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Indoor commercial farming in Bay Area

The trend towards a more sustainable future keeps growing. While fossil fuels get a lot of attention in the media, the environmental impact of our food choices, which arguably has a much wider and longer lasting effect, is where the largest potential for positive lies.

Not only do we need to decrease the food miles, we need to reduce land and water use as well. At the same time, we need to ensure that people of all socio-economic levels have easy access to healthy, nutritious and sustainable foods.

I'm only in the exploratory stage but would like to partner up with one or more founders in the Bay Area to not only start a commercial indoor farm but create a model that can be easily scaled and widely adopted.

If anyone is interested in partnering with me, please comment below or send me a message.

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    Hey Kamal,

    Love the idea and it's something I've had in mind for a while too. I'm currently already working on a startup, but I'm also based in the bay area so maybe we can keep in touch if things progress. I think companies like Ugly Juice or Plenty have interesting business models that can potentially be scalable?

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      Thanks, @JonKim! All the best with your startup. yes, let's do keep in touch. My email is in my profile.
      I'm aware of Plenty but hadn't heard of Ugly Juice before.

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        Thanks Kamal! And great, I'll message you.

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    Hey Kamal, that's an interesting idea. What are your skillsets? Feel free to reach out as well, my email is in my profile

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      My skillsets in this area are very limited. My main background is in environmental impacts of conventional agriculture, which is devastating. I've been learning about existing indoor/vertical farms and seems to me many of them are not very scalable and limited to low-calorie foods like herbs and greens.

      To make this widespread and scalable, there will be need for a calorie dense food food production as well.

      Also, most vertical farms outsource the nutrients they use to grow the food, which is another scaling problem.

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        The unit economics dont work well except for high priced foods rn - you will need to start on high priced foods then deive down the costs with continuous innovation on the tech

        Thats the reason vertical farms are starting on high priced foods first then taking the money to do research and development work to drive down costs for more mass market foods

        Similar to most innovations - iPhones, Microprocessors, Tesla etc

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          Good points. Vertical farming is not anything new and there has been a lot of development in the field, many of which a documented online and can be made use of.
          I wonder if a CSA model could be used for highend clients who'd be willing to pay more for the foods knowing exactly the source of their foods. Remote monitoring/viewing of food production could be made available to clients so they can check in on their food production anytime. Price could be justified by being on the cutting edge and the ability to boast to friend abouts truly knowing where one's food comes from.

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    The market you are looking at is quite interesting to say the least, I really enjoy dreaming about future things like that. I would love to join the cause but I don't think my skill set would be of any use. Nonetheless I can always do grunt work and bounce ideas around.

    Love the idea reach out if you would like.

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      Thanks for your interest. This is a very new space to me so there's a lot of opportunity for learning and growth for everyone involved.

      What are some questions/concerns you have as you read this proposal? Knowing this can really help fill in the cracks that I may not have thought of.

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  5. 1

    Hey Kamal!
    Very important concepts that you are sharing here. I'm really no expert in this space to be honest but I would love to share my technical capacity and skills to help in whatever way possible. Feel free to reach out any time !

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