way to produce food for people in a distributed way.

Manav: Let's talk about FarmPod's business model — is it a one-time payment plus a yearly maintenance fee, or more of a franchise model, like McDonald's, where you get the FarmPod but then ship in materials every month to keep growing produce? What's the current model?

Mike: There are people who'll write a check outright — it'll go in front of a Four Seasons, or in the back parking lot of a resort, or in a community with 35 homes and an HOA that buys two FarmPods and shares both the cost and the produce.

We've also found a few other models people have asked for. We're working with a couple of groups now to place FarmPods around the country essentially as a service — they'll tell us, "we need this many towers growing this," or give us their existing produce purchasing and costs, and we figure out how many towers of each crop makes sense. Something like potatoes, we don't grow — they last, they transport well, they're cheap, not worth it. But leafy greens, yes, that's great, edible flowers, peppers, all of that. We're building out a model around that with a couple of partners.

We're also working on financing options through us directly — though this is such a new product category that banks don't really know what to do with it. There's an established resale market for cars; they didn't know how that'd work with a FarmPod, until we showed them our pre-order list, and they realized, okay, if we had to take one back, there's a real resale market there.

Lastly, we're working on a model in partnership with a couple of universities — putting FarmPods in food deserts, at commuter train stations, places where people can't easily get food late at night, or if they can, it's a local bodega, mostly packaged goods, nothing fresh. What we're working on now is a FarmPod operated by one of our team or a partner's team, paired with a produce vending machine next to it that takes credit cards and EBT cards, with pricing set low enough to be genuinely affordable for everybody. It gives people an option they wouldn't otherwise have, since we can grow through the middle of winter and all summer — really consistent food. So instead of grabbing chips and soda on your way home from work, you could grab what you need for a Caesar salad, at an affordable price, right as you get off the train. We're exploring a lot of different models around that.

Manav: This is a genuinely hard problem to solve — the pods themselves are enormous, so shipping, moving, and setting them up takes a lot of human labor. I'm sure you'll automate a lot of that eventually, but what's the biggest challenge right now in terms of mass-producing these pods?

Mike: Honestly, the biggest challenge right now is finding partners who can actually handle the volume of orders we've been getting. Our original plan never accounted for the growth we've seen — it's easy, when you're heads-down inventing something, to think "this is the coolest thing ever, it's going to change the world" — and we do believe that — but we never expected 3,000 people to end up on a pre-order list. Our original plan was 100 units the first year, 200 the next, and so on. I've got one project coming up alone that's 600 FarmPods.

Manav: That's a great problem to have, by the way.

Mike: It really is a great problem to have, but growing too fast can also kill a business. What we've had to do, luckily, is connect with people who already run large manufacturing facilities specializing in fitting out shipping containers and handling the heavy logistics involved — companies that can produce thousands of units a year at that scale. Right now we have twelve different groups involved — two groups in the US, plus Panama, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, New Zealand — all places that want to do FarmPod production and support locally. We also love that this keeps the carbon footprint of building each unit low, since shipping stays as close to home as possible.

Manav: I feel like with businesses, once you really solve the hard problems, you hit escape velocity — and it sounds like you're there already, with 3,000 pre-orders to fill. If someone wants to order a FarmPod today, when would they actually receive it, and what are the unit economics — is it around $160,000 a year, or what?

Mike: It's interesting — we've had people on our pre-order list since before we even built the first prototype, going back seven years. We're aiming to clear that backlog through 2025 and 2026, and if we keep getting the volume of orders we're currently seeing, we'll be opening more production facilities quickly. If the order flow keeps up the way we expect, we should be cleared out within about 18 months.

If you want to place an order, the first step is reaching out through our website and telling us you're interested — then you'll actually talk with us on the phone, because we want to make sure it'll genuinely work for you. I don't want to sell you a FarmPod if you're in northern Canada — we're not the right solution for you, we can't do minus-60-degree weather on solar. We'd have that conversation first, and if it makes sense, you'd order from us, get placed on the list, and we'd let you know your position and start prepping to get your pod out to you.

On the economics, we're aiming for around $100,000. It's a bit challenging right now given how much inflation has driven up material costs over the past few years — but materials have only gone up about half as much as food prices have, so ironically, the ROI on a FarmPod is actually better now than it was three years ago, because food costs rose even more. Here where I'm based, in the Virgin Islands, the return on investment is right around a year, mostly because our local produce costs are roughly double what they are in the mainland US. In the states, it's closer to two years. Of course, it depends heavily on what you're growing — if you're growing shiso, which sells for about a dollar a leaf, and one tower produces around 1,400 leaves, that's great, assuming you have enough Japanese restaurants nearby to buy all of it. We generally calculate ROI based on what an average restaurant would need, or what an average household would use.

Manav: Amazing. One purpose of this podcast is genuinely to convince more entrepreneurs to build hard, physical products like you have. What advice would you give to other founders looking to build in agriculture, or even around raising money? I'm sure you've learned a lot of hard lessons over these seven years.

Mike: Here's what I'd say — it's important to build something meaningful, both to you as the founder and to the people you're trying to help. Because, how many times have we run out of money? At least five. How many times have we skipped paychecks for six months at a stretch? Yeah, that's happened too. We haven't had our lights turned off yet, but it's gotten close a couple of times over the years — it wasn't easy.

So first, you have to be genuinely committed, you have to believe in it, and you have to accept upfront that it's going to be harder than you think, for sure. But if you have an idea you genuinely believe can work, you have to do it anyway. The best thing you can do is surround yourself with a team that both believes in you and shares the same mission, and find investors who believe in that mission too — not just because the numbers need to work for them, and yes, of course they want a return on their money, but because they can see it's actually going to happen. We're right on the edge of that now, and people are genuinely excited about it.

It isn't easy, but it's easier when you love it — if you love what you do, it makes the hard parts bearable, and honestly you don't mind them as much even when it's genuinely difficult. And I'd say building something isn't always as hard as people assume — you don't have to raise billions of dollars. We've raised in the tens of millions, not the hundreds of millions like a lot of these bigger companies have. We don't have some big fancy office — I'm literally in a factory, we've got a few other rooms in the same building, about 10,000 square feet of prototyping space, and the equipment we actually need. Is it pretty? No. Does it work? Yes. So keep it as simple as you can, and let your product speak for itself. If you're making something genuinely great that inspires people, even if it's just a niche slice of the market, that's your market — let people know you exist, and the people meant to support you will show up. Then you just need to be ready when they do — when someone comes to write you a check, make sure you have a real plan for that money, and know you'll probably need another 100% on top of whatever you planned for.

Manav: Oh my god, that's a lot of great advice packed in there. Thank you so much for coming on the pod, Mike, I really appreciate your time — I know you're a busy person, but a story like yours is going to inspire a lot of people, because you're literally solving hunger, and there are going to be a lot of places affected by climate change going forward. I think FarmPod is just going to keep growing and growing — I wouldn't be surprised to see a FarmPod in every country in the world.

Mike: I really hope so too — I can't wait to see an entire cargo ship full of FarmPods heading out to go make a difference somewhere. And I just want to say, it was great to be on here, we're really glad you had us, always happy to take the time for something like this.

I also want everyone watching to know — we don't think we have all the answers, and the best way for us to get better at what we're doing is through communication. If people have ideas, something they think could help, or a use case we haven't thought of yet, go to farm-in-a-pod.com and send us an email. We're not a huge company, so it'll probably reach me pretty quickly, and that's exactly the kind of interaction we want — we don't want to be working in a bubble, we want to work with the world to make a better product. Whether that's buying a FarmPod, or someone saying, "hey, my school would really love one, can we get on with your Green Stem learning program" — that turns FarmPods into classrooms, feeding kids and educating them at the same time. Whoever you are, reach out — we're totally here for that kind of communication, we'd love it.

Manav: Thank you everyone for watching this show — Mike Straight, everybody.