08 Jun 2020 by Jasmine Stone in Berry & Donaldson, Business, Elon Musk, Lifestyle, Partners

When your older brother is Elon Musk, you probably get used to growing up in somebody else’s shadow.

Just over a year separates Elon and Kimbal Musk (above left), with the former grabbing headlines in the wake of SpaceX’s successful launch of astronauts to the International Space Station.

Makes a nice change from some of his other headline-grabbing antics, but let’s chat about Kimbal.

In 2016, he co-founded Square Roots with CEO Tobias Peggs, to grow non-GMO crops in reclaimed shipping containers.

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Square Roots has developed and installs “modules” — hydroponic farms in reclaimed shipping containers that can grow certain non-GMO vegetables around the clock and without pesticides. Today they are producing mint, basil, other herbs and leafy greens. The company made CNBC’s 2019 Upstart 100 list…

The modules, which employ software-controlled LED lighting and irrigation systems, can be set up in the parking lot of a grocery store or even inside a large warehouse or industrial building, enabling a food maker to access fresh ingredients locally for use in their dishes or packaged products.

Kimbal, who also serves on the board at Tesla and SpaceX, says that whilst they’re currently working on providing food for people here on Earth, the same farming technology “can and will be used on Mars”.

While freight containers are working hard to grow veggies, their former life saw them shipping goods around the world, which is no mean feat, either.

South African-owned shipping logistics company Berry & Donaldson knows all about the business of moving goods and has been handling every step of the complicated process for more than 50 years, but they’re happy to leave the veggie-growing game to Kimbal and his team at Square Roots.

The company also hopes to inspire more people to become farmers, running a Next-Gen Farmer Training Program aimed at teaching city dwellers about agriculture.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Square Roots has also provided hundreds of kilograms of produce to Rethink Food NYC, an organization that provides nutrient-rich food to the needy, all of which was grown in its Brooklyn shipping container.

For Kimbal, it’s quite a pivot from how he originally cut his teeth. In a recent profile on 5280, his journey was summarised as follows:

In 1999, after the $307 million sale of Zip2—which he’d founded with his brother—Musk left Silicon Valley to train at the French Culinary Institute in New York City (now known as the International Culinary Center).

Kimbal [above, with Elon, sister Tosca, and mother Maye back in 2018] ended up in Colorado two years later with his first wife, artist Jen Lewin. That he had moved into the “food space,” as he calls it, and eventually turned one Boulder restaurant into a formidable chain of locally sourced eateries across the country made him something of a star in the industry.

Whilst the pandemic has seen some of his restaurant empire take a real hit, Kimbal still seems in good spirits.

You can read the rest of that interview here.

Not a bad set of accomplishments for the Musk family, with Tosca running a streaming service called Passionflix, as well as having producer credits on more than 30 movies.

[sources:cnbc&5280]