The Short: To grow and scale fast, we allow some of our own mealworms to pupate and turn into beetles, but we also input ones from Rainbow as well. It’s much like having an employer that matches your retirement account investments, instead of $10 that you alone put in, maybe they match with $10 and now you’re investing $20. This means that at the end of the year, whatever increase in that investment, it’s much more!
Our mealworms are grown on all organic wheat bran purchased from Azure Standard, organic California carrots, and brewer spent grain from our favorite local brewery, Hops and Spokes, so that we can provide you with the biggest, healthiest, and most nutritious mealies!
The Long:
At the end of Dr. Gina Oliver’s Ph.D. program she had a dream of building a futuristic farming facility. From that dream, From The Land was born. Our zero-net energy climate controlled cob farming facility blends low tech creative design with high tech sensors and smart systems to run as an autonomous, grid-free farming facility.
To prove the concept, we chose mealworms as a foundational protein source. They also are great for stress testing the facility because, as living organisms, they need to stay within a very specific range of temperature and humidity.
Our first mealworms came from Camillies Vita-Mealies. After that we were buying from anyone and everyone that we could in order to grow and scale our colony. In parallel, co-founder Richard Hutchison was in his 3rd year of running his tea business. By serendipity he came across Rainbow Mealworms, as the company’s owner, Gillian Spence, liked the tea brand.
After back and forth conversations for over a year, as well as several in-person visits, the team at From The Land LLC felt that Gillian and Rainbow shared the same excitement for taking care of community, pushing progress forward to make the world a better place, and providing a superior mealworm to our customers. Gillian and her team have also been super supportive and given us advice that we would have moved much slower without.
We are still growing and scaling and plan to continue to do so as rapidly as funding, local officials, and our own bandwidth will allow, and so we still order from Rainbow weekly and let those mealworms turn into perfect pupa, beautiful beetles, and the future generations of our colony!
If you haven’t already, go check out Rainbow Mealworms, they are the oldest and largest grower and supplier in the US AND they’ve proven that you can have a large, successful business with a high quality product while still taking care of your employees and the surrounding community.
If you are an investor, local business and economic official, or other interested party, please feel free to contact us. With a USDA Phase 1 successfully under our belt, we are confidently pushing in to Phase 2 as well as several other R&D products to commercialize.
What you can look forward to that our other investors get to enjoy:
- Two engineers, scientists, and versatile polymaths that make a killer team
- Regular, routine updates on progress, vision, and the path forward
- Impact-driven entrepreneurs, balancing cool engineering and science with bringing products to market
Curious for more?
Our mealworms are kept in a happy temperature range in our climate controlled cob future farming facility which you can see below. This facility is Prototype 1, created for the USDA NIFA SBIR Phase 1 Research and Development grant.
The facility and systems were built completely from scratch by the founders in order to custom tailor them to this application. As of 2022, with almost one full year of growing mealworms in the facility, From The Land is looking to expand to create a network of these farming facilities across the US! More, well dispersed facilities means more redundancy, as other local facilities can cover for one if it has production issues, as well as shorter distance from facility to table. In 2020 we watched as the supply chain broke down and tens of millions of tons of food was simply thrown away at the farms across the US. Store shelves were empty and people were scared.
We at From The Land believe that it is time to innovate in farming, reduced environmental impact, and supply chain through leveraging low-tech and ancient technologies like cob construction, creative design, and high tech modern methods: such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, sophisticated sensor systems for data driven decisions, and automation.
Altogether, this means that we can grow, care for, and provide you with the Happiest of Mealies, and, eventually, the most sustainably grown and nutritious foods!
We would like to humbly thank and proudly promote the highly selective USDA NIFA and the California Dream Fund programs for which we were were selected to participate in.
