This interview details Urban Stalk Inc., an indoor farming company based in Canada. The interview is with Brent Downey, Founder & CEO of Urban Stalk Inc..
Urban Stalk was founded in 2018 by founder and CEO, Brent Downey through fire, tribulation, and personal strife. Some might say that this is the “a-typical” founder story, and although that could very well be possible, the story of Urban Stalk is one of global technological disruption on how our communities will access staple vegetable food crops into the future.
Before the world had even known the meaning of “social distancing” the global food supply chain had already begun to show signs of fragmentation. Climate change, labour and logistics disruptions, environmental regulation and a host of other factors were working to disrupt the world’s movement of healthy foods. Brent was apart of a global community who was able to see what negative affect such destabilizations, even in their smallest forms, can have on international communities. Brent’s research on circularity as a focal thesis for his Dual Master of Global Business and Master of Science of Business degrees from Canadian and French institutions that spanned 16 countries in 2.5 years showcased how agriculture was changing rapidly to rethink how, where, and with what our food is grown.
Brent witnessed the human and societal toll food desserts; food swamps and nutritional deficit regions have across multigeneration and through communities and even found common negative social downturn amongst otherwise disparate communities when food supplies are insufficient for human health. Communities that had less localized food access had a higher than the national average of mortality rates, increased prevalence of mental and cognitive health ailments, increased hospitalization rates, and increase in healthcare expenditure and or need due to nutritional deficits.
The latter alone is a billion-dollar public and government cost. In Canada alone, an estimated 11% of the population, or 4.4. million people are living in a nutritional deficit region. Globally, is it estimated that 828 million people, or almost 3x the United States population are negatively affected by nutritional deficit regions annually.
If what you just read was not already sounding worrisome, in the early winter months of 2020, the world changed forever with what we know now as the COVID-19 pandemic. As was the case for so many people, the pandemic also changed Brent’s personal life. Brent’s research dollars dried or were redistributed, his job lost, his personal home that he knew for over a decade was gone, and five years on he is still in search of a new forever home.
Economically, Brent was wiped out and turned himself to social services such as food banks and assisted housing to survive. In the two years of that were consumed more or less by pandemic restrictions, Brent lived firsthand in a food deficit region; personally experiencing hunger, social, and mental angst of not knowing where the next meal was coming from, rationing food supplies, and stock piling what he could in case the small incremental assistance he was receiving, too disappeared.
Living through one of the lowest periods of his personal life and armed with a global perspective on food security and the importance of health localized food access was the driving motivator for Urban Stalk’s creation. Brent’s personal mission is to ensure food insecurity is a term used only in history books and is no longer a lived experience in our communities. This sentiment is reflected in the guiding principle mission or purpose statement behind Urban Stalk which reads: “We are going to Nourish the Planet from POD to Plate and Back Again”.
*Urban Stalk’s POD Technology is a smart connected circular, controlled environment
that is able to autonomously grow vegetables at their highest nutritional value while
decreasing cost and carbon footprints*.
One of the short-term challenges for Urban Stalk is around fundraising. A sentiment echoed by many entrepreneurs and those in the agriculture sector. Taking the viewpoint of the current Canadian economic landscape, the fallout of the global pandemic coupled with poor governmental leadership, has led to a contraction of all funds (from government spending through to private capital). Canadian private equity has, and most likely will continue to be, more conservative than American counterparts, however, with record inflation, lack of reasonable affordability amongst common daily products (i.e., a head of lettuce is reaching close to $8.00/head retail) is closing fundraising opportunities rapidly.
Additionally, Urban Stalk, as is much of the ag-tech innovative community, is a hardware focused, or integrated design system company lending itself to more traditional payback periods, scale and growth patterns, and ultimately more traditional ROIs on investment dollars. Poor market conditions with traditional industry coupled with hardware capital expenditures dries the funding avenues further. Many investors are seeking a 10x return rate, or rapid scale that is more aligned with an e- commerce or software based organizational model. The way around these challenges is a potential two-fold.
First, to find strategically aligned investors from circularity, climate change or climate action, agriculture, sustainability, and the like who are more tuned into the requirements and needs hardware focused companies have and will continue to have into the future. Onboarding investors to your mission, creating social impact investment, and positive externalities into the communities through which you operate and scale into is an attractive outcome to strategically aligned investors and governmental actors alike.
The positive in the industry is that food availability, food security, and food equality are predicted to become even more critical to national security as climate change, domestic consumption quotas, logistics disruptions, sectoral labour exits, etc. increase the pace at which global foods are becoming unsuitable for global trade. Innovation and investment into the ag-tech space is therefore predicted to increase in volume and in strategic importance into the coming decade.
The second way to circumvent the downturn in short-term fundraising markets is to align with strategic corporate industry leaders. Strategic innovation pilots that address operational pain points such as waste, product pricing, product quality, product predictability etc. can add competitive advantage to commercial points of sale such as retail grocers, wholesalers, restaurant and fast-food chains, wineries, and other hospitality groups. Such strategic joint ventures can help signal industry willingness for new and alternative solutions and when private industry dollars begin to flow, investor dollars are often not far behind.
Urban Stalk is committed to the quality of the product, or the nutritional composition of our vegetable foods that promote human and environmental health. No one else in our space knows our plants and their environments better than we do.
Without the inclusion of carbon-based chemical interventions such as pesticides, nor with the large and often wasteful consumption of natural resources, Urban Stalk is able to customize, optimize, and automate the most optimal environment across 14 different inputs that grow vegetable foods at their highest nutritional value, while intersected at their lowest cost and environmental footprint. This is our POD Technology core differential.
Our core business differential is that Urban Stalk is leveraging smart circular infrastructure to develop a Global POD Network that allows POD users to gain insights into resource use, consumer taste preference, supply, cultural influences, and other criteria to develop a customized just-in-time-agricultural model. This model is powered by a global data infrastructure for a localized distribution model that self-learns and optimizes recommendations for product by region. The “world-wide-web” of food.
Urban Stalk has been able to benefit from productive space alongside leading innovation and academic partners such as McMaster Innovation Park, NeuronicWorks, and others. In total, the total productive space Urban Stalk has reached 6,500 square feet of PODs.
Our POD Technology actively uses C02 as one of 14 growth metrics that are included in Urban Stalk’s Plant Recipes. Our POD Technology is designed to be agile and micro- environmentally focused to mirror, optimize, and stabilize nature’s optimal growth conditions by plant (vegetable) to grow foods at their highest nutritional values (quality), while lowering the price and carbon footprints.
C02 is used in several ways inside our business and technology model. The most evident way Urban Stalk incorporated the use of C02 into our technology is the injection of organic food grade C02 to increase yield health and size. In this use case, C02 is micro dosed at the right parts-per-million of oxygen in the atmosphere that each specific vegetable plant requires at its optimal environmental condition. This strategy is part of Urban Stalk’s growth strategies where our POD Technology is able to know and understand our plants and respond to suboptimal growth conditions in real time to make sure our quality remains stable and predictable between growth cycles.
Our business model also leverages a circularity plan to reduce natural resource dependencies and carbon or environmental footprints of growing vegetables. Resulting from this business tactic, Urban Stalk breaks down organic waste (both internal and client partner waste) to create a nutrient base for new food growth. As this process involves a carbonization process with organic material, naturally C02 will be generated. Instead of adding carbon to the atmosphere and ultimately being a carbon diverter, Urban Stalk is a carbon sequester and carbon captures C02 and other gasses that come from the organic waste breakdown process to be used as a feedstock of organic C02 for new food growth. This process also creates heat, energy, as well as carbon to reduce utility, natural resource, and environmental costs of vegetable growth inside our PODs.
As operational and natural built environments are changing rapidly, learning how to incorporate and divert large volumes of carbon or C02 into a productive resource is arguably one of the best areas of opportunity vertical and indoor farmers have. Identifying cleaner, and even rejuvenating growth practices that change the carbon as a negative outcome of farming into a renewable input that helps people, profits, and the planet is a win for the vertical and indoor farming communities to explore and innovate.
Energy is a big topic in indoor farming right now. How much do you pay for electricity (kWh)? Is it mainly from the grid or renewables?
Energy consumption will be one of the going concerns not just in farming but globally in the coming decades across an array of industries such as advanced manufacturing, transportation, textiles, chemical production, and more. Electricity that is greener and cleaner is arguably still above market rates in many parts of the world (if that infrastructure is even built yet) and more established markets are also witnessing inflation in utility costs along with most “staple costs” such as rent and taxes. These cost increases (at least in the short term) are not predicted to ease or decrease but remain constant and in some cases further increases (expense) is predicted.
Knowing this outlook, Urban Stalk as a company has pivoted to full circular model, meaning that all resources from water, organic waste, spoilage, C02, energy and other resources are reused or broken down into inputs for new products and services. This circularity can happen as much as eight times (in the case of water) through our POD system and eliminates or reduces staple costs. For example, organic waste reuse processes eliminate organic materials from ending in landfills that produce C02 and methane as well as ground water pollution and upcycles this waste into a nutrient base for new foods. C02 and other gasses are carbon captured and reused inside the PODs for plant health. Anything that cannot be broken down is in turn placed in biomass heating which creates both heat and energy for the greater building.
Electricity from water, solar, and wind technologies are also included both at the facility and POD level for Urban Stalk. Circularity as well focuses on the external and natural built environments which Urban Stalk actively deploys which mean planting trees, shrubs, natural or manmade bodies of water and other natural features to decrease ambient air temperatures, humidity, and increase biodiversity of the surrounding area. These inclusions decrease heating, cooling, and subsystem strain to maintain optimal growth environments and thereby lowers electricity consumption and brings economic equations that are cost competitive with traditional agricultural producers.
These above efforts are valuable and are making both environmental and economic impact on Urban Stalk’s business operations, however, reality would showcase that a portion of electricity consumption remain on municipal grid system as would likely be the case for most, if not all, vertical farms. A hybrid grid system between municipal and renewable energy is still predicated to be the default configuration until renewable energy technologies and infrastructure are able to outpace carbon-based electricity production and provide stable connection and usage at commercial and industrial scales regardless of geographic region.
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