Lars Rinnan (00:07)
  So imagine stepping into a place where not a single human hand touches your food until it's ready to be packaged. An environment so precisely managed that every seed, every leaf and every minute of growth is part of an automated dance between technology and nature. So is it science fiction? Not quite. It's happening right now. And to explain all of this to us is Endre Harnes, Chief Commercial Officer of Vertical Farm Startup, Avisomo. Welcome, Endre.
 
 Endre Harnes (01:56)
 Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
 
 Lars Rinnan (01:58)
 It's great to have you on the show. So you built what many call the world's most automated vertical farm. And I'm so curious to learn more about that. But first, what is a vertical farm or hydroponic farm?
 
 Endre Harnes (02:15)
 Oh, that is a good question. I think maybe something that not many people know, people aren't used to seeing produce yet from vertical farms, and a vertical farm can be actually quite a lot of things. So a hydroponic farm is one thing, an aeroponic farm is one thing. There are several different production methods and forms that you can use in a vertical farm.
 
 But in general, it's also a point that the name in itself is sort of potentially a bit misleading. There are variations to as to whether the vertical farm is vertical in itself. So you have some vertical farms where plants stand on racks that are put sideways. They're very vertical. Or then you have vertical farms like ours, where we stack plants on top of each other in horizontal layers. But in general, and I'll get back to that.
 
 Lars Rinnan (02:56)
 You
 
 Endre Harnes (03:14)
 But in general, a vertical farm can be described as farming inside a controlled environment without the use of sunlight in most cases, where you grow in a different growth medium than soil and you stack the plants on top of each other in order to have a more efficient area use in your food production. And that's the...
 
 Lars Rinnan (03:41)
 And
 
 this is done indoors of course.
 
 Endre Harnes (03:44)
 Yes, this is done indoors in a potentially
 
 totally controlled environment.
 
 Lars Rinnan (03:48)
 Yeah, great. Okay, so now I know at least the basics of what a vertical or semi-vertical or whatever farm is. So let's go back to the big headline, you know, the world's most automated vertical farm. That sounds really big. And here's the kicker. No human hands ever touch a crop until it's ready to go out the door. How is that even possible? You need to explain this to us,
 
 Endre Harnes (04:16)
 Yeah, it's very fascinating. And I do love the sci-fi reference, the science fiction is usually tends to become science at some point. And we are doing this right now here with Avizomo in Norway. And to illustrate, I would just like to take it one step back to the vertical farming itself to begin with, which is then usually a large scale facility where you put racks.
 
 with lighting on top of each other. And then you put plants in these racks, on the shelves, you can call them. ⁓ And then you put the plants in something that they grow in, and then you add water, which is filled with nutrition. And then you simulate as good as you can ⁓ the outdoor climate, or you optimize on what a plant would usually have as outdoor climate.
 
 And then using that in order to grow produce, because when everything comes down to it, then what produce needs in order to grow or plants need in order to grow is ⁓ water, it's ⁓ lighting and it's nutrition. And then you can start from as general as that into the really, really, really nitty gritty plant science, which we as species are.
 
 barely scratching the surface of as so far. And the vertical farming concept was coined about 25 years ago in the US by a professor that recently passed away called Dixon Despommier, who was a professor at Columbia. the attempt of controlling environment to grow plants is something that's been trialed for hundreds and actually thousands of years from first one to...
 
 moved tomatoes around was a Roman emperor in the year of 52, just about. But the Japanese have actually been doing this since the 80s in more industrial contexts ⁓ and are still doing it and still prefer quite a lot of vertically front produce. But even the 80s, that ⁓ is a young technology and a young industry.
 
 Lars Rinnan (06:16)
 wow.
 
 Endre Harnes (06:39)
 The concept and the development of vertical farms in themselves are still very immature, you could say, especially from an industry perspective, and has been commercialized in the Western hemisphere over about, I would say, the last 10 to 15 years. And when these farms have been built, they have usually been following some principles that we've seen in...
 
 commercialization and industrialization of other types of industries, like for say, ⁓ car industry or warehouse automation. You see companies striving to reach economy of scale as fast as possible and building huge facilities. And also in the startup industry, you've seen sort of like ⁓ go fast and ⁓ break things fast and move on.
 
 And those sort of ideas also having been prevalent in the vertical farming industry. But when the facilities have been built, they've very often been large scale structures inside warehouses. ⁓ And then it turns out that if you build a large scale structure with plants on top of each other in a big warehouse, you get some challenges with physics and biology.
 
 Lars Rinnan (08:02)
 I can imagine.
 
 Endre Harnes (08:04)
 Yeah. So physics and biology doesn't scale in the way that software does. It compounds. So when you have a big, big, big ⁓ system, a big, big room filled with plants that transpire and put humidity out into the air, and you have lights that ⁓ create heat, then you will have much and heat rises in a room. Then you will have tons of heat at the top.
 
 level of this plant facility and a different temperature at the bottom. And the high temperature increases risks of plant diseases, et cetera, which makes this into a farm or a production facility where you get very uneven results in the same room. So these parameters are prerequisites of growing inside a vertical farm. We're sort of
 
 In the beginning, they weren't taken into account.
 
 Lars Rinnan (09:06)
 This
 
 is pretty complex. This is probably also why it has taken a few years. I think you mentioned 10 to 15 years, this has been going on and most people don't know about this at all. So they're struggling with some of the, like you said, the physics and the biology of the whole thing. It's not just putting some racks with plants inside the warehouse and putting the energy on. It's a bit more complex.
 
 Endre Harnes (09:18)
 Yeah, yeah, ⁓
 
 It is a bit more complex than that. that outlines the main challenges, some of the main technological and biological challenges that the vertical farming industry has seen. And obviously, when it was started in 2018 as a ⁓ spin-off from the Norwegian School of University of Technology, ⁓ then we were sort of,
 
 we entered that reality, that current reality of large scale farms, and especially in the US that follow these principles. But being a Norwegian company, we didn't have ⁓ the access to American funds in order to build huge structures. And we also have a very different food system here. So we did what was close to us and started talking to Norwegian farmers and Norwegian greenhouse farmers. And they were pretty adamant on saying that if that
 
 Building things like these structures that won't work. We need systems that are smaller, that are modular, where you can use already existing standards and equipment. And that allows you to address variations in the market as the year passes, because they all know that people want different things during the summer and the winter, and you have different availabilities in the market in the different seasons.
 
 And import structures, cetera, et cetera. Sometimes it's cheaper to get something from here. And sometimes it's cheaper to get something from there. So these conditions were then, or we were trying to sell to them. So we started building a system that addressed those challenges, which then turned into what we've now named the Avisomo growth station and the growth system, which
 
 enables us to address all those challenges and then also enables us to create the most automated vertical farm or as far as we know, the most automated plant production facility on the planet.
 
 Lars Rinnan (11:41)
 So what does that really mean? Where does all the automation come from? What do you actually do?
 
 Endre Harnes (11:48)
 Well, what we actually do is that we grow our system is built sort of like an Amazon warehouse. I think that's a good analogy, just containing plants and having some biological parameters fulfilled. So we have plants growing in what we call trolleys. They're smaller in comparison to the huge tracks.
 
 They're smaller shelves. They're about two and a half meters tall and they have everything from 15 to two layers. But usually we have five layers when we're growing, say lettuce in them. And then these shelves are moved around in different rooms inside a facility where they're parked next to what we call a station. And a station is ⁓ an infrastructure that it looks almost like a
 
 If you've seen those, like an old school TV antenna, the ones that used to be on the... This is not for the Gen Z people. But the old TV antennas that used to be outside the windows, outside the buildings that have sort of these wires almost. So, those... And the wires are the... These are LED lights standing out from the station. There's also an irrigation channel coming down from the top.
 
 Lars Rinnan (12:57)
 Yeah, I know the one.
 
 Endre Harnes (13:12)
 And there's a ⁓ pillow, a pressurized pillow, a pillow in the back that provides the necessary airflow for the plants. And then we park the plants next to these stations. And then the station provides the plant with all the necessary parameters for plant growth. The lighting that I mentioned, the airflow with extra carbon dioxide ⁓ and the...
 
 Lars Rinnan (13:20)
 Huh?
 
 Endre Harnes (13:40)
 water with a nutrient solution in them. because, we sort of don't need to, but this is why we've built, but this enables us the automation. So when we move the plants around the facility, instead of having people going to the plants, we...
 
 Lars Rinnan (13:45)
 need to move them around.
 
 Endre Harnes (14:07)
 disabled, we reduce the need for workers handling plants, moving plants around. That's also a very typical thing you see in a vertical farm and also in a greenhouse is that people move plants around very manual processes, quite a lot of manual processes, which are expensive and then also increase risk of say disease outbreaks because people bring germs, people bring bugs with them. But the most important part of the moving of plants within the facility is that we're able to
 
 Lars Rinnan (14:19)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Endre Harnes (14:36)
 to optimize all different parameters throughout the plants growth cycle. this means like, I've lately started using the analogy of a spring and a summer. Right now we're in spring. So we're seeing the sun is still low in the sky, right? But we see the knobs on the trees coming in and see the flowers are starting to pop, right?
 
 Lars Rinnan (14:43)
 Uh-oh.
 
 Endre Harnes (15:05)
 This they do because they receive signals from the sky. they either like us plants receive signals and then they respond to them in some ways. And like us plants do respond differently to different types of signals throughout their, ⁓ life cycle. So a plant in order to have an optimal output, like for a person in order to have an optimal result, then
 
 A plant needs to be treated in this way when it's a young plant or this way when it's a larger plant and in this way, depending on what we want the plant to express and what sort of plant we want it to become. Do we want it to become a big plant? Do we want it to become a very tasteful plant? As everyone has tried different types of produce, like a tomato is not just a tomato. ⁓ And we all know that like the safe and well-kept.
 
 tomatoes from our mother's garden, those are the best tomatoes, right? But in our farm, we can optimize for all of these conditions and we can control them and we can receive the data from them and we can tweak on all those parameters for as long as we want to. And then design the best possible food for people out there.
 
 Lars Rinnan (16:04)
 Of course. ⁓
 
 So it's actually designer side of the tomatoes. It could be.
 
 Endre Harnes (16:30)
 Yeah, it could be. We're
 
 starting to design tomatoes. There are some people in the US being inspired by companies ⁓ and approaches from Japan that are doing designer strawberries. They're very expensive and they're delicious.
 
 Lars Rinnan (16:47)
 Well, I can imagine. That sounds like Japan. Designers, strawberries, very expensive. Sounds very much like Japan. But you said that you're moving the plants around, but there no people. So how do they move around?
 
 Endre Harnes (16:57)
 Yeah.
 
 yeah, I forgot to tell you about them. have what's called AMR robots. So they look a bit like ⁓ robot vacuum robots, but they can lift up to 500 kilos. And then they move in under these shelves and they pick them up and then they drive them to the next place in the growth cycle of a plant. Or it puts them inside the automation.
 
 So we have, I mentioned, because of our dialogue with the existing farmers, we decided to go for using standards or building our system on standards that are widespread in the food production space. So we've utilized what's called, it's very well known, it's called the CC trolley, or the Danish trolley. Those are the trolleys that stand outside of the...
 
 every florist shop, you'll see. So the black trolleys with a small orange reels on them. And we've based our design on these trolleys and built the system around them. And that means that they're already very well fitting to existing automation machinery, say harvesting machines, packaging machines, washing machines, and those types of things. And then we've built a logistics hub.
 
 in which we take the trays with the plants out of the trolleys and put them back into them. So this is where the plants start and end their journey. So first they are put inside an automation process, which fills the tray with the growth medium, the substrate that the plants grow in, which in our case is the biodegradable remains of a recycled foam mattress from the 80s.
 
 Lars Rinnan (18:42)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 wow,
 
 that's really circular.
 
 Endre Harnes (19:01)
 Yes.
 
 Yes, yes, we're trying our best. We're not there yet, but we're working towards complete circularity, of course, which I think should be the basis of every new developed technology. If not, we're missing the target. ⁓ But this is ⁓ a Dutch company ⁓ supplying this and new substrates, new approaches are being developed continuously.
 
 Lars Rinnan (19:18)
 Good point.
 
 Endre Harnes (19:30)
 Automation line then fills this substrate into a tray, then a seeding machine that you will find in practically every greenhouse on the planet, puts the seeds into the substrate. And then this goes to a robot arm that takes out the tray, puts it in a trolley. Robot comes, picks it up, puts it into a germination chamber where the seeds sprout for a couple of days. The robot comes back, picks it up, takes it back to the robot arm.
 
 which spreads the trace out into a different configuration. Robot comes in, picks them up, and sends it to the propagation early zone for the plants. And in this zone, they have specific parameters. So they have a lot of blue light, for example, which is, of course, and everyone knows this, ⁓ is because blue light is perceived by plants as stressful.
 
 And when plants are stressed, you have short frequencies. And when plants are stressed, they do not stretch. They do not stretch towards the sun, but they spend their energy that they get from the nutrition on building good root systems. ⁓ and then when you have a plant that has sort of built a good root system and you put it into conditions after a few days in the young plant zone, under conditions that have a lot of red light, which
 
 Lars Rinnan (20:41)
 Uh-huh.
 
 Endre Harnes (20:56)
 Plants then receive us, and also deep red light. Then plants receive that they are standing in a warm environment, ⁓ in the shade, somewhat close to the sun. And if you're a plant like a lettuce, which is a shade plant, then you will try your best to stretch towards the sun. And this way we can sort of play around with all the parameters throughout the growth cycle. And then the plants are taken back to the robot arm.
 
 adult plant is taken out of the trolley and sent into a harvesting machine, which sends the plants into an automated packaging machine and distributes it directly into the supply chain.
 
 Lars Rinnan (21:40)
 Wow, that is really hands-free harvesting. so you take in what nature has actually spent thousands or don't know, millions of years kind of perfecting and you're doing it even better because you're taking all the little, how can you optimize every little step of that to make it even better?
 
 Endre Harnes (21:44)
 Shriss.
 
 In time, in time, yes, that's the ambition. And we are very humble when it comes to what nature has actually perfected. But we know, and we know that food is also emotions, right? So, so whatever, how, no matter how good of a produce we can grow in, in our systems, I do not think that it will ever match my mother's kale, for example. I'm from the Northern parts of Norway and
 
 The kale that stands throughout the winter has the best acidity balance that I've ever found, right? ⁓ But when it comes to the industrialization of the food system, which is the backbone of all the food that we eat in a modern society on regular basis, then that is not the perfected food that nature has actually built for us.
 
 And that system is something that we see as one of the main drivers of climate emissions. So we're also one of the great drivers of decrease in nature and biodiversity. ⁓ this is not just because of that we're using huge, huge swaths of land for monocultural growing. It's actually even more important that we're using so much fertilizer.
 
 Lars Rinnan (23:11)
 Hmm.
 
 Endre Harnes (23:27)
 that ends up in the rivers that kills off the fish and the kills off the, the, the, ⁓ underwater habitation. So, so food production in an industrialized form, in order to feed nine to 10 to 15 billion people, that is a practice that is not either in line with the perfected food that nature has developed for us.
 
 And when it comes to our produce, we knock industrially produced crops out of the park every day.
 
 Lars Rinnan (24:07)
 I can imagine. But you mentioned something about, you know, will people ⁓ like to eat lettuce that's been produced by a robot or a series of different robots? This is of course an interesting question. What do you think about that? Are people reluctant to eating something that has not been touched by your mother's hands or something like that?
 
 Endre Harnes (24:34)
 Yeah, yeah, yeah. this is, is, I think that's a really good question. And this is something that we're, we're yet to find out though. But the quality of the produce in itself is very, very good. We can see much, much, much increased, increased shelf life. And then of course, ⁓ higher nutritional values. ⁓ They're the main indicator for the nutritional values in, ⁓ produce is the amount of time from harvest to consumption. And if it's being produced,
 
 In the south of Italy, quite a lot of our produce is being grown. And also if you have an avocado, say, being, that much that ripens in the container on it, on the way across the Atlantic, then not that we're growing avocados yet. Maybe we can in the future, but if it's harvested here when it's ripe.
 
 then its nutritional values will be dramatically higher. As goes with the lettuce as well, if it's harvested inside our facility, put directly into the supply chain and delivered at the store within 24 hours of production, then it will have a substantially higher nutritional content. But of course, it's like...
 
 Like heart surgery or heart transplants, they were very frowned upon when people came up with them. When they started experimenting in very sketchy ways 150 years back, right? ⁓ But has now become more of an idea of something that's actually able to save a lot of people. And so, that is the blessing and the curse of innovation is that it will take some getting used to.
 
 And it will also take some numbers and some facts and some data to prove that this is better than the old alternative. And we are trying to be as humble as possible and not trying to over promise because we know that in the, many people have seen from the vertical farming industry, then over promise is sort of, was the dynamic that was necessary in order to get
 
 hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding and build huge plants, but those huge plants didn't work. So then there's a very understandable skepticism towards both the industry in itself and to the produce that we grow. it will take some time. then I think that when people try it, when people see the data, and when we continuously develop better and better recipes and understanding of the science behind the plants.
 
 Lars Rinnan (26:55)
 Yeah.
 
 Endre Harnes (27:17)
 which is also so much easier to get from a totally controlled environment because we ⁓ eradicate all the variability that you will get when you're trying to research plants outdoors. Then, yeah, that I think we have a good case of convincing people.
 
 Lars Rinnan (27:24)
 Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
 
 Yeah, I think so as well. mean, people are always skeptical, especially at the things that they know nothing about. So it's a bit like fear of the unknown, I think. The more you know about something, the less fear you have. And then you can actually do rational decision making and not just based ⁓ on feelings and lack of knowledge. Of course, this is an exponential technology. You're using various
 
 kinds of exponential technologies. And of course they are doubling every like 18 months. And at some point you have the knee of the curve and then it goes ballistic and ⁓ probably the same thing here, I guess. But I mean, this automation is really impressive. ⁓ So is that primarily aimed for ⁓ developed countries and not so much the developing countries because
 
 I mean, if you have low income regions with ample access to manpower, ⁓ it doesn't make as much sense to automate versus in the West and especially in this country where your ⁓ incomes are really, really high, even for unskilled labor. It probably makes a lot of sense to automate as much as possible from a financial perspective.
 
 Endre Harnes (28:58)
 Yes.
 
 Lars Rinnan (28:59)
 probably also on to other perspectives here.
 
 Endre Harnes (29:02)
 Absolutely. Well, those are great questions. it's, we are talking now situation and we're talking about 10 year, 15 year situation. We're always trying to think in that perspective, even if it's, so even if it's hard, it means that you have to turn around all the time. ⁓ but, ⁓ but in general, yes, to the question does different cases of automation and, ⁓ different crop types, et cetera, make sense in different, regions and in different countries, of course.
 
 It absolutely does. There's a benefit to our approach though, is that our primary technology is the thing that's happening in the grow rooms, in the rooms that have the different conditions. And then we have a software that controls everything from the logistics to the production planning, to the parameters themselves, et cetera. So that is, and then our software controls both the automation and the HVAC or like the ventilation system, right? And the irrigation systems that we get from partners.
 
 Lars Rinnan (29:40)
 Hmm.
 
 Endre Harnes (30:01)
 And the partners part that we are agnostic to that. So we can vary that based on the case. So we can sort of scale up and down automation, scale up and down the size of the rooms. can build as many rooms as we want to. Also, I forgot to mention one thing, because we're building these smaller racks in the smaller rooms, then we have less of what I mentioned, the build up of heat in a room. So we have. ⁓
 
 smaller variation from the bottom layer to the top layer. But then at the same time, we can then build more rooms and then we use the automation to move them around in different rooms. So in this way, we are able to reach economies of scale, even if we have small rooms for the plants. But the software is the magic and that is where we are focused. And then we can vary based on...
 
 the need of the customer and our partners in the specific regions. And it shall also be said that as of now, vertical farming, especially industrial vertical farming will make more sense in the Western hemisphere when we have where we have high salaries, ⁓ et cetera. But that is more or less in the same way that cell phones made more sense in the Western hemisphere where you had access to
 
 early adopters of public companies like Telenor who built out the cell phone networks. Actually, one of our board members was part of the Asian development of Telenor during the nineties. And that is such an analogous process of seeing that we have to sort of start building the infrastructure one place. I've looked at electrical vehicles, for example, in Norway now they're
 
 95 % of the new cars being sold. So you need to first have the initiative and take the time to build the infrastructure that has to come from a combination of public and private players. And then you'll have to get the structures in place for the private companies to productify. And then you'll start to see the adaptation. it's almost like the case of AI just a couple of years ago saying that we overestimate.
 
 It's potential on a short basis, but we dramatically underestimate its potential in the long term.
 
 Lars Rinnan (32:27)
 Yeah, that's so true. ⁓ Let's not sidetrack to AI because you know that's my field. But yeah, I've been working with AI for 10 years and it's so true. It's so true. ⁓ fantastic. So the world's most automated farm. Fantastic. I've also heard rumors that playing music can actually boost plant growth.
 
 We need to talk about that. Is this just a fun experiment or is there some real science behind this?
 
 Endre Harnes (32:53)
 Yeah.
 
 What you're referred to is actually, it's actually from a scientific studies done at a university in Indonesia, ⁓ but where they tested specific types of music on specific types of crops. there's for quite a long time. So every person with you call green fingers will tell you that talking to your plants ⁓ improves their growth. Right. And it's been...
 
 There have been quite a lot of unstructured and formal tests of playing classical music for plants. But this specific study was then done on music that has different focus on different frequencies in the frequency spectrum. So sound and lighting is essentially the same thing, right? Just with different lengths of waveforms.
 
 Lars Rinnan (33:47)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Endre Harnes (33:57)
 And sound has shorter waveforms than lighting. And then they tested music that had more of a focus on different types of frequencies. And it turns out that if you play music, I don't know the playlist though, so that's very interesting to try and find out. But in terms of spinach, if you had...
 
 music that had a focus on the 3000 Hertz frequency, meaning that it's country music, country like jangly indie pop, something that has a bit of this twang. it's sort of like that thing is pronounced in the 3000 Hertz area. And that improved plant growth in spinach with up to 20%.
 
 Lars Rinnan (34:36)
 Hahaha.
 
 Wow, that's insane. So, yeah.
 
 Endre Harnes (34:51)
 Yeah, and they also tested
 
 it with ⁓ music that has more of a frequency, more of a high frequency, but the 3000 Hz for spinach specifically has a profound effect on spinach growth.
 
 Lars Rinnan (35:09)
 wow. So who's the favorite artist of the spinach?
 
 Endre Harnes (35:12)
 I'd say just I'd guess that they also like Taylor Swift. Pop music with a bit of country twang, think that's right up their alley.
 
 Lars Rinnan (35:19)
 Hahaha!
 
 Ahahaha
 
 Okay, so Spinach loves Taylor Swift. You heard it here first. That's pretty amazing. It's also a little bit funny that country music improves plant growth, isn't it?
 
 Endre Harnes (35:40)
 It sort of makes sense. What came first, the music for the farmers, did it come from, in what way, caused the necessity? But that is just one of the many, many things that we don't know yet why and how they happen in plants.
 
 Lars Rinnan (35:42)
 Ha ha ha.
 
 Yeah, exactly. So, ⁓
 
 Yeah, yeah. But it's not the same thing with human beings, you know. I know that you have different sound waves that also affects different emotions in human beings.
 
 Endre Harnes (36:15)
 Yes. No, absolutely. There's something, I think that we have to sometimes be acknowledged that we know so little about ourselves and about the planet and about how physics work. it's not that many years since we found out what the atom was, right? So just like with the plants, some theories about the atom
 
 Lars Rinnan (36:39)
 Exactly.
 
 Endre Harnes (36:45)
 were swerving around for a couple of thousand years through Greek philosophers thinking that they were sort of like a bit of water, a bit of air. And then a couple of thousand years later, we sort of like see the first structures and then we go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I can only assume that this is the same with the plants.
 
 Lars Rinnan (36:53)
 Ha ha ha.
 
 Yeah. So does this mean that in your farms, when you go into those farms, you can hear a lot of Taylor Swift music?
 
 Endre Harnes (37:13)
 ⁓
 
 We ⁓ haven't integrated the sound system into the farm yet. So this is still a research stage. We might do it in the future and have different playlists for the teenage disco over here.
 
 Lars Rinnan (37:34)
 mean
 
 20 % extra growth, that's substantial. I would endure the pain of listening to Taylor Swift if my plans grew 20 % more.
 
 Endre Harnes (37:40)
 Yes.
 
 I actually think also that Hank Williams would be even better than Taylor Swift. If I think about where their frequencies are focused. yes, this is one of a huge array of examples of things that haven't been tried yet because we haven't been able to try them. You can't play music for outdoor field crops.
 
 Lars Rinnan (38:20)
 Exactly.
 
 Endre Harnes (38:20)
 because,
 
 then, and then also there are tons of different ways, like biostimulants, identifying which types of things you can put in the nutrition that enables the plants to grow faster. know that electricity has a substantial potential, substantial effects. So you can actually electrify the plants a bit and then they grow faster. And then you can do other things like working with light. So that was one of the things that I said first, like is that,
 
 Lars Rinnan (38:31)
 Yeah.
 
 Endre Harnes (38:47)
 Plants respond differently to different frequencies of light and identifying both which types of lighting is more effective for which sort of plants. And then also finding out how we stimulate plants to take up more of the energy that we give them. There's a very cool example of something that we're doing some early stage trials on now, which is called flashing. ⁓
 
 which basically means just that, that we will flash the lights super, super fast and try and match the flashing of the lights with the opening and closing of ⁓ the light receptors that the plants have. just like we take in light through the eyes, also through the skin though, but plants also do the same when they take in the energy of the plants, the energy of the light.
 
 Lars Rinnan (39:30)
 Interesting.
 
 Endre Harnes (39:42)
 And those receptors are not open all the time. They flicker just like eyes And if we're able to time that with just flashing lights, then we can drastically reduce energy consumption. And then we'll also reduce heat production in a facility. And that means that we reduce costs of production.
 
 Lars Rinnan (39:46)
 Yeah, right.
 
 Yeah, I was just thinking, I mean, if you have like this kind of flashing lights to get rid music, you'll probably need to play Scooter or something. Yeah, okay. Well, fantastic. So of course, the fun of music in vertical farming is yet another difference from conventional farming. And like I say, it's pretty hard to have music out in the fields. But conventional farming is also known for, you know,
 
 Endre Harnes (40:11)
 Yes.
 
 Lars Rinnan (40:31)
 being just about the worst in class when it comes to sustainability. So how is your robot farm different or better when it comes to issues like water scarcity or land use or carbon emissions or all those kinds of parameters?
 
 Endre Harnes (40:45)
 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
 
 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll start with the elephant in the room there, which is of course, energy use and energy usage in, in vertical farming is much, much, much higher than you have outdoors because the sun, ⁓ but then that also then again, depends on the energy mix. So when we are building a facility in Norway, which is hydro powered and we have plants that
 
 in which we feed the rooms with almost three times the amount of CO2 that's outdoors, then we in effect have a vertical farm that's also a carbon sink. So the energy mix will be very important. If we're able to connect it to renewables, then the general output, of course, of emissions goes down drastically. But it is a substantial amount of...
 
 power usage in these farms compared to outdoor farming. And that is also why we're doing all this research in order to see how we can increase yields and reduce energy ⁓ usage. when it comes to water and water usage, land use, food waste, those other elements that are some of the primary drivers of negative consequences from conventional farming, we...
 
 Yeah, the vertical farming is a way, way, way, way much better production form just because we have.
 
 Lars Rinnan (42:15)
 Yeah, I think you talked
 
 about using like 90 % less water.
 
 Endre Harnes (42:20)
 Yeah. Depends a bit on the setup. ⁓ In theory, in the future, hopefully, potentially, I think that we'll get there. Then the only form of water that will ever leave a vertical farm is locked inside a plant. So the plants contain this water and the water that they, in our facility that we're building now, we're almost done building. ⁓
 
 When the plant has, or when we've done an irrigation cycle, ⁓ meaning water running by the roots and the roots taking up some of the water, then the water is put into a filter, recycled, measured for nutrient content and put back into the system for another round. And we might have, so it's quite a lot of vertical farms have to flush out quite a lot of the parts of the water when nutrients ⁓ accumulate, right?
 
 And, if something happens in the farm, if we have a bacteria outbreak, et cetera, et cetera, these things happen in also in conventional farming all the time. Uh, but we can control it tighter and we can design systems around it to reduce these types of risks and also to increase the circularity of the different inputs, which is what we're working towards. And we're not saying that a vertical farm is perfect. Of course not, but it's, already now we see that when it comes to.
 
 water usage and especially like land use in our facility, which is a small, it's an industrial pilot. It's a large facility. It's like up to a hundred tons of produce a year. So it's much more than I eat. it's still in the greater scheme of things, a very small food production facility. we went to, we were at a conference in ⁓ Germany, the largest one on the planet for, ⁓
 
 fruit and logistics called fruit logistica. Then this Romanian farmer came up to me and he's like, yes, where's the big vertical farm? I'm like, there are some big 30,000 square meter ones in Dubai. That's the largest there is now. And he's like, yes, where's the big vertical farm? My acreage is like, have 25,000 acres of farm. And so it bleaks in comparison still, but...
 
 In our facility now, we have a two to one land use. So one meter of ground floor will be two meters of growth area in this specific setting that we're doing right now. And if we are to build another floor on top of that room, then we'll have a four to one land use. And then you see the exponential thing happening.
 
 Lars Rinnan (44:54)
 What?
 
 Yeah, exactly.
 
 Yeah, I think I read somewhere that it was already like 300 times more area efficient than traditional farming. Of course, it depends on the setup, probably how many shelves you have and how high is the room, et cetera, et cetera. But still, mean, if it's four times or if it's 300 times, it's still...
 
 Endre Harnes (45:34)
 Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And there's another thing to that. One of the reasons why you can say 300 times, I think those are plenty numbers. So plenty is an American company, one of the most funded vertical farming companies so far in the history of mankind. And they just declared bankruptcy a week and a half ago. So they raised about a billion dollars and now just declared bankruptcy. So it is still the sign of a...
 
 Lars Rinnan (45:34)
 massively more efficient.
 
 Ooh.
 
 Endre Harnes (46:03)
 ⁓ an early stage industry. So, one of the reasons that we can say increased efficiency, not necessarily area use, but it's both the fact that we can stack things on top of each other and use less land in practice, but then also we grow year round. depending on the crops, when we're not doing lettuce production, which is
 
 Lars Rinnan (46:24)
 Exactly.
 
 Endre Harnes (46:31)
 for obvious reasons that I can get into a good starting point for any vertical farm, then we will have 15 cycles of production every year.
 
 Lars Rinnan (46:42)
 Yeah, exactly.
 
 And if you also play a little bit of Taylor Swift, you'll have 20 % more growth. So, I mean, it all adds up. So this is, yeah, this is pretty interesting. And of course, since it's done indoors, you probably don't need pesticides either, do you?
 
 Endre Harnes (46:48)
 Yes.
 
 no,
 
 not all. Those are eliminated.
 
 Lars Rinnan (47:04)
 Exactly, which is a good thing. Wow. And of course, I mean, the world is getting warmer and warmer as we all know due to climate change and probably huge parts of the world will not be able to have any farming at all due to climate change. ⁓ But I mean, if you're doing it indoors, could probably produce just about anything.
 
 Endre Harnes (47:07)
 A very good thing, yes.
 
 Lars Rinnan (47:33)
 anywhere at any time of year.
 
 Endre Harnes (47:36)
 Yes, in principle that is possible.
 
 Lars Rinnan (47:40)
 Yeah, so you could actually
 
 grow strawberries on Greenland in January if you wanted to.
 
 Endre Harnes (47:46)
 No problem. We know that there are some. So one of the fun things about this hydroponics, to go back to it, which is then plants not grown in soil in controlled climates is that it's being tested on the International Space Station. ⁓ We know that in Antarctica, they have hydroponic systems in the research stations in order to grow.
 
 some, in order to get some vitamins throughout the year when they're there, because the scientists are there over the entire winter, but they're not able to get hold of fresh produce in any other form. But plants and ⁓ photosynthesis creates vitamins. ⁓ Vitamins is a plant's response to stress. It creates vitamins like we build muscles, plants build vitamins in order to protect themselves from stress.
 
 Lars Rinnan (48:16)
 Yeah.
 
 Endre Harnes (48:43)
 And that stress can come in many forms, which is why we expose them to stress, but which is why you can use hydroponics year round in the most radical, most weather-barren areas on the entire planet in order to get fresh produce that has vitamin content year round.
 
 Lars Rinnan (49:04)
 Yeah, that's fantastic. I didn't know about the International Space Station. That's really interesting. I mean, that's an interesting use case. But of course, seasonality is then a thing of the past. You can produce anything at any time of year. And I also know that there's at least one farm or maybe more on Manhattan, really, which is not the old traditional farmland, to be honest.
 
 So this could actually be on the roof of your local grocery store. Yeah, that's probably a more relevant use case than the space station or Antarctica or even Greenland.
 
 Endre Harnes (49:35)
 Yeah, yeah.
 
 For most people, yes. Absolutely. And those ways of integrating food production into urban areas or closer to distribution centers where most people get all their food from, one of the challenges. And then we get into supply chain, right? And that is a big topic in itself. But most of the produce that you see in the stores comes from a distribution center like an Amazon warehouse somewhere.
 
 Lars Rinnan (49:46)
 Yeah.
 
 Yeah. Yeah.
 
 Endre Harnes (50:12)
 with our current supply chains. So one of the challenges that vertical farms in the US, et cetera, has seen is that in order to get into the local stores, they have to send it to the distribution center and then for it to be shipped back to the store. there are some... So the new systems that we've built over the last hundred years aren't flawless either. So there are quite a few things that still need to be worked out there.
 
 Lars Rinnan (50:38)
 Yeah, I can see that. ⁓ but there are, know, like I said, there are other players in this space. One of them just had a billion dollars in funding, still went bankrupt. ⁓ I know there are others that are growing and becoming quite large, but you seem to be doing something distinctly different than the rest of the crowd. So.
 
 What is that unique approach really?
 
 Endre Harnes (51:12)
 Well, are focusing, we, a company is focusing on a very specific place in the supply chain, which I think is important when you see industry starting to mature that the placement in the supply chain is almost in the business model is almost as important as the product itself. And because we have this potential or we have this
 
 level of automation, have this remote controlling abilities of the facility through our software. Then we have identified that some of the food system or the food supply chain players that have the largest challenges and the biggest pain points are actually retail store chains. They do the sourcing.
 
 clean and wash and pack the products and send them out to distribution. They have to throw them away when people don't buy them because they've gotten too old. And they also have a market access, which is in itself a big challenge when it comes to new industries. And especially if you're building new industries inside established value chains, which we are doing right now.
 
 So we are then focusing on implementing systems like this directly into retail storage chain supply chains. So we're doing that right now here with Coop in Norway.
 
 Lars Rinnan (52:40)
 That's big player in ⁓ the grocery store industry or food industry. ⁓ So what does that mean in practice? if you are like a greens and fruits purchase manager. ⁓
 
 How do you actually do this? How do you integrate with our summer to get the letters that you need in, I don't know, X weeks?
 
 Endre Harnes (53:10)
 I think at current moment, it starts from a much more high level approach. it's still a pretty large and pretty expensive instrument that you have to buy in order to have the fresh produce. And our model now is identifying retail store chains globally that are looking at vertical integration.
 
 not vertical farming, but vertical integration of production forms in their value chains. So we know that this has been a thing since early 80s, 90s, which actually started with coffee roasteries, which is because you have a product that you can add value to by having a roastery locally. So then you just source the beans and they're simpler to... They don't...
 
 lose quality at fast. So you can take that into the facility and then rose them and identify your taste profile to research on your market. And then have a continuous, continuous quality, ⁓ have a good price overview, et cetera, et cetera. So following this model, and we see this in more and more instances of retail store chains focusing on vertical integration in their supply chain. So we are trying to identify players that focused a lot on that.
 
 and building a plant machine inside their supply chain. And that means that in the end, when we've built this facility, which is then owned by the retailer themselves, and we focus on our software and our software development and on creating new and better crops, improving the yields, reducing the costs, rather than us owning and running the supply chain and the market access.
 
 building of the facility, then this is something that industry players that have the pilot pain points themselves and also have the resources to do a large scale investment in something that yields on ROI down the road. But when we built that, we integrate our systems directly into their ERP. which essentially leads to that if you are a produce manager or in a convenience store, wherever.
 
 then you can be like, okay, how do our sales numbers for this and this and that look? Okay, then I want fresh produce of this and that sort delivered Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and you put that into the ordering system. And the ordering system then integrates through an API into our system and starts the machine. So...
 
 Lars Rinnan (55:42)
 Hmm.
 
 Endre Harnes (55:50)
 Technically, the farmer is the fresh produce manager at the grocery store, you can say.
 
 Lars Rinnan (55:58)
 Yeah,
 
 that's pretty impressive. So it's you're actually selling a turnkey solution then so it you're focusing on the software so you're not trying to you know, Owners of large warehouses, etc. Etc. That's probably a bit different from you know, a lot of the other competitors in this space Because that's that's so costly, you know, that's high high capex
 
 Endre Harnes (56:20)
 Yeah.
 
 Yes. No, we think that's a way to be more lean in the space. And we know that the investments are large, but then we see very good numbers on the other side for our customers. And also we see quite substantial increases in challenges of getting a hold of fresh produce. for our business model, which is a horrible thing to say almost, but still real is that climate change is
 
 Lars Rinnan (56:29)
 Hmm
 
 Endre Harnes (56:55)
 pushing for these solutions. So the vertical farming solution will be more prevalent because we see more floods, we see more droughts, we see all of these things in the countries that we are used to getting steady supplies from. But that is over the last almost decade, that is not necessarily any more a given thing. So we've seen lots of production failure. ⁓
 
 I really think we'll see more of that.
 
 Lars Rinnan (57:26)
 Yeah, so you're addressing a really important issue that is definitely growing in importance, you know, day by day. That really makes sense. if we know on this show, it's called The World in 2029, of course, we like to look into the future. And from your vantage point, how might vertical farming
 
 transform both local communities and global food systems by then.
 
 Endre Harnes (58:00)
 2029. That is...
 
 Lars Rinnan (58:02)
 Okay.
 
 Endre Harnes (58:07)
 about 45 to 50 growth cycles of lettuce from now. So even in a vertical farm, depending of course on how you structure your R &D processes and such, then it's not far away. It is not far away. So in 2029, I do think that we'll see...
 
 more vertical farms. Vertical farming has actually been growing by about 25 % continuously since in CAGR generally accumulated revenue across the industry, meaning produce from vertical farms has been growing by 25 % year on year since 2017. you're talking about the knee, the inflection point, the hockey stick, it's not there yet.
 
 I doubt that we'll see that before 2029, but I do absolutely think that we'll see more onboarding of systems and more onboarding of business models. And we'll also see much more interesting use cases of different types of produce that we can start doing the tests of, or someone will do the tests of. hopefully this is financed by academics, by universities, by governmental infrastructure.
 
 while we can focus on what makes economical sense right now and start building good companies and good business models around it. And then, I don't know, my calculations say that if the growth rate in vertical farming continues, then it stays the same as it currently is, then the produce from vertical farms will surpass conventionally grown produce in 2044.
 
 Lars Rinnan (59:58)
 2044 to 4, yeah. Is that actually taking into account the exponential nature of both the technology, everything around it, et cetera? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
 
 Endre Harnes (1:00:09)
 No, just focusing on the revenue, current revenue projections.
 
 So if that continues, but if we're able to combine three technologies or three techniques in growing, in seed breeding and in even better optimization, then of course I might be wrong. This inflection point might come earlier, ⁓ but it's a bit...
 
 We are still trying to be humble and we, we always remember, remind ourselves that, plants take quite a lot of time to grow. So it's not just, it's not just like a software iteration cycle that we can try and do on a day and, send 5,000 experiments out through our website or our channels and get the data back in. takes just to get a, just to get a decent, baby leaf lettuce. takes almost a month. So,
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:01:06)
 Yeah.
 
 Endre Harnes (1:01:06)
 That is, there are some limitations to the exponential exponentiality, but of course we are doing our very best in order to increase or improve and shorten those improvement cycles.
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:01:12)
 Ahem.
 
 Yeah, yeah. Of course, you can't probably get plants to grow exponentially, but I mean, you're doing so much around all the ⁓ natural stuff that is actually exponentially. And both with Taylor Swift and growing, you have the 300x kind of area efficiency also with different multiple growing cycles. And I think all those together, I would almost be...
 
 surprised if this was not really normal around the world, again, at least in your high income countries, developed countries. Do you think this could make a substantial contribution to eradicating hunger in 2029?
 
 Endre Harnes (1:02:15)
 ⁓ if utilized correctly, yes, absolutely. There are some forms of plants that are ⁓ very high protein, very high nutrition, but they're not... ⁓ One of my favorite examples is called duckweed or water lentils, which...
 
 actually doubles in biomass in the course of 24 hours and it floats on top of water and it has 40 % protein and the complete amino acid profile. But it's grown in an environment where it exists in unison with the, what's it called? I don't remember the biological term, but it coexists next to algae. So that makes it very, and those algae are not healthy to humans, right?
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:03:02)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Endre Harnes (1:03:06)
 But some people are developing techniques that enable, ⁓ that enables them to grow without having that synergistic existence with algae, which means that we could try and implement this into a system like ours. And then, and then not making produce that is economically viable from a conventional sort of market idea. But if we are to focus simply on eradicating hunger and building facilities and building systems that
 
 utilize these types of plants, then that is actually, that will be viable within, I don't know, year of research. I'm just throwing something out there, but that can be made viable in not too much of time. But that requires then of course prioritization from infrastructural entities, because that is not something that we can fund. And especially when the market doesn't exist, that is basically, that is asking to go bankrupt.
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:03:50)
 Yeah, fantastic.
 
 Yeah, yeah, it's probably, you know, it's probably on the government side that this needs to be least started off and probably also funded. But, you know, I think there's 800 million people starving in the world today, which is, it's a horrible number. And we all know that we could actually pay for this and, you know, get rid of it right now because I think it costs like 30 billion US yearly, just not a lot of money. You know, it's I think it's like
 
 Endre Harnes (1:04:19)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Yes.
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:04:35)
 5 % of the US defense budget or something. It's really nothing. But if you could do this with, you know, smarter farming, better farming, more efficient farming, but also producing more nutritious produce, that would help so much. Yeah. ⁓
 
 Endre Harnes (1:04:38)
 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
 
 Absolutely.
 
 there's a notion to why we actually have to do it like this. It's because there exists no more soil on the planet that we can inhabit in order to grow more produce in the conventional way. Over 80 % of all the arable land on the planet is used and all of it is now declining in quality because of climate change.
 
 There, this is a place where you actually have to be on, ⁓ on our toes and actually have to put resources into in order to develop sustainable food systems and develop sustainable food production systems. Because the current one we cannot rely on anymore. It's like we've had this car now for say a ⁓ 25 year life cycle of the car. ⁓
 
 In the societal terms, it means that we've had this food production system for about 8,000 years. And it's scaled to, and it's come to the point where we've used it. It's, it still sort of gets by. We, the engine starts now and then. Uh, but overall it needs, it needs continuous overhaul. We see that the tires are not hanging on as well as they should anymore. So we.
 
 have to get a new car. Of course, we can still use it, but then it's sort of like my neighbor who has this veteran car standing in their garage and he takes it out every spring and he cleans it and then he drives it around for a couple of hours and you have that as part of the system. And it can of course be more practical than a veteran car that you take out once a year, but we can not continue using it in the way that we're currently doing because then the wheels will fall off and will...
 
 rushed into a wall.
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:06:54)
 We actually need to do this. This is not an nice to have. This is something that we need to do. mean, global population is growing and the food system is declining. And then we definitely need to do something about that. I think that's a fantastic way to finish off because there's so much positivity around what you're doing.
 
 Endre Harnes (1:07:07)
 Mm
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:07:20)
 and we covered everything from automated hands-free harvesting to the curious case of Taylor Swift music boosting plant growth. And you heard why Avisomo is forging a uniquely different path in vertical farming. So thank you so much for sharing the amazing work you're doing. I just love hydroponic farming and I want a farm like that on top of my local grocery store.
 
 Endre Harnes (1:09:22)
 thank you so much for having me. I also really hope that we can have vertical farms supplying fresh produce in your local perimeter as soon as possible. And I truly hope and believe that we will see vertical farming as part of a sustainable food system in unison with regenerative outdoor farming, unison with practices that enable the regrowth of nature.
 
 at the same time as we have industrial solutions that can provide people with the industrial food that we need in order to maintain an ever-growing ⁓ civilization.
 
 Lars Rinnan (1:10:02)
 Yeah, yes please. So thank you again, Andre. And to everyone listening, thank you so much for joining us on The World in 2029. If you found this discussion enlightening, please stay tuned for more episodes exploring how today's tech can shape a brighter tomorrow. And remember, the future is better than you think. Thank you.