Kimbal Musk, the brother of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is trying to change the way we eat by creating what he calls a "real-food revolution."
For over a decade, Kimbal Musk has run two restaurant chains, The Kitchen and Next Door, which serve dishes strictly made with locally sourced meat and veggies. Since 2011, his nonprofit program has installed so-called Learning Gardens in over 300 schools to teach kids about agriculture.
Musk's latest food venture delves into the world of local urban farming.
In early November, he and fellow entrepreneur Tobias Peggs launched Square Roots, an urban-farming incubator program in Brooklyn, New York. The setup consists of 10 steel shipping-container farms where young entrepreneurs work to develop vertical-farming startups. Unlike traditional outdoor farms, vertical farms grow soil-free crops indoors and under LED lights.
On Tuesday, Square Roots opened applications for its second season, which will start in October and last 13 months.
"Graduates are uniquely positioned to embark on a lifetime of real food entrepreneurship — with the know-how to build a thriving, responsible business," Musk wrote on Medium. "The opportunities in front of them will be endless."
Six weeks into the first season, just after the entrepreneurs completed their first harvests, Business Insider got a tour of the farms. Take a look:
SEE ALSO: The world's largest vertical farm will produce 2 million pounds of lettuce every year
The Square Roots farms in Brooklyn sit between an old Pfizer factory and the apartment building where Jay-Z grew up.
Everything grows inside 320-square-foot steel shipping containers. Each container can produce about 50,000 mini-heads of lettuce a year.
The US Department of Agriculture gave the Square Roots entrepreneurs small loans to cover preliminary operating expenses. Other investors include Powerplant Ventures, GroundUp, Lightbank, and FoodTech Angels.
On four parallel walls, leafy greens and herbs sprout from soil-free growing beds filled with nutrient-rich water. Instead of sunlight, they rely on hanging blue and pink LED rope lights.
About the size of the standard one-car garage, each shipping container can produce the same amount in crops as two acres of outdoor farmland.
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