The Future Is Now: Brandon Alexander of Iron Ox On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Arable land per person continues to fall, and farming intensity has risen to match — depleting soils and creating dust bowls. Meanwhile, the annual amount of freshwater resources per person has declined by more than 20% in the past 20 years. Food production stopped scaling with population years ago, so the more we grow, the more climate impacts we have. Combine this with the projection that we’ll add 2.5B people to the planet in the next 30 years, and the situation becomes beyond urgent. It’s immediate.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brandon Alexander, CEO of Iron Ox.
Brandon does not consider himself an environmentalist. He grew up in a large agriculture family: it was the definition of industrial farming. While Brandon grew up in agriculture, his background is in robotics and machine learning. Eventually, he quit his job at Google and spent 6 months driving around California, talking to farmers of avocados, strawberries, lettuce, almonds… you name it. The problems he saw were systemic: from ploughing land to the abundance of artificial fertilizers, and shipping 2,000 miles. He realized food production is shockingly wasteful from seed to plate, and this waste is behind agriculture’s contribution to global warming. Brandon cares because he is a lover of food, he doesn’t want to give up those salads, and believes if we don’t address the climate impact of food we’ll end up with neither. To do this, we have to rethink the entire food process from the ground up.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Every summer of my childhood, I was shipped off to my grandparent’s farm for hours picking cotton, potatoes, and peanuts under the Texas sun, and let’s just say it wasn’t my favorite activity. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone when I decided to pursue a career other than farming, and I found my passion for engineering and robotics during my time at the University of Texas at Austin. After graduation my career in robots and engineering began to take off. I spent years developing technology, making drones and other innovative products I believed could change the world. However, when I learned the technology was being used to deliver burritos and not to directly help the global food crisis, it was a monumental moment. I knew there must be a better way to utilize technology and to feed the future. Little did I know I was learning necessary tools that we use each and every day here at Iron Ox.
There were a few raised eyebrows around the Alexander family dinner table when I announced I was leaving my dream robotics job to become a farmer. But Iron Ox isn’t my grandparents’ farm, and I’m not your typical farmer.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Funny enough, the most interesting thing that I’ve experienced since starting my career is learning that in AgTech, not much has changed. Beyond fancy tractors, nothing has changed in the past 60 years. Global agriculture, the thing designed to nourish the human race, is killing the Earth. A quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions come from growing and shipping our food. Even worse, 40 percent of all the food produced in the U.S. is wasted before it hits the grocery store, creating huge amounts of methane as it rots in landfills.
The truth is this: Humans can lower our thermostats, bike to work, and opt-out of long-haul flights. But eating isn’t optional. This means we need to find a more efficient way to grow our food — and we need to do it right now. I found that through farming we can work towards making agriculture carbon negative — this is where Iron Ox was born.
Before harvest, waste is anything that is provided to the plant, but not used by the plant. Today about 70% of our freshwater goes to agriculture, and about 90% of that doesn’t reach the plants. Agriculture’s water waste is unparalleled. Then there’s nitrous oxide from the overuse of fertilizers — one of the most damaging greenhouse gases reaching our atmosphere. And while it’s growing, we’re using immense amounts of fossil fuel-based energy. Food waste as a whole, creates 4.4 gigatons of emissions. This is equivalent to all global road transit: solving just post-harvest waste would have the same climate impact as switching every car to electric.
We need to fix this now. Right now.
Can you tell us about the cutting edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
Iron Ox recently unveiled a first-of-its kind, autonomous mobile robot — Grover.
Grover is not your average farm hand. It can lift more than 1,000 pounds and assists in the monitoring, watering and harvesting of a wide variety of crops.
Grover is a key component of Iron Ox’s broader farming ecosystem, a closed-loop system that optimizes plant yield, reduces growth cycle time and maximizes crop quality. The result is delicious, nutritious, locally sourced fruits and vegetables that currently cost about the same as produce from conventional farms, with substantially lower environmental impacts. The robots work alongside our team of plant scientists, growers and data scientists. Iron Ox grows more with less, leading to less food waste and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
How do you think this might change the world?
Grover is a durable, hygienic and highly capable autonomous mobile robot that allows Iron Ox to save water, land and energy — while predicting and responding in real time to local consumer demand. Grover tends to a wide variety of produce — while drastically reducing food waste. As I stated previously Iron Ox’s mission is to make agriculture carbon negative through the use of advanced robotics, artificial intelligence and plant science. Grover is a key part in getting Iron Ox one step closer to this mission.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
At Iron Ox, our AI works hand-in-hand with our team of plant scientists, roboticists, grow teams, etc. to solve for the future of farming.
Arable land per person continues to fall, and farming intensity has risen to match — depleting soils and creating dust bowls. Meanwhile, the annual amount of freshwater resources per person has declined by more than 20% in the past 20 years. Food production stopped scaling with population years ago, so the more we grow, the more climate impacts we have. Combine this with the projection that we’ll add 2.5B people to the planet in the next 30 years, and the situation becomes beyond urgent. It’s immediate.
In a similar way to how solar and wind changed over fossil fuel energy to renewable energy, we need a new category — renewable foods.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
When I first thought of what is now Iron Ox I headed on a six-month road trip traveling through California to see how automation could tackle the hardest problems facing American farmers.
We found that in the Central Valley water and labor was scarce. Farm work is backbreaking and it is causing younger generations to opt out for better opportunities. The problems didn’t stop there. Pests, herbicide-resistant weeds, and the loss of topsoil from years of tilling the ground was making farming that much more difficult. On and on went the list of farmers’ struggles.
We started our trip thinking we could advance robotics for harvesting, weeding, or other small farm tasks. By the time we pulled the car back into his driveway, I knew that wasn’t going to be enough. This was the tipping point, the moment I realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole damn system with automation and efficiency baked into every bit of it.
So that’s what Iron Ox is doing.Iron Ox grows plants under natural sunlight, leveraging photosynthesis — the 3-billion-year-old process by which plants use energy from the sun to turn atmospheric CO2 into plant biomass, and the most scalable carbon capture technology on Earth.
Iron Ox generates 30x more produce per acre and uses 90% less water than field farms. But our farms aren’t just about doing more with less, they’re also about doing more with more.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
In order to make people passionate about the Iron Ox solution of solving global climate through food, we need to raise awareness of the problem and challenges of traditional large-scale agriculture. Recently, we had the opportunity to introduce the concept of Renewable Food at the Web Summit in November in Lisbon, Portugal and it was met with great success.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
We are at the starting point of Renewable Food, raising awareness around efficiency, sustainability and renewability are at the forefront of our strategy and mission. We are excited to unveil more details in the coming months on how Iron Ox will accomplish zero waste through precision farming, make each farm carbon neutral and make the entire operation carbon negative.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Renewable food starts with eliminating waste. We have to solve all the environmental variables — energy, water, and land use — in ways that can scale to meet the needs of a growing population. Operating with this kind of precision at scale requires robotics, data science, and plant science, all working together to grow more, using less. Every input needs to lead to the creation of calories. It is a multistep project and the first step is focused on Efficiency — get to zero waste through precision farming.
Renewable food starts by making sure every input, every liter of water or gram of nitrogen is converted to a calorie. And everything that’s grown is delivered to a customer that day. But plants are complex, living things. And to truly understand what they need, We have to be able to isolate each of the dozen variables and inputs at scale. This is where Artificial Intelligence combined with Plant Science and Computer Vision can play a role. With the right systems, we now have tools available to us to process millions of images of plants throughout their life and learn how each one responds to different inputs and even which genetic sequences thrive in what conditions.
Robotics creates a platform to give each plant the attention it needs at scale. We no longer have to sacrifice quality for quantity. And technologies like hydroponics enables precise control of the exact water and nutrients into each plant, regardless of location or soil conditions.
And the results can be powerful: at our robotic indoor farms in the United States, we’ve seen a 90% reduction in water usage and over a 15x yield increase per acre. And while we’ve built these tools for indoor farming, the same principles can be applied throughout the entire food production industry.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Renewable Food becomes what Renewable Energy is today. In a similar way to how solar and wind changed over fossil fuel energy, we need Renewable Foods to become a new category.
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
We don’t have very long to make this happen. At Iron Ox, we think about this exclusively from the standpoint of fresh produce, but it needs to be all types of food. Thankfully, a handful of companies have already started, and more will join. We hope you will too.
How can our readers follow you on social media? — UPDATE
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/iron-ox/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ironoxfarms/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ironoxfarms/
Twitter https://twitter.com/IronOxFarms
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
The Future Is Now: Brandon Alexander of Iron Ox On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
