- Elon Musk's brother, Kimbal, is on a mission to reduce the global food shortage and train the next generation of urban farmers.
- His Brooklyn-based company, Square Roots, delivers fresh herbs that are grown inside 320-square-foot shipping containers.
- In the wake of the romaine E. coli outbreak, Square Roots is determined to substitute the opaque practices of the industrial food industry.
- The company now allows you to scan its crops and learn exactly when they were produced - and who made them.
While his brother, Elon, dreams up moonshot projects like colonizing Mars and building a tunnel for autonomous vehicles, Kimbal Musk's thoughts are rooted in a much more immediate crisis: the global food shortage.
Though he's on the board of both Tesla and SpaceX, he'd much prefer to talk about Square Roots, the urban farming startup that he co-founded with friend and entrepreneur Tobias Peggs.
Since 2016, Square Roots has been delivering fresh herbs to retail stores across New York City. The company also pioneered a training program that walks young entrepreneurs through every step of the indoor farming process, from planting seeds to selling crops.
Read more: Kimbal Musk predicts a movement of millennial workers fleeing desk jobs for farms
One of the advantages of indoor farms is that they can control climate conditions to reduce the risk of contamination in the water or air.
Square Roots is taking this a step further by offering customers some peace of mind about how, when, and where their food is being grown - adding in the kind of transparency that could one day prevent incidences like the recent romaine E. coli outbreak, which resulted in more than 50 reported illnesses across 19 states.
By scanning a QR code on the back of an herb, customers can learn the name of the Square Roots farmer who grew it, and exactly when the growing process started.
The new scanning system makes Square Roots an industry standout, even among the numerous vertical farms popping up across the nation.
Earlier this year, Business Insider took a tour of the Brooklyn-based indoor farming compound. Take a look.