Episode 64

S5E64: Growing AgTech by Supporting Small Farming & Farming as a Service with HRVSTS’ Ali Daniali

Episode Summary

Founder and CEO of HRVSTS, Ali Daniali joins the show today to share his engineering background, the origin story of HRVSTS and the importance of supporting and promoting small farming both domestically and abroad. Today, Harry and Ali discuss decentralizing the food distribution network, some big wins HRVSTS was able to achieve recently and advice Ali would give to first-time farmers.

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Key Takeaways

07:13 – Harry welcomes back Founder and CEO of HRVSTS, Ali Daniali, to discuss what he got out of the latest Indoor AgTech Conference in NYC

12:27 – Ali’s background prior to HRVSTS and taking an engineering approach to AgTech

21:37 – The idea behind the ‘Sold Before You Sell It’ mantra

23:02 – Decentralizing food distribution and challenges Ali faced

29:46 – Indoor farming as a service and the variety of services available

35:21 – Ali recalls latest wins from HRVSTS

40:30 – Advice Ali would give to first-time farmers

43:26 – A tough question Ali has had to ask himself recently

46:19 – Harry thanks Ali for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can follow HRVSTS

47:02 – An ask Ali has for the audience

Tweetable Quotes

“Scale becomes this thing where everybody needs to scale up. And, because of that, we leave behind a lot of conversations about small and medium-sized growers. We leave behind conversations about food service and other ways of distribution of food.” (10:40) (Ali)

“What I had learned from those interviews was that the grower who had a relationship with a buyer and could pre-sell their crop - two crops ahead of time, all their crops ahead of time - they were the ones who were being successful in their process.” (16:31) (Ali)

“That model is very susceptible to breaking and it’s not very resilient. We have created these very efficient distribution models that can even come over to the next one when there’s a problem. You have to bury food because you can’t move it from one distribution network to the other. And, with crypto and all these other types of technologies and the conversation about decentralization, the question was,’Can we decentralize our food distribution as well?’” (23:02) (Ali)

“I think this is the time right now to bring small farming back to the U.S. and across the world. We lost them because of WWII. Big Ag became this monster to be able to feed and commoditize agriculture. I think we need to fix that. And the way you do that is with indoor growing.” (38:02) (Ali)

“There’s so much produce being eaten in the U.S. and abroad that the pie is huge. We just gotta get in the door with these buyers and tell them, ‘You can have a bespoked order, exactly to your specifications using this indoor farm as a service and have the highest quality, locally grown, with no pesticides.” (42:36) (Ali)