91 Clint Brauer, why robotics are key to scale regen ag without chemicals

Clint Brauer of Greenfield Robotics talks about the key role robotics are going to play in the next 20 years on scaling regenerative agriculture across millions of acres.
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It is relatively early, but the first signs are promising. We just might be witnessing the start of a robotics revolution in agriculture, helping farmers to grow their soils faster. Listen to the conversation between Koen van Seijen and Clint Brauer of Greenfield Robotics.

More about this episode on:
https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/2020/09/15/clint-brauer/.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The key role robotics are going to play in the next 20 years when it comes to scaling regenerative agriculture across millions of acres. It's still super early, but the first signs are very promising. So we just might be witnessing the start of a robotics revolution in agriculture, helping farmers to grow their soils faster. Welcome to another episode of In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, ask me anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investing region. an egg or find the link below thank you Welcome to another episode. Today, we talk robotics. Greenfield Robotics was born with a simple mission, to get chemicals out of your food. They are developing robots that enable farmers to implement carbon farming on a massive global scale, economically, and without agrichemicals. Welcome, Clint. Thanks, Koen. Glad to be here. And to start with a personal question, how did you end up building soil with robots?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

How did we start building robots? Well, about five years ago, I decided I wanted to start doing what I've learned I learned about organic farming using vegetables and whatnot, and I wanted to do it out on broad acre fields. I wanted to have the biggest impact possible in getting chemicals out of food. I wanted to figure out how to do weed control out in large field settings. There's 250 million acres in the United States alone. you know, how do you get rid of weeds without tilling, right? Without disking, plowing, chiseling, without chemicals. You do what's called no-till farming. And there wasn't an answer out there. And so that's how Greenfield Robotics started with some tests without robots. And about three years ago, we built our first one.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

And how did you end up in farming? Because not everybody is farming organic vegetables.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I have a lot of friends in farming and they just always knew they wanted to be farmers. And I come from from a different set of circumstances. Like most, I grew up farming. I grew up here in Kansas. And unlike many, I hated it. And a lot of that was, to be honest, my dad, it was kind of his hobby. And so we had crappy old equipment. And I hated working on it. It always seems like things break down on the worst days for weather possible or when places are closed and you're out there bailing wire and whatnot. So I just hated it. And that drove me to get into tech and really get serious about business at a pretty young age. But, you know, things change and I won't get into the big details, but about a decade ago, came back to Kansas and set out to do exactly what I'm doing, which is trying to get chemicals out of food, starting with agriculture.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

And you went 40 The organic route focused on vegetables. And when did you realize you needed other solutions to basically keep the weeds out? What was their specific moment or was it just a long struggle? What was the turning point there?

SPEAKER_01 3:40

You know, we had a soybean field, I believe, five or six years ago, maybe five years ago, that the pig weeds, we just couldn't keep contained. And they were record soybean crop for at that time. My dad was still alive at that point and he hired some guys to go rove and they quit like a quarter way through the field. And so when we went out to harvest those soybeans, we literally kind of ripped up one of the combines really badly, trying to put pigweeds through them. That was when I really said, man, this is just no good. And then another example would be I took over a new piece of ground and it just happened to be a spring that just nonstop rain, couldn't get out there. By the time I did get out there, you know, the weeds were taller than the tractor. And so you're like, so something different has to occur. And so those two things led up to it as well.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

And what is, because as a non-farmer, we keep hearing the principles of regenerative practices, obviously the no-till or very low-till or minimum soil disturbance or rotations, and both in time and space and the animal integration, et cetera, et cetera. And then you sometimes hear these almost impossible stories, or they sound too good to be true, like the weed pressure is no longer there, et cetera. You sound very different. What is happening there?

SPEAKER_01 4:55

That's complete nonsense. There, of course, the weed pressure is still There are a lot of techniques, and I tried them all before we started this, and none of them, you know, let me step back for a second. Farming is about risk right now. It's all about risk, managing risk. I would say farmers are some of the most sophisticated risk managers in the world. And given their margins, they might be the most sophisticated. Definitely giving the Wall

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Street guys and girls a run for their money.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Yeah, I mean, they are not running it off algorithms, but that's a separate discussion. So I think that... What you realize is that none of these methods work in all situations. And I'll just give the example roller crimping, which I think is fantastic. So just for the non-farmers, what's a roller crimper? Roller crimping is essentially you'll plant a cover crop, which means a crop you never intend to harvest for grain or legumes or anything. And you simply plant that cover crop to restore nutrients to the soil and also maybe to slow down weeds coming in. And so that's become a trend that's growing quickly. The idea that they came up with is a roller crimper basically goes in like cereal rye. And before you go plant your crop, you've grown this cereal rye and maybe it's three foot tall or four foot tall and it's starting to mature. And you go out there with this machine that basically breaks it over and kills it and lays it on the soil. So now you have weed suppression simply by the fact of they can't find sunlight. And it's very effective when it works. The issue is, you know, we have these springs here and everyone has this at times. And with climate change, I think they're getting worse, where we had 13 inches of rain in one month. So everything goes through your cover crop. Yeah. You can't get out there. It's a really heavy deal. So it just doesn't always work. It's a very good idea. And people are putting it on their planters now and same type of deal. And so it makes a lot of sense, but it is not bulletproof.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

And you're saying unless it works in all circumstances, I cannot rely on it, which means it's risky, which means I'm running the risk to lose that field for the year or etc. Of course, the other option is to spray it down. But also there you need to get on the land plus all obviously the issues with the heavy chemicals, which is exactly the reason you started to farm organically. Right. So it's either cutting up the plant of the cover crop or spraying it down to die.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

Yeah. And there's also some debate out there when I talk to farmers who are in more arid regions. I'm in a semi-arid, but if you get in more arid regions, there's a lot of farmers who feel like maybe cover crops won't work for them, that they'll maybe take all the moisture away for the crop. And there's a lot of debate going back and forth on that. So a lot of farmers just simply are not going to cover crop at this point until they understand, see enough studies that it's not going to take the moisture away from their next crop.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

And how do the robots enter the space there? What took you from realizing, okay, the current set of practices and the current technologies that are out there don't work for me on my farm. So I'm going to develop something else, which is already a big step. And how did you end up on robotics?

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Yeah, I mean, we tried all kinds of different things. And at the end of the day, the idea was well what is the primary problem right now even not thinking about trying to get chemicals out because the limitations the chemicals have become increasingly evident so how do you solve this problem period regardless of your view on chemicals and that's where i looked at and so problem number one is you got to get out there before the weeds are a foot tall and they become a resistant to your chemical at that point and you may stun them but a lot of times they'll come they'll start growing again you think you have it solved in two weeks later here they come come again so you had to get out there and so to get out there what's important well can't wait a lot

SPEAKER_02 8:36

it needs to be light yeah otherwise your tractor will be stuck in this very

SPEAKER_01 8:41

yeah

SPEAKER_02 8:41

wet

SPEAKER_01 8:41

spring they weigh 140 pounds they can go out there we've been out there days after we had three inches of rain the very next day or even during the day that's problem number one problem number two how do you get rid of most of the weeds if not all well there's a lot of folks out there trying to do you know let's recognize the weeds and let's just deliver the rare a right amount of chemical. Well, my view is no chemicals. And so why settle? And as a farmer, one thing I know is the genetics are so strong in broadacre field crops for the most part now. When they come up, they come up very quickly and they canopy very quickly in row. And so that means you don't have a lot of weed pressure in that row if you did the right things leading up to it. So the issue is not the in row. It's from an inch through the middle of the row and then to the side of that row to the middle of the row is where the weeds start coming up because there's nothing to stop them. And so we focused on that first. Will we have an in-row solution? Yeah, we got one in development right now. They've been working on it for two years. So, but it's, you know, 95, 98% of the problem. And it's the old technology adage of get something out there that works. And you know that your customer will raise their expectations of you on their own accord. So that's the way I view it. So again, spraying chemicals is just not an option in my mind.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

So can you describe the robot you have out there now in terms of size, in terms of what should we expect? You mentioned the weight and what does it do? Just for folks that haven't seen it, I obviously put the links to your website in the description below, but just for folks to imagine we're here in audio land, what could they see when one of these robots or a swarm of robots actually moves into a field and what do they do?

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Yeah, well, they're small and it's It's more of a swarm approach, meaning we'll put 10 bots out there at a time is the way we're doing it. And they're going to drive between the rows. They're a four-wheel drive, essentially. They're running off batteries.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

Between the rows of, let's say, soy, the field you mentioned before. So there's a row of soy plants that's already grown to half a meter, a meter or something. And then this swarm of robots basically navigates between these rows and takes care of the weeds.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Yeah, that's right. And right now we're focused on 30-inch rows. We do have a prototype. Actually, it was the very first bot we built that would go down 15-inch rows as well. But right now we're focused on 30-inch. And corn, soybeans, milo, cotton, sunflowers. I mean, there's a lot of crops growing in 30-inch rows right now.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

And you put them at the beginning of the row and they go.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Well, yeah. I wish it was that simple.

SPEAKER_02 11:50

Theoretically, that's the

SPEAKER_01 11:53

idea. I will say this. They're a lot more structured than your Roomba. So it will make more sense. when you're standing there looking at them in the room, but which I still can't figure out what the hell it's doing. They're basically mowing. And that was kind of what my test was. And I thought, surely it could not be this simple to mow pigweeds. And again, we're not trying to solve all weeds. We're trying to solve the broadleaf, the big ones that really can ruin your crop pretty quick. Solutions for grass weeds, herbicides still work, right? And we're working on that. But so we're just mowing these weeds off about an inch high repeatedly through the growing season. The idea is we can come back in and do this multiple times. And we're doing it. I don't want to get into too many details, but the pricing model actually coincides. You can eliminate your chemical and we make it a fixed cost versus chemical is a variable cost. And so we operate as a service. And so those bots come and go in and out of those fields as often as needed to keep those pigweeds down. Or mare's tail would be another example.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

That's very interesting. Let's unpack that in a second, but just I want to make a comparison. You're basically almost grazing just the weeds repeatedly.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Just mowing them about an inch off, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:04

Mowing them without eating them, just repeatedly hitting them.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

I wish I could get sheep to go down those rows, but I don't think so.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

We still need to work on that. And so It's repeatedly hitting that row where it's growing up and up. And at some point the weed just gives up or you're putting it so much under pressure that you keep it under a certain level.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Yeah. What will happen is ideally we cut right at the growing point, but that's not always the case. And the weed basically, you're just, you're backing it off. You're taking almost all the leaves off, if not all of them. And so now it's got to expend resources to try to put it back out and it just can't grow back very quickly. So that really is what we're doing in that case. And that was the test. I did, you know, I started mowing with a rotary mower, you know, three inches off the ground, two and a half inches, go out there with a knife and cut it one inch and see what happens. And what the pigweed, you know, was really what I was testing the most at that point. So it, you know, it doesn't stop them stone cold. It does wear them out eventually. They get smaller and smaller. They come back slower and slower. So it's not perfect, but neither is any herbicide.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

That's the job. And so let's unpack the as a service piece. So I'm a farmer in kansas i have let's say x amount of fields with organic soybeans or non-organic soybeans but i really don't like the chemicals anymore so i knock on your door and you basically give me the wheat suppression as a surface and as a fixed fee as a fixed fee per hectare acre whatever the standard is that we're using and you come in with your robots as many times as needed to make sure we keep those the pig weeds basically under control

SPEAKER_01 14:41

yep we just have a reasonable reason rule of thumb. If they get a certain size, we're going to get out there and we're going to start working with them all. And that is a service. It's a fixed fee per acre, period. So we figure on soybeans, we're going to be out there two to five times per season. That is the way it works currently. And we don't sell the bots directly to folks right now. We got some great advice from another robotic company early on, and they said, you know, technical support is a real challenge. And, you know, so I said, all right, let's let's go with the service model and let's mask any problems we have from farmers so they don't have to worry about it. And I'm not saying someday they might not be able to buy them, but right now, if we're going to sell something to folks, then it's going to have to be on par with what John Deere or these guys have done machinery-wise, which means it should be bulletproof. And we're getting better, but it's not there.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

And looking at comparing me as a farmer to spraying, what am I looking at in terms of price difference or convenience, obviously, I don't have to do anything, which is much better. I don't have to hire somebody to spray as well because I just outsource that weed pressure part to you. In terms of price, where are you compared to the chemical guys? Obviously, depending on how many times I have to spray.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, I mean, chemicals for broadleaf control, we estimate are 25 to 16 acre. When we say we estimate, I do it and I know lots of farmers. And so, you know, I gathered that information. So we know that's true on soybeans, for example. Just can you repeat,

SPEAKER_02 16:10

what's the price on that for soybeans more or

SPEAKER_01 16:12

less? 25.$25 to$60 an acre. I'm not actually sure I've seen anyone do it for 25. So let's say a bit higher up. Yeah. So that's the range. And so I think we just lock it in at 30. So that's what we charge. It's a fixed fee at 30 and it's our risk if we have a particularly rainy year and to maintain that field.

SPEAKER_02 16:34

And when did you start and where are you now in a sense? How many boats are out there? How many acres are you working on? If you want to share that, obviously, but you're further than just a As a pilot, you're not only on your farm, obviously, you're in the market. How has been the response?

SPEAKER_01 16:47

I wouldn't say we're in market. We've got some beta trials we signed this year, and we're actually moving out today, literally, out onto other farmers' markets. Now, we've been on some seed company market fields in the past few weeks, but today, literally, we're moving onto our first sort of beta trial field. Otherwise, we've been on mine. It's new technology. Sometimes you have delays. And how many acres do you have, just to

SPEAKER_02 17:08

do your farm currently, just to give an idea?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Oh, my farm's super small. it's about 300 acres, broad acre. And then we have green houses and we do vegetables and we run sheep as well. Intensive grazed sheep. It's an organic

SPEAKER_02 17:21

farm. And what do you see happening with this specific one? And then we get to some other, because you already mentioned you're working on others as well. So let's say we're talking a year from now. What would you be happy with where this specific offering of this specific robot, does it have a specific name? Where would you like it to be?

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Well, we're terrible with names. So we call the, we're too busy to be brainstorming. I kind of squash those things sometimes, and the engineers squash me. I was coming up with too many names. WeedBot's all we're calling it right now. I'm sure that's not what it's going to be called when we're really marketing it out.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

People have suggestions. Email you.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah, it's real super creative. We're getting through some trials this year. We're really going to hone this thing. I don't know that we'll be in full market next year. What we want to be able to show next year is to have farmers look at it and go, this worked And so we're going to take the farms that we signed. We signed 10 farms that manage about 50,000 acres collectively. We'll just continue to work with them next year and show that bot's bulletproof. We also have another bot in development that helps you with the animal grazing and intensive grazing, which is a key, key part of regenerative ag that nobody talks about a lot because it's actually very difficult to graze animals right now, especially small ruminants.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

Why is that for anybody that is wondering now? Why is it difficult to farm? Small ruminants compared to larger ones?

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Yeah, sheep and goats like to escape. It's that simple. And cattle are a little more chill. You can use a single-wire electric, which doesn't take, you know, it still takes time. I still think we have a solution for them in the making, but it's not as crazy. Dealing with sheep and goats, I mean, you're just, my God, the last two years have been something else. So we built a prototype for that, by the way, and it works. My sheep haven't escaped in a week since we rolled it out.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

Okay. So basically a robotic device. I've heard stories, especially of goats, that love to escape and eat everything. And I'm imagining if you have fields and greenhouses full of vegetables and you try to keep them into grass, they probably, in this case sheep, love to get out and have some breakfast somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

They are something else. You know, they look all innocent, but I'm just telling you they're not. And they're smarter than people realize. And we did exactly have that. We had a lot of broccoli growing. As it turns out, I think that's their favorite thing in the world to grow. And if they ever get loose and in your broccoli, they remember that. And I arrived one morning at the farm as the sun was coming up because I knew I needed to get a move before we have this system out there. And I literally watched and they had a llama with him. And I saw them see me drive up and across the field, look over at me, run over the fence and just make a beeline for the broccoli field. I mean, they must've ran, they ran across like 30 acres right to the broccoli and they're munching on it. And then you can't, you know, once they're there, they're like, they're not going anywhere. It's like trying to take a candy bar from a kid, you know, it's not going to happen.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

So also there you're working on robotics. It's very interesting. And just dreaming a bit further or thinking a bit further, I mean, you must've opened the door to so many other interesting... As robotics is getting cheaper, I think that's a key underlying... There is a reason why these things are happening now. I think the underlying technology is getting cheaper. The hardware working is somehow moving along a lot faster. We have a lot of these household robots that make a lot of these things easier as well to at least sort of imagine for farmers, but also for investors. Where do you see robots go in like five or 10 years if you just completely dream, obviously, in this case?

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Yeah, I think that if we step back for a second, most farms are around farmer as manager and also doer, or they try to hire the doers. You know, folks actually do all this stuff and maybe don't do as much. I think robotics can make the farmer a more effective manager. And it may be even more of a detailed level than their eye can capture at this point. I don't think you'll ever escape where the farmer has to go out and walk a field or eyeball their animals. I've learned that from greenhouse. We walk our greenhouses every day. I don't care what technology there is, we're going to walk them. So I don't see them replacing, you know, that type of deal. But I think that we can replace a lot of the chemicals and a lot of the difficult things that farmers have to do with robotics. it doesn't eliminate jobs. It just makes them more efficient. And I actually think it'll make farms more concentrated just using the, by concentrated, I mean, you can do a lot more on an acre of ground for even a small farm like mine. And we hope that it'll lead to more profitability for them. And also it realigns consumers and farmers. But anyway, so go back to your question. I think that robotics will be woven in in 20 years. I'm not sure about five to 10, but 20 years to everything going in on in a farm in one form or another.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

And to speed that up if you would be in charge, let's say tomorrow morning, of a$1 billion investment fund and you would have to invest it, not grant it, but you would have complete freedom of how to put it to work. What would you do? What would you focus on? And what would you not focus on? I would put it all in what we're doing. And what would that help you?

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Honestly, the regenerative ag right now does not scale. There are portions of it you kind of can scale. The no-till, obviously, people have been doing for quite a while. But to do it without chemicals, and the way consumers want to see it does not scale. And so that is exactly what we're doing. And that's exactly where I'd put the billion dollars. I would just accelerate the development of the things I already have in my mind or things that are already being developed right now. And then I think on the other side of that is connecting consumers with those farmers in efficient ways. Meaning I think we're going to under robotics or unleashing an era where consumers can expect to know exactly how someone was raised. Now, most aren't going to care, but the ones that do will communicate to the rest, just like any other technology or way of sort of assimilation going on. And so if you look at what's happened in food historically, for the most part, it's a dumb channel, meaning all the ingredients come through a dumb channel and they all treated the same. It's all commodity. And then some marketing guy tries to figure out how to be creative in the way they combine those ingredients and slap some new, improved or whatever the thing is they come up with to try to sell it. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's the way it's going on for a long time. When you have transparency, it becomes, and you have robotics being able to enable that, then it becomes about the reality of what's happening, not some little marketing moniker. What is the reality of what you're doing and that impact on health of humans, dogs, and cats, and whatever, anything else we're feeding?

SPEAKER_02 23:57

How do robotics enable transparency?

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Well, for us, one thing is you're always going to have an audit trail. And so when our robotics are in the field, they're always connected. So one way or another, they're storing information in whether it's cameras and GPS data. And it's very specific. It's not a monster tractor driving around and sort of knows where it's at and knows nothing else that's going on. We know exactly what's going on in a field. And so we could literally provide consumers a login if they wanted to see what was going on in a given farm. I'm not saying it's going to happen like that, but that is there. That option is there.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

The data piece

SPEAKER_01 24:35

makes it

SPEAKER_02 24:36

completely

SPEAKER_01 24:36

different.

SPEAKER_02 24:38

And if you could change one thing, so we're taking away your investor hat, I'm sorry, but we do give you a magic powers and basically a magic wand and you have one thing you can change in the food and agriculture space. What would that be?

SPEAKER_01 24:51

Yeah, I'd give farmers a lot more of the margin. That's easy. These guys and women and men, whatever, I use guys interchangeably, whether that's right or not, that's what I do. These folks, like I'm telling you, they're salt of the earth. Yes, they're very sophisticated managers, but you're not in farming if you don't love it. You have to be out there. out of your mind to do what they've done. And they're very passionate about it. And they all take pride in that they're raising food. And, you know, any shortcuts they've had to adopt is simply because they're getting hammered from all directions. And so that is for sure. And that frankly is something we are circling is to make sure farmers get a better deal. And I already do that with a pet food company named Canada. And so, so we've already proved some of that. Can you explain that

SPEAKER_02 25:37

a

SPEAKER_01 25:37

bit?

SPEAKER_02 25:37

What are you doing with a pet food company?

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Yeah, there's a pet food company called Canaday Pet Foods I've been working with. This is our fifth year. And when I originally approached their founder and CEO about this type of deal, where we would basically develop a vertical supply chain for them that they could basically monitor and know that every ingredient that went into their pet food was raised a certain way and aiming towards chemical free, as you would know if I'm involved. So that is exactly what what we've been doing. It's been slow going at times, but actually we've been picking up the pace and we have partner farms. And what we do with these farms is we figured out that basically some of the things that were occurring between the farm and their pet food plant could be changed efficiently. And we could take some of that margin and give it to the farmers. And so most of the farmers are working with this are getting a plus percent over what they get locally. In return, we ask them to be no-till, no- broad spectrum pesticides. Don't use glyphosate to desiccate your crop. So some very basic things. And over time, they're on a path to do these things that they want to do anyways. And they would do it now if they would get the additional margin to do it. So I've already seen that. It's not like farmers are sitting around wanting to be lazy or put chemicals everywhere. They don't want to. They have to.

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Is it just the extra or did they already have, I don't know, obviously, long-term agreements? Because something I hear in the space, a lot of farmers say, I would love to change my practices, but I cannot be on a commodity market. I need some kind of contract that lasts longer than a season. And then I can make changes to my cover crops, to my grazing, to my potentially robotics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Was that the case in this as well? Or is it a markup basically on the suppliers or in this case, the farmers?

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Yeah. So we basically kept prices stable. To be honest with you, I haven't figured out that whole model yet. I've done a lot of stuff. I've talked to economists, ag economists and gotten their thoughts on it. And I don't think we have that nailed yet but we just know we're by and large a better deal for farmers what i've said to farmers from day one that we're working with is we're going to keep it as consistent as possible and for now you're getting the additional margin maybe someday it might be less than what you could get for a year but every farmer who's been around which is most they get that you know they understand that inherently that those things never last i mean 2008 things went bonkers right in farming well where are those prices now

SPEAKER_02 28:04

where are we now yeah all right it's very interesting And now to ask a bit of a tricky question. Why a pet food company and not a human food company? It strikes me as interesting that I see cosmetics moving faster in ingredients with regenerative practices. I see, in this case, a pet food company moving faster than a human food company. Is that interesting? Is there a reason? Would we have thoughts on that? I

SPEAKER_01 28:27

think pet food companies are pretty darn innovative. And Canaday in particular. I mean, my hat's off to the guy who started this. Now the marketing team I work with, Rafi Klotsch, who was someone I knew a long time ago. And we remain friends to this day. He's no longer with Canaday, but he's the one we had the discussion with, and it kind of kicked off in an ad hoc way. And Scott Whipple, who founded Canaday, was open-minded and worked with us. And now it's a different group there. They were acquired, but that thing has lived on. And it's a matter of, I mean, when I work with these folks, they are passionate about this. They get very excited about various developments at Greenfield and so on and so forth. And I think it's just pet food is a very innovative industry right now, and it just has to be right there in front of us. It's fascinating. Yeah. And they were, you know, they're growing quickly, of course, but they were small enough that it's a little easier to tweak your supply chain in some ways as well. Yeah. Much more difficult when you're really big.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

No, of course, of course. I'm just fascinated about apparently the marketing department and that's the clients and the customers of a pet food company. I wouldn't say, yes, they care more about the food they give to their pets, but almost, yes, in a sense, like probably this pet food you get is almost better to eat eat than your average meal you buy in an average supermarket, which is fascinating from so many different society perspective.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

It is amazing. And, you know, I was just talking with my wife the other day and I said, you know, one of the crops we've grown in Canada is chickpeas, you know, and so I was roasting some chickpeas out of a can. I'm like, what are we doing? Like, I'm going to call the farm and have them ship me like a hundred pound bag of chickpeas that I know exactly how they're raised. Like, this is silly. Yeah. You know, and they're probably better than we bought in a can. And I've had farmer's laugh about that who come out to my farm. They're like, my God, some dogs are eating better than we are, you know, because it is the same stuff.

SPEAKER_02 30:14

Yeah, no, no. And it's probably, I mean, in terms of clean ingredients, they have been, if you look at the packaging, and I'm not an expert, but they've been way ahead of a lot of food companies for a long time. And it's only logical that they're moving into the regenerative practices space, et cetera, et cetera. But it's still, I mean, one day people will write papers about this. What it says about society, that the first movers are cosmetics, fashion, and pet food and not human food. But that's for another podcast.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Yeah. And, you know, I think I want to call out Canaday specifically because I think they're trying to be transparent and, you know, it's not their whole supply chain, obviously. So we're building it and they're not trying to represent that. Neither am I. But you got to give them credit. I mean, this is not easy what we're doing. Absolutely. But the opportunity is there. And so just a lot of respect for the current crew and the crew that I started with there. And I don't know why it's pet food, to be honest with you, but sometimes it comes down, I think most of the things in life come down to individuals.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

So a lot of credit needs to go to these folks.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

And to end with a question, which you actually already answered, but maybe you have another take on that as well. I'd love to ask this question that John Kempf asks, slightly different in his podcast, but what do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture? And he asked, John asked, what do you believe to be true about agriculture? But I'd like to focus on regenerative agriculture. So what do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't believe to be true?

SPEAKER_01 31:37

First off, I'm not in Jon Kemp's league. That guy and the things I read, it's exciting and it's discouraging at the same time because I read it and I go, oh my God, I'm not even close. I'm

SPEAKER_02 31:49

reading his daily blog posts. It's funny. I always tell him I understand 20%, maybe 10%, but I do really like it. But it's more about the question. Of course, a very easy answer for you is you don't believe region I can scale without robotics or without technology. to get over the wheat pressure, et cetera, et cetera. But do you have another take on that question? If not, obviously, perfectly fine.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

No, I have a ton of things on that. But I think regenerative ag is going to lead to a complete reset of the way ag markets function. And I don't think it's just crops and fields. I think it's going to affect the way proteins are raised as well, big time. And I think it's going to impact land values and it's going to have extremely far-reaching implications for markets that no one's, I don't see anybody has brought it up to me.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

So what do you mean land value and protein? What's the... Regenerative ag. Remember, you've got animals grazing. Which is still a discussion for many. I mean, I've seen the vegan farming space and there's still, it's sort of a, I don't know, it's like the fifth wheel on a car. Like they say, these are the four practices you need to do. And oh, there's a So integrated animals somehow, but it's always sort of mentioned in the after. It's very interesting how that is structured to sort of avoid it and not touch there. Or, I mean, and other people are just full on, everything has to be animals involved. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. So it's a very touchy subject, rightfully so because of the CAFO industry and because of the lobby power of vegan versus big protein companies. But it's very interesting how that's sort of always on that side. But what do you mean when it comes to raising animals and the land value. I think a lot of people would be interested

SPEAKER_01 33:32

in that. If there's 250 million acres that come online that our animals are grazing, meaning cropland annually, that's a systematic change. And if you're grazing them and they're moving and doing intensive grazing rotational, with my sheep, we use no antibiotics. We use no vaccines. They're grass-fed, basically. That's a big change.

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Meaning a lot more intensive than what you meant previously. You're stacking on top of each other and you need less land, which Yeah,

SPEAKER_01 34:02

we learned from this farm. There's this farm and, you know, you grow up, I must have been in a bubble, but there was a farm two miles, I believe, as a crow flies or three miles from where I grew up. I had no idea what these guys are doing. All these kind of intensive grazing techniques and they were doing raw milk 30 years ago. And, you know, on that, I have no, I don't know that I have a solid view, but these guys have been innovating doing this and they taught me kind of how to do this. And you can see this has caught fire everywhere now. And it's just going to be a sea channel. I think, for regenerative ag, for food production in general. And I think the other thing is when you look at robotics, small robotics like ours, you have a flexibility maybe that you don't with a large machine down the road. Right now, you know, we have weed bots, but there are other things you could imagine that could be developed. And I'm not telling you we've thought through it all. We haven't. But you can see a lot more flexibility on what you're doing. So things like intercropping become more achievable. achievable. And I just think there's a lot of change coming. Now, again, I am a veteran of the tech industry. In 99, I had a cell phone from Sony Ericsson. I think it was almost a proof of concept, crazy expensive. I think one or two people in the United States had one that was ready to stream video walking down the street. You know what I mean? You couldn't imagine anybody

SPEAKER_02 35:42

would do that, but

SPEAKER_01 35:44

now we do. Yeah. look at that. And I thought, man, this is what's coming. And I used to talk to people and be like, oh, my God, that's hard to imagine. Yeah, well, everyone, almost everyone's got that phone in their hands. Right. But not everyone. My mom just got her first smartphone. And so it takes a long time for these things to be adopted. And a lot of infrastructure has to get into place. So while I'm bullish on all this, you had said five to 10 years. That's why I say 20. farmers want to adopt new technology, but you can't put your farm at risk adopting it. And so it's not going to be an overnight process as far as that goes. But in five to 10 years, I think everyone will see the writings on the wall.

SPEAKER_02 36:24

And do you see the impact of, like, let's say you're using the full suite of regenerative practices, integrated grazing, et cetera, et cetera. Does that take care of some of the weed pressure? In a sense, does it get easier and does less work for your robots? Like, do you see that? changes happening or is it too early or pretty much the same?

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Well, I think those guys have been doing a lot longer than me and I would ask them, but from what little time I've been doing it on my farm, I see some changes and, uh, you know, I think for it to really function, I was just having this conversation with one of our new engineers the other day to really function. It's not just grazing. You need to graze with different animals. Right. So beef, sheep, goats don't know beyond that, but they eat different things. And so that will address a lot of your weed problems if you're not letting them go to seed. And again, if you're grazing, you consistently plant cover crops, which can be monetized better if you're grazing those cover crops. Right. Then then, yeah, you're going to cut down your weed pressure that way. So so we'll we'll see how it all goes. But absolutely. I mean, it's going to be a shifting landscape. landscape over the next 20 years. And we're well aware

SPEAKER_02 37:37

of that. Yeah, literally. And final question. I always say that it never is the final question, but what was the response so far from investors? You've raised some money and how did they understand, did they understand like regenerative farming obviously is getting a lot of press, but mostly in our bubble, robotics is getting a lot of press, but not really on the farm. Agtech is definitely getting a lot of press, but not necessarily meaning to help build soil or to get chemicals out. It's mostly the precision chemical doses that you talked about before. How were those discussions with investors?

SPEAKER_01 38:08

You know, I got on the internet in 97, but I listened to the stories from guys who were in 92, 94. And I think raising money for ag robotics specifically right now is akin to trying to raise money for e-commerce in 1994. I think a lot of people see it and they think this is probably going to be a really big deal, but it's so early, they're not really sure how to take it. And there are other opportunities to invest that are much more clear path, at least from what they've seen, meaning SaaS companies. Two of our founders, Stephen and Carl, both created one of the first SaaS companies, successful ones called Crown Peak. That was 20 years ago. And now we're getting there. And just now we see investors in the Midwest wanting to invest in SaaS. They get all excited about it. But in my opinion, most of the big opportunities are gone. And so it's hard to resist that when you look at what what we're doing, which there's, there's more variables. Right. And, but 20 years ago when Steven and Carl were starting SAS and their other founder, Jim Howard, who's a good friend of mine and, and trying to sell SAS solution in a major corporation at that time was hard because you had to explain to them their entire financial balance sheet had to change. Right. And so they had a lot of challenges selling SAS. Now everyone's SAS everywhere. And I think it's the same with what we're doing. I think most people understand robotics are coming, but as an investor, they're sitting there going, what's my return? And so if you look at our roster of investors, they are a phenomenal group of people and they've all done very well, extremely well. And they want to see this succeed on something that isn't just about the return. But I would encourage folks that, you know, in this space in agriculture and robotics is take a long-term view because my belief is the company we're building building has more upside than anything I've ever seen in my life. And I've been through a lot in the last 20 plus years of technology. So while it's not overnight, we can't just go print robots out literally and go from 10 to 10 million like you can with a SaaS or some software play. I believe that the value of this will be phenomenal over time, but we'll see. We'll see. You know, every entrepreneur is excited about what they're doing. I hope so. Yeah. So I'm not out of respect. You know, everyone's bullish about what they're doing. So we'll see what happens.

SPEAKER_02 40:41

And imagining if there's a theater of investors, smart investors that are looking definitely for deeper impact. I mean, they're not only interested in return. They are looking for to have an impact on the world. What would be your advice, obviously without giving investment advice, but looking at robotics companies could be anywhere. They're looking at something in Singapore and looking at something in Australia. If they get excited about soil and robotics, what would be a good question to ask that robot company just to understand if if they know their stuff. You as a robotic company, what would you ask another robot company if you would be investing or interested to invest?

SPEAKER_01 41:17

I would want to go see the thing in action. And I know with COVID and really understand, in our case, you really need to understand the context. And I know COVID's a factor right now, but I think that you really need to go and see what you're getting into, right? And spend time. And I know that the few folks who visit the farm really understood. I heard the words remarkable and just you know because you can't understand what's going on and I'm going to refer to our specific market but you can't truly understand it unless you're a farmer or you've been out here and we've walked you through and you can see what's going on and so I think if you're an investor you're all about risk you need to understand at depth the opportunity and I can tell you about it all at once but seeing is believing and I think with robotics the physical nature of it you have to understand that so it's not really a question it's my answer is this is what I think you should be doing

SPEAKER_02 42:13

I think it's a perfect answer and it's actually an answer we hear all the time in the podcast go and visit farms in this case go and visit farms where the robotics are are swarming around but go and see it go and touch go and listen and go and learn because you cannot do it through audio in this case or through zoom or through I mean there are a lot of clever ways obviously to visit the farm now digitally but it's not the same you need to understand you need to feel you need to smell you need to touch and you need to to really really listen so i think it's a perfect way to end the podcast i want to thank you so much for your time clint and i'm pretty sure we're checking in to see how the 10 robots became 20 and then 40 and then 100 and then how the other ones are coming out that and i if we have any good names we'll we'll email you that would be great so definitely text me or send me a message if you have some good suggestions both just don't

SPEAKER_01 43:06

don't trademark it and then email

SPEAKER_02 43:07

it just no don't do that just just nice. Just send it to Clint or to me. That's great. Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. If you found the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast valuable, there are a few simple ways you can use to support it. Number one, rate and review the podcast on your podcast app. That's the best way for other listeners to find the podcast and it only takes a few seconds. Number two, share this podcast on social media or email it to your friends and colleagues. Number three, if this podcast has been of value to you and if you have the means, please join my Patreon Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.