From Bronx Schools to Cruise Ships: Babylon Micro-Farms CEO Marc Oshima Shares What’s Next
Marc Oshima has spent his career at the intersection of food, sustainability, and innovation — and now he’s bringing that experience to Babylon Micro-Farms as its new CEO. With more than 350 micro-farms operating in a range of settings from schools to cruise ships, the company is redefining what’s possible with on-site indoor farming. In this Q&A, Oshima shares why he joined the team, how Babylon is scaling its impact, and what’s ahead for the indoor ag industry as it faces both new opportunities and real-world challenges.
You’ve helped shape the indoor farming industry from its early days. What drew you to Babylon Micro-Farms at this point in your career, and what excites you most about leading the company into its next chapter?
I am a builder and love helping businesses and people grow. I am passionate about the FoodTech/AgTech space and understanding how we can drive commercial, scalable solutions to our most pressing agriculture and supply chain challenges. Babylon Micro-Farms has been leading the way for on-site farming solutions, with over 350 farms across 40 states and 5 countries, and I am excited to lead them for the next stage of transformational growth. They have a great product line, seasoned team, proven track-record and business model, fantastic customers, and long-term committed investors, and I see so many positive opportunities ahead for them.
Babylon Micro-Farms has really carved out a unique niche with its on-site farming model in places like hospitals, schools, and corporate dining. How do you see this approach evolving as more organizations look for fresh, local food solutions?
There are major tailwinds with greater emphasis than ever before for food as medicine, health and wellness, sustainability, and culinary differentiation that are fueling a significant pipeline of projects for Babylon Micro-Farms. What is exciting for us is that we now have years of operating experience, established business cases and proof points on how we can help drive greater employee/guest engagement and more positive customer experiences when our on-site farming solutions have been deployed. While our systems are turnkey to install, we see further opportunities with new builds and retrofits to have our systems already specified into the design and planning phases to create even more seamless integrations. A great example is our ongoing work with MSC Cruises where we have our on-site farming solutions built right onboard for their dining and kitchen facilities. We were excited to see the unveiling of their latest World America cruise ship this month in Miami at the Seatrade Cruise’s major event called F&B@Sea where Babylon Micro-Farms was recognized as Trailblazing Product of the Year.
With hundreds of micro-farms already up and running — and a tech platform managing it all — how is Babylon using data and automation to keep things consistent and scalable?
Our Babylon IQ operating system is the brains for our business, managing the entire fleet of farms real-time with remote monitoring and oversight. Our Guided Growing app enables anyone to become a farmer with easy-to-use training and tips that automatically guide the farmer through each stage of growing. We are able to use data from our systems to measure all aspects of the individual growing sites and our overall operations to provide a consistent, high level of performance.
You’ve long been an advocate for making healthy food more accessible and equitable. How does Babylon’s mission tie into that — and what role can the broader indoor ag community play in pushing this forward?
I have been working for over 20 years to improve our food systems, and Babylon Micro-Farms is committed to inspiring a greater connection with freshly harvested produce and how it is grown in order to help address our broken, complex food supply chain. We operate in key verticals from Education to Corporate Dining to Hospitality to Healthcare / Senior Care and can have a direct positive effect on anyone aged 4 to 84. We recently had ribbon-cuttings for some of our new farms in NYC public schools in the Bronx and Queens, and it is tremendous to see the immediate connection you can make with today’s youth about our food and where it comes from. We are also fortunate to work with great partners and changemakers like Stephen Ritz and his Green Bronx Machine organization that works with thousands of schools around the world, and we see how partnerships like this can help us scale our mission and impact.
In general, we hope to learn and lead within the broader agriculture community and see tremendous value working closely with important trade organizations like Indoor Ag-Con as well CEA Alliance and International Fresh Produce Association to help share best practices and help advance the indoor farming industry. We realize that we go faster and have greater impact by working together collectively.
What do you think are the biggest opportunities — and maybe a few challenges — that indoor farming is facing over the next few years as the industry continues to grow and evolve?
There are tremendous opportunities ahead because the macro-pressures facing traditional field farming from climate change, increasing weather volatility and damaging storms, drought, overuse of pesticides and fertilizers, food safety, worker welfare, cost of doing business are all continuing to increase dramatically. The challenges with any business are understanding your economics and what problems you are uniquely solving. Babylon Micro-Farms has identified a unique niche and solution for hyper-local, on-site growing where we make margin on the sale of our farms and even more margin on our recurring subscription fees to service our farms.
The recent downfall of a few Agtech companies represents a market correction because the business fundamentals were not in place to drive the right unit economics with the right technology solutions. As with any emerging industry, we fundamentally need to continue to invest in new technologies and solutions to help mitigate these increasing pressures. We, as an industry, need to do a better job of celebrating and showcasing the success stories to continue to attract interest from key stakeholders from selling partners to government to investors, and we are appreciative of the work that Indoor Ag-Con does to help provide a platform and forum to come together as an industry.
Hands-on Learning – Removable trays in workstations promote hands-on learning for crop planting, nurturing, and harvesting.
For more than 10 years