Meet The Man Putting Farms Into Shipping Containers

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 in shipping containers. Today, every FarmPod is powered by solar energy and rainwater and can grow produce for up to 20 to 30 people and pretty much you can grow everything except root vegetables. This episode, Mike tells us all the stories behind the founding of FarmPod with his best friend, the way he built the first prototype in under 35 days, and how he took pre-orders and how they've scaled the company in the last 7 years. So, stick around till the end because there's a lot of nuggets of wisdom in this podcast and I really had a great time talking to Mike. How are you doing, Mike, today? I'm really excited to have you on the show. Great. Yeah, doing real well. We're really excited to be here. FarmPod, how long has it been since you founded FarmPod? So, I guess there's two parts to that. You know, I when I first had the idea, you know, I woke up at 3:00 in the morning with a weird idea in my head and I drew it on the big whiteboard I keep in my bedroom, right? So, then from there, I spent probably a year running it as a model in my brain and refining it and slowly getting to the point where I felt like we could actually build something and then I told my best friend about it who was a bit of an engineer and a builder and put him on an airplane and we built the thing. And so, at that point, we didn't have an actual company, but we were starting to build the product and that was probably 9 years ago we first started testing the idea out. The company itself probably been in business for about 7 years. That's great. For a person who's seeing a FarmPod for the first time, how would you describe it and the technology behind it? What it is is a 20-ft shipping container. We can make a larger one, but our standard one is 20 ft cuz most businesses have a parking space and this fits in a parking space. And then, unlike some of the other companies that are doing vertical hydroponics mostly, we do aquaponic. They use 40-ft containers, which means you need eight parking space. They also use light and we felt like a a different approach was needed so that we could be sustainable and run on solar and and battery. So, we have a greenhouse on the second floor and the greenhouse on the second floor has vertical grow towers in and all the water is circulated from the tanks below up to the towers where the healthy bacteria and plants clean the water and that's how the fish, which are in the lower level, are able to stay happy and healthy because they're working kind of symbiotically together, right? We're imitating nature here, the way a pond can grow lots of plants around it. We're doing that and we're controlling it in this box. And this entire system can be like completely off-grid? Or do you still need like the Wi-Fi or internet for that? No, yeah. So, we we designed it with the goal that it needed to be deliverable and operable in any place where the environment will allow in the world, which means we may be using these for aid relief, where there may not be access to things like cranes or even forklift. And so, we built the whole thing so that all the parts could pack inside the second floor, basically all the towers, solar panels packed in the pod. Then that can be set up by two people pretty quickly without any heavy machinery. And so, we we have a two-leveled approach. And the other reason we do that is because in our experience, the best grow light in the world is the sun and it takes away a cost of lighting and all the need of powering that lighting. And so, it allows us to be really efficient in the style that we've done. And it's kind of why we went with a shipping container with a greenhouse on top. Your approach right now is more like B2B or are you going to eventually target like consumers as well? The thing about it is is that basically, if you're a consumer that wants to buy one of these for your house, it's as affordable as it can possibly be, but you know, you got to be able to write a decent size check to have this put in. It produces such a high amount of food that, you know, it's really geared towards commercial applications, but small-scale commercial. You know, you could use it at your house, but you'd want to maybe get your neighbors involved, maybe your extended family. You know, you can feed 25 people off of a Farm Pod. So, if it's three people, yeah, it's overkill unless you have a nice little side business you want to do. For example, most of our customers that are buying them for their owns, it's a home business. So, they're going to put it in their backyard, they're going to put it in their driveway, they're going to eat whatever they'd like from the Farm Pod, and then the other 90% of the food, they're going to make deals to sell premium organic produce to local restaurants or, you know, getting it maybe farm to school programs for kids. There's a lot of options there. It's hard to make it small and as efficient as we've done. So, this size is about the most efficient, cost-effective way to to produce food for people in a distributed way. So, let's talk about the business model of Farm Pod. So, is it like a one-time payment and then a yearly maintenance fee or is it more like a franchise model where like it's like McDonald's where you get the Farm Pod, but every month you ship the material that you need to like actually keep growing the produce. How, what's the membership model right now? So, yes, there are people that will write a check for it and it's going to go in front of the Four Seasons or it's going to be in the back parking lot of a resort or it's going to be in a community where you've got 35 homes and they have a association and they buy two Farm Pods and everybody shares the cost of buying it and everybody shares the produce and and that comes out of it, right? But, we've also found a couple different models that people have asked us. We've got a couple groups we're working with now to put Farm Pods out around the country basically as a sir. So, they can say we need 50 towers of that to grow or they give us their purchasing that they're buying their food costing and we say, all right, we need this many towers of each of these things and it's a good idea to have us grow these, but maybe not these things cuz they, you know, like potatoes, we don't grow them. They last, they transport well, they're cheap, not a big deal. But, leafy greens, yeah, that stuff's great. Edible flowers, peppers, you know, all that stuff for sure. And so, we are working on a model for that where that can be done with with a couple partners. And then we're working on making it so you can finance it through us. But, you know, again, this is such a new product that the banks kind of don't know what to do, right? They like there's a resale market for cars. They don't know how to do it with the FarmPod until we showed them our pre-order list and they said, "Oh, if we had to take one back and have a good resale on it." So, you can. And lastly, we're working on a model kind of in partnership with a couple universities. And what we'd like to see here is we're going to be putting FarmPods in food desert at commuter stations for the train. Places where people can't get food late at night and if they do it's like a local bodega, mostly packaged, nothing fresh. And what we'd like to see, and this is what we're working on now, is a FarmPod that's operated by one of our team or a partner's team with a produce vending machine next to it that accepts credit cards, EBT cards, and that the price is set low enough that it's really affordable for everybody. And And now it gives people options where they wouldn't have it before cuz we can grow in the middle of winter, we can grow all summer. That it's very consistent food. So, if every night you get off work, instead of stopping by and getting, you know, you know, chips and sodas and whatever else, you're like, "I can actually pull up the stuff for a Caesar salad out of here right now for affordable price without even having to go to another store but get off the train." So, there's a lot of different models we're looking at around that. The problem you're solving is not it's a very difficult problem to solve. First of all, the size of the pod is ginormous. So, shipping them, moving them, setting it up, it's like it takes a lot of human labor. Still, I mean, I know eventually you'll like automate it a lot. But, what's like the biggest challenge in terms of mass producing these pods? Yeah, honestly, the biggest challenge that we're having right now is working with partners that can handle the amount of orders we've been getting. You know, like we our plan we never thought we'd have the growth that we have. I mean, it's easy when you're in a bubble and you invent something and you're like, "This is the coolest thing that's ever been done. It's going to make it's going to change the world, right?" And we do believe that. But, we didn't think we'd have 3,000 people on a pre-order list. Like it just never occurred to us. So, our plan was to put out 100 the first year, 200 the next, and so on. I've got one project that's coming up that's 600 Farm Pods by itself. And by the way, that's a great problem to have. Like it is a great problem to have, but too fast Having much growth quickly can also kill a business. So, what we've had to do, luckily, is that people found out about us, people that have large manufacturing facilities that specialize in feeding shipping containers and dealing with the heavy stuff that it takes to do it. And that these guys are able to do it thousands a year in that kind of level. And right now we have 12 different groups that have come out from Let's see, we've got two groups in the US, Panama, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, New Zealand. These are all places that want to do Farm Pod production and support. And we love the idea of keeping the carbon footprint of the building of it low, too, right? So, keeping our shipping as close to home as possible makes sense. With businesses, I feel like once you like really solve the hard problems, then you hit that escape velocity. And like I think you're there already in terms of like filling these 3,000 orders or 3,000 pre-orders that you're getting. If someone wants to order this Farm Pod today, if I had to order now, when will I get it? And what's the unit economics? Like how much would it cost me? Is Is it like around 160 grand a year? It's interesting. We've had some people on our pre-order list before we even built the first prototype, so like 7 years ago. We'll be able to get the backlog out 2025, 2026. And if we continue to get the type of orders that we're looking at, we'll be opening more facilities quickly. So, you'll we'll end up being able to ultimately, if we get the orders like we think, we'll be clearing it out in, you know, 18 months. If you go to place an order, the first step is, you know, you reach out, you go on our website, and you say, "I want one of these things." And then you're going to sit and talk on the phone with us because we want to make sure it will work for you. I don't want to sell you a Farm Pod. You're in northern Canada, we're not the guys for you. I can't do minus 60° on solar. So, we would have that conversation. And then, you would order it from us and and we'd get you on the list, tell you where your place is, and we'd start um you know, getting ready to hopefully get your pod pretty quickly. When it comes to the economics, we're trying to be around $100,000. Right now, it's challenging with the amount of inflation that's happened in the past few years. Our materials have gone up a lot, but it's only gone up half as much as the cost of food has gone up. And so, actually the return on investment of a farm pod is better now than it was 3 years ago because unfortunately, food costs went up. And in somewhere like where I'm located right now, in the Virgin Islands, the return on investment is a little right around a year. I just cuz our cost of produce is about twice the state. In the states, it's about 2 years. Now, of course, it depends on what you're growing. You know, if you're growing shiso that sells for a dollar a leaf and you got one tower with 1,400 leaves on it, you know, that's great except that you need an awful lot of Japanese restaurants to buy all of that or calculated we do it based on what the average restaurant would need and years or the average person at home would do. Amazing. You know, one of the purpose of this podcast is actually to convince more entrepreneurs to build hard products like yourself. So, what advice would you give to other founders looking to build in the agriculture space or even in terms of like raising money? I'm pretty sure you've learned a lot of hard lessons in the last 7 years. Here's what I would say. It's important to do something and build something that's meaningful to the person that's doing it and is meaningful to the people that 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 6 months? Oh yeah, it's happened. We haven't had our lights turned off yet, but they've showed up a couple times over the years. Yeah, wasn't easy. So, you got one, you got to be committed to do it, right? And you got to believe in it and you got to just own that it's going to be harder than you think it is, for sure. That's the first step, I would say. But, if you have an idea that you feel like it can be done, you got to do it anyway. And the best thing you can do is surround yourself with a team that both believes in you and has the same mission and find funders who believe in that mission, not just because, yeah, the dollars got to make sense, and they want a return on their money they put in, of course they do. And they see that it's going to happen, and we're we're on the edge of that. They're all very excited about that now, right? It isn't easy, but it it's easy when you love it. If you love what you do, it makes it easy. And you certainly, even if it's not easy, you don't mind, right? And I would say is that it it's not as hard as you think sometimes to build something. 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 companies have done. We didn't get big fancy offices, right? Like, I'm in a factory. We've got three other rooms in the factory. We got 10,000 square feet of prototyping space. We got the needed equipment we have. Is it pretty? No. Does it work? Yeah. And so, you know, keep it as simple as you can get it. And then just let your product speak for itself. So, if you're making something awesome that will inspire people in some way, even if it's just a niche of the market, great. That's your market. Let people know you exist, and the people that are supposed to support you will will show up. And then you just got to make sure you're ready for it when they show up. When they come to write you a check, you want to make sure you got a plan for that money. And then know that you're going to need another 100% on what you plan on top of it. Oh my god, that's a lot of advice. I think you just packed in there. Thank you so much for coming on the pod, Mike. I really appreciate your time. I know you're a very busy person, but a story like yours will inspire a lot of people, cuz this is actually like you're literally solving hunger, and there's going to be a lot of places getting affected by climate change. So, I feel like FarmPod is just going to keep growing and growing. I won't be seeing a FarmPod in every country in the world. I really do, too. I can't wait to see an entire cargo ship of FarmPods going out. Just going off to go make a difference. And and I'll tell you, I just want to say to everybody also, one, it was great to be on here, and we're really glad you had us. Always happy to take the time for something like this. And I just want everybody out there who's like seeing this to know that we don't think we have all the answers, and the best way we can be better at what we're doing is communication. And so, if people have ideas, if they have something they think could be helpful, if they have a use that we haven't thought of yet, go to farm-in-a-pod.com, send us an email. We are not a huge company, but it will probably get to me at some point pretty quickly, and we want those type of interactions. We don't want to be working in a bubble. We want to work with the world to make a better product. So, like, we're here, whether it's buying a Farm Pod or whether it's saying, "Hey, my school would really love a Farm Pod, and can we get on with your green stem learning program turn Farm Pods into classrooms and get these in? Now, we're feeding kids, and we're educating." Whoever you are, reach out to us. Like, we're we're totally here for that, and we like that kind of communication. So, we'd love it. Thank you, everyone, for watching this show. Mike Straight, everybody.