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In this episode, Arc CEO Mitch Lee explains why the jump from gas-powered boats to electric boats is even bigger, in terms of quality and user experience, than the jump from gas-powered cars to EVs. EBs are strikingly quieter, have greater torque, and require much less maintenance. Oh, and despite what Trump says, they are also much safer and less likely to strand their occupants.
Okay. Hello everyone, this is Volts for July 18, 2025, "What's going on with electric boats?" I'm your host, David Roberts. Cars get all the attention, but there are plenty of other types of vehicles for which electrification makes as much or more sense. One example: boats!
Most boats leave from and return to the same place every day, so they have a natural spot for charging and fewer range worries. As anyone who has driven an EV knows, electric motors have crazy torque, so they accelerate quickly, which makes a difference when you're dragging people around a lake.
Also, anyone familiar with lake sports knows that gas and diesel engines are extremely loud. It is impossible to have a conversation if you're going more than five or ten miles an hour. Electric motors can be much quieter. Also, they don't spew toxic fumes in the faces of swimmers and wakeboarders. It just makes sense.
Mitch Lee
Several companies have jumped into the electric boat game, seemingly more every day. The one that has gotten the most attention is Arc, a VC-backed team of rocket scientists — or at least, rocket engineers — that have designed and manufactured a high-end wake-sports boat, the Arc Sport. A fishing boat, the Arc Coast, will be available next year. The boats are nice. But they are expensive. Let’s get into it.
I'm excited today to have with me Mitch Lee, the co-founder and CEO of Arc, to talk all about electric boats: the design challenges, the economic logic, the performance advantages, and how he plans to bring down costs and just how much of the marine sector can be electrified.
With no further ado, Mitch Lee, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Mitch Lee
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to share more about what we're doing at Arc and the mission that we're on.
David Roberts
So let's go back to the very beginning, four or five years ago. I think you had been in software for a while. I think you sold your software business. Your friend Ryan was designing rockets for SpaceX, and you guys were thinking, "Hey, let's start a company," and you looked around and you settled on electric boats. So I'm just curious, like, what went into that? I'm sure there was some market analysis. I'm sure a little bit of it was following your heart. I'm sure some of it was sustainability. What was the mix?
Mitch Lee
Yeah, it breaks down to three things. The first is that Arc is a pursuit of personal passion. I grew up in the Bay Area to parents that loved being out on the water and had our family out on the water all the time. A lot of that was skiing behind our 1986 MasterCraft ProStar, where I learned how to kneeboard, wakeboard, double ski, slalom ski, you name it. But we also spent a bunch of time out there on the river fishing and generally just enjoying the water. Fast forward; I get a degree in mechanical engineering. I spend a while as a mechanical engineer.
I then pivot over to software and jump around some software startups, including starting one of my own that was later acquired. At that point, I started thinking about what do I want to go do with my career in this next phase? And I had always had this idea, as I'm sure a million other people in the US have had, that electric boats make a lot of sense.
David Roberts
Right. As I said, it seems like it's just sitting right there.
Mitch Lee
It's one of those very obvious ideas that is dominated by execution risk rather than market risk or technology risk. I mean, electric boats just make way more sense than gas boats. You could talk to somebody driving an F-350 and they'd still say, "Yeah, electric boats make more sense." Because gas boats are a nightmare to maintain, a nightmare to keep running reliably. They're super expensive to operate. They're loud. You can't hear yourself think, much less hear the person surfing behind you.
David Roberts
I mean, they're sort of legendarily a misery to own. Right. There's a whole kind of mythology around it.
Mitch Lee
Absolutely. There are all these phrases in the industry, like, "The best days of a boat owner's life are the day they buy it and the day they sell it."
David Roberts
Yes, yes.
Mitch Lee
I really think the analogy to automotive undersells the opportunity because gas cars are pretty good at what they do. They are quiet, they're reliable, they're fuel efficient, they're inexpensive. They are the benefactors of 100 years of these giant automotive companies pouring money into R&D and refining that machine. That is not the marine industry today.
David Roberts
You know, there are companies out there doing this, and there have been for a good while. What did you find when you looked out at the market, what did you find lacking?
Mitch Lee
The way that the industry has evolved looks different than automotive. Pretty much anyone can make a boat. You have hobbyists that make boats in their garages and kind of strap on an outboard, and you have yourself a boat.
David Roberts
Right. I guess there are not the same legal hurdles to get it, you know, out on the road or out on the water, I guess.
Mitch Lee
Exactly. So it's a low barrier to entry. And what that ends up translating to is a lot of different boat builders out there. You almost get this commodity market where a lot of people are using the same sorts of outboards or the same sorts of motors, the same sorts of components off the shelf. And what that means is that in a commodity market like that, or a market that's differentiated largely by brand rather than technology, you don't have a lot of spare money to pour back into R&D to make all of this stuff better.
What happened in the past, call it eight years or so, is that there's been a paradigm shift. Something that was not previously possible is now possible thanks to the automotive industry. So the automotive industry has been reaching incredible scale with the electrification of cars. And that has established supply chains for things like batteries and high-voltage power electronics and all the different things that you need to go make an electric vehicle possible, you can in some respects buy off the shelf. Now, there's a giant asterisk around that, but the supply chains now exist that as a boat company, you don't necessarily need to go pour tens of millions of dollars into R&D to get a product to market.
David Roberts
I see, so you're drafting a little bit off automotive spending on innovation.
Mitch Lee
Exactly. So going back to how did we end up at Arc? Well, one was the personal passion. It's kind of this obvious idea that I personally feel a lot of passion for. The other is a compelling mission. Even setting aside global warming, gas boats are, you know, most people can agree that you don't want fuel getting dumped into the water. You probably don't want black carbon burning in our ports.
David Roberts
I mean, and there are specifically people breathing in very close proximity to all these things.
Mitch Lee
Every gas boat comes with a sticker on the back that warns about carbon monoxide poisoning and, you know, like, you've got kids on your boat. So I think that there's a lot to like about the mission side of this. And then the execution part is maybe the most compelling. And maybe what tipped myself and Ryan, my co-founder, into doing Arc. The technology was there, thanks to the automotive industry. And the hard part was actually putting it all together into a product. And that's where a lot of his expertise comes into play. He had worked at SpaceX building complex products there and had a network of other super talented engineers that he could tap into when it came to helping build Arc.
So when we looked at it, we're like, all right, compelling product. It's a compelling mission. The timing is right. And the hard part is figuring out how to actually get these pieces to fit together in a way that's competitive with what's already in the market. So our job is fundamentally to solve the power challenge: How do you build battery packs that are big enough to sustain the amount of power that boats need moving through water, which is a thousand times more dense than air? Then, how do you bring the cost of those packs down low enough to be price competitive?
How do you compensate for the weight and the size of the packs, and, you know, how do you prepare them?
David Roberts
Is it safe to say that you are the first company to just sit down with a blank sheet of paper, as opposed to trying to sort of electrify current offerings and current technology?
Mitch Lee
I don't know that we're the first. I think many people have experimented with this. I think we have taken it the furthest.
David Roberts
I'm very curious, like, when you sit down with a blank sheet of paper, you're going to design a boat, you're going to design an electric boat. I'm guessing that, like, design consideration number one is the battery. It's big, it's heavy. So the physics of it and the layout of it. How did you think about the relationship of the battery to the vessel as a whole, to the hull? Like, what were those design considerations around the battery?
Mitch Lee
Yeah, pretty much everything about Arc you can derive from the basic premise of: we're solving the power problem in maritime. That in order to go electric, you need to overcome the fact that boats consume a lot of power moving through water. So the natural consequence there is you need to store a lot of energy on board, which means big battery packs. That was definitely where we started. And then that creates second-order problems. You can't just buy a big battery pack off the shelf. So you need the team that can go a level deeper to be able to build those size of battery packs in house.
David Roberts
So your battery pack is 226 kilowatt-hours. Just to help listeners out, how does that compare with a car battery? Like, what is the —
Mitch Lee
Yeah, you could think of it being roughly three times the size of an electric sedan.
David Roberts
No shit. Oh, excuse — pardon my French. Really? Three times bigger than an auto battery. And auto batteries are big.
Mitch Lee
Right. And boats consume a lot of power. I mean, boats are closer to semi-trucks than they are to sedans.
David Roberts
That's really interesting. So that really is a design problem then. A 226-kilowatt-hour battery, three times the size of a car battery. You have to integrate that into the vehicle.
Mitch Lee
Yeah. So that brings you to one of the problems, which is, that thing is big, it's heavy, it's expensive. How do you compensate for those things? Well, it really boils down to you need to build the vessel around the battery pack. You need to integrate these things intelligently. In the same way, if you look back at the early automotive industry, electric cars didn't get that compelling until Tesla came along and built the car around the battery pack. And suddenly you get the frunk, and you get the low center of gravity, and the great cornering, and you get all these other benefits by rethinking the vehicle around the electric powertrain.
We're doing that same thing at Arc for boats.
David Roberts
So for a normal boat, the engine is in the back. That's the big chunk of weight, I'm assuming. Like, where is the battery in the boat? How should we think of the layout of the battery?
Mitch Lee
It depends on the product, and it looks different on every product. You know, our wakesport boat has the battery positioned differently than our center console boat, which has the battery positioned differently than that luxury cruiser that we started with, the Arc One.
David Roberts
And this is all going to depend on how the boat is intended to move around.
Mitch Lee
Exactly. And the purpose of it. So the Arc One had a unique layout to it. It was very spacious for the size of boat, because everything was packaged below the floor. In those cases, it was two flat packs, a total battery capacity of 220 kilowatt hours, and everything packaged below the floor. The battery packs were actually structural to the boat, so they were supporting the floor directly. In the Arc Sport, your goal is to throw an incredible wake. So the battery pack position shifts, and it's actually a single pack that's 226 kilowatt hours. And it's located near the back of the boat.
And in the Arc Coast, you're going for range and how much distance can you cover? And that battery pack shifts forward a little bit also because of the motor position on the boat; on the Arc Coast, it shifts to the back of the boat, whereas on the Arc Sport, the motor's located further forward. So it's all to say that we are building the vessels around the electric powertrain and optimizing them for what their purpose is.
David Roberts
One of the actually more recent Tesla innovations is literally integrating the battery pack into the frame of the vehicle such that, like, it is, as you say, load-bearing, like part of the frame of the vehicle, which, you know, people have debated about. This gets you efficiency, right? Gets you more out of your battery, but it also means you can't swap out the battery. The battery is not very, like, sort of modular, replaceable, or recyclable, et cetera. Like, are you thinking about those considerations? Like, how integrated is integrated?
Mitch Lee
What Tesla is doing in the industry is special. They have accumulated intellectual property over a long period of time that allows them to push the limits of what electrification looks like in a vehicle. And they operate at a scale where those marginal benefits make a lot of sense to invest in. For us, we are not actually trying to push the limits of where the industry is at today from an electrification perspective. So we are happy to be downstream of automotive R&D, say, "Look, we're going to do something that we know works. It's a proven formula. And how do we make this as serviceable or maintainable as possible for us and for our customers?" Which involves, you know, not directly integrating cells into the structure.
David Roberts
So you can switch, like, when, if the battery, like, theoretically, if one of these things is driven around for whatever, 10 years — I don't know what the warranty on a battery is — you can replace the battery?
Mitch Lee
You can. I will immediately volunteer that we do not expect anyone to be constrained by battery cycles. What I mean by that is, automotive, these battery packs are designed for, say, five years or 10,000 cycles, 5,000 cycles, which you might hit if you're driving your car 360 days a year. Boats are used less frequently, and so your useful life on the battery pack before you see some amount of degradation is so much longer in terms of calendar years.
David Roberts
I want to get back to the battery. But the hull, the Arc Sport hull, is aluminum.
Mitch Lee
It's actually composite.
David Roberts
Composite. Is that different from the industry standard in some way that is related to this design challenge?
Mitch Lee
Yes. So when we started with the Arc One, we made it out of aluminum, and that really supported our ability to make modifications to the hull as we went. It was conducive to the R&D process. As our ability to design hulls matured, we have switched over to composite because that's where the industry is at today. And there are many benefits to that. However, we use a different form of composites. So a lot of boat builders today in the sport industry — and everything I say is specific to the specific segment that we're in — so if you look at wake sport boats, most boats are made out of chop-sprayed fiberglass.
It's a low-skill form of manufacturing that involves basically taking fiber, putting it in a blender with some resin, blending it up, and spraying it out. The downside is that it's bad for the people doing it, it's bad for the environment, and it has pretty bad material qualities — but again, it's cheap. What we have switched over to is, if you think about what are we trying to accomplish; well, we've got this big heavy battery pack and we need to compensate for the weight of that battery pack somehow. The way that we're doing that is by taking weight out of the hull and giving that back to the battery pack.
So we want our hull to be stronger and lighter than boats that exist in the industry today because we have this big battery pack. The way that we do that is by using vacuum resin infusion. So it's still, you know, fiberglass hull, but it is using a different manufacturing technique that allows us to get a lot more strength for a given unit of weight.
David Roberts
Interesting. And I'm curious, like, with the lighter hull, do you net out at a comparable weight to other boats in this category?
Mitch Lee
That's the goal. We are a little heavy relative to other boats of this size. We're certainly within the realm of what wakesport boats weigh. But if you look at another, you know, 23-foot wakesport boat, we'll be a little heavier than that. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone in this industry wants to have a heavy boat because it's what displaces water and allows you to throw a great wake. So, in a lot of respects, that's actually an advantage.
David Roberts
So the weight, you don't have to be as worried about weight as you would with, I don't know, like a rocket for SpaceX or something like that. A little extra weight is not that big of a deal.
Mitch Lee
We still want to get close because of trailering loads. So, you want to be able to use the truck that you already have.
David Roberts
Right.
Mitch Lee
But outside of that, you're not really concerned with weight. Especially when you consider how much power we pack into the boat that you don't really feel the weight. It still handles like a jet boat because of the amount of torque that we have, the amount of power that we have.
David Roberts
What is the battery chemistry?
Mitch Lee
We use NMC.
David Roberts
Right. Kind of old school. Is that just the most power-dense? Is that for power density?
Mitch Lee
Right, exactly. There are a variety of trade-offs here. And one thing that I will call out, kind of harkening back to, you know, Tesla's making certain design decisions. Those design decisions are optimized for automotive, and we are making a different set of design decisions that are very much optimized for the marine industry for how boats are used. An example, we are not cycle constrained. So trading to chemistry that gets you a much higher cycle count doesn't actually benefit us.
David Roberts
Right. Which is LFP, just to throw that in there, trading to LFP gives you lower density, lower power density, but more cycles. But you don't need more cycles.
Mitch Lee
Exactly. That's a good example. You know, some of the things that automotive is really sensitive to, like cooling, we are less sensitive to because automotive has this challenge of your car has a very high peak power, meaning when you are accelerating onto the highway, you are consuming a lot of power over a short period of time. And relative to the size of your battery pack — this is known as the C-rate — that power consumption is significant relative to the size of your battery pack. And that can really heat things up. On a boat, it's actually quite hard to have a high peak power because you're limited by your propeller.
The propeller can only put so much power into the water. So you can think of a propeller kind of like a tire, and a boat has basically a really bad tire on it because—
David Roberts
Yeah, I was going to ask this later. Like, would there be any point in getting a more powerful battery at a certain point? Because I feel like you're limited by other physical things. The amount you can accelerate in a boat is not unlimited. Even if you had, you know—
Mitch Lee
Exactly. You start being limited by your propeller. Now, we could increase the size of the propeller, and we have. But you are still bumping up against the limits of—
David Roberts
Well, like, physical comfort at a certain point. You're scaring the crap out of your passengers at a certain point.
Mitch Lee
Right.
David Roberts
So everybody wants to know also, I mean, NMC is in the flammable category of battery. And it's funny, everybody, the first thing they want to know when they hear the term "electric boats" is about safety. I'm sure at this point you've heard all the Trump jokes. You've heard the Trump — getting shocked versus sharks. I'm assuming that if for whatever catastrophic reason you hit a rock and were sinking, that you would not get electrified by this boat, but just maybe say a word about, like, it is electricity out in water. So how do you think about that safety?
Mitch Lee
I have many different ways to answer this. I will start by saying cars also get wet. So a car goes through a car wash, they go through rainstorms, they ford rivers. And the automotive industry has already kind of developed the technology necessary to waterproof these battery packs, and they need to be waterproofed. Our boat batteries are not sitting in water. In fact, they're sitting quite far off of the water. They're, you know, feet above the bottom of the hull where water might collect. So we're already leveraging technology that exists, and then we take that several steps further.
You know, we put a lot more emphasis on the sealing of our battery packs to make sure that they are — I mean, we essentially strive to be IP67 rated, which means you could submerge a battery pack under a meter of water for 30 minutes and it not leak. And that's kind of an insane standard for a battery pack of this size. That's like a lot of water pressure on it.
David Roberts
Yes.
Mitch Lee
So we take that obviously several steps further, and then we think about redundancy at every level. It's like, okay, now let's assume that our IP67 battery has some sort of leak in it. How long can you go before it becomes an actual issue? And so we do a bunch of testing on that. And the way we've designed the battery pack is tolerant to water sloshing around on the inside of that pack. We have sensors that are monitoring for all of this and alert you. And, you know, the analogy I would draw here is, like, in cars, the safety — yeah, you should definitely be concerned about that. You could get in an accident, you could be immobilized, and, like, you definitely want time to be rescued. On a boat, you know, if you crash that boat and it's sinking, you put on a life jacket, you are good to go.
David Roberts
You're not hanging out on the boat for long.
Mitch Lee
Right. It's unlikely that you — I mean, boats are inherently pretty safe in part because you can control your own safety by putting on a life jacket and exit the boat. You're not going, you know, insane speeds or anything like that.
David Roberts
So there's no sort of, like, wreck or accident you could envision that would be traumatic enough to the hull to make electricity and water a problem.
Mitch Lee
Not where the battery pack is positioned. Now, you could hit a rock and sink your boat, and eventually that battery pack will go underwater. That is true. But the thing — I mean, we just talked about electric vehicle safety. I want to take a second to talk about gas vehicle safety, which is very bad. So, gas boats are pretty notorious for catching fire because one of the biggest problems that you have is you have this hull, which is a big pocket of air, and when you run that engine, it creates fumes. And if you don't blow those fumes out and then you go ignite the engine, it can cause a fire.
The engines are also not typically designed to run at very high continuous power, which is what boats generally do, and can catch fire, like overheat. So you end up with a status quo of gas boats catching fire more often than most people think. If you have spent enough time at a marina, you have seen a boat catch fire. Electric boats are much safer than that. And so you are starting out from a way better place than you are with your gas boat in terms of safety. We've got a ton of sensors on board to warn you if there's any sort of anomaly with the vehicle.
Gas boats do not have that.
David Roberts
Interesting. And what about charging? I mean, one of the things I think that's relevant here and this is sort of like, you know, sort of obvious once people are reminded of it, but they don't necessarily think of, which is that there are batteries on almost all boats these days, on almost all modern boats. Like, electricity on boats is not a novel problem. And similarly, because there are batteries on almost all modern boats, there's charging available on many modern docks and marinas. But I'm sort of curious, like, how many boats go electric before you max that out?
Do you know what I mean? How prepared is marine infrastructure for electrification at scale?
Mitch Lee
This is one of those areas where the more you dig into this idea, the more obvious it becomes: I will argue that gas boats make way more sense to go electric than gas cars. I'm glad that cars have gone electric. But when you look at the opportunity or the percent improvement in your experience, it is dramatically higher in going from gas boat to electric boat.
David Roberts
I should have said this earlier. My parents co-owned — you know, we were sort of like classic lower middle class Tennessee — we co-owned a boat that we parked at this lake. You know, Tennessee is full of lakes, and so I can testify on a personal basis that gassing up a boat is an unpleasant experience. Gassing up a car is unpleasant, but gassing up a boat is even more unpleasant.
Mitch Lee
Yeah. A lot of people lug gas cans down to the dock or they've got to go 30 minutes to the one marina on that dock or trailer through a gas station. There aren't great solutions out there compared to plugging your boat in and every morning it is ready to go. So to get back to your question about infrastructure, the awesome part about boats—take the wake sport boats that we're producing today — a big day out on the water might be three, maybe five hours, call it four to six to be conservative. That means that you have 18 to 20 hours to recharge before you're using that again.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Mitch Lee
Which means that Level 2 charging, which most marinas already have, you could easily get down to your dock. If you already have a boat lift, then that runs 240. The infrastructure is a very tractable problem here. It's not doing anything crazy there. So they are already wired for this sort of power, and you charge it overnight, and the next morning it is ready to go. And when you take it out on the water, you have perfect precision over how much battery you have left. So range anxiety is solved.
David Roberts
Yeah, I wanted to ask about range, and then as I was thinking about it, I was like, well, is that really the — like, people do not take out their boat intending to go far generally, or like, you know what I mean? Like, that's generally not the purpose. Sort of like, what is the right unit? What units do you use when you're telling people about the capacity of the battery, what they can expect from it? What are the right units here?
Mitch Lee
So we tailor it to the market, and for the wakesport market that we're in today, we say four to six hours of active usage time. I have grown up on wakesport boats my whole life. I could not tell you their range in miles because that's not how you use the boat. You take it out, you basically go in circles, and then you bring it back. Four to six hours is the target there. The reason that it's hard to even estimate, you know, more precisely than that is it very much depends on how you use the boat.
So at low speeds, you are consuming almost no power. At five miles an hour, you could go for tens of hours, you know, well in excess of, call it, 200 miles. You would have a really hard time running out of battery at low speeds. At high speeds, you consume a lot of power because power draw starts to go cubic once you're up on top of the water, cubic with your speed. So 40 miles an hour is very consumptive. What that means, though, is if you think about the typical wake sport profile, you go through a no-wake zone at five miles an hour, that burns no battery.
You put somebody in the water, they go surf for 30 seconds, they fall because they were trying a trick, you go pick them back up, you're at five miles an hour, again, not consuming battery. You go do that a handful of times, you stop for lunch, again, not consuming battery. And when you blend these things together, what you realize is actually a lot of time out on the water is with the boat not necessarily in motion or at least at slow speeds, and that translates into unexpectedly high amounts of time you could be out there before running out of battery.
David Roberts
But there's no real, like, you can't sort of guarantee anything just because usage is so variable that, like, the amount of time one boat could be on the water—
Mitch Lee
We have collected a lot of data on this. So we collect data from all of our own boats. Each of our boats is streaming thousands of data points a second that we can then run analytics against. We've also gone and looked at diagnostic data from typical wakesport boat gas engines that we've pulled off and have looked at. You know, we've done data logging exercises where we put little data loggers on boats to really understand the amount of time people tend to spend at different speeds. And that is what allowed us to size the battery pack.
Now, when we size the battery pack, we want to make sure that we meet the needs of the majority of the market without oversizing it, because then you're paying for battery that you're never going to use. It's kind of like if you think about your phone, you don't want your phone battery to just get bigger and bigger and bigger because now you're carrying around something that's heavier. You don't really need it. All you need it to do is last you through the day. You're going to plug it in overnight, and you know, it's good to go again.
David Roberts
So the idea here is you can say confidently you're not going to run out of battery if you go out for the day. Basically, yes.
Mitch Lee
That's the goal. Full day of usage is the goal.
David Roberts
Right, right, right.
Mitch Lee
The thing that I will say with confidence is you will not get stranded because you ran out of battery. This is a really compelling point that I hope resonates with people that have been stranded on gas boats, myself included. You could go straight offshore at top speed, run the battery down to 5%, turn around, and make it all the way back. Because at low speeds you're consuming so little power. So the boat actually essentially safes itself and says, "If you get low enough, you can only draw a low amount of power and you will make it back to shore."
It's not a question of if you make it back to shore, it's how long it takes you. You'd be pretty annoyed because you would have covered a lot of distance and now have to go back at slow speeds. But you will make it back.
David Roberts
But sort of this mental image of, like, running out of battery and being stranded in the water, effectively, it cannot happen.
Mitch Lee
Correct.
David Roberts
That is an interesting point. It's not really totally analogous to a car. Right. There are differences.
Mitch Lee
Well, because in a car you can't really go — you can't be on a highway going two miles an hour.
David Roberts
Exactly. Did you guys mess with the motor at all, or did you just buy a big motor off the shelf?
Mitch Lee
Our goal is to use as many components off the shelf as we can, because what you get by doing that is reliability and certainty around the performance profile. There are cases where we have had to make modifications to off-the-shelf parts or bring something entirely in house. The motor is an example of something actually on the Arc One that we had to modify to suit our needs because the motors run at such high continuous power that they need extra cooling that they might not otherwise need. We solved that problem so that we could use an off-the-shelf automotive motor for the Arc Sport, and we're happy with the result.
That motor is, I mean, knock on wood, bulletproof. It's over-designed for the vessel, and we're happy about it.
David Roberts
Yeah, 425 kilowatts for anyone out there who's listening and cares. So just in terms of the experience, I mean, you've referenced this a couple of times, but you know, anybody who's driven an electric car, I think almost universally finds like, "Whoa, this rules because it's so peppy." Like, I have a Chevy Bolt, which is, you know, the dumpy hatchback version of the EV world, and it is the zippiest, fastest off-the-line car I've ever driven in my life. Is the difference in performance as striking with an electric boat?
Mitch Lee
It is as striking, but in different ways. So it is exciting to punch the throttle for two reasons. The first is the responsiveness is so much higher. Imagine going from an old gas Suburban where you punch the pedal and you have to wait for the car to realize you did, compared to your electric car where it's responsive. Like, that's a really great feeling as a driver. And it does launch in the way that we have a bunch of torque from our motor. And we've paired it with a larger-than-average propeller, which means that you could dump more of that power into the water.
So you definitely do feel that exhilarating punch when you hit the throttle. It's not as extreme as you might see going from, I don't know, like a Honda Civic over to Model S because we're limited by the propeller. But it is way more striking in other ways. The most notable one is how quiet it is. Yes, gas cars are — you are in a shell, and they do a really good job of dampening sound. So it's quiet and, you know, you could hop in a Mercedes and it's whisper quiet in there. Gas boats are the exact opposite.
There is nothing kind of covering you. There's no sound dampening, and it is deafening. So as soon as that boat's in motion, all that you could hear is the engine. You are yelling at each other to talk, or most often you just stop conversation while the boat's in motion and you resume it when it stops. The experience of being on a boat, even just going five miles an hour, and all you hear is the water is incredible and striking and leaves people with this imprint of what boating should be like.
David Roberts
Maintenance, I'm guessing, similar to EV, similar to cars, is much less simply because there are fewer moving parts.
Mitch Lee
I'd say even better.
David Roberts
You're not controlling thousands of explosions every second.
Mitch Lee
Yeah.
David Roberts
Is that a bigger difference than in the automotive world?
Mitch Lee
It's a bigger difference than in automotive because your electric sedan still has windshield wipers, still has actuating trunks, still has lights, like all these other components that can break — the AC unit. You know, when you strip away the complexity of a combustion engine from a boat, you are left with a very simple vehicle. There's not a lot else going on outside of the complexity of that motor. And you're in a highly corrosive environment — water — that really does damage when you've got thousands of little parts on an engine. When you then, you know, seal this all in a battery pack and it's just a very simple structure, your maintenance burden goes down by quite a lot.
David Roberts
And is there any concern, you know, sometimes you hear like, you don't want to leave a battery half-charged for long periods of time. You know, boats are all going to be parked for long periods of time. Is there any worry about battery degradation or battery quality or, like, is there any problem with storing these for a long period of time?
Mitch Lee
No, is the short answer. Ideally, you leave the boat plugged in. If it's in storage for a long period of time, the software, the firmware will handle the rest for you. The reality is, a lot of that talk is optimization on the margin where you're dealing with a vehicle or a device — think about your phone or your laptop — that gets cycled so much that that becomes a concern. How do you extend that? Again, you go back to boats, they're just not cycled that much, so you don't have that same sensitivity to, like, how do you eke out that next 10 or 100 cycles from it?
Yeah, it's just not the same concern that you have in these other industries or applications.
David Roberts
And so maintenance is less. But one other maintenance question is, are there people who know how to fix these things? I mean, if something does go wrong, is there the knowledge out there yet? Can you call a mechanic and he'll be able to work on this? I'm just curious, like, from the mechanic's perspective, how much is left for them to do and how unfamiliar will it be? What's the deal there?
Mitch Lee
We are still building boats and there are still very basic boat parts on these boats. If you ding a prop, anyone can go help you replace that. If you tear upholstery, there are upholstery people all over the country. If you scratch your paint or your gel coat, you know, there are people that can fix that. That's kind of that first tier. And the most likely type of maintenance that you will run into — people are familiar with that today. The next level down are things that we could fix with software. We have the ability to update our boats over the air, and we do so regularly.
And you can solve a surprising number of things through software. When you have a boat that is primarily driven by software, it's throttle-by-wire, it's steer-by-wire, it's all controlled by a PCBA, like a compute engine on board.
David Roberts
So you could fix problems over the air?
Mitch Lee
Theoretically, yes, absolutely. And we have.
David Roberts
Interesting. Can you add functionality over the air? Sorry, we're off the maintenance thing for a bit, but, like, the over-the-air thing has captured me. Can you add new features and functionalities like Tesla sometimes says they do?
Mitch Lee
Absolutely. We have been doing this at a steady clip, some might even call it a frenetic clip, over the past year that every week or two the boat's getting better, it's getting smarter, it has new functionality, new features. And that's not just about updating what the touchscreen display looks like. It's giving you more advanced control over the thrusters that are on board, giving you different steering profiles, different throttle profiles, the ability to record surfers and play that video back, the ability to hit a button and have the boat stay exactly where it's currently at, like anchorless anchoring.
There's so much you can do when every part of that boat is controlled by software.
David Roberts
Oh, that's really interesting. There's one more thing you wanted to say about maintenance. I have another question about software. But if you want to complete your maintenance point.
Mitch Lee
Maybe to tie a ribbon on the software part of this. This is atypical. The degree to which we can improve our boats over the air looks a lot more like what you would find in automotive compared to marine. That is an ability that, to my knowledge, no one else in the marine industry truly has.
David Roberts
Well, not just that. I mean, let's talk about software then. It's not just that you can improve it, it's just that a lot of it just exists. It doesn't even exist on other boats. You know, this is because electric sort of comes with digital, you know, smart, connected, you know, online. So I wanted to ask a couple of questions about that. Just like, what is, you know, like, when I think about my parents' boat, it's all very manual, all very analog. Once you add that software layer, what are you programming? Like, what sort of things can this boat do that an analog boat couldn't?
You know what I mean? I'm thinking of, like, you know, like my car will park itself and it'll beep if something else is close. All this kind of stuff. Like, is all that stuff being ported over to a boat?
Mitch Lee
A lot of it is, yes. It's being ported over to our boats to be clear, you need the foundation, the hardware foundation, in order to enable this. Our boats are steer-by-wire and they're throttle-by-wire. And that enables a lot. We have pretty much every component speaking to each other over software, you know, communicating via software. And that gives you so much potential that you could tap into. And then you need to pair that with the software team, with a firmware team, with teams that actually can take that potential and turn it into real features.
Our team at Arc looks very different than your traditional marine company. We are a team of software engineers and electrical engineers. And those aren't the types of engineers that you tend to find at your traditional marine company today.
David Roberts
So then I'm just thinking of software stuff now. So if I could tell my boat to maintain a 25 mile an hour or whatever the knots, whatever the knots are, whatever the equivalent is and whatever the marine equivalent is. But like, you know, instead of me eyeballing it and nudging the thruster this way and that, can you just tell it to go 25, adjust the thruster to maintain this steady speed?
Mitch Lee
Absolutely. I mean, you're describing cruise control, and that was one of the very first things we built into the boat. And you can do that, but we take that many steps further. An example is you want to go wakeboard behind the boat. You hit one button, and it fills the ballast system, deploys the control surfaces underneath the boat, sets the cruise control profile. You know, in the future, might cue up the song that you want, your equivalent of a walk-up song. You can do so much more when everything is controlled by the same software system.
And then you've got a video feed that you can hit record on that's all integrated into the same platform. So I'll give you another example that really puts this into perspective. Another very basic feature that is lacking on most wakesport boats today is the ability to steer in reverse. Because these boats are —
David Roberts
Awful, a miserable experience on a boat.
Mitch Lee
So we give you the ability to steer in reverse because we have two lateral thrusters on board paired with the main propeller and the software intelligence to be able to talk to all of those at the same time and the sensors on board to be able to actually control for turning this. We can just do so much more here that even the basics aren't out of reach for the industry today because they're not wired up this way, they're not powered and controlled by software. And you can't update that software over the air.
David Roberts
Right now I'm thinking your other boat is a fishing boat. And my mind's racing about what does fishing software look like? Can you have sensors that can, like, show you underwater? Like, can it help you fish better? I have no idea what fishing software would look like.
Mitch Lee
But we're really limited only by creativity, and our goal coming into the market is to get the right hardware in place and then start unlocking the potential of that hardware through software over the air over time. And I mean, if you were a customer of ours even three months ago, you have seen pretty dramatic improvements in the software system powering this boat. And you know, we're just getting started.
David Roberts
That's fun. That's pretty cool. Well, let's talk about sort of the elephant in the room, which is the other thing that comes up immediately when I toss this out on social media, which is that this thing, the Arc Sport, is close to $300,000 price-wise. So tell us just to begin with, like, how is that comparable to other high-end wake sport boats? What is the sort of class price range?
Mitch Lee
It is directly competitive with other premium wakesport boats.
David Roberts
God, that's expensive as crap, though.
Mitch Lee
They are, they are expensive. This industry has trended towards that more expensive area. And I'll tell you something interesting, or at least something I find interesting. In automotive, you have your Honda Civics and you have your Mercedes S-Classes. There's kind of like this bimodal distribution of a bunch of these lower-cost sedans and then a smaller bump when you get into the more premium end of sedans. Boating has that same sort of distribution in wake sports in particular, except that the premium class is the more popular one. Because if you think about this, this market segment tends to be more of a luxury good, tends to cater to people that have houses on the water, houses on a lake.
And if you're going to enter that market and you've got a nice house on the lake, you're going to get the best boat out there. So these boats are certainly expensive, and our goal is to make a bunch of wake sport boats, but also use that to get into segments where the price of the boats is lower.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, this is my question. This is sort of, again, this is the classic Tesla strategy, right? You sort of create a foothold in the luxury market to establish that your hardware works and establish your brand name, and then work down or out — down and out to other segments. Right. I mean, is that sort of the basic idea?
Mitch Lee
Yes, definitely. Although, again, I would say you take wake sports, for example. Our goal is not necessarily to just drive the price down as much as possible because a lot of the interest and demand is for "What's the best boat money can buy around this price point?"
So we'll continue to improve the boat at that price point, but not necessarily try to drive it down to half the cost it is today or something like that. There are other markets that are a lot more price sensitive where we will care a lot more about the price of the vessel and how do you get that down over time.
David Roberts
Well, I'm sort of curious about that question then, because it seems like if the battery — the battery, again, is the thing. Is the main thing, the biggest physical weight and also the biggest cost, I'm guessing. And so, are you sort of to some extent at the mercy of battery prices, or are there other areas where you think you could substantially cut costs?
Mitch Lee
We will continue to cut costs as we scale because our components factor across every boat that we're building, whether the Arc Sport or the Arc Coast or any future products we introduce. And so we get economies of scale from that. We can also invest in tooling that allows us to manufacture the boats more efficiently as we scale. Having said that, yes, we are downstream of the automotive industry on some of our key components, including batteries. The good news there is—
David Roberts
Well, I mean, as you said earlier, that's not a bad place to be.
Mitch Lee
Right. It's actually quite a great place to be because for very little work on our side, what you tend to see is prices just fall over time because there's so much money and energy going into how do we produce cars for less money? And that's fueling all this R&D that we eventually get to take advantage of. So, we like the position that we're in kind of downstream of that market.
David Roberts
So, yeah. So to some extent, you can reliably forecast that your costs will come down just because of that. Just because you are lashed to the falling prices of batteries.
Mitch Lee
Yeah. Holding all else equal, I would still expect our prices to come down. And again, we're stacking our own efforts on top of that when it comes to the efficiency of manufacturing the boats and the economies of scale we get on other components and—
David Roberts
All of that. In terms of branching out, what's this I hear about tugboats? Tell me a little bit about that. So it's not on your product site, but it's in this LA Times article. So what's the deal there?
Mitch Lee
We have a core thesis at Arc that pretty much everything on the water should be rebuilt around an electric powertrain. On the consumer side, we've already talked at length about all the benefits you unlock by going electric. But on the commercial side, you look at the "Why would somebody want that?" It's because the biggest operating costs of a commercial vessel are fuel and maintenance. And if you want to go cut down on fuel costs, and if you want to go cut down on maintenance costs and increase reliability and uptime, boy, is going electric a good move.
David Roberts
Yes. That is the premise of this entire pod, you might say.
Mitch Lee
So that's kind of one of the core theses here. The kicker is that you still need to solve for range. You still need to solve for, you know, how do you get battery packs that are big enough.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, I would think, all things being equal, as the boats get bigger and bigger, it just gets harder and harder because, as you already say, like, even in a small boat, relatively small boat, you have a relatively giant battery pack. So I'm thinking, like, big boats, you know, don't the size of battery packs you need kind of get out of control pretty quickly? I would think big boats would be a much bigger challenge.
Mitch Lee
One of the things that we think about on larger boats is we want to rebuild them around electric powertrains, but that does not mean that they are purely battery electric. We're actually quite big believers in hybrid electric powertrains.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Mitch Lee
You kind of can view this almost like the grid source of energy. By going electric with cars, you push the problem of "Where does the energy come from?" to the grid. You could do that same sort of thing on boats. You could say, "All right, we're going to go electric with this powertrain," which is a lot more efficient — and I'm going to come back to the efficiency piece in a second — it's a lot more efficient. And then you hook it up to some source of energy. Now, in the short term, that might be diesel generators, but in the medium term, that might be, you know, some form of nuclear or any number of other ways to generate electricity in a more sustainable way.
The efficiency that you get, though, is you look at your diesel motors, the efficiency is related to how much power they're putting out, and they're kind of primed to be most efficient when they are putting out a lot of power. So you look at tugboats, for example, they are most efficient when they're pushing or pulling on a larger vessel. However, a lot of these commercial vessels spend a lot of time at low speed, and they are just burning a bunch of fuel because they are running inefficiently at those loitering speeds.
David Roberts
Right. You can't scale energy used to power the way you can with the same precision as you can with a battery.
Mitch Lee
Right. So electric motors are perfectly happy to run at low speeds and have good efficiency across kind of all of that. What that means is that at those loitering speeds you're actually, you know, a lot more efficient, and you're saving a bunch of fuel even if you are backed up by diesel generators. Those diesel generators get to run at their optimum power from an efficiency perspective. So that's still an improvement. Even diesel-electric hybrid is an improvement over pure diesel.
David Roberts
Or you could get — fuel cells are in that conversation too. I talked to the guy who's doing a fuel cell-battery hybrid plane.
Mitch Lee
Right. So our focus is to rebuild the vessels around that electric powertrain, and now you could kind of move the problem to now what other source of energy do you plug into that? Then we also battery buffer them so that you could cover substantially all of your usage through that battery. So you look at tugboats again, we're talking about seven plus megawatt hours battery packs on these boats. And that allows you to run most of your operating profile just on batteries and then charge them back up. And you're now running that hybrid powertrain very infrequently or that other source very infrequently, only as kind of a range extender.
David Roberts
Right. But you are making some tugboats, aren't you? I mean, I was a little surprised at that because when I was thinking, like, pulling a giant vessel is like the most power you could need. So that seems like the biggest battery, you know, like of all the sort of mid-sized vessels to electrify, that intuitively struck me as like one of the hardest, because towing a ship is a lot bigger of a task than towing a person on a wakeboard.
Mitch Lee
When you look at the harbor craft market, they are ideal for going electric because two of the biggest costs are fuel and maintenance. They run these short mission profiles where they won't actually cover that much distance. They will go out to collect and kind of escort a boat back in. They require a lot of torque. So you want, you know, motors that are capable of a lot of torque, and they're in these ports that can install the infrastructure necessary to charge them.
So I know that it might seem crazy, but when you just boil this down to what do operators care about: They care about their operating costs, they care about the fuel and maintenance costs, they care about uptime and reliability. And by going electric, they can accomplish a lot of that. And, oh, by the way, tugboats and harbor craft tend to be some of the worst polluters on the planet. They burn this diesel that's just —
David Roberts
Yeah. Super gross.
Mitch Lee
Yeah. And it's not just about, again, emissions into the air. It's your black carbon, it's your sulfur oxides, it's your carbon oxides. There's a lot of pretty nasty stuff coming out of them, which is why they tend to be subject to some of the highest compliance scrutiny on emissions. And by going electric, you could jump way forward in terms of meeting those compliance needs that you could kind of solve those once and for all.
David Roberts
So you have the one built. Are people buying those? Is that on the market, or is that just a demonstration?
Mitch Lee
You could think of that like our Tesla Roadster. It was a limited run of boats. They've sold out.
David Roberts
It's not ongoing — it's not going to be ongoing.
Mitch Lee
It's not an ongoing project now.
David Roberts
So you've got the Sport, the wake sports boat, and you've got the fishing boat that's coming, the Coast, next year. Can you tell us what are the next steps on the product map? Because as I was thinking about this, it is a little bit of a mind boggler. There are lots of different kinds of small boats. There are jet skis and other kinds of water vehicles. There are bigger boats. Like, you could go in a lot of different directions. Do you have a product map, and if so, can you give us a sneak peek?
Mitch Lee
We do have a product map and, unfortunately, I cannot give you a sneak peek. We have our hands full with ramping production of the Arc Sport to meet the incredible demand we're seeing there and getting the Arc Coast to market and into customer hands early next year. So that's where our focus is both internally and externally. Our aspirations certainly don't stop there, but that's where the focus is today.
David Roberts
Okay, well, by way of taking us out, tell us a little bit about your R&D facility. Because as we mentioned, you know, as you mentioned earlier, a lot of these, you know, these sort of various boat segments have become a bit commoditized, and so there are not big margins, and so there are not a lot of companies that do a lot of R&D. So you are distinguishing yourself in that way. What is the R&D facility? And what are you doing there?
Mitch Lee
Yeah, Arc is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The reason that we're headquartered there is because it is an incredible hub for engineering talent, particularly on the hardware side.
David Roberts
Hey, before I forget, are your batteries also domestic? Like, how much of your supply chain is domestic?
Mitch Lee
We manufacture our battery packs out of our headquarters in Los Angeles.
David Roberts
I see. So these tariffs, for instance, you're not worried about?
Mitch Lee
We are not immune. If you view the purpose of those tariffs to encourage reshoring manufacturing, we are ahead of the curve there. We are more vertically integrated and more domestic than many manufacturers are today. We are not immune to the tariffs. And again, especially as an electric vehicle company, there are critical supplies that come from overseas that will be impacted. But we are in a pretty good spot as a company because of how much we have already vertically integrated, because of how much we already do domestically, and because we can be nimble as a company. We're pretty flexible and pretty fast moving and so can adapt as the landscape for tariffs shifts.
David Roberts
And this R&D you're doing is, you know, just sort of imagining, like, boat shapes, battery shapes, like the characteristics of vehicles moving through water — is this, am I warm?
Mitch Lee
Yeah, it's all of the above. So our facility in Los Angeles, it's 150,000 square feet.
David Roberts
Oh, wow.
Mitch Lee
All of our engineering, all of our production lives under one roof, which is incredibly important in terms of fast iteration and design loops. So we focus on battery R&D. We focus on manufacturing R&D, software R&D. It touches pretty much every discipline. And that's where work on the Arc Coast is underway. It's where our new commercial efforts are taking shape. It's all happening under one roof with everyone all sharing space, which means that knowledge sharing happens very rapidly.
David Roberts
Very cool. Very cool. All right, well, this is as fascinating as I expected. I love hearing about things being electrified. So, thank you so much for coming on and walking us through this. Super fascinating.
Mitch Lee
Absolutely. It was great talking to you. Thanks for having me.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
In our recently published Annual Energy Outlook 2025 (AEO2025), we introduce our new Carbon Capture, Allocation, Transportation, and Sequestration module (CCATS), which allows us to model carbon capture in the coming decades.
Dogs trained by everyday pet owners are proving to be surprisingly powerful allies in the fight against the invasive spotted lanternfly. In a groundbreaking study, citizen scientists taught their dogs to sniff out the pests’ hard-to-spot egg masses with impressive accuracy. The initiative not only taps into the huge community of recreational scent-detection dog enthusiasts, but also opens a promising new front in protecting agriculture. And it doesn’t stop there—these canine teams are now sniffing out vineyard diseases too, hinting at a whole new future of four-legged fieldwork.
Mango lovers and growers alike may soon rejoice: scientists at Edith Cowan University have found that a simple dip in ozonated water can drastically extend the shelf life of mangoes by up to two weeks while reducing spoilage. This technique, called aqueous ozonation, helps prevent chilling injuries that typically occur during cold storage, a long-standing challenge in mango preservation.
A shocking study reveals that many leaders of nuclear-armed nations—including US presidents and Israeli prime ministers—were afflicted by serious health problems while in office, sometimes with their conditions hidden from the public. From dementia and depression to addiction and chronic diseases, these impairments may have affected their decision-making during pivotal global crises.
Using advanced metasurfaces, researchers can now twist light to uncover hidden images and detect molecular handedness, potentially revolutionizing data encryption, biosensing, and drug safety.
Crystals may seem flawless, but deep inside they contain tiny structural imperfections that dramatically influence their strength and behavior. Researchers from The University of Osaka have used the sophisticated math of differential geometry to reveal how these defects—like dislocations and disclinations—interact in elegant, unified ways. Their findings could help scientists engineer tougher, smarter materials by intentionally leveraging these flaws rather than avoiding them.
Neanderthals living in two nearby caves in ancient Israel prepared their food in surprisingly different ways, according to new archaeological evidence. Despite using the same tools and hunting the same animals, they left behind distinct cut-mark patterns on bones—hints of cultural traditions passed down through generations.
Yoga, Tai Chi, walking, and jogging may be some of the best natural remedies for improving sleep and tackling insomnia, according to a large analysis comparing various treatments. While cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) remains effective, exercise-based approaches—especially Tai Chi—were shown to deliver significant improvements in total sleep time, efficiency, and reducing how long people stay awake after falling asleep. Yoga stood out for boosting overall restfulness, and jogging helped ease insomnia symptoms.
A groundbreaking study from Flinders University reveals that it's not just making eye contact that matters, but precisely when and how you do it. By studying interactions between humans and virtual partners, researchers discovered a powerful gaze sequence that makes people more likely to interpret a look as a call for help. Even more surprising: the same response pattern held true whether the "partner" was human or robot, offering insights into how our brains instinctively process social cues.
In July, Farm Foundation celebrated the leadership of outgoing Board Chair, Dan Basse, President of AgResource, and welcomed its new Chair, Cheri De Jong, Owner of AgriVision Farm Management.
“As I conclude my time as Board Chair, I want to express my sincere appreciation to the Farm Foundation team, my fellow board members, and all our partners who are committed to advancing agriculture. It has been an honor to help guide this organization through a time of growth and evolution. I’m excited to welcome Cheri De Jong as our new Board Chair. Cheri’s deep industry expertise and thoughtful leadership will serve Farm Foundation well as it continues to drive meaningful change across the food and agriculture system.” — Dan Basse, Outgoing Board Chair, Farm Foundation
Dan Basse passes the gavel to Cheri De Jong at Farm Foundation’s annual meeting in Spokane, Washington.
Cheri steps into her role as Chair after serving as a board member since 2019 and will lead the organization as it works towards its 95th year of working across the food and ag value chain.
“I’m honored to step into the role of Board Chair at such a pivotal time for Farm Foundation. This organization has a rich legacy and a bold vision for the future of agriculture. I look forward to working alongside the board, staff, and partners to foster innovation, strengthen collaboration, and accelerate practical solutions that benefit farmers, communities, and the broader food system.” — Cheri De Jong, Incoming Board Chair, Farm Foundation
Farm Foundation also celebrated outgoing board members George Hoffman, Former President/CEO at Restaurant Services, Inc. and Mike Torrey, CEO of Torrey Advisory Group and welcomed new members Kelly Adesina, Director, Global Government Affairs at The Kraft Heinz Company, Karen Carr, Partner, Food & Drug Practice Lead, AgTech Industry Lead at ArentFox Schiff, Jayson Lusk, Vice President and Dean of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University, Regents Professor in Agricultural Economics and Matt Moreland, Partner at Moreland Farms at the organization’s annual meeting in Spokane, Washington. David Gilmore, Independent Advisor, was elected as Vice Chair.
“I’m incredibly grateful to Dan Basse for his passionate and dedicated leadership during his time as Board Chair. He has poured his heart, insight, and energy into advancing Farm Foundation’s mission, leaving a lasting impact on our work and our community. Dan and all our outgoing board members have helped shape a strong foundation for the work ahead,” said Shari Rogge-Fidler, President and CEO of Farm Foundation. “I’m equally excited to welcome Cheri De Jong as our new Board Chair, along with the new board members joining us. Their energy, insights, and commitment to the future of agriculture will help us continue building momentum as we grow our impact across the food and ag system.”
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