Latest / Hydroponics Daily / Lease to Grow: The Rise of Rental Hydroponic Systems

Transcript

Lease to Grow: The Rise of Rental Hydroponic Systems · Hydroponics Daily

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything
• 0:04
  soilless cultivation. I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:06
  Russell Sharp, the founder of Utrema Limited, who manufacture novel biostimulants,
• 0:12
  interesting fertilizers, and
• 0:13
  organic biopesticides for use in hydroponics and other forms of growing.
• 0:18
  In the past, I've talked about how often lots of indoor growing companies that
• 0:24
  seek source investment, especially in the vertical farming sector,
• 0:28
  sort of pivot and think that they can start selling their technology,
• 0:32
  selling their software or selling their designs and things like this.
• 0:35
  And it's often, you know, you often wait for this to occur like two or three
• 0:40
  years after they first raised funds.
• 0:43
  But I wanted to talk about a different aspect of that and a potentially different pivot.
• 0:48
  And that is the ability to rent out, lease out your equipment.
• 0:55
  And I saw this because I've seen a few times, you know, a big vertical farming
• 1:00
  company saying that they will, that with the help of their finance team,
• 1:04
  they'll be able to like, as well as sell equipment.
• 1:07
  Equipment they could potentially lease it but the
• 1:10
  reason it got caught my interest because that's nothing new
• 1:13
  is sort of smaller scale
• 1:16
  domestic units and there
• 1:18
  was a company i think in california or maybe canada and
• 1:22
  they were leasing out
• 1:25
  hydroponic vertical hydroponic towers for domestic
• 1:29
  use or for small scale growing and i thought that's an
• 1:31
  interesting concept because then you can sort of
• 1:34
  build in the support the technical support that could
• 1:37
  be an additional fee and also sundries things
• 1:41
  like fertilizers and also lighting and stuff like that so
• 1:44
  an interesting business model one for people to consider you might
• 1:47
  be a cog in that supply chain that that.
• 1:49
  Might be attractive to you depending on
• 1:52
  which country you're in and the demand for
• 1:55
  hydroponic units so definitely something interesting certainly
• 1:59
  vertical towers something that can fit easily into
• 2:02
  say a kitchen and things like this and we've seen lots of designs like
• 2:05
  that so the hydroponic towers that go into kitchens zory de
• 2:09
  chanel's company in california that
• 2:12
  does something similar could they do a rental model as well as
• 2:15
  well as the expensive single tower so something
• 2:18
  to consider as i say on a commercial scale this
• 2:22
  is nothing new companies like i farm freight farms square
• 2:25
  mile farms v farm by hydro garden
• 2:28
  growponics these have all these have all
• 2:30
  looked at this in the past for commercial production and
• 2:34
  rental of the units by farmers who
• 2:36
  want to take on the risk of growing the crop it's quite you know
• 2:39
  you can see why a financer would like it because the farmer
• 2:42
  takes on the the risk of the crop and the crop failure and also of whether they
• 2:47
  can actually sell the crop and they only take on the risk of the farmer you
• 2:53
  know being able to pay for the rental of that unit and at the end of the day
• 2:56
  they can return it so i can see why it would be attractive to a CFO.
• 3:02
  It's attractive from a farmer's perspective because you could,
• 3:04
  if you're not familiar with hydroponics but you want to get into it,
• 3:07
  it's a potential for a turnkey solution where they come and install it,
• 3:10
  install the software, train you and all that.
• 3:12
  So potentially you could get you up to speed with hydroponics very quickly for
• 3:16
  a small outlay compared to investing in all the equipment yourself.
• 3:20
  You could use that sort of desire for rental to your advantage.
• 3:24
  They're desperate for the sale.
• 3:25
  They're desperate to put that on the books for the future income. so
• 3:28
  you could get them to install a small unit and then in your head you're thinking
• 3:32
  well i'm actually just going to buy all the equipment myself once they taught
• 3:35
  me how to do it so that's an option other advantages for the commercial scale
• 3:39
  is that you you rent out a lot of equipment on a large scale whereas if you're
• 3:44
  going for the domestic units that's a single small scale
• 3:48
  low income compared to commercial and also you've got
• 3:50
  the hassle of getting them back off the customer when
• 3:53
  they've decided they don't want it what state will that be in will it
• 3:56
  be be able to be rehired out or will
• 3:59
  it have to be dumped so you you don't know those sorts
• 4:02
  of unknowables until you get into the business model and try
• 4:06
  it out for certain so a short and sweet episode today because
• 4:09
  i'm about to go out to a house party for christmas
• 4:11
  drinks and it's the weekend but i hope you like this episode if
• 4:14
  you've used rental hydroponic units or you've you've rented them
• 4:17
  out lease them out in the past then let me know because it'd
• 4:20
  be interesting to know of your experience and more than
• 4:23
  have to do a follow-up if you've got any examples case studies then
• 4:26
  shoot them my way that's been hydroponics daily for today if you
• 4:29
  found it interesting please leave an apple podcast review make sure you follow
• 4:32
  the podcast and if you're into a interesting fertilizer for hydroponics nice
• 4:36
  additive a biostimulant to get your crop growing or a biopesticide to control
• 4:40
  a pest or disease and you're in the uk check out utreema.co.uk and if you can't
• 4:44
  spell utreema it's latin for wasabi thank you very much for listening and until tomorrow goodbye.