287. Starting With the Plant, Not the Machine w/ Rodrigo Pereyra

In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Rodrigo Pereira, VP of Horticulture, Development, Innovation and Quality Assurance at GoodLeaf Farms. Rodrigo joined GoodLeaf in August 2025 after roughly three and a half years at Bowery Farming, where he led R&D across plant science and farm operations before the company closed in October 2024. We walk through his non-linear path into CEA, from a physics background into a decade in horticultural lighting at Osram and Fluence, and how that lighting work led him into vertical farming. We cover the plant-first system design philosophy he carried from Bowery to GoodLeaf, building the growing system around the plant's biology instead of forcing the plant to fit the engineering. We get into how GoodLeaf runs three profitable farms today, the cost discipline and demand forecasting behind that result, and how Canada's buy-local sentiment following 2025 tariff tensions has shaped retail demand. We also cover microgreens as an underdeveloped category opportunity, GoodLeaf's national Canadian retail footprint including a new Walmart launch, and Rodrigo's read on where vertical farming goes from here as the industry shifts from a technology-first mindset to an agriculture-first one. Rodrigo closes on what scares him most in this business, the risk of an unidentified pathogen taking down a farm, and what excites him, the chance to prove that a small handful of vertical farms can show the model actually works.