Food Security is one of the biggest challenges we are facing today and our future depends on our ability to secure food while battling the challenges that Climate Change is bringing to agriculture.
We have heard of urban food deserts, typically city areas where it’s hard to source healthy and fresh foods, a problem that impacts often minorities and low-income communities, with clear repercussions on health. In countries where harsh climate fluctuations ruin seasonal produce, price increases, and harsh profit losses are heavier on the farmers.
Being a farmer is becoming an increasingly challenging job, even when it’s a profession passed down by generations together with the decades of knowledge and wisdom that comes with it.
It is probably not one of those professions you dream of getting into after graduating college, and it’s probably the reason your parents told you to get a degree in the first place, so that one day you may do better and be spared from the hardship that farming life brings with it.
But it’s 2024 and we are rewriting the rules of everything we know, there are farmers turned influencers who are hacking their way into popularity creating increasing demands for their products, sharing knowledge and showing that any profession can be updated to modern times and use technology as an advantage.
I met Stuart Oda, whose surname coincidently means “small farmer” in Japanese, when he was completing the first cohort of the Future Foundation Accelerator program in Dubai with his then-infant company Alescalife.
He offered me a small bag full of leafy greens, microgreens to be exact, and invited me to taste them.
I am vegan and I never pass on the opportunity of free pastures, and as I munched on his produce the most amazing symphony of taste unleashed on my tongue.
“What on earth is this? and where can I get more ?” I asked.
“These are microgreens from our vertical indoor farming system” he said and he proceeded to giving me a tour of the incredible product he had developed with his team.
We instantly clicked because he is not just smart, he is an investment banker turned farmer, but he is one of those people who beams with childlike energy every time they are about to share something, and it’s absolutely inspiring to witness the passion for his work.
His story is quite unusual and his approach and vision are clear and optimistic.
“my Japanese surname, Oda, means small farmer,
so I came back full cirle”
He started out as an investment banker, then moved on to work for Dell for a brief period, and then realized his passion was elsewhere. He liked food and travel, and his interest in great quality food made him curious about origin and production and some of the problems associated with sourcing it.
It all started with tinkering in his small apartment converting every space into what would become the prototype zero of his vertical indoor farming system. He had no previous knowledge and this was the making, failing, googling phase of his journey. Together with 2 other friends, they found AlescaLife, and within four months outgrew his apartment space and moved into a quarter of a container size to start scaling and failing in a steep learning curve.
Of these early days he recalls that he knew nothing about hydroponics so even talking to anyone specialized would have been hard not knowing the right questions to ask. But that learning quickly scaled, and so the operations and failures started to convert into cycles of successful plant growth.
When we met in 2016 Stuart had already designed a vertical system for consumers that could be installed in restaurants or hotels, but his main goal was to deploy the large-scale multifunctional containers with a plug-and-grow Alesca system.
Today Alesca is fully deployed in the Middle East, Japan and China and the journey to making healthy greens available to underserved areas is well on the way to success.
As Alesca evolved, Stuart learned that the farming world had not evolved as fast as other industries. “When it comes to tech that monitors and helps automate and gain insights into specific parts of a growing cycle, these machines are developed in silos, one piece of tech, often very expensive, per problem to solve or monitor, and often from different providers who don’t collaborate with each other or interconnect,” he said.
Stuart felt there was a unique opportunity to bypass this hardship and develop all the tools needed as tech and software under the Alesca umbrella, and today the unique camera system Alesca uses can analyze the images of their products and immediately indicate if the plant is in a critical stage that needs assistance to avoid death. The most expert naked eye would not be able to see that in time, and certainly not at scale.
Furthermore, they have been able to understand that the plants don’t need lights all day long, as past a certain point it does not help with growth, and by simply applying this knowledge Alesca can feed an intermittent supply of light, that is similar to what intermittent fasting does to a human, propelling some yields to a 60% additional growth, which means more product less energy.
Stuart’s vision for Alesca’s future is to be more of a fintech company and provide their tech and software to any farmer, not just for indoor hydroponics, and enable precision, growth, no pesticides, and successful harvests as a regular all-year-round experience.
In his 20-year plan, Stuart’s vision is to develop Alesca Philanthropies to explore the non-profit good and impact that could be done at scale everywhere.
Please give @Alescalife a follow and listen to our conversation in the podcast link below to learn more about this incredible “small farmer”, and if you like it, share it with love.
