Welcome back to Turning Corners: inspiring stories about the people and organizations working to make life better in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. It’s a podcast launched this year in Santa Fe, NM, by me, Wade Roush. Listen to the trailer for more about who I am, why I started the show, and what it’s about. Listen to Episode 1, Whose private mountain?, for a sense of the kinds of stories we’ll be telling. And check out Episode 2, Signs of resistance, for a short but sharp taste of Santa Fe’s independent streak.
For Episode 3, I wanted to tell a story that starts in the world-famous “atomic city” of Los Alamos—a place that’s been back in the spotlight recently, thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer—but that doesn’t end with with the usual mushroom cloud. It’s about how Los Alamos National Laboratory and one of its spinoffs, UbiQD, pioneered safer and cheaper ways to make quantum dots, and how these remarkable light-shifting materials are helping practitioners of controlled environment agriculture improve crop yield and quality.
I met with UbiQD’s founder and CEO Hunter McDaniel back in May to hear how quantum dots really work, how the company got spun out of LANL, and how it makes the materials for its agricultural films (and many other products) from its facility at the edge of the Pajarito Plateau. The company is living proof that non-classified R&D at Los Alamos can generate benefits beyond nuclear weapons technology. It’s also evidence that there’s a booming ecosystem of innovative startups right here in New Mexico. (Driving that boom is the willingness of LANL’s tech transfer office to license the lab’s intellectual property for commercial development, plus enlightened venture capital investment fueled by New Mexico’s $30 billion sovereign wealth fund.)
I also met with Kevin Barrows, co-founder of La Capilla Farm in La Cienega, NM, to hear how UbiQD’s quantum dot films for greenhouses actually work in the field. The company’s UbiGro product is designed to shift sunlight, whose energy peaks in the green part of the spectrum, toward tge reddish-orange wavelengths that chlorophyll can absorb and use more readliy. Barrows says that in a side-by-side comparison—with identical lettuce beds planted in greenhouses with and without UbiQD’s UbiGro covering—he and his wife Shawn noticed a significant difference in the speed of growth and the color richness of their crops. It’s a prosaic but compelling example of the ways R&D at the nation’s flagship national lab, where weapons production and environmental cleanups often dominate the headlines, can also benefit businesses and consumers. (The full transcript is below.)
Featured Voices
Hunter McDaniel is the founder and CEO of UbiQD, an advanced materials company powering product innovation in controlled-environment agriculture. Hunter earned a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Chemistry Division. He founded UbiQD, Inc. in 2014, and the company has raised more than $10M, and employs ~40 full time workers. Hunter has more than fifty publications and patents, and more than 2000 total citations, h-index: 20.
Kevin Barrows is the co-founder and co-owner of La Capilla Farm in La Cienega (formerly known as La Capilla Hops Farm). In its two “high tunnel” greenhouses, completed in 2020 and 2022, La Capilla grows a variety of fruits, vegetables, and flowers for local farmer’s markets, restaurants, and grocers. In 2025 La Capilla was one of the first New Mexico farms to adopt UbiQD’s UbiGro quantum dot film in place of traditional polyethylene greenhouse covering.
Wade Roush, PhD, is the creator and host of Turning Corners. He’s an MIT- and Harvard-trained freelance science and technology journalist, editor, and audio producer who has written for publications such as Science, MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and Scientific American. From 2017 to 2025 he produced the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish. He’s the co-founder of the Hub & Spoke audio collective, the author of Extraterrestrials from the MIT Press, and the editor or co-editor of three volumes of hard science fiction: Twelve Tomorrows (2018), Tasting Light (2022), and Starstuff (2025).
More Resources
Santa Fe Community College Controlled Environment Agriculture Program
Los Alamos National Laboratory Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation (LANL’s tech transfer office)
New Mexico State Investment Council (managing the state’s sovereign wealth fund)
Transcript
Sonic ID: Hub & Spoke Audio Collective.
Kevin Barrows: It is a little unfortunate that the lab has got the bad image of being the place of the nuclear weapon and so forth, but my father actually worked up there. And, um, over the years, I’ve seen all the other kind of things that come out of there and they should like try to improve their image, I would think with, with the community and, you know, with the, the country or whatever, and show that they do all these other kind of things up there.
Wade Roush: Today on Turning Corners, a look at the other side of Los Alamos, the national lab and the town around it are infamous as the birthplace of the atomic age. But few people realize how many other kinds of things the lab works on, including tiny glowing particles called quantum dots, that are changing the way some farmers in New Mexico raise their crops.
Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer: Welcome to Los Alamos. There’s a boys school we’ll have to commandeer. And the local Indians come up here for burial rites. But apart from that, nothing for 40 miles in any direction. The perfect spot for success.
Wade Roush: My first extended visit to New Mexico was in 2022. I stayed with my friend Ellen in Santa Fe, and one day I borrowed her car and drove up to Los Alamos. I’d been reading about the Manhattan Project Ever since I was a grad student studying the history of science and technology. So the town had a pretty big place in my imagination, but I’d never been there. So it was a treat, in a weird way, to see the place where scientists first figured out how to adapt the phenomenon of nuclear fission into a bomb. Now, interestingly, on the cold March day when I visited, Christopher Nolan and his film crew happened to be in town, and I learned that they were shooting scenes for a movie version of the Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I glimpsed a tent full of extras, dressed in 1945 clothes and hairstyles, getting ready to stamp their feet for what turned out to be the big climactic rally scene inside Fuller Lodge. That’s when Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer has a hallucinatory vision about the human cost of the lab’s success.
Wade Roush: Later, I talked to a volunteer at the local history museum. She said everybody in town was excited about the movie, but she also said they were worried about whether it would be historically accurate and whether Oppenheimer himself would come off as a hero or a monster. In the end, it was a little of both, just like in the book. But what I don’t think anybody expected was that Nolan’s movie would so brilliantly capture the epic, tragic, almost mythological scope of the Manhattan Project and of Oppenheimer’s own life. Los Alamos is the locus of that myth. To drop a more current Chris Nolan reference, it’s like Ithaca and Troy rolled into one. And honestly, when you live here in the state like I do now, you start to feel like the lab plus the Trinity atomic test site. Give New Mexico a dark historical vibe that the state wouldn’t have otherwise, and that history seeps into the present. Los Alamos National Laboratory is still the place where many of the plutonium pits for the nation’s nuclear arsenal are assembled. And when you read about Los Alamos in the local newspapers today, more often than not, it’s because of the environmental mess left by decades of weapons research and construction.
Newscaster 1: Nearly 20 years after a large plume contamination was identified in the ground near Los Alamos National Lab, the state and the feds are still trying to figure out the best way to clean it up.
Newscaster 2: A government report says a radioactive water spill at Los Alamos National Lab was the result of workers failing to close a cooling system valve.
Michio Kaku (physicist): The good news is that at Los Alamos, they no longer store atomic warheads, so we no longer have to worry about explosions or anything like that. The problem is radioactive waste, essentially plutonium contaminated waste because plutonium is found at Los Alamos.
Wade Roush: So the legacy of the atomic age is obviously something New Mexico and the nation will have to grapple with for a long time. But here’s what I want to talk about today. There are plenty of other stories about Los Alamos that also deserve to be told. About 30% of the research at the lab is unclassified, and I bet you didn’t know, for example, that it’s the birthplace of the modern geothermal power industry. Starting in 1974 at a technical area about 35 miles west of the main lab, scientists drilled some of the first wells designed to test whether it was possible to inject cold water into hot, dry rock 2 to 3km below the surface and bring it back up at a temperature high enough to power a steam turbine and make electricity. Now we know that it is possible, and that there’s enough heat energy underground to power the entire country for centuries. If we just decided to build enough plants to tap into it. And there are so many other kinds of R&D going on inside the lab that the town of Los Alamos is now home to a number of high tech spin off companies, including one led by this guy.
Hunter McDaniel: My name is Hunter McDaniel. I’m the founder and CEO of UbiQD. We are an advanced materials manufacturer spun out of Los Alamos National Laboratory focusing on quantum dots, technology and manufacturing.
Wade Roush: And you pronounce it ubiquity, the same as the actual word ubiquity.
Hunter McDaniel: Yeah. That’s right. I mean, it’s short for ubiquitous quantum dots. Originally people started saying Ubi-Q-D and it just sort of stumbles in your mouth a little bit. And ubiquity rolls off your tongue. And that’s really what we’re trying to achieve. Ubiquitousness, which is ubiquity.
Wade Roush: Hunter McDaniel told me his father worked in another ubiquitous industry, oil and gas, which meant the family moved around a lot. He was born in New Orleans and went to high school in Bangkok, Thailand, then majored in electrical engineering and physics at UC Santa Barbara, and then got his PhD in material science at the University of Illinois, where he studied ways to control the synthesis of nanocrystals.
Hunter McDaniel: And my advisor at University of Illinois had written a chapter in a book that was authored by one of the leading scientists here at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Viktor Klimov. He’s kind of a, you know, sort of the godfather of spectroscopy of these kinds of materials. He’s a physicist who’s known for being able to do ultrafast spectroscopy so you can measure dynamics of electrons and electronic states in these materials and also the optical properties. And so it was really a wonderful opportunity to be able to come here as a postdoc and continue that along that path of research that I had started at University of Illinois and really dig into quantum dots.
Wade Roush: For people who don’t even know what a quantum dot is. And this might be the first time they’re even hearing about quantum dots. Can you give the thumbnail explanation?
Hunter McDaniel: So there’s two words there. Quantum and dot. The dot part is pretty easy. These are tiny little specks of material vanishingly small particles of semiconductor typically. And it’s kind of hard to imagine just how small they are. I like to give the analogy of the ratio of a golf ball to the planet earth is about the same size ratio as a quantum dot to a golf ball. So a quantum dot sitting on a golf ball is like a golf ball sitting on the earth. And I like to play golf. So I like to use that analogy, but tiny, tiny bits of material, which we call dots. The quantum part is where it starts to get interesting. This is where we’re able to sort of create new properties by controlling the size, in some cases, the shape of these nanoparticles. And it’s a quantum effect, so-called quantum size effect.
Wade Roush: I should tell you right now that we’re really going to nerd out about quantum dots in this episode. So it’s worth hearing more of McDaniel’s explanation of what quantum dots are and why they’re useful. It all has to do with controlling the color of the light the particles give off when they’re releasing energy.
Hunter McDaniel: If you take quantum mechanics in college, one of the very first examples they’ll give is called the electron in a box. And it’s a hypothetical example of where you put an electron in this very small box, and you change the size of the box. When you change the size, smaller and smaller of the box, the energy levels of that electron start to go up. So in the past, if you wanted to make a certain color of material, you’d have to come up with a new combination of atoms to create that new color, a new phosphor, a new molecule, whatever it is. And maybe that molecule will have a blue color. Maybe it’ll have a green color and you’re sort of stuck with whatever those combination of atoms ends up giving you. But with quantum dots, now we can control that color of material by changing the size of the particle. In other words, the size of the box in a very continuous way. And this only happens when you’re down at the small enough size scale, but it tends to be around ten nanometers, five nanometers, which should be on the order of a couple thousand atoms, maybe per particle. When you make materials at that size scale a little bit bigger, they’ll have a little bit more of a red color, a little bit smaller. They’ll have a little bit more of a blue color. So the classic kind of example of quantum dots is we make a rainbow of colors, all the same composition of matter. And the size of the particles are just changing slightly in each of the vials. And we can control that in the manufacturing process.
Wade Roush: Quantum dots aren’t a brand new discovery. Glass makers knew for centuries that they could make different colors of glass by mixing in different dusts and powders with the exact color, depending in part on the size of the particles. But scientists didn’t realize that quantum mechanical effects were at work until the 1980s, which is also when they came up with the name quantum Dot. And they didn’t figure out how to synthesize the dots until the 1990s. For that discovery, MIT professor Moungi Bawendi and two other scientists won the Nobel Prize in 2023. And since their work, quantum dots have found their way into a variety of products, including TVs.
Hunter McDaniel: The beachhead market has been the display industry, and quantum dot displays have been on the market for about 12 years now. Sony had a line of TVs that used quantum dots in there to make basically very pure reds and greens from a blue backlight. And fast forwarding to today, there’s been about 100,000,000m² of TVs deployed cumulatively, thousands of different SKUs. Every major brand from Samsung to Hisense, TCL, LG, all have quantum Dot displays on the market. It’s part of the reason why I started the company is I was very inspired by those first products coming out.
Wade Roush: Can you explain the Los Alamos connection? So was it Viktor Klimov? So what’s the connection between his work and your post-doc and the company being here?
Hunter McDaniel: So Viktor is a lab fellow. I think he’s been at the lab for more than 30 years now. And that you’re starting to get up into, like, the earliest papers on quantum dots. So he was collaborating with some of those folks, like at MIT. And so he has this at the time, and actually still today, a very large research group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the chemistry division. So he’s kind of a physicist leading a research group in the chemistry division. So naturally, he’s going to do a lot of chemistry. My background was more in chemistry, more materials. So he kind of let us, you know, go run amok a little bit, play around and try different things.
Wade Roush: One of the things McDaniel started playing around with was the question of whether quantum dots could be made from safer materials. The first generation quantum dots used in TVs were mostly composed of cadmium or indium phosphide, which are both pretty toxic.
Hunter McDaniel: You can get away with maybe a gram of material in a TV. It’s embedded behind layers of plastic and it gets kind of diluted down. But if you wanted to go into a lot of these other applications that people have talked about for many years, like solar panels and cosmetics and diagnostics, um, you would really have to have something that was inherently safe and also much lower costs.
Wade Roush: While he was in Klimov’s lab, McDaniel developed a body of papers and patents showing that it was possible to make quantum dots from one of the safest and most abundant materials on earth silicon, and also that it could be done simply and cheaply.
Hunter McDaniel: And I think that new synthesis method ended up being what makes this work so well. Um, it gives rise to better properties, but it’s a very low cost, scalable method. I’ll show you some of the tooling that we’re using, but it’s a heat up method. Simply just add your stuff in there, heat it up, stir it. There’s a little bit more to it than that. But you know, so-called bucket chemistry, we get made fun of by the organic chemists because they’ll have like 50 steps in their process. But we just throw our stuff in a bucket and heat it up. And, you know, you need good patents to be able to defend that. But it’s it’s very elegant synthesis method.
Wade Roush: Mcdaniel says much of the work in Klimov’s lab had been funded by a Japanese company that expected to take the new synthesis method and scale it up commercially, but that company fell on hard times and decided to waive its licensing rights.
Hunter McDaniel: And that was the sort of founding moment. And so I was talking to the tech transfer office and, you know, they were supportive in principle of me starting a company and potentially getting a license. It was around that time that I started to do some diligence on, you know, what would that actually look like? I didn’t have any background in this, and I found that there were some patents that had been filed by MIT and some by University of Washington in this area that predated our work at Los Alamos. And so I reached out to them and I asked if the patents were available for licensing. Lo and behold, they were. And so I was able to kind of piece together a portfolio of licensed IP from Los Alamos, MIT, and University of Washington. That was the sort of founding technology of the company. And then, you know, since then, we’ve filed many, many more patents and expanded, you know, in our own ways. But that core technology came out of actually those three research institutions. I mean, at the company, we figured out a bunch of other things. Yeah. I think we’ve we’ve figured out some manufacturing methods that enable scale and reduce cost.
Wade Roush: Mcdaniel says he decided early on that he didn’t want to try to compete against Samsung and its supply chain partners to make quantum dots for TVs. Instead, the company started hunting for new markets where ubiquity could become the dominant supplier from the beginning. One of those markets is anti-counterfeiting. It’s possible to make currencies and even pharmaceuticals, with quantum dot watermarks and other security features that are very difficult for counterfeiters to copy. Another market is new materials for the roofs of greenhouses. And that’s how this story loops back around to farming. Now, as we’ve been saying, the most useful thing about quantum dots is that they can absorb light at one set of energies or wavelengths and re-emit it at a different energy depending on the size of the dots. And it turns out that one kind of light you might want to optimize this way is sunlight.
Hunter McDaniel: So you have this very broad band spectrum, all this energy coming from the sun. But things on earth are absorbing only certain colors. That’s why things don’t just look black and white. And I think plants give us a great example of this, because the chlorophyll plants look green. Chlorophyll doesn’t absorb green light very strongly. It absorbs mostly red and blue photons, especially red photons. And so when a plant looks green to you, it’s because it’s you’re you’ve subtracted the red and blue and what’s left over is the green. So the green gets reflected back and that’s the peak of sunlight. So it is kind of an interesting question. Why don’t plants, why didn’t chlorophyll evolve to absorb green light better? Because it’s at the peak of sunlight. But that’s maybe a story for a different day when you’re talking to a biologist. I’m the physicist on the podcast today. So And so if you’re going to build an indoor growing operation, like you’re not going to use sunlight at all, you’re going to build your spectrum up from the bottom. You’re going to use mostly red LEDs and a little bit of blue LEDs, or there are certain types of lighting fixtures, lighting bulbs like high pressure sodium lamps that have more red in the spectrum.
Hunter McDaniel: The ratio will be about 5 to 1 or so. Red to blue is what you’ll want to use in those kinds of setups. So what that’s telling you is that plants prefer red light and photosynthetically. It’s about 30% more efficient red light than blue, and then about 50% more effective than green. So what we’re talking about is basically creating that spectrum from sunlight directly, rather than having maybe solar panels next to your warehouse and then powering lights inside your warehouse, or adding lights into your greenhouse to add more red light, we just shift the spectrum of sunlight passively to where it’s no longer centered in the green, but centered in the red, and just by making the roof glow. So very simple concept glowing roof glowing with red photons. Red orange photons makes the plants more effectively using that light, and then they grow more vigorously. Vigorously. You get more crop yield between 10% and 30%, but we’ve seen as high as 40 to 50 in some trials that we’ve done.
Wade Roush: If you’ve ever been to a farmer’s market here in New Mexico or any other state, you know how much beautiful produce comes out of small farms, especially during the summer and fall. A lot of those farms aren’t growing their crops outdoors. A better way to protect them from weather and pests is to grow them in greenhouses covered with plastic or glass. The practice is known as controlled environment agriculture, and it’s small compared to outdoor farming. The area of all greenhouses in the world would add up to just one quarter of 1% of the planet’s cropland. But this kind of farming is incredibly productive. About half of the fresh tomatoes that Americans eat are raised under glass or plastic. Americans spend over $1 billion a year on food grown this way, and that number is up 44% in the last five years. So giving farmers a better way to convert the energy from sunlight into commercial crops would be a big deal. UbiQD’s film for greenhouse roofs goes by the brand name UbiGro, and to show me how the company makes it, McDaniel gave me a tour of the company’s headquarters building in Los Alamos. Every quantum dot that goes into every product UbiQD makes is manufactured here, and agricultural films are just the beginning.
Hunter McDaniel: I didn’t talk about it, but you can use our technology to generate electricity from a window. We have a brand. A trademark called window WENDOW, and it uses fluorescence in the glass. We put the quantum dots into a layer of laminated glass as a polymer layer in between two sheets of glass on the outer pane, and then the light that’s emitted by the quantum dots gets guided to the edges of the glass. And we have solar cells hidden in the frame. In this case, it’s powering a smart blind. So this is going kind of up and down depending on what the settings are, but you could use that to optimize around energy efficiency and ultimately power portion of the building.
Wade Roush: So this is a case where you’re using the quantum dot technology to channel light into conventional photovoltaics that are just kind of around the edges.
Hunter McDaniel: The silicon around the edges. It’s light in, light out. Um, and then we’re purchasing just strips of solar cells basically that go along the edge. Um, so now we’re going to enter an actual, um, lab space. So the folks are doing um chemistry in here. There are some hazards. Um, they’re all listed here. Just try not to drink any vials or um, eat anything that you find on the countertops.
Wade Roush: I’l try not to get bit by any radioactive spiders.
Hunter McDaniel: So this is more of like a polymer lab. So we’re taking the quantum dots and combining them into different compositions where we’re mixing them into polymers. You can do that either with a monomer that then you cure into a resin with photo initiation. Um, but yeah, we’re combining the dots into sort of prototypes. And usually it’s in two types of polymers. One is where you mix them into a liquid and you cure it with UV light, so-called photo initiated polymerization. The other is where we melt the polymer. And then we’re adding quantum dots into the liquid melted. And then as it cools, it solidifies. That’s a more scalable process, more of an industrial process. And so we’ve evolved kind of away from monomers. We still do that with some products, but towards this extrusion melted polymer.
Wade Roush: That’s the one you were talking about the heat injection. Yeah, yeah.
Hunter McDaniel: So there’s two screws that kind of come out of this and they’re going in opposite directions mixing. You can control the temperature along this path. So you can set the temperatures here. And then we’re adding in quantum dots, feeding them or other additives and mixing it in. When it comes out the other end, you get a strand kind of like this. And then this strand can be chopped into small pellets, and that the industry. Most polymer industries know how to accept those pellets so-called master batch. It’s a concentrated form that then they can let down into injection molding, cast, film, blown film, different kinds of standard polymer manufacturing processes.
Wade Roush: So that’s the these little strands are what would leave this facility. That’s the end product here.
Hunter McDaniel: Well, it would end up being more like these pellets. Oh.
Speaker 10: Okay. So that’s like a little vial full of like little, um, they look like sprinkles from an ice cream store.
Hunter McDaniel: Yeah. If we find a UV light sitting around somewhere, I’ll shine some on there and you can see the glow. Hey, rarely do you know where the, uh, rainbow demo would be.
Wade Roush: Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. That does it. So there’s five vials lined up on a a UV emitting sort of table. It really makes the liquid just like pop immediately. And these neon colors like blue, red, green, orange and blue again. That’s super cool. Thanks for showing me this. Um, yeah, sort of like the highlight of the tour. I love it. It’s supposed to be.
Wade Roush: A few minutes later, McDaniel showed me an area where the company stores the films that are ready for deployment.
Hunter McDaniel: So we have a couple different colors. Um, you’ll see like this looks like a little bit darker red. This is a little bit more of an orange color. And then, you know, as we’ve been developing the extruded film, so that’s that cast, uh, UV cured one that I was talking about earlier, a monomer that gets UV, um, polymerized. This is more like from the melted polymer and it’s more flexible, more durable. And this is the kind of polymer that they’re using on a traditional greenhouse. Whereas this is a little bit more exotic for them. It’s a little bit more rigid um unusual.
Wade Roush: You can just lay either one of these down on top of the existing glass or polymer.
Hunter McDaniel: Yeah. We hang below the existing glass, but about 85% of greenhouses in the world have this kind of, um, roof material. It’s just a, it’s a metal scaffold. And then it’s all polymers like this. Mostly polyethylene, just over a metal structure. And then this gets recycled. So the life of this and the the in the field, typically these types of polymers would be about three years. Ours is like a five year film. So it makes it more durable adding the quantum dots, but they’re having to recycle that and replace it. So it’s a, you know, it’s a lower cost point or lower price point type market, but it’s also a steady sales cycle, which is good for a business like ours.
Wade Roush: Before I left UbiQD, I asked McDaniel to put me in touch with some local farmers who were actually using the company’s quantum dot films. And the person he thought of first was Kevin Barrows, together with his wife, Sean, and their daughter, Kelly. Kevin runs La Capilla Farm in the La Cienega Valley, about 12 miles south of Santa Fe. In his day job, Barrows is a machinist and a tool and die maker. He’s also a former volunteer firefighter and EMT. But seven years ago, he and Shaun found this property on La Cienega Creek, and now they put in about 60 hours a week raising crops for local farmers markets.
Kevin Barrows: There is a spring fed creek that’s all in this area. La Cienega means wetlands. Um, and that creek basically runs most of the year, which is a great thing for agriculture in the La Cienega Valley here because there is a decent water supply for for some farming out here.
Wade Roush: So you built these, um, high tunnels, as you call them. And I’ve never heard that term, but I’m assuming that’s your name for basically a greenhouse.
Kevin Barrows: Yes. It’s a, it’s, it’s more like a hoop house.
Wade Roush: What have you got growing in the two in the two high tunnels.
Kevin Barrows: Well in, in, in this first one we have, uh, the citrus, which is the tangerine, lime, orange and lemon. And then we have I can look at a lot of lettuce and tomatoes at this time of year. And then we have, uh, my wife grows a lot of herbs. We have oregano, thyme, and we have the figs in here. We have collard greens, some kale, some mustard greens, um, some arugula.
Wade Roush: So I’m assuming that there’s, uh, like a trade off when you build a high tunnel or a greenhouse. Like the plus is you’re getting stability and temperature control, but then everything that’s under the roof obviously has to be watered, and you’re not going to get any rain. Not that we get much rain anyway.
Kevin Barrows: Right, right. Um, well, we use drip irrigation so it doesn’t use a lot of water in these greenhouses. Plus there’s not a lot as much evaporation. Um, there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of talk about now with doing what’s called CEA, uh, agriculture, which is a controlled environment, agriculture. Um, a little plug for the Santa Fe Community College has a great program over there. And the benefits of having this, the greenhouses, you can control the weather mostly. Um, you know, last year we had a hailstorm that wiped out all our peppers outside and, uh, you have wind and, and insects and all that stuff that’s outside that you don’t have or you have better control of inside the greenhouse, you know, especially the wind in New Mexico. It’s the humidity is so dry, it dries out the plants.
Wade Roush: Now, does this high tunnel have UbiGro film on it, or is that a different one?
Kevin Barrows: This particular one has the UbiGro film on it. Okay. And we just purchased that, I guess August or September of last year. It’s a new product and we’re one of the first ones that, uh, got the product in its full form that was in a poly, that you could put a whole roll of it on a greenhouse. So the decision was we needed to replace the poly on this because it usually only lasts six years or whatever. So, um, and, and I saw, I saw the product, I guess through the internet because I keep tabs on the community college website. Um. They have a lot of, of media that they put out about their greenhouse and, and what they do over there, their high tunnel and, um, that was on there and it was interesting and sounded space age, I guess you could say, or new or you don’t have to have lighting for it. It just automatically the sun shines through it and you get better light for your plants. So financially it is more expensive, But, um, one of the things that we do, we grow all winter, all year long. So in the wintertime, there’s not as much sunlight because the sun is lower in the atmosphere or lower on the planet. So plants don’t get as much sun in the winter to grow. So we said, oh, if we get better growing in the winter, then our plants will grow faster and we could have more to sell in the winter.
Wade Roush: Okay, we’re standing under the UbiGro. The light in here, to me feels a little more yellow than the light you would get just standing outside.
Kevin Barrows: The product is a little orangish color because, um, the quantum dots for this particular product is a orangish looking.
Wade Roush: Yeah. So it’s casting this kind of diffuse orangish light. Um, that makes the, I don’t know, it makes the greenhouse feel greener somehow. I mean, like the plants kind of light up in that in those frequencies, in those wavelengths, and they look almost more plant like. They look more they look happy. I guess that’s all I can say.
Kevin Barrows: You could say happy. I mean, if that’s the kind of light they like to grow in, that’s what they like.
Wade Roush: And have you been able to kind of like make any comparisons yet and, and make form a judgment, an early judgment about whether the product is doing what what ubiquity said it would do?
Kevin Barrows: Well, we don’t have any scientific data, but we did a trial since we have two of the exact greenhouses. Um, we did a trial when we first got it, we planted the same lettuce and basically tried to build the same bed to plant them in at the same time. We did, uh, some in one greenhouse and some in the other greenhouse. And we did notice a significant difference right away.
Wade Roush: In the speed of the growth or in...?
Kevin Barrows: Um, in the speed of the growth. And actually there’s a little bit different coloring of the lettuce for some reason.
Wade Roush: It’s super cool. I think what’s fun about this story, and the reason I wanted to tell this story at all is that here in New Mexico, obviously Los Alamos is famous for one thing, and it’s for being the birthplace of the nuclear age. And even people here in New Mexico aren’t necessarily aware of how much other kinds of science is going on at Los Alamos all the time, including material science and chemistry and some of the quantum dot technology that, um, ubiquity is built around. And here it is being used in an agricultural setting where you guys are making the most prosaic, most beautiful, most hands on possible stuff like farmers market vegetables, right? And that to me is a beautiful story. And I just, I wonder whether you see that kind of poetry in it too.
Kevin Barrows: Yes, I do. It is a little unfortunate that the lab has got the kind of a bad image of being, uh, you know, the place of the the nuclear weapon and so forth. But, uh, you know, I’ve lived in Santa Fe most of my life since 67. Um, and my, my father actually worked up there over the years, I’ve seen all the other kind of things that come out of there and they should like try to improve their image, I would think with, with the community and, you know, with the, the country or whatever, and show that they do all these other kind of things up there, a lot of science. And it is kind of unfortunate that they have that bad image and, and it be be great for them to do more of other things, you know, to help out with society. I guess you could say.
Wade Roush: Um, have you ever driven over to Fenton Lake State Park on the other side of Valles Caldera? So on the way there, I don’t know if just off the road there’s a place called the Fenton Lake geothermal experimental site, and it’s from way back when, from the mid 70s I think. And it’s, it’s one of the places where um, the government was funding very, very, very early studies of geothermal energy and.
Kevin Barrows: Not to get political, but we know what happened there. Yeah. My dad actually worked on, on that, that big hole that they dug up there.
Wade Roush: No kidding!
Kevin Barrows: Yes. Yeah.
Wade Roush: Amazing. What was what what was his role?
Kevin Barrows: Well, he was a machinist up there and, um, he, he used to work at this company called the Zia Company, which is a contractor. And they, they used to make things for, for the lab. And my dad worked at the lab for a little bit. I’m not exactly sure what he did up there. Probably some kind of machinist stuff or whatever for the drilling rig or whatever. But I remember that quite well back then when they were digging that and they just left. Left it be. That’s kind of what it’s kind of upsetting about the science up there. Sometimes they they invent or whatever this this really nice stuff and it doesn’t go anywhere.
Wade Roush: Right. And other times they invent cool stuff that, uh, does go somewhere and maybe this is on its way to going somewhere.
Kevin Barrows: Yeah, hopefully. Um, you know, uh, like I say, this controlled environment stuff seems to be a way to help, you know, with the changing climate and what have you droughts around and such, um, if you believe in that kind of stuff. But, um, you know, here it is. Here’s some food coming, you know, growing right here.
Wade Roush: It seems to me like you’re the kind of farmer who is pretty positive toward innovation. Like you’re willing to try new things. You read about stuff on the internet. You know, when it comes time to replace your plastic, you’re, you know, you’re actually thinking about using quantum technology instead, right?
Kevin Barrows: So if it helps, if it helps the plants thrive and it helps helps you, uh, you know, give a good product out, then, you know, why not give it a try?
Wade Roush: Jumping back to my conversation with Hunter McDaniel at UbiQD, we talked a little about where the real markets for a product like UbiGro might lay. And in the end, it’s probably not New Mexico.
Hunter McDaniel: I wish there was more agriculture because the climate is actually pretty decent for it. I mean, especially down in the, you know, by the Rio Grande, you have the right kind of, uh, you know, soil to, to do agriculture. Um, but what we like to give the example of, you know, the highest concentration of greenhouses in the world is in Almeria, Spain. It’s on the southern tip of Spain. Um, it’s a, you know, along the coastline there. You can see it by eye from space. It’s one of the few man made structures you can see from space by eye. There’s this big white spot basically, and it’s all the greenhouses down there. It’s almost the exact same latitude. At least it has been effective in terms of, um, the results that we get with the product in this region, as in the highest concentration of greenhouses in the planet. And we have done some trials there too. One of them’s 28% yield improvement with tomatoes. So the product works quite well there. It’s because it’s so sunlight rich, really.
Wade Roush: But McDaniel says that even if New Mexico isn’t the best place to sell quantum dots, it’s still a great place to make them.
Hunter McDaniel: You know, I’m very passionate about New Mexico. I think we have our place in the ecosystem here, and Los Alamos obviously does. I think I hit on this a little bit earlier. Um, just how exciting of a time it is for New Mexico right now. Um, I saw a figure that was just talking about venture capital and the state. Um, that was something like 75% quarter over quarter growth in the first quarter of this year at a time when last year was really a tough year for the venture capital community. When I say venture capital, I’m talking about those investors that are putting money into companies like ours. So it’s a really good leading indicator for economic growth and kind of innovation translating into commercial activity when VCs are active. And the reason why is because the state has developed this, um, huge sovereign wealth fund that is all funded by oil and gas revenues, right? And they’re deploying it in a handful of different ways. First of all, they’re investing it in a portfolio of assets. And one of those is venture capital. So they’re deploying a ton of capital into VCs that are in California and other states, but they’re telling them, hey, you, you need to come into New Mexico and make some investments here.
Hunter McDaniel: So some of our investors had gotten support from the State Investment Council. And I think that’s true across the board. A lot of the other companies in the state that are doing exciting things are getting more and more support right now because of this, um, basically sovereign wealth fund that we have. I think it’s been a big help for us as a business in multiple ways. How the state has basically transformed their oil and gas wealth into economic growth and support for companies like ours. And it’s happening right now. There’s a big boom that’s happening in the state. Maybe people aren’t seeing it quite yet, but I think in the next few years, like New Mexico is destined for greatness. There’s a lot of, uh, things to be positive about right now in New Mexico. And we’re part of that story. I mean, a small part of that story. Um, but I think you’re going to see more UbiQD’s sprouting up and, you know, more UbiQD’s growing to the scale that we have.
Wade Roush: Turning Corners is reported, written, produced and hosted by me, Wade Roush. Thank you so much to Hunter McDaniel at UbiQD and Kevin Barrows at La Capilla Farm for spending so much time with me. Thank you also to Julia Wilson Williams and her colleagues at Spark PR for helping me to set up my visit to UbiQD. Our theme music is by Joel Roston of Title Card Music and Sound in Boston, with Amelia Hollander Ames on violin and viola and Eden Raiz on cello. The opening audio clips were from Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer. I’m always in search of new stories about people making a difference in their communities, bridging old divides and finding innovative ways to bring people together anywhere in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah or Arizona. If you know somebody like that and you think their story needs to be told, please write to me at wade@turningcorners.org.
Wade Roush: Turning Corners is a proud member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, and I want to take a minute to tell you about one of the latest shows to join the collective. It’s called Stories of Sound and it’s curated by Riccardo Giacconi at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Riccardo finds creators of audio documentaries, radio dramas, Podcasts, soundscapes and sound art installations and invites them to talk about why sound is such a unique medium for art.
Voice 1 from Stories of Sound: What I’m thinking about is like, what is the equivalent of white space in audio? And the closest thing that I can think of is silence. And I wanted to create something that felt almost as if somebody had taken a huge bucket of white paint and just, like, splashed it over this like very colorful, like portrait, but did so violently.
Voice 2 from Stories of Sound: Stories of sound conversations on sound art and audio storytelling.
Wade Roush: You can learn more about Stories of Sound at our website at hubspokeaudio.org. I also want to make sure you know about another project we launched at Hub & Spoke this year. It’s called Sounds Like America, and it’s meant to spotlight independent audio producers by inviting them to send us sonic postcards that capture the sounds of their state. So far, we’ve got submissions from more than 30 states, and you can hear all of them on our podcast, The Hub and spoke Radio Hour, or at hubspokeaudio.org. I use AI to help me research my scripts, but I never use AI in the writing or production of this show. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you next time.
