Redesigning Modern Agriculture for Selfish Reasons…and More.

I started Pluck to initially answer the question: how can I get an edible garden I don’t need to install or take care of?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Arthur C. Clarke’s third law.

This doesn’t only apply to aliens teleporting around town. It also applies to good product and system design. Think about a device that can produce any item for you on demand (like the replicator machine in the Star Trek universe). Wouldn’t it be amazing if to have that?

While the technology does not exist today, the experience almost does. I’m not talking about 3D printing. I’m talking about Amazon Prime. The replicator provides you with the experience of near-instant access to any object on-demand. Amazon Prime serves this same purpose: almost any item you can think of can be obtained in hours or a day — and I’m sure Amazon is working towards asymptotically approaching the latencies achieved by the replicator.

I love this example, because it illustrates that amazing and “magical” experiences can be built without the need for futuristic outer-space levels of advanced technology. It is a powerful angle to consider when it comes to developing products to solve problems or improve the human experience, and one I think we could look to apply in a lot more places. Like agriculture…or rather, the experience of how we obtain our food and its quality.

One of my most cherished food memories occurred on a 2017 trip to Denmark. My wife and I visited family friends in the Danish countryside where they maintained a large and idyllic edible garden. While preparing dinner, our friend went out to the yard, plucked some stalks of fresh rhubarb, and prepared a “humble” rhubarb crumble for dessert.

For being so simple, it was easily one of the most delicious desserts I have ever tasted. And there was also a deeper, almost spiritual, and indescribable feeling that went along with it. It’s an experience I’ve attempted to capture several times over the years, but it turns out that maintaining the sort of a garden needed to produce this experience is a difficult pain in the ass. It’s a challenge I’m willing to tackle.

This experience was not isolated. I began to pick up on two threads during my subsequent gastronomic excursions and conversations.

First, I found that the “magical” experience of plucking and immediately using fresh produce was not isolated to me. When discussing Pluck with friends and testers, a majority mentioned a previous “magical” experience involving harvesting and using produce. For example, a childhood experience where the grandparents had a large garden where they would harvest and cook together.

Second, minimizing the amount of time between harvesting and using ingredients as well as the quality of the ingredients (e.g. produce that genetically promotes taste) plays a massive role in both taste and nutrition. There’s a reason why that Michelin kaiseki or those San Sebastian pinxtos taste otherwordly despite using a few simple ingredients. Their ingredients are primarily obtained the day of from small local (non-industrial) suppliers.

And the research backs it up. There is a well-established literature that shows rapid deterioration in both nutrition and subjectively-related palatability post-harvest of produce([0][1][2][3][4][5] and on and on). This is called “post-harvest loss.” Taking broccoli as an example from Finger et al. ‘99:

Fresh broccoli deteriorates quickly once harvested, mainly due to relatively high respiration and susceptibility to wilting when stored at room temperature (Gillies & Toivonen, 1995). Since freshly harvested broccoli is composed by immature tissues, the inflorescence head shows rapid senescence and chlorophyll degradation (Clarke et al., 1994; Corcuff et al., 1996). Wang (1977) studied the length of broccoli shelf life and observed that after two or three days at 20C the florets showed intense yellowing caused by sepal chlorophyll degradation. In addition, during the early hours after harvest, broccoli branchlets stored at 20C showed sharp reduction of glucose and fructose contents (King & Morris, 1994). This might be related to the high respiration rate observed in this vegetable (Kader, 1987; King & Morris, 1994; Tian et al., 1995).

As another example, Spinach loses 50% of its folate content about 4–8 days after harvest depending on its storage temperature. The produce we obtain from the grocery store has been in storage and transportation for at least several days.

Then there’s the quality of the ingredients. Us plebs mainly get our produce from the supermarket. The supermarket in turn obtains their supply from a sparse worldwide network of large industrial farming operations who utilize monoculture practices. There are plenty of negative environmental and food security consequences of monoculture, but the culinary impact is that crops are genetically bred for yield, uniformity, and looks completely at the expense of taste or nutrition. Over the last decades, many of the nutrients in our produce have decreased by over 20% and sometimes as high as almost 40% according to this Scientific American article and its cited studies.

Over the last decades, many of the nutrients in our produce have decreased by over 20% and sometimes as high as almost 40%.

Dan Barber has a fantastic talk about this (and his new seed company Row 7):

Today, if you want to access quality produce, you can — it’s just not convenient or downright difficult. You can special order it online from sites like https://www.froghollow.com or https://www.chefs-garden.com, go to your local farmer’s market (although there you’re still likely to find primarily monoculture produce), or — the best option — grow yourself, where:

• You’re not subject to post-harvest loss. Also, no need for refrigeration or storage when you can just pluck as needed!
• You can grow from seeds bred for taste and nutrition rather than yield
• You can bypass the post-farm industrial supply chain that’s responsible for 11% of global CO2 emissions!

But that’s difficult.

I wanted that 2017 Denmark experience, and I wanted it on the regular.

I initially started thinking about Pluck to answer the question: how can I get an edible garden I don’t need to install or take care of?

I didn’t have any gardening experience however, and my interest in maintaining a garden was mild at best. Still, I “tried” — with moderate success, but it wasn’t sustainable.

First I tried click-and-grow, a line of indoor gardening devices that make gardening as braindead as possible. The products work by installing pre-prepared seed pods in a container that uses bottom-irrigation. The idea being that you only need to water it about once a week. This worked for a bit, but I eventually forgot about the thing. Over time, I forgot to water it and at one point it became an overrun mess of dead mint. Ironically, I think the fact that its watering system requires less attention made it even easier to forget.

Then I was introduced to Buzz Buttons from my friend b0t and had to grow my own. I didn’t have any trouble growing them, but eventually other interests and life priorities took over and the planter, like the click-and-grow, became an overrun mess.

We also have a small succulent I haven’t watered in years that’s still hanging on — I’m pretty sure our housekeepers water it each week for us out of pity.

What I came to realize is that gardening successfully and continuously is an unrelenting process. As soon as you drop the ball, because other life interests and obligations take a priority, it’s game over. And that’s just with needing to water a relatively controlled indoor system.

Edible gardening — outdoors especially — is susceptible to so many more issues that one needs to stay on top of: pests, disease, weeding, pruning, weather. It’s no wonder that less than a quarter of households in the US participate in vegetable gardening today, and I’m sure the number that do it successfully with a stable bountiful output are far less than this. It wasn’t always like this, either. Thanks to the victory garden movement during World War II, almost 50% of US households participated in edible gardening and supplied a massive 40% of the nation’s produce by 1944!

Almost 50% of US households participated in edible gardening and supplied a massive 40% of the nation’s produce by 1944!

At this point I was desperate to throw money at the problem. I wanted a successful edible garden without doing any of the work beyond maybe harvesting. Based on my experience, I needed a solution that was — practically speaking — truly autonomous. But that technology isn’t fully realized. And like that Star Trek replicator, I began to wonder: Was there anyone out there who I could pay to just handle it all for me?

As it turns out, this isn’t really a preexisting profession (for the masses, at least). Landscaping is, but horticulture isn’t part of their speciality. That being said, there are landscape gardening companies that specialize in installing edible gardens that will perform some degree of regular upkeep, but they’re extraordinarily expensive and the process still isn’t fully hands off. Eventually, I was able to find individual gardeners for hire here and there on places like Nextdoor, but even then — it doesn’t make much sense for a gardener to drive all the way across town to take care of a garden for 5 minutes 4–5 days per week.

For a time, I gave up on the prospect of having an edible garden. I spent most of my time putting the pedal to the metal CTOing at my (now former) company, Neosensory, which I co-founded out of graduate school with my PhD advisor, David Eagleman. Neosensory was an incredible learning experience: I learned how to plan, hire, build, manage, execute, and ship in the consumer Direct-to-Consumer hardware space. We made plenty of mistakes and had plenty of successes.

After being 6 years into Neosensory and about a decade into working with sensory augmentation, I realized it was time for a new adventure. Life is short. I have a bunch of other interests like the culinary arts/food, music, Bitcoin, and hacking, which were falling more and more to the wayside. I adored the startup experience. I knew I needed to build something new and boundary pushing in one of those other spaces to remain fulfilled. I was hungry to apply all of my learnings from Neosensory.

I started taking long walks with the dog in Houston— listening to agricultural and food zeitgeist books like Dan Barber’s “The Third Plate” (a culinary and agricultural tour de force I cannot recommend enough) and the canonical startup audio books, like “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” “Zero to One,” “Traction,” and “The Mom Test.” Brainfood to get some new synaptic connections going, and connecting they did. My brain started bubbling about piecing together disparate learnings and observations.

I noticed on my walks that there is a heckuvalota unused land (in Houston at least). Could all of this land be put to productive agricultural use?

And I thought about my quest to find someone to install and maintain an edible garden for me. I couldn’t be the only one, could I? And I also began noticing all the decrepit raised beds in peoples’ yards: an indicator as clear as any that, no, I’m not the only one. Perhaps, for the right price, just about anyone would love having an edible garden they didn’t need to maintain.

And then I thought about the challenges with finding a gardener to take care of maintaining a bed for me: it didn’t make sense for a gardener to do this for one person on the other side of town, but what if they had a bunch of clients in a small geographic area? All of a sudden, spending 5 minutes on someone’s property is no big deal…

I started to model it out. The numbers looked good. And that is the genesis of Pluck. The world’s first truly yard-to-table service of tech-enabled edible gardens. We install. We maintain. You Pluck.

From your perspective, it’s like having a fully autonomous garden that manages itself. It’s like something out of Star Trek if you ask me.

And the implications of such a service are much, much, larger… more soon!