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012 Square Mile Farms: vertical farming
78 Plays5 years ago
GUEST: JOHNATHAN RANSOM, SQUARE MILE FARMS
- https://www.squaremilefarms.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/squaremilefarms/
- https://www.facebook.com/squaremilefarms
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/square-mile-farms/
- https://twitter.com/SM_Farms
HOST: MATT MORLEY
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Transcript
Introduction to Sustainability and Wellness in Real Estate
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 12 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we take a deep dive into the world of sustainability, wellness and community in the real estate and hospitality sectors. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of BioBlue EcoYachts, biofilico interiors and biofit nature gyms.
00:00:36
Speaker
If you see value in this type of content, please hit like, share or consider subscribing.
Meet Jonathan Ransom and Square Mile Farms
00:00:42
Speaker
In this episode, we talk to Jonathan Ransom, co-founder and CEO of Square Mile Farms in London, UK, a business that's bringing vertical farming to the home and workplace with the aim of promoting healthier, more sustainable lifestyles.
00:00:58
Speaker
I first came across Jonathan and Square Mile Farms a couple of years ago and have kept an eye on their steady progress since then.
Square Mile Farms' Impact on Green Building Certifications
00:01:07
Speaker
As I look after the ESG and placemaking for a commercial real estate development fund in London, I'm aware that their product aligns neatly with both LEED, BRIAM green building certifications on one side and WELL or FITWELL healthy building certifications on the other.
00:01:23
Speaker
which in turn has the knock-on effect of helping with the property fund's annual ESG assessment score. That means you get two or even three hits for the price of one.
Connecting Urban Environments with Nature
00:01:34
Speaker
Beyond the box ticking though, these mini vertical gardens are genuinely about more than just quirky wool decorations.
00:01:42
Speaker
represent a tangible connection with nature in urban environments. They have a practical function in terms of producing a respectable quantity of edible leaves and herbs each month and frankly just go one better than what is often a largely passive vertical plant wall in a corporate office reception. A garden like this helps promote engagement among staff
00:02:07
Speaker
It adds intrigue and even why not a little fun into the office experience right when offices need it most in the post-COVID era. Not a mess, that's enough from me. Here is Jonathan Ransom of Square Mile Farms.
Jonathan's Journey from Finance to Vertical Farming
00:02:26
Speaker
Jonathan, thanks for joining us. Great to have you here on the Green and Healthy Places podcast. Perhaps you could give a quick introduction to who you are and what you do as co-founder and CEO of Square Mile Farms in London.
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, okay. So my professional backgrounds in property, I'm a chartered surveyor by training. I spent a lot of my career working in financial services though, but with a property slant to it. Most recently was the COO of a fintech business in the UK called Lend Invest.
00:03:02
Speaker
And I think what got me into doing what I'm doing today, and we'll come on to perhaps a bit more description of what that is, but is that I got a little bit disenfranchised by the world of finance. And I guess, you know, there's an obvious career route in financial services, but ultimately it can be a little bit
00:03:27
Speaker
under-satisfying and I was looking for a career in a sector that's more personally rewarding and fulfilling and my now business partner Patrick Dumas and I got talking about this prospect of growing fresh healthy vegetables in the built environment which played nicely to my professional experience with the built environment and
00:03:53
Speaker
I guess the backdrop to all of that is both of us having a pretty, let's say being a little bit conscious or even worried about the state of our agri-food sector and the impact that that has on the environment, but also on our personal health.
Urban Farming in London's Financial District
00:04:13
Speaker
And so the name Square Mile Farms, for anyone who's not familiar with it, Square Mile is London's financial district or CBD.
00:04:22
Speaker
And so essentially you're proposing or proposing you deliver urban vertical farms specifically to London, but what's your geographic focus now?
00:04:36
Speaker
Yeah, at the moment we're focused on London and the genesis of that name was really that the original business model was to look at putting controlled environment farms within a square mile of the end consumer, which naturally then cuts down on food miles, but also re-engages there.
00:04:54
Speaker
the consumer with the food system and the food they eat. It also has benefits on the nutritional content of the food as well because food tends to lose some of its nutritional qualities the further it travels. So that was really the genesis of Square Mile Farms. Obviously also because we're based in London and it was going to be a very urban
00:05:15
Speaker
model. So that's why that name came about. And the business model then focusing specifically on homes and offices, you're not in the game as yet of agriculture itself, i.e. growing food for sale and distribution. It's more about a provision of this piece of hardware effectively that produces greenery in a home or in an office environment.
00:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, maybe I'll just take a quick moment to take you back over some of the history of the business. So we've been around for a couple of years now and the original model was a grow to sell model. And we set up our first self-built controlled environment farm in in Bermondsey back in towards the beginning of 2019. And
00:06:10
Speaker
We tested that market, you know, growing within the built environment to sell to local restaurants and local chefs and local consumers ultimately as well. And so we built what we called a flat pack farm, which the idea was that it's something that can be easily assembled or disassembled within tight urban spaces. And it became
00:06:30
Speaker
quite apparent quite quickly that that model of rowing to sell is very hard to make work economically particularly if you're not doing it at large scale and most of the controlled environment farms that you see are doing it on massive scale but even they I think would be struggling to kind of turn a profit based on
00:06:53
Speaker
their operational overheads as of
Office Farming: Engaging Employees and Sustainability Goals
00:06:55
Speaker
today. But what that meant was that we quickly turned to what we knew a bit more and that what we knew was more about
00:07:05
Speaker
corporates, big corporates and the built environment and got talking to a big property company called British Land over here in the UK and they invited us to build one of our flat pat farms on the roof of a building in Paddington Central and it actually just so happens that Microsoft occupied the building that we have that farm on the roof of.
00:07:29
Speaker
But whilst we were there, we were then able to talk to a lot of the big local occupiers, such as Vodafone, Visa, Microsoft, Britishland. And it became quite apparent that what they really wanted was something that helped them engage with their employees to create an experience for their employees, but also helped to address some of their sustainability and
00:07:57
Speaker
say community responsibilities. And so we came up with this idea of office farming. And the idea with office farming is that we put a hydroponic farm up inside the office.
00:08:12
Speaker
and run basically an engagement model around it. So we get the employees involved in the running of the farms, they get to take home the fresh produce, but we also educate them on sustainability and personal health, both physical and mental health, with a focus on the food you eat, where it's coming from, how it's being produced, how you consume it, what it does to your body, those sorts of things. So it's going beyond the kind of
00:08:40
Speaker
is the sustainability of the building that we're located or has some benefits for that also, but also helps accompany, say, educate their workforce on how they can live healthier, lower impact lifestyles. So I was going to ask you for a clarification on or a distinction between what's commonly referred to as, say, like a vertical garden wall or a green wall.
00:09:10
Speaker
which obviously in one sense plays to biophilia, it plays to reconnecting with nature in an urban environment, possibly it can play into productivity and potentially a purifying benefit, but clearly
00:09:26
Speaker
Once you open the door to this being in a consumable natural leaves, you open a whole discussion around the food system and relationship to food and urban farming, which is clearly where you sort of make a big right turn away from just being a decorative object, right?
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of benefits of having plants in buildings, as you touched on, and this phrase or word biophilia is banded around quite a lot at the moment.
Benefits of Plants in Office Environments
00:10:00
Speaker
But ultimately, well, it boils down to two things. One is, how does it improve the environment in which you are? So whether that's within the office or at home. And that environment is both about
00:10:14
Speaker
you know, air quality, air quality can be around acoustics, it can be around, you know, just having greenery in the office as an automatic benefit to the office. But on the flip side, this biophilia benefit, which is that kind of
00:10:35
Speaker
goodness that humanity gets from being with nature and interacting with nature. And that's a very, can be a psychological thing, but it's also a physiological thing. So it's, you feel better for reasons of, you know,
00:10:52
Speaker
I think thousands of years of evolution alongside nature. The benefit of having edible plants in the office is that that interaction becomes enhanced. So if you've just got a green wall that looks great, you know, there's a novelty there. It does look great. And it does have some benefits in terms of the kind of quality of the air, et cetera, in the office. But you're not interacting with it. You don't have that same interaction that naturally we might have with nature. Whereas if it's an edible,
00:11:21
Speaker
farm wall, you do interact with it, you're harvesting it, you're eating the produce from it, you're helping to plant it up. So every time you walk past it, you see the fruits of your labour and you get some satisfaction from that. So it goes further than just sort of urban greening, let's say, it brings in that element of engagement and an experience and, you know, it's a physical activity as well. So it has some physical benefits as well. So when you think about
00:11:51
Speaker
the problem that you were solving or the unmet need that you were trying to address when you got started on this, what, if you like, would be your competitors in
Integrating Vertical Farms into Office Design
00:12:02
Speaker
that sense? What else is typically in an office or a corporate office environment such as a Microsoft or wherever it may be that is doing something similar because obviously the walls have more of a passive element, whereas you're talking much more about an experiential piece, right? Yeah, so I guess,
00:12:20
Speaker
Well, it might be worth just dwelling quickly on who the buyers of the services are. So one of the buyers would be someone that's responsible for fitting out the office space and making it look good and making it work well for the employees. The other buyer is, and sort of competitors that might fall into that space might be your typical kind of office or interior landscaping companies.
00:12:46
Speaker
On the other side, the buyers are the, you know, the HR team is responsible for employee wellbeing and engagement and even recruitment and retention.
00:12:55
Speaker
And they're more interested in the kind of engagement and the experience element of it. So on that side, the people that I guess we might come across in terms of competition for budgets, let's say, spoil it down to that, would be your people like, you know, Nuffield Health, for instance. The thing about, and they're providing a wellbeing service around, that's focused on, let's say fitness and exercise.
00:13:24
Speaker
The thing about someone like Northfield Health is, of course, they're taking you out of the office to get that experience. What we're doing is keeping you in the office, which really plays to the kind of the future vision that people have of the office post COVID. We're keeping you in the office and creating
00:13:42
Speaker
an experience for you in the office which can get you away from your desk create some physical activity create some mental activity takes you away from the kind of day to day thinking about you know what's on your computer screen but then alongside that we do also provide other services such as workshops it might be you know nutritional consultations and we do supper clubs and things like that
00:14:05
Speaker
which is again some of those things you'd expect enough field health type business to offer alongside the gym membership. So there is some similarities let's say but we feel that our model combines so many different let's say needs of a big corporate. I think the activation piece is really strong
00:14:33
Speaker
component to what you're doing to the sort of overall service
Post-Pandemic Office Innovations
00:14:37
Speaker
offer. You mentioned COVID and how have things been, I'm guessing budgets have been reduced, offices have been closed, therefore it's had a direct impact on
00:14:47
Speaker
perhaps new orders or perhaps your pipeline of potential clients. But how are you seeing the next 12 to 24 months in a post COVID world? And how do you think your product will emerge from the ashes of this current crisis that the workplace is going through?
00:15:07
Speaker
So I think that the world is looking for the type of services that we offer, fortunately. Admittedly, the last, say, nine months have been challenging, mainly because the types of the people that hold the budgets for this type of service really need to have some visibility on when
00:15:32
Speaker
people will come back to the office. But they're also going through a pretty involved process of trying to think about what they want their office to be for in the future. And I think even before COVID, there was this shift towards more experiential office places that are less about
00:15:55
Speaker
places where people come and sit behind a computer screen like a battery hen and churn out work because you can do that at home, frankly. It's more about engaging and let's say growing your workforce and about experiences and about interactions and so consequently
00:16:20
Speaker
you know, the office of tomorrow will be full of things that help foster those type of activities. They won't be crammed full of desks where people perch with their laptops. They'll be more lounge-y in appearance. And so, you know, one thing we've been working on with Vodafone in Paddington is this idea of a zen garden, which is, you know, their idea, where they,
00:16:50
Speaker
create a kind of area for people to relax and chill out and a better kind of place to put an allotment wall than in a zen garden within the office.
00:17:07
Speaker
It's very topical and a lot of companies that we talk to now have tasks forces put together that are tasked with making the office suitable for the post COVID world. And so it seems that there's quite a lot of activity going on in terms of reconfiguring refitting spaces to make it appropriate for that post COVID world. And that's where we fit in.
00:17:33
Speaker
because they want something normal. Lots of offices of the past might have ping pong tables or table football or computer consoles or whatever, but an office farming model brings both the experience, but also the educational side. And it ticks a lot of boxes from a kind of office sustainability perspective as well. Yeah, I get it. I mean, it's fun, it's engaging, it's a talking point.
00:18:03
Speaker
It's a water cooler moment in a way. So just to dig into that process then, the idea of, you might have HR on one side, perhaps sort of brand director or marketing guys on the other, perhaps the facilities manager or management team around the table.
Setting Up Vertical Farms in Offices
00:18:20
Speaker
Who else is involved in that process when you go from identifying a suitable location and perhaps you might be able to comment on what would make up a suitable location within an office environment.
00:18:33
Speaker
and describe that process of going from initial introduction through to actually opening one of your vertical farms presumably a few months later. Yeah, I mean, it varies depending on where the kind of entry point was to the conversation, but just take one example. So let's say the office, the company's looking to refurbish their space in light of changes that are needed post COVID.
00:19:03
Speaker
They might they likelihood is then we're talking to the person responsible for the fit out so maybe a, you know, workplace strategy person, you know, in the old world we call them kind of corporate real estate managers or something along those lines so
00:19:21
Speaker
They then obviously will be engaging with their interior designers and at some point once they've got an idea of the sorts of things that they can get from us they then introduce us to the interior designers. We have a chat about where it can go, whether we integrate it into the
00:19:43
Speaker
building services such as the plumbing or whether we have it as a standalone unit that has its own water source we find the location and
00:19:53
Speaker
We then talk to the contractor about, you know, what services we do need. And, you know, often if it's a wall hung unit, then we might need some reinforcing on the wall. And then just sort of bed into that project management as the fit out goes along. And normally we're the kind of last people in and just mounted on the wall at the end. And off it goes, planted up and people can then start engaging with it.
00:20:23
Speaker
So irrigation, the load that goes onto the wall, if it is a wall loaded piece, preferably sort of a structural wall, and some component of light, I'm guessing, or does the vertical farm come with its own lighting system integrated into the hardware?
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, so actually the loading isn't so much of an issue. We've just mounted one in sort of double thickness plasterboard. So it's a consideration, but often doesn't become a limitation.
00:21:01
Speaker
What it needs is either a water source that we can plummet into for the irrigation or relatively near to a water source so that it's quite easy to get water to the
00:21:16
Speaker
to the wall itself but it's recirculating so it doesn't need to be continually topped up and yes it does need a light source but because we're talking about edible plants they require higher intensity
00:21:33
Speaker
light than some of the conventional office plants would need because the light intensity does affect the growth rate and also the flavour of the plants as well. The system has an integrated lighting which needs a little bit of thought because it does come off the face of the wall.
00:21:56
Speaker
We also use what we call hydroponic towers, which are sort of standalone units, which is literally a tower with plants growing out the side of it, which have lights integrated again in like a halo effect, which we can put anywhere in the office. It doesn't need to be mounted on the wall. What are the options then in terms of the actual type of foliage that the farm is producing and the sort of nuts and bolts of all of this at the end of the day?
00:22:25
Speaker
Is it a bag of leather sleeves, the flowers? Typically, what would you recommend growing for maximum productivity and limited amount of maintenance required and so on? Yeah, so you touched on a couple of good points there. Productivity is important. Plants that give you the opportunity for engagement are important, but also from an operational perspective, we don't want to be going there.
00:22:51
Speaker
too frequently to replant things that, in the case of a lettuce, for instance, you eat the entire lettuce head, so you end up having to replant the entire plant. So we do focus on leafy greens and herbs. You can grow fruiting crops, tomatoes, strawberries, that sort of thing in these types of systems, but they do require
00:23:18
Speaker
a higher intensity of light so if for instance we're putting we have some outside space we might use outside space to to put up put up a farm wall an exterior farm wall or one of our hydroponic towers outside and in the summer you could then grow
00:23:33
Speaker
things like strawberries and tomatoes but in the office we're growing things like lettuce but also like kale, chard, both of which you cut the leaves and you can leave the plant and they grow back so you can get multiple harvests off them and they look great as well so you know rainbow chard, lots of different colors
00:23:56
Speaker
on your wall so they look fantastic and they're relatively quick growing as well. We also then, Basil's is a very popular one and again you can cut the leaves and come back and it smells fantastic so particularly when you're harvesting it creates a lovely fragrance around the office. You know rosemary, thyme, all the
00:24:16
Speaker
stuff that you might grow in a English garden, the difference being that you're growing it in the office and you can do it all year round because the office environment's a lot more stable than, you know, the seasonal environment outside in the UK. So yeah, in a nutshell, it's leafy greens and herbs.
Home Farming Solutions by Square Mile Farms
00:24:38
Speaker
But then you do also have now a home farm
00:24:42
Speaker
alternative, which would be presumably on a smaller scale that's more manageable, that would be more of a residential product? Yeah, correct. Yeah. And it's worth saying that one of the main challenges with growing indoors is the lighting. And so with the home farms, there is much about making the most of limited outdoor space that you have, as they are about indoor space.
00:25:11
Speaker
So in some homes where you have a lot of light, you can put one indoors and we have a lighting solution that supplements the light, which means that you're not reliant on natural light. But if you're growing
00:25:28
Speaker
outdoors on a terrace for instance then you know the world's your oyster really and and it doesn't you know if you're growing outdoors you might be just as inclined to grow flowers flat flowering plants as you are edible plants and and if it's sort of over winter then you might put some evergreens in and our systems modular which means that the plants each have an individual pot that you
00:25:55
Speaker
hang on to a frame that sits behind it, but it means that you can easily take that pot out and replant it with different plants, or indeed create patterns on the wall of different colors. So whatever takes your fancy, really. And I think just touching on this concept of a pollinator pod and a productive pod and those sorts of things, what we're trying to do there is just in simple terms demonstrate that
00:26:21
Speaker
you know, each plant plants have different functions. And both in the environment, but also in terms of what you humans get out of them. Some of them are are about they look great, which is the flowering ones, and also they produce flowers. So they're great for insects as well. So pollinator pods are great for attracting insects into your garden, which has the knock on effect of
00:26:50
Speaker
pollinating other plants that you have in the garden. So you start creating fantastic biodiversity. And then the producer pots are edible plants. So stuff that you can cut and eat in your kitchen and replant and off you go again. So that's the idea really there. We just thought that was quite a fun idea of bringing to life the different sort of plants that you can grow.
00:27:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's exciting. It sort of makes you want to grab one and get started. And there's no excuses once you've sorted the light issue. I mean, one can always complain about how hard it is to grow plants on one's terrace. But in a way, this is a different approach. You've also gone through a crowdfunding process recently. So you've raised some capital.
Crowdfunding for Expansion
00:27:35
Speaker
What are your plans in terms of rollout expansion or growing over the next few years?
00:27:42
Speaker
So yeah, we did the crowdfunding last year, which was a fantastic success. And I think it was well timed in that a lot of the people that get involved in, a lot of the investors that get involved in crowdfunding campaigns were spending a lot of time at home during lockdown, but also were reflecting on the sorts of things that are important.
00:28:03
Speaker
And obviously health and well-being are, you know, they're increasingly important to people. And I think our model resonated with the crown. So we raised half a million pounds through that process and had nearly 900 investors contribute, which was a fantastic
00:28:27
Speaker
Fantastic to see. So the idea is that now what we want to do is really focus on getting these farms into offices, but also into, we've got a new push recently into getting farms into co-living spaces. So working with the operators of the sort of apartment buildings and putting farms, sort of communal farms in apartment buildings and helping people then also get some production going within their apartments and cells.
00:28:54
Speaker
So this year is all about kind of rolling that out and really demonstrating how it can work and then sort of scaling off the back of that. So I think we'll have, we're optimistic about getting about 15 farms in over the next nine months or so. And that for us would be a good achievement to start with.
00:29:20
Speaker
It does feel like the whole sort of biofilium movement, biofilic design made its name with office environments and now does seem to be being adopted. Probably both at the very, very high end of the residential market, but also with the sort of more millennial focused co-living spaces. So I think you're on something there. I think it'd be really interesting to see how you get on with the co-living.
00:29:46
Speaker
new business strategy.
Integrating Living and Working Environments Post-COVID
00:29:48
Speaker
One final question, if I may, if you were to send one message out to the real estate and hospitality sector in a post COVID world, if you could see one change in this industry of ours over the next few years, what would you ask for?
00:30:04
Speaker
I guess I'd encourage them to listen to their customers, particularly in the sort of residential space because the types of accommodation that people have been living in up to now, the urban world is a pretty cramped world and in a world where we're spending a lot more time at home, we have to be a lot more
00:30:29
Speaker
focused on people's you know what they need to live healthy lifestyles and you know it doesn't mean you have to give them huge amounts of space but it does mean you need to give them amenities and and those amenities have to be beyond the kind of normal stuff maybe having a gym in the basement or or what have you it needs to be broader than that and
00:30:53
Speaker
From kind of combining those two, you know, the residential space and the office spaces, it shouldn't really be thinking about them independently because, as we're seeing now, the concept of an office isn't so much about that kind of physical manifestation of a building that you go and work. It's about
00:31:13
Speaker
it's about where you work and the kind of amenities that have provided you to be able to work in that environment. So it's joining those, the kind of living environment and the working environment together and how we balance those two things. So I'd just encourage some kind of novel thinking around that space.
00:31:32
Speaker
Very cool. I think you're neatly positioned to make your contribution to that whole process over the next few years. Good on you.
How to Connect with Square Mile Farms
00:31:40
Speaker
So if people want to connect, what's the best way for them to reach out to Square Mile Farms?
00:31:47
Speaker
The phone numbers on the website, there's an email address on there as well. We're also very active on social, so if your thing is Instagram, then follow us there. You can see what we're doing. We tend to put videos and pictures of what we're up to on there, and by all means, ping us a message, and we'll get back to ASAP. All right, we'll add all the URLs and
00:32:09
Speaker
links through for the social media onto the show notes at the end. Thanks so much for your time and best of luck for everything that's to come. Cheers Matt, thanks.