In a world where we have more than enough food to feed everyone, many are going hungry. Farm From a Box has created a solution to increase access to food and create the infrastructure to support healthy food abroad, and at home. Founding Partner Brandi DeCarli shares how Farm From a Box works and her personal and professional practices to balance life as an entrepreneur.
“Most of the world’s food is grown by the hands of women globally. And if we look at different underdeveloped countries, women are the ones that do not get the training, do not get the financing, and do not get the support for being able to really increase what they’re able to produce.”
In this episode:
- What goes into Farm From a Box
- The importance of reinvigorating youth’s interest in farming
- Increasing the support, funding and financing into the hands of women growing most of the world’s food supply
- How Farm From a Box uses data to provide farmers with real information about what’s happening with their farm to track, monitor and even control remotely
- How entrepreneurship has affected all areas of Brandi’s life and the ways SheEO has impacted Brandi personally and professionally
- Finding the joy and celebration in working on the World’s To-Do List
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Show Notes
- SheEO Venture: Farm From a Box
- Social Profiles: Facebook | Twitter
Transcript
Brandi: Entrepreneurship is probably one of the most invigorating and challenging things that you could possibly do. It feels like it’s an accelerated path for self growth, because every day you’re kind of, or at least in my world, you’re coming face to face with, okay, do I feel insecure in this area of my life? Or do I feel like I need to push harder in this area? And where do I learn to flow versus really charge forward? It’s an interesting path.
Vicki: Welcome to SheEO.World, a podcast about redesigning the world. I’m your host, Vicki Saunders. In each episode, you’ll hear from SheEO venture founders, women who are working on the world’s to do list. These innovative business leaders are solving some of the major challenges of our times. Sit back and prepare to be inspired.
Brandi: My name is Brandi DiCarli and I’m the founding partner of Farm From a Box.
Vicki: Welcome, Brandi. I’m so psyched to have a conversation with you today. This is amazing. I love what you’re doing and I can’t wait for people to learn more. Let’s start off with, how did you get into this business? Is this something that you’ve been thinking about your whole life? Or you happened upon? Or what’s the founding story?
Brandi: I definitely happened upon it. I can’t necessarily say that I ever thought farming would be in my future at all. My background is actually in art and microbiology. Farming actually took me by surprise. It came about when my business partner and I started a nonprofit doing a project in Kenya in collaboration with the UN Habitat, and we were building a youth empowerment center. For that project, we were using modified shipping containers built around a soccer field, and we were really focused on bringing in resources that the community lacked. But that was specifically around education, health and sport. And it just became really obvious that there was a foundational need of food access that was really missing. That was really the birth of Farm From a Box, is, how can we create a deliverable, localized solution that would be able to help communities grow their own food right there within the community?
Vicki: What is Farm From a Box?
Brandi: Great question. We’ll start with that one. Farm From a Box is a deliverable toolkit for off grid food production. We took a 20 foot shipping container and we basically put in all of those core components that you need to be able to start and maintain an off grid farm in one deliverable kit. That includes off grid power, drip irrigation system, pumping, internal cold storage. It’s literally, we like to refer to it as the Swiss Army knife of sustainable farming, all in one system that can be delivered.
Vicki: Wow. Off grid meaning there’s no electricity nearby, you don’t have to rely on any, on being on the grid obviously.
Brandi: Exactly.
Vicki: Just to unpack some of the jargon.
Brandi: completely. I’m sorry if I’m getting stuck in the jargon. It just basically means it’s a complete independent system. Not only is it powered by clean energy, which is important even if we have urban farms, but it also completely opens up the possibility for it to be rural and even really remote locations because it’s its own independent system that’s entirely powered by off grid solar energy.
Vicki: That’s so amazing. I can just imagine, there’s so many possibilities of how you would actually go to market with something like this, where it’s most needed. Is that hard to figure out where to go first?
Brandi: It’s been a bit of a journey and I think because our initial concepts with Farm From a Box was really looking at it through that lens of how could we approach international food aid differently so that rather than providing short term food aid, short term food aid, we actually hit the root of the problem and connected these communities that were struggling with food access with a kit that would enable them to grow their own food so that they could really be stabilized and empowered there directly in the community. And through that, the more we dove into it, we realized that lack of food access and lack of infrastructure to support healthy food access was not unique to the global dynamic. But it’s right here in our own backyards also.
Brandi: We’ve shifted a bit to your point, exactly where do we start first? Our very first idea was let’s do a dual concept where we pilot both here in the San Francisco Bay area of California and also do an additional pilot in Ethiopia so that we could examine and test both of those approaches. Our first one in the, our first prototype ever, was on a school site in Sonoma, California. That was really our very first testing ground with how do we make sure that we have the right system? How do we make it fit the needs of the farm? But how do we also link it from the educational perspective?
Brandi: To answer your question, we go on both sides now. We’ve found that there’s both a domestic market and we’re still working on the international level to make sure that we’re really approaching it from the humanitarian sphere too.
Vicki: When you talk about the education component around food and being able to have a local farm attached to a school or in some kind of more urban area, I immediately go to, I think it was probably Jamie Kennedy. And when he was asking kids where ketchup came from, and they were like, they had no idea it was tomatoes. And I grew up in a farm so I’m like, what? How is that even possible? Could you talk a little bit about what you’re learning as you’re doing some of this work with education, the awareness building that’s part of this business as well.
Brandi: Absolutely. And that ketchup example is perfect because somewhere along the line, and I think really with the rise of industrialized agriculture and really processed food, we lost our connection with food and understanding what crops look like and what plants look like and what do the components of the food that we’re actually consuming. Exactly to your point with the ketchup, on one of our farms, we actually for the kids put together small plots of this is the salsa plot so you understand all of the things that actually go into salsa.
Vicki: Cool idea.
Brandi: Not only are we helping teach the kids about healthy nutrition and how food can really be a point of medicine for our bodies and how it impacts us, but also what all of those things look like. And the science behind it. Photosynthesis, how things grow. There is actually a pretty large component in terms of the agricultural side, but even if we pan out from kids per se, we’re looking at an aging farmer population also. If we don’t start reinvigorating youth’s interest in farming, we’re really going to have a big problem. We’ve also been experimenting with how we can utilize our system, especially since it has so much different technological components.
Brandi: We’ve kind of graduated up from what the old division of farming is. Youth is really starting to get into it now too and is seeing that farming and agriculture can really be a solid profession. But a really cool one. The educational component is a really important one. And even for women to add this other one, most of the world’s food is grown by the hands of women globally. And if we look at different under developed countries, women are the ones that do not get the training, do not get the financing, and do not get the support for being able to really increase what they’re able to produce. That’s also something that we’re really dedicated to changing and making sure that we’re offering that education to women for farmers globally.
Vicki: Wow. Let’s pop up a level as I like to say, and can you talk to us a little bit about the problem around this? Food deserts, food insecurity, my understanding around all of this is that we have enough to feed everyone around the world, just our distribution structures are all messed up and our systems are crazy. Can you talk a little bit about the stats around this and how big this problem is?
Brandi: Oh my gosh. Problem is so huge and that’s exactly it. We do have enough food. It’s just a matter of how it is distributed and that’s really where we see the solution is in forming localized food hubs and really making sure that we’re strengthening local production. And it’s a food justice issue also in terms of where those food hubs are going and what areas are being left out. There’s a good 500 million people that are absolutely food insecure just in the United States alone and certainly we’re familiar with what’s going on in the global level and even when we look at the problem of a lack of localized food production, we can see that case in point, even in Venezuela and the crisis that’s happening there. It’s a global problem and really strengthening what our localized production is, we make people a lot resilient to be able to handle climate challenges, economic challenges, but we make sure that those health points are really connected also. Localizing our food production is really a solution to make sure that people are economically and nutritionally empowered to take care of their own needs within their own areas.
Vicki: Your stuff is so visual, when I first saw it on a video, I’m like, oh my God, this is amazing. The whole concept of a container arrives and it’s got everything it needs in it for you to then farm this plot of land is really compelling. What happens when you go into a community? Can you tell a couple of stories of how you’ve, like in Ethiopia or wherever you’ve gone and what people’s reaction is to something like this?
Brandi: It is really funny because it is so visual because it’s a bit hard to imagine. Usually people think, oh my God, this is like a transformer of food production. We go in and the shipping container comes in on a truck and is rolled off onto the ground and we make sure that we pre-install as much as we possibly can to limit any complications that can happen in the field. If you see this shipping container land in this field, first thing that happens is we open it up and we pull out the solar array. And so if you can imagine a three kilowatt massive wing of a solar panel array that goes up onto the roof. That’s what powers the entire system. We put that up first and foremost.
Brandi: We have the pump basically already pre-installed inside of the shipping container, unless we’re pumping out of the ground well system. We’ll connect in with the water then next. And if you were to walk inside of the shipping container, as soon as you walk in on the left hand side, there’s a long stainless steel table that has the energy storage array underneath, the pump underneath as well. And then you see a door in the back and that’s our walk in cold storage unit. What a lot of people aren’t necessarily familiar with is that most of our crop loss and food waste actually happens in the field before it even makes it to the stores and that’s up to 80% of our food loss that actually happens in field. Connecting with cold storage and cold chain is something that’s really, really important to make sure that all of the food that’s actually grown on the farm is utilized and doesn’t go to waste. We make sure in each one of our units we have a walk in cold storage unit, incorporated as well and that’s also powered off of the solar array.
Brandi: You walk in, you see that and then suddenly the drip irrigation system starts going out into the field. It’s connected to the pump and the drip irrigation basically provides that water source to make sure that each one of the rows of the crops is watered exactly where it needs to be watered and can actually support year round crop growth also.
Vicki: If you don’t know anything about farming, is there a step one, step two, step three around this? Or what does the training look like?
Brandi: Thankfully, right now there are a lot of people that are just starting to get into farming newly and we definitely want to support that. What do is we really help take a lot of the guesswork out of how do you go about starting a farm? And we work with each one of our farmers to identify, okay, what’s your water access point? What type of crops do you want to grow? What’s your soil type? So that they’re supported all along the way. But we have also established partnerships with basically some of the best providers in the world. Netafim being a great example. They basically invented drip irrigation so they are absolutely familiar with how to be able to create lush crops in all kinds of different environments. It’s really in the design that we’ve taken a lot of that guesswork out, can really help with that one, two, three step process for farmers also. And make sure that they’re supported along the way too.
Vicki: What are your biggest challenges? This is a crazy huge thing. I think one of the hardest things when you have an amazing idea is to figure out where to start. And I can imagine you getting so, well, I’ll speak for myself, getting so spun out by the possibilities. I’m a possibility seeker, so I’m like, oh, this way and that way and oh my God. But how do you decide where to start?
Brandi: I do the same thing. I have a tendency of just panning out and looking at what we can do globally. But in order to do that, you really have to zoom in because outdoor agriculture has so many different variables. It’s impossible to have a cookie cutter solution, one size fits all that’s going to work for everything. And that’s actually been one of our biggest challenges is how do we make a system that can be adaptable rapidly to a wide variety of different locations in different environments and even different user needs? And that’s just taken us some time to be able to really develop whether that is different crop sets, again, different water access points.
Brandi: While we’ve been developing this, we’ve been testing this system in different environments to make sure that we figure out what components are really necessary and how can we make sure that the system itself is flexible to be able to respond to those. The way that we’ve approached at least that side of things is we have figured out a way of being able to design the system to almost be Lego like where you can plug in and plug out different components pretty quickly without customizing the full system completely each time. And that’s really going to help us be able to make sure that we’re able to get a lot of these systems out quickly without having to have a unique, completely unique system each time. But it’s also been getting that live farmer feedback of what are the things that are really easy to use? What are the sticking points that are still big challenges? And how can we make sure that our system responds to that and helps those questions?
Brandi: One of the interesting things that we have found is information, live information from each one of the farms, helping farmers understand exactly what’s going on in the field so that they don’t have to wonder or not be able to track it. But that they’ve got full real time data control at their fingertips. And this is one of our more recent developments is we decided to incorporate an entire data system on the farm also and connect sensors on each one of those main components that we have so that we can get the information in terms of how much water is being pumped? How much energy is being depleted from the battery system? How much energy are we getting in the solar array? What’s going on with the soil levels, the soil moisture levels?
Brandi: Through that all in one system we’re able to now track, monitor and even control remotely what’s going on on a farm. Initially I thought, okay, this is going to be a wonderful thing for farmers that are operating in urban farms and can control things off of their smart farm. But what we have found is in the example of a project that we did with the world food program in Tanzania, not having an idea of what’s going on on really remote locations makes things really, really challenging. Incorporating the data system on something that is as remote is where we are working in Tanzania has really empowered not only the farmers, but it’s empowered the world food programs understand exactly what’s going on with their project.
Brandi: A perfect example of that is water systems. When you’re operating something somewhere so remote as where we are, not getting water out into the field can literally mean not getting food onto your family’s plate. One point in time they’d reached out to us and they said, “Oh, the pump isn’t working. Everyone’s in a panic.” We were able to remotely pull up the information from San Francisco and see that the pump was actually fine, but the waterfowl had decreased on either side of the water filter. We told them flush the water filter and then let us know what happened. And we found that the silt had just increased in the river that we were pumping from and that solved the solution without us having to fly out to Tanzania or the world food program have to fly out to the location and certainly without the farmers losing any of their crops. There’s things like that that we’re finding are just absolutely make or breaks not only from the knowledge level but making sure that the crop is really protected also.
Vicki: That’s a good use of technology right there.
Brandi: That’s a good use of technology, exactly.
Vicki: That’s what we should be using technology for. That is really, really cool. Who are the kind of customers that you want to be working with right now? I’m sure there’s tons of people who are listening to this who have different perspectives on how it could help with them. Where are you right now in terms of partnerships? Is it, you want to go to areas where there’s migration challenges? You want to be in third world countries? Developing nations, what’s the place for you right now?
Brandi: Great question. And right now we’re actually at a really exciting point because we’re about to commercially launch our 4.0 model specifically for the US market. And so it’s a little bit different than the international work which we are also doing. But in the US we’re finding that it’s a lot of people that are coming in interest for commercial farming to be able to turn what is currently unproductive land into a commercial enterprise. We’ve been getting a lot of interest lately for using our system at corporate headquarters, which interestingly enough, took me a bit by surprise, but it makes sense. Certainly school programs and really family farmers too. They’re looking to be able to start growing with something that’s going to save them a lot of money down the line.
Brandi: On the international side, we are continuing to do a lot of projects from the refugee crisis and also how we can make sure that we’re economically empowering areas that are not currently in the market. Working with different nonprofits and aid organizations. That’s kind of the international side, but really it’s this commercial launch that’s the most important that we’re focusing on right now.
Vicki: Mostly US.
Brandi: Mostly US.
Vicki: Is kind of your focus right now. If people are listening from the US please reach out. And so how does, can you talk a little bit about the business model around this?
Brandi: Number one, we localize the manufacturing, which is why I’m saying focused on the US right now. We have manufacturing hubs currently in the US, also in east Africa and we’re about to open another one in south Africa. When it comes to localizing that, we make sure that each one of these farms is built out there locally to be able to limit any shipping that needs to happen, but it also is made from local components, so it helps with ongoing support and making sure that everything’s working the way it needs to. From the business side, we sell the units and that is basically that infrastructure that people need to be able to start and maintain their farms. But then we also have an ongoing support system to make sure that you have that data system at your access, can get different technology upgrades and you’ve got help along the way too.
Brandi: It’s really kind of B to C within the US and then on the global side, B to G.
Vicki: To government. Yeah.
Brandi: And selling to the United Nations also.
Vicki: Yeah, those type of larger global NGOs. And so there’s basically a onetime fee I assume for this and then a subscription model?
Brandi: Exactly. As a piece of agricultural equipment, our system can also be financed, which is really, really important. The USDA offers financing, but there’s also private entities that we can also finance through for anybody that’s interested in our system as well, which brings the cost down to as little as $1,200 a month financed. If you’re selling your crops, for example, our very first farm that we had, the food was grown to support the school’s CSA program, which is community sustained agriculture. They were bringing in $120,000 a year just off of two acres selling to this community sustained agriculture system. You can make your money back really quickly and make sure that you really got a good business on your hands.
Vicki: That is wicked. Okay, that’s amazing. And then hello, teaching entrepreneurship.
Brandi: Exactly.
Vicki: Super nice crosspollination. Yeah. That’s cool.
Brandi: There’s so many different benefits to it. It’s entrepreneurship, it’s independence, it’s nutrition, it’s connecting with the community, it’s localizing production so it also helps with local restaurants. And there are so many different components that are a part of localized food production and really connecting in with that larger system. We’re really looking forward to expanding this out.
Vicki: Let’s settle in on you for a second personally and the journey that you’re on with this. Talk to me about a day in the life and what trips you up and what sets you on fire in a good way? In a positive way.
Brandi: I think entrepreneurship is probably one of the most invigorating and challenging things that you could possibly do. It feels like it’s an accelerated path for self growth because every day you’re kind of, or at least in my world you’re coming face to face with, okay, do I feel insecure in this area of my life? Or do I feel like I need to push harder in this area? And where do I learn to flow versus really charge forward? It’s an interesting path. Setting out, trying to make partnerships with different organizations that can fill needs that you can’t necessarily fill.
Brandi: A day in the life is probably starting early with calls with Tanzania. Currently in our world food program project we recently formed a new partnership with Care International. We’ve developed a partnership with them so that there’s an economic agribusiness model that actually goes alongside our system for international development projects and then we’ll quickly start going in and talking with different providers or potential customers. There are so many different components. Every day is a little bit different.
Vicki: Right. When people ask me the day in the life, I’m like, ah, well starting with today because literally every day is so different. I really, really love your framing, which I will use going forward if you don’t mind, and I will say it came from you, but this concept of an accelerated path for self growth. Does that ever resonate with me. I really do feel that. It’s for me that this pathway of entrepreneurship is really just a way of getting to know yourself and testing yourself and growing.
Brandi: Completely.
Vicki: Distantly, it’s quite hellish at times I’d have to say.
Brandi: It is. It is. Learning how to navigate the ups and downs and operate with grace under pressure. I literally feel like the things that I have learned and have experienced and have weathered as a female founder particularly, have absolutely had an impact on how I approach my family dynamics and the way that I show up for my friends and try to make sure that I create a bit of a balance in my own life too. And that has definitely been a part of the experience. There’s been moments in time where I’ve just been so fiercely focused on developing Farm From a Box, but I’ve neglected other areas of my life and I’ve certainly neglected my own sense of sort of self care and grounding. You learn that that’s not a longterm solution, so you need to make sure that you pan out and really pay attention to all areas of your life. Interesting lessons that come up when you’re an entrepreneur.
Vicki: As part of the SheEO program you have coached. Worked with development guide, do you want to talk a little bit about, obviously that makes a difference. That’s a good or a bad ugh.
Brandi: I honestly, when when I first learned about SheEO, I was so thrilled because I wanted so much to be a part of a women organized network. Certainly the funding has also made a very big difference for us. But the most significant thing that I’ve experienced so far has been that mentorship. It feels sometimes as a female founder that you’re kind of out in no man’s land by myself trying to make the best choices. But definitely learning as you go. And I have found that the mentorship that I’ve had, particularly with MJ, has been absolutely transformational. Having that access can really make or break you and that is one of the greatest, greatest benefits of SheEO, as well as having access to the entire network of these women that just want to support you and see you flourish and actually offer help and you can ask questions of. It’s been a pretty amazing experience. I’m very, very grateful.
Vicki: Do you have a specific example of when you started a call with MJ and then how you felt when you started and how you felt when you ended? Which is one of my favorite things.
Brandi: I feel like every call with MJ that I have, but I think that the first one that actually sticks out in my mind when you asked that question, it was one of those moments where I just felt like I was a tangled mess of stress and I had a number of different things that just felt like they were going wrong and I didn’t really know what the solutions were. At the same time I get on the phone with her, I start kind of going through that list of like, okay I’ve got this and I’ve got this and I’ve got this and I was kind of going at it in a really hard angled way because that’s been the path that has kind of been ground into me for so long. And MJ just had this amazing way of going, “Okay, what else is going on?”
Brandi: And in that moment it was enough to soften me enough so that I could actually get to the root of it where I’m like, my grandmother’s in the hospital, I’m trying to tend to her needs and care for her, I feel like the section is failing and I don’t have the solution and I’m not quite sure if I’m choosing the right path in either direction right now. And she was able to just suit me down enough so that we had the clarity to be able to really look at all of everything that was on the plate that I was approaching from a really human, compassionate level. And sometimes it just takes a little moment to just go, now I can see clearly and I understand the path that I need to take going forward. It’s more just business. Quite honestly, nothing in life is just business. To be able to actually look at what a founder needs from a holistic perspective is really a beautiful thing, but it’s also just really effective.
Vicki: This is something that is one of the things I’m most proud of in our model, the SheEO, is that I have learned, I grew up in a very family full of boys and I was laughing to myself. A minute ago when you said, “It’s like no man’s land,” I’m like, actually it feels like all man’s land. That’s where I’ve grown up. I’m like all man’s land, not no man’s land. You can’t really bring your humanity to the moment in a lot of these places and I was an entrepreneur in residence at one of these incubators and accelerators and this young man came in and I was the mentor for the day and he started talking about all this stuff and I just looked at him like, why don’t you just go to a movie? Just don’t work today. You could just tell, he was on the edge of a meltdown and he looked at me like, you can do that? And I’m like, it’s your life. You chose to be an entrepreneur. You have the flexibility and the freedom, and this is one of the things that I just feel is so important.
Vicki: It’s there’s all this emotional stuff going on and there’s nowhere to put it. It’s like, don’t talk about that. Suck that up, leave it over at the side. You can’t actually get to your business unless you deal with all those other things. The ability to surface that, oh my gosh, there’s all this other stuff going on in my life that’s stopping me from getting to my business. Let’s start there. I’m just such a goddess at that. It’s literally the opposite of what we do in the world. Start with who you are as a human, thank you very much.
Brandi: It’s the opposite. It’s been such an eye opening experience to actually have those things become a priority on the priority list also. It’s the classic, in case of emergency, make sure that you put your own oxygen on first and I’ve certainly been on the other side of that where I’ve taken that classic masculine approach of just go, go, go, go, go, go, go and I’m like, I am depleted. It is for the benefit of everything, from the business, from the objectivity that you can bring, from the compassion that you can bring, from whether or not you can keep going to bring the business to the point that it needs to be. But got to be able to fuel yourself in that too, and connecting with the human aspect of being a founder is as important as connecting with the human aspect of being a customer within the broader ecosystem of what we’re trying to search. I am so, so grateful for the different approach, and I think that that’s really where the world is going and certainly needs to be going.
Vicki: Yeah, there’s no doubt. It’s just madness. It’s absolute insanity what we’re living through and pretending it’s normal that you just work 24/7 and be always on and always giving, and it’s just absolutely depleting and insane.
Brandi: Yes.
Vicki: The last thing I want to just touch on specifically around this is what do you do for you to re-energize and recharge and do you have a process, a health thing that you do? Breathing? What gets you back on track?
Brandi: Those magical elixir rituals that I’ve come to learn over time. Number one, I have a really solid meditation practice and that is hugely impactful in my life. When I get out of practice of that sometimes, I just feel again the static rise and I don’t feel like I’m really connected with myself or I’m entirely in my head. My morning meditation practice is a big one for me. And it also just helps me see the day with a little bit more clarity moving forward too, so I can approach things a little bit differently.
Brandi: I think one of the other things is water. Water. That’s one of those big grounding things for me. Whether it’s taking time to just take a bath or even my co-founder and I, we get to the point sometimes where we will call a board meeting and what that means to us is we just stop everything and we just go to the beach for a day. We race each other out into the waves and there’s something that’s just really purifying and renewing about that. And we can actually just be humans again without necessarily looking at, oh, what are you operating on the side of production? What are you operating on the side of legal? And what are you doing with the finances? And it just gives us that re-grounding connection point again. And so that’s always a really big one that we’ve learned.
Vicki: Okay, so when you said call a board meeting, I’m like, what? What is she talking about? Go to a board table, oh, you need a performance point. And then when you end that with like go to the beach and run in the water, I’m like, oh, redefine the board meeting. Redefining the board meeting.
Brandi: There’s just those little things that can just bring everything back down to yourself. From internal side the meditation is a big one. Dancing is a big one. Getting out into nature is a big one, but even just from the founder side, having that moment to connect with each other and with our team is so, so, so important.
Vicki: It’s interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. The joy in what we’re doing because I feel in general that everything is, we’re all so earnest, solving food security globally and it’s a heavy thing and working on climate change and zero waste and wellness and redefining the education system. It’s just it can be completely overwhelming, especially if you read the news on top of that and just like how the challenges seem to be getting bigger and bigger. And so I think this grounding in joy, love and connection with people is such a huge balance to the earnestness and the challenge of what we’ve all taken on.
Brandi: Absolutely. There is some innate heaviness to tackling the world’s to do list as you like to say.
Vicki: Just a little. It’s a little heavy.
Brandi: But there’s also unbelievable amounts of joy and celebration and connection with it as well because you are solving real problems. You always hear as a founder, celebrate the victories, celebrate the victories, but what does that actually look like? And what does that look like specific to what we are individually working on? Sometimes that’s literally just going out to one of the farms and grabbing some tomatoes and having a picnic with some of our farmers and just connecting with what it is that we’re quite literally growing alongside with them.
Brandi: There is an earnestness to it and there’s a good balance that needs to be strike. It’s a different perspective and I think it’s a different way of being able to make sure that we’re operating effectively across the entire board but from a really centered way.
Vicki: Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Brandi. We are cheering you on and thrilled about the work that you’re doing. Do you have an ask or something you’d like to leave people with? How can they learn more about the Farm From a Box?
Brandi: First and foremost, thank you so much. Thank you so much Vicki, for everything that you do and certainly to all of the activators out there supporting organizations and businesses like Farm From a Box. We are going to launch our new website and do our product announcement, farmfromabox.com, that one’s going to be a big one for us. The more that you can actually spread the word, that would really make a huge difference. Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping us, helping us shout it from the hilltops.
Vicki: Awesome. All right, well thank you very much Brandi and take care.
Brandi: Thank you so much.
Brandi: Thank you for listening to the SheEO.World podcast. If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with a friend and subscribe on your favorite podcast player. If you’d like more information about SheEO, please visit us at sheeo.world. That’s S-H-E-E-O.world.
