Helping Farmers Protect Our Beautiful Planet

Our Story

GroNorth started in 2019 originally.

Roughly since 2007-ish I started writing to MPs about developing technology for vertical farming after watching a documentary about it.

See we have a cost of living crisis in Canada.

Nearly half of all Canadians live in food insecure homes. Our monthly rent is absolutely ridiculous, many of us have to choose between a roof over our heads or are we going to eat that month. Many are working two or three jobs just to try and get by.

This is an untenable situation.

Everyday we are getting closer to being homeless. Everyday the stress on the population gets worse.

I told the idea to a friend of mine Austen and he actually spurred me in to action and wrote the original draft for what would become GroNorth.

I had the idea for these systems in my head for years now after watching a documentary on vertical farming. While driving one day in 2019 I thought the whole idea through.

I could see it in my mind—the full build, the whole process— We were originally going to go with shipping containers as it seemed like a smart idea, but then we quickly realized that we wouldn't be able to make it economically viable and we wouldn't be anything special as every other person and their dog is doing shipping containers. Figured there was no innovation there.

We wound up coming up with a pretty slick setup for rotating rack indoor hydroponic system. That would be fairly efficient process optimized but eventually had the idea to bring it outside. Learning more about soil science, drought management, and regenerative farming. We made the switch to a soil base system and redesigned.

Austen had to step away after switching jobs. He just didn't have the time to dedicate anymore with the new position so it was just me at that point.

The next step was attracting the right people. For this I needed to get the attention of the academic community in order to take me seriously enough to invest in us and I was terribly introverted with an aversion to attention. 

2019 I started answering questions on quora knowing it was only a matter of time before I gained enough traction to attract the academics and that's how I met Adam originally.

After seeing one of my answers connected with me. We started talking about this idea for GroNorth. He's a professor of finance and economics at the university of Illinois but actually had experience with startups as his other company (he invented the tech for) was valisure pharmaceutical. He believed in the idea and “the why” and put up 50 grand.

By 2021 and networking through Facebook I had managed to connect with and be respected among the larger business and academic communities and was able to find the core members of the team:

.We finally found the right design engineer to get the initial design work accomplished, that's Lech Bednarczuk.

Noreen Sullivan is incredible she was responsible for designing our online presence and marketing materials and website. Which we are currently working on now. 

To protect our IP we have Carlos Villamar and his firm representing us for our patent application. 

Met the engineer and farmer, Dave Yeah through our agricultural producers group on clubhouse the Yeah family farms in Georgia will be the location of our initial build to proof and trial. 

Yuna Wu is a great friend and software engineer we stole from Amazon.

Incorporated July 2021 as a Delaware LLC we are passionate and committed to bringing the solution the worlds food producters need to address food insecurity, environmentally sustainably and and economic viability.

- Frank Pepper. CEO/Founder GroNorth

Core Values