Can you provide a brief overview of your background and journey in your career so far?
I currently serve as the operations manager at Bowery’s Bethlehem, Pennsylvania facility. I have been a part of the Bowery team since 2019, when I started as a project manager responsible for constructing new facilities and upgrading existing ones through capital projects. Over time, I transitioned into my current role as an operations manager.
Prior to joining Bowery, I spent over a decade in the controlled environment agriculture industry. I began my journey with a startup company where I designed and built a greenhouse aquaponic farm in Chicago, using a closed[1]loop ecosystem of fish and plants to produce fresh fish and produce for human consumption. I then became the company’s CEO, Metropolitan Farms, for six years before moving on to a larger project in Grand Rapids, Michigan called Revolution Farms. At Revolution Farms, I co[1]founded the business, built the operations team, developed products, and designed the facility.
It was at an indoor farming conference in Las Vegas where I had the opportunity to meet Irving Fain, CEO of Bowery. We discussed my background, and I learned about Bowery’s innovative approach to indoor farming. Irving saw the potential for us to work together, given my experience in developing indoor farms. At the time, Bowery was in the early stages of building its first commercial facility and needed someone with my expertise. Subsequently, I joined the team as a project manager, and the rest is history.
What are some of the latest technological trends in the indoor farming space?
The indoor farming industry is currently undergoing a period of self-reflection and, in some cases, reinvention. Some major farms have closed down, which is publicly known. However, I believe Bowery is different. With our wealth of experience in the field, we are focused on developing standardized facilities that can be deployed anywhere to grow food.
In terms of technology, we have both hardware and software innovations. Bowery’s proprietary operating system governs the production within our farms, which integrates all our facilities into a network.
The software runs the logic of the grow room and moves crops through different stages of their life process. Our Bethlehem facility has a process that takes our crops from seeds to finished clamshells of products ready for retail shelves - all under one roof. This is a significant advantage compared to traditional agriculture, which requires multiple businesses in the supply chain.
We use off-the-shelf business programs like warehouse management, but our equipment and hardware are unique. Our machines range from custom-built and designed product conveyance and automation to standard, off-the-shelf pieces of equipment. We have crop retrieval technology that allows us to pull trays from the grow room and onto the production floor for harvesting and quality control.
My goal is to make the facility more standardized, like a conventional manufacturing plant. This requires creating standardization and systematization of the process, which is an assembly of steps
It’s essential to note that indoor farming is more like a plant factory than traditional agriculture. My goal is to make the facility more standardized, like a conventional manufacturing plant. This requires creating standardization and systematization of the process, which is an assembly of steps. I aim to make things less customized and more like any other manufacturing plant. I work closely with my team, including operations, quality, facilities, and plant specialists, to achieve this goal.
How do you prioritize safety and regulatory compliance in your day-to-day operations?
Safety is always our number one priority. Plants are not sharp, but some of the instruments and industrial machinery that we use to work with plants are, so we talk about safety all the time. We have an onsite safety officer who touches on the safety culture, just like any manufacturing plant. The first step to safety is identifying and eliminating hazards, so we try to remove the danger and identify risky processes wherever possible.
No matter how careful you are, you cannot remove everything. We use personal protective equipment (PPE) to avoid anything dangerous and put our employees through behavior and training. The most important thing is that everybody that comes to work in the morning goes home in the same shape that they came in. Our workers don’t have to be out in the field because our setting allows all the materials to be bought for them. This makes it a safer environment because our workers are not in an uncontrolled environment, where they are moving over rough terrain and are safe.
We are primarily focused on making sure that we deliver the healthiest and best quality products to our customers. We are a safe quality food (SQF) certified facility, one of the most rigorous voluntary programs for only a few manufacturing plants. We also have a sanitation team that comes every night, a quality team that runs ATP tests on all our facilities, and run good manufacturing practices (GMPs) on our facility.
How do you stay up to date on the latest technology and industry trends relevant to your company operations?
Information about this industry and its technologies is hard to find. I have an extensive background, but there is not a huge amount of information published because a lot of companies have proprietary information, and they are trying not to share it. Usually, when I find information, it is through other specialists in the industry. It is an early-stage industry, so many companies are guarded about what they release in terms of their processes and plants.
Is there any particular project that you have recently worked on? What strategies did you use that made the project successful?
It is challenging to be in a capital-intensive startup, like vertical farming, because we are either transforming an existing technology or building something from scratch, before operationalizing it. After this, there is usually not much space for prototyping and testing, so we need to execute as quickly as we can when we are launching farms. We are the beta testers and solve the issues that come up in real-time, while also doing our work.
One thing that I focus on is cross-functional collaboration, working heavily with our technical specialist teams. We keep the doors open to communicate about improvements and new projects and understand goals. We also need to understand run rate, preventative maintenance schedules (PMS), the way the machine is used, and its ergonomics. A lot of times, that means running the machine to understand it, then taking a step back to put all the learnings together and talking to cross-functional groups before refining it.
What would be your piece of advice for budding professionals in the field?
My advice would be to find a specialization in the field. Whether you are interested in being a software or hardware engineer, operations manager, human resources, or agriculture specialist, finding a specialization unique to you is important.
