CropTalk

This episode of CropTalk is brought to you by Hort Americas and HortiPlan.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with John McMahon, President of Equinox Growers. John left a corporate finance and audit career in New York, bought a run-down piece of Virginia land during the financial crisis, and bootstrapped a 1,500 square foot greenhouse into a lettuce business supplying Whole Foods, Sysco and regional distributors. Today he runs ten acres of mobile gutter production in Virginia, fully owned by Taylor Farms since March. We walk through his path from gutters to deep water culture and back, and why he argued for a mobile gully system over cheaper ponds on yield and crop quality. We cover how risk-averse investors shaped the supplier decision, why it can be easier to raise more capital than less, and how minimum check sizes influenced the size of the building. We get into why commissioning in the dead of summer made every mechanical issue harder, and why running ten acres turned out easier than running a small greenhouse. We also cover the three-legged stool of investor, operator and Taylor Farms as offtake partner, why the venture model of chasing one moonshot doesn't work in farming, and the middle-ground scale he calls no man's land.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Jesse Porter, VP of Business Development at Grow Pros Solutions. Jesse started growing cannabis around 2004 while studying plant science at UC Berkeley. Over 20 years he has run cannabis businesses, consulted, sold HVAC, racking, lighting, and airflow equipment, and designed facilities from 5,000 to 100,000 square feet. We walk through what he calls the translator problem, where the cultivator, the engineer, and the owner each speak a different language and a facility can fail even when everyone is good at their job. We cover how sharing SOP details like media size, runoff, and week-by-week set points can cut a cooling estimate in half, why five engineers can return five different latent load calculations, and how an IR gun set to 0.97 emissivity and a hot wire anemometer can show leaf temperatures six degrees below ambient. We get into the difference between basics and fundamentals, a transpiration ceiling of 0.25 gallons per canopy square foot, and why accurate data matters more than AI. We also cover his four pillars of financial success: quality, quantity, consistency, and operational efficiency. He describes customers going from five to seven harvests a year with spectrum control, and explains how dirty coils, drain pans, and clogged filters can cut HVAC performance by 20%.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Rodrigo Pereira, VP of Horticulture, Development, Innovation and Quality Assurance at GoodLeaf Farms. Rodrigo joined GoodLeaf in August 2025 after roughly three and a half years at Bowery Farming, where he led R&D across plant science and farm operations before the company closed in October 2024. We walk through his non-linear path into CEA, from a physics background into a decade in horticultural lighting at Osram and Fluence, and how that lighting work led him into vertical farming. We cover the plant-first system design philosophy he carried from Bowery to GoodLeaf, building the growing system around the plant's biology instead of forcing the plant to fit the engineering. We get into how GoodLeaf runs three profitable farms today, the cost discipline and demand forecasting behind that result, and how Canada's buy-local sentiment following 2025 tariff tensions has shaped retail demand. We also cover microgreens as an underdeveloped category opportunity, GoodLeaf's national Canadian retail footprint including a new Walmart launch, and Rodrigo's read on where vertical farming goes from here as the industry shifts from a technology-first mindset to an agriculture-first one. Rodrigo closes on what scares him most in this business, the risk of an unidentified pathogen taking down a farm, and what excites him, the chance to prove that a small handful of vertical farms can show the model actually works.

Carl Gupton filled his first greenhouse at half capacity on purpose, to learn how the house behaved before chasing a yield number. Now CEO of Greenswell Growers, the start-from-scratch operation outside Richmond in Goochland, Virginia, Carl returns to CropTalk to walk through what that discipline bought. Greenswell runs a single one and a half acre house, and Carl breaks down the climb to financial equilibrium after about three years, where the operation sits now, cash flow positive, self-sustaining, and selling out, and the roughly 15 percent of yield he thinks is still on the table. We cover how distribution drifted far from the plan first pitched to the bank, spreading from Virginia across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, and the Lowes Foods co-brand that lifted movement about 30 percent by letting a new label ride an established one. We get into the fork Carl is standing at, expanding the current site or greenfielding a new one, and why he wants to go big while staying wary of building ahead of demand in this financing climate. We also cover the Cyclospora scare rippling through field greens, and why he sees clean, ready-to-wash greenhouse lettuce as CEA's opening to take share and draw capital back.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Andrew Howell, Partner at Ascendant Partners. Andrew last joined us 101 episodes ago at episode 174 in November 2021, and he returns to test what actually holds up about getting a CEA company funded or sold heading into 2026 and 2027. We walk through the three legs of the stool he uses to judge any operation: reliable growing technology and a cost effective build, yield that pencils, and a buyer at the end. We cover why "if you build it, they will come" broke down against retailers like Kroger and Whole Foods that were never going to carry 50 suppliers of the same 5 ounce clamshell. We get into offtake as the precondition Ascendant now requires before taking on a mandate, the shift from world domination plans to businesses targeting a 10 to 15 percent EBITDA margin, and why food and agriculture is roughly 8 percent of US GDP but attracts less than 1 percent of investment dollars. We also cover the shrinking pool of investors who have not already been burned in the space, the two plus year cycle to bring new acreage online, Taylor Farms acquiring the Equinox facility in Virginia, whether a head grower belongs in the boardroom, the 2017 white paper Andrew wrote arguing greenhouses would win out over vertical farms, and his call for small and mid-sized acquisitions to roll into larger networks through 2027. The unvarnished truth he gives clients, even when they do not want to hear it, runs through the entire conversation.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Ryan Douglas, cultivation consultant and author of Presence Is a Strategy. Ryan brings more than 25 years in commercial cultivation, starting with 15 years growing ornamental flowers across New Mexico, Mississippi, and Massachusetts, followed by a decade in cannabis that included serving as head grower for one of the first federally licensed medical cannabis facilities in Canada, built inside a former Hershey chocolate factory, and consulting for international investors and operators in Colombia. We walk through the book chapter by chapter, starting with why infrastructure doesn't run itself and the lesson of a low-tech Mississippi greenhouse with blackout curtains closed by hand that produced impeccable crops. We cover the corporate interference trap, including a tone-deaf HR hat program that divided a crew of H-2A, local, and staffing agency workers overnight. We get into why dashboards don't grow crops, from a management team quietly collecting weekend overtime to an IPM manager who never left her office, and how showing up at odd hours surfaces problems no sensor ever will. We also cover the price tag of ego, why top performers resign quietly and leave first, and the bankability test, Ryan's case that lenders fund repeatability, that a new operation should prove consistent production within its first 12 months, and that an outstanding first crop can be one of the most dangerous things for a cultivation business. Ryan closes with his prediction that the future of CEA lies in bringing traditionally outdoor crops like coffee and citrus into protected environments.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Ryan Archer, co-founder of Horizon Growers, a developer and operator of high-tech greenhouses. Ryan came into CEA in 2018 from a construction background, brought onto a project he was told only was a greenhouse, which turned out to be a 12-hectare semi-closed facility in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, producing 6,000 tonnes of fresh tomatoes a year for the local market. We walk through what it takes to build at that scale all at once rather than in modular phases, from 18 months of construction in summer heat reaching 48 to 50 degrees Celsius, to a peak workforce of 130 people across 16 to 20 nationalities, to managing the interface between a Dutch construction company and local civil crews. We get into why humidity, not temperature, became the defining grower challenge, and why the team ran the operation as a fully integrated business covering the build, the growing, the packing, and the sale into local retailers. We cover what they underestimated about market entry, including why a population of 11 million is misleading once you break it down by earning power and buying habits, and why local high-tech product struggled against a regional perception that premium means imported. We also cover the energy thinking that came out of the desert and now drives a roughly 35-hectare tomato greenhouse in Germany, labor retention at remote sites, and where Ryan sees greenhouse automation heading. The advice to build trust with your technology supply chain early runs through the entire conversation.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Jennifer Neujahr and Ted Buis, co-founders of Next Step Solutions. Between them they bring nearly six decades in horticulture: Jennifer spent more than three decades introducing products across six continents, including the 60X scale-up of Hydra fiber while building the horticulture group at Profile Products, and Ted grew a Dutch substrate company from €40 million to €200 million in turnover across 11 operations in nine countries. We get into why innovation doesn't sell itself, and why grower economics decides whether a new product gets adopted no matter how good the technology is. We walk through their Innovation Journey framework, the five steps from unvalidated technology to validation, commercial proof, funding, and scale, and Ted's point that real strategy means being clear on what you won't do. We cover the substrate market itself: the Wageningen University projections for global growing media demand through 2050, where the missing volume comes from, and the place of peat, coconut coir, and wood fiber alongside emerging materials like rice hulls, sugarcane bagasse, miscanthus, hemp fiber, and hydrogels. We also cover the costs growers overlook, from disease pressure to the 10 to 25% sell-through loss tied to pay-by-scan in North American retail. We close on predictions: fewer but larger operators, food security pulling India, China, and Africa into controlled environment production, and the new crops surfacing from wasabi to cacao. The case that a market has to be built before it can be scaled runs through the entire conversation.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Pieter Slaman, founder of GaaS Solutions and advisor to Green Gardens in Slovenia, and Tim Van Hissenhoven of Cultivators. Pieter spent over a decade scaling Little Leaf Farms into one of North America's leading greenhouse lettuce operations, while Tim was raised in a Belgian greenhouse, spent years in commercial hydroponic lettuce in the Netherlands, and now takes operations from first business concept through technology selection, startup, and grower training. We walk through the discipline both of them practice the same way, letting the plant lead the operation while sales, finance, and the boardroom organize around it, and the morning walkthrough that tells them within minutes whether a facility is healthy, from sizing up labor by the cars in the lot to reading the propagation field first. We cover why the first seven to eight days after seeding decide the fate of the crop, and how Pieter holds germination at 97 to 98% through redesigned germination boxes, screening, and fogging. We get into the failures they see most, greenhouses engineered around a technology instead of the crop, projects sited where the grower fights the climate every day, and operators who forget they run a low-margin business with no buffer. We also cover vertical farming's narrow economic window, the finance-versus-grower fight over yield as equipment ages and light degrades, and how they pressure-test vendor claims of 2.5 to 25% yield gains. The conviction that the fundamentals have to be right before any technology earns its place runs through the entire conversation.

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Rachael Warner, head grower at Planteva, a vertical propagation company in Canada delivering clean, pest-free starts for leafy greens and strawberries. Rachael holds a master's in plant science with a controlled environment focus and has worked across small, medium, and large-scale facilities before taking on the role of building Planteva's production protocols from the ground up. We walk through what protocol development actually looks like when your job is to push a plant as hard as possible without breaking it, and how running a plant past its delivery window by just 24 hours can take you right to the edge of tip burn. We cover the clean start problem the industry has with strawberries, what it means to give growers a genuine stamp of approval on plant health, and why that responsibility sits entirely with the propagator when something goes wrong. We get into grower-to-grower collaboration as a collective protection mechanism, why word of mouth is still the most reliable filter for evaluating new technology, and what happens to an industry where operators keep reinventing the same wheel in isolation. Rachael also shares her take on where high-tech propagation fits into the broader CEA supply chain and where she sees the model going as the push for local production accelerates.