122 Wayne Gibbins on the role of tech in regenerative agriculture from gene editing to nanotech soil sensors

With Waybe Gibbins of New Foundation Farms we discussed how to invest in technology to regenerate soil at scale.

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Key Points:

•  the appropriate role of tech in building soils 
  
  
• working with nature,tech and farmers 
  
  
• difference between gene editing and market assistant technology 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

What is the role of technology in the regenerative movement? Agtech investments have exploded over the last years, and I would argue that most of them are not focused on helping farmers to build their soils. So what are the questions you as an investor should ask when seeing all of these decks promising the moon and the stars and everything else? And what about the darker side of tech, like gene editing, or the maybe less darker side, like marker assistant breeding? Join me on this deep dive into tech, agtech, and regenerative agriculture. Make sure you stay until the end where Mark joins us again to share fundraising updates and how investors are responding to the technology angle of Neo Foundation Farms. 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 investingbridge. an egg or find the link below thank you Welcome to another episode where we dive deeper and deeper into new foundation farms. Today with the CTO, Wayne Gibbons, on the role of tech in RegenAg. Welcome, Wayne. Hi, Cairn. How are you? I'm very good. Thank you so much for coming on in a very, very busy period. But I want to dive deep into, to start with your personal story, and we already discussed it a bit in the pre-interview, and I know you have some interesting insights into that. Why are you working on soil from all the other things in tech you could be doing, or non-tech?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

That's a good question. I spent 20 years in technology startups. Founding startups, investing in startups, and operating in startups. Everything from product management to engineering, writing code, investing, sitting on boards, advising, working with accelerators. And the consistent thing about all of them, whilst we were building stuff, is we weren't manifesting anything physical. The output was a digital output. And it felt quite abstract and distant from the real world. You might be building software, Thank you very much. The ways people were approaching this kind of radical new way of living had a fundamental link, which was the use of permaculture or an understanding of the soil and the water cycles. And that was everywhere from, you know, the mountains of Switzerland to the arid regions of Portugal. And so I went off and studied permaculture. And this was really, you know, for someone that grew up in a countryside, you know, I grew up, spent my childhood in a farming village in Northamptonshire. We were surrounded by by farms. There were probably seven farms in the village alone. My godfather was a farmer. I've got photos of me driving combine harvesters and tractors at the age of six. thankfully with adult supervision. So I grew up in quite a rural setting, you know, with a, one would think with a knowledge of the way the world works, you know, ecologically speaking. And yet permaculture, the course was radical. You know, I genuinely.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

What's the most radical thing that you still remember from that?

SPEAKER_01 4:10

I mean, everything from the discovery of mycorrhizal fungi to soil microbial life to companion planting. You know, my father had a garden. We grew vegetables. I'd never been told about companion planting. I hadn't really understood natural predators in the sense of pest control. You know, I think my dad used Roundup as a child. So just understanding this more sort of ecological way of producing food and doing it with real understanding of how our nature works, I think was really interesting. Now, I was driving a Land Rover around Europe for many hours on my own. So I also listened to a lot of books, right? And you know, you'll have read the same books, but everything from subjects on new models of economy, people like Charles Eisenstein, regenerative agriculture, including people like Gabe Brown, books on ecology and all sorts of sort of books that are moving the world in a direction where we can be more sustainable, we can live a more free life in a way, more fulfilled life. And so last year, I kind of came up with a concept set for a relatively small farm which would integrate farming with technology startups and a few months into that business planning I met Mark and Marcus and joined the team at New Foundation for Farms so it's been a sort of a four-year journey really following a 20-year career in technology and part of me wanted to reject reject wholeheartedly the technology part right because it's the I've been spent you know 20 years on airplanes in offices under bright lights and sitting in front of a computer screen writing code or more recently in spreadsheets. And the natural reaction was to reject the whole thing. But as I decided to transition into agriculture the last three, four years, actually I felt that the technology was a sensible bridge and it's led me on to doing a master's degree at the Royal Agricultural University in Agricultural Technology and Innovation. And I'm driving that academic path down a regenerative line too. I'd say that the university is not necessarily promoting regenerative agriculture. But the great thing about masters, of course, is you can sort of self-direct your learning. So hopefully all the things are starting to join up.

SPEAKER_02 6:34

That's extremely interesting. I think we're getting to a moment now in the movement, or at least I'm seeing that in my or our little bubble, that people with experience from outside agriculture and food are coming into it and bringing their experience, sometimes willingly and sometimes You have to drag it a bit into it, like the technology piece, or sometimes it's really, I mean, we have Paul obviously here and also others with deep financial knowledge and bringing that to ag, deep cooking knowledge could be very relevant. Just knowledge of building stuff, building companies, venture knowledge is extremely useful. And we need all hands on deck in this case to turn this around. So it's very interesting. And what do you see now? I mean, we're talking, let's say spring, summer 2021. It's a very open question, but what do you see as the role of technology in agriculture and especially in soil building agriculture. There's a lot of hype around AgTech. I think every other week we see the numbers go up and more money has been poured into AgTech in general. I would say most of it is not focused on soil building. So you would say there's a role, but what is that role of technology in building soil at scale? I'm adding to that.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

First, you know, you're right. Regenerative Ag is a mindset. It's a mindset, it's a movement, and it's a utilization of various agricultural practices is combined together in an appropriate context, right? Whether that be a climate context or the country you're in or the farm you're on or the field you're tending. So it's mindset driven. And the way we use technology, as you'll know from using mobile phones or laptops or any technology, is so diverse, right? With the different mindset, you can be an entirely different person and use technology in an entirely different way. So what are we trying to achieve with regenerative ag? So, you know, we have soil health. Thank you. But we also have ecosystem health and we have human health and farm prosperity. Within that, we have animal health and welfare. We have plant health and nutrition. Within the soil health, we have carbon sequestration. We're trying to contribute to reversing climate change. In the ecosystem health, we've got biodiversity gain. How can we measure and monitor that? We've got ecosystem services. How do we reduce externalities, pollution tracking, fossil fuel usage, greenhouse gases? That's before, those the primary outcomes right the principles we might look at then on the field level are minimizing soil disturbance not having bare ground and integrating livestock optimizing diversity so we start to look at technology that can help us move from minimum to no chemicals or minimum to no fertilizer or minimum to no tillage or even to organic cover cropping technology how do we retain residues how do we work with mulch and green manures how do we undersow how do we work with animal integration so apiculture How do we use holistic planned grazing and multi-species rotations? How do we integrate trees? How do we use integrated pest management? How do we manage our complex crop rotations? So that's what we're trying to achieve. And we're doing all that with an innate knowledge of energy cycles, carbon cycles, nutrient cycles, and water cycles. And below that, even, we've got the soil science, the hydrological science, and the biogeochemistry, which drives our decision-making on a daily basis. basis. So with all that, now let's look at the technology. Before we get into the field level, let's look a bit broader, right? We might be using satellite imagery to evaluate our farms and fields. And I'm particularly fond of open source and technology that's available to everyone. So the European Sentinel-2 satellite data is now available at certain resolutions for free. So how can we use that data? Maybe we can work with a startup that's using that data to give that's layering on AI to analyze any number of things from weather to water flows or whatever. We might be using Google Earth, something like Google Earth, right? To plan a farm design. Maybe we're doing some key line design and we're using Google Earth. We're layering on data that we've got from the satellite imagery or data that we've taken from drones. That gives us a better insight to make planning decisions on where we might plant trees. Maybe we're using the latest software as a service, right? SaaS-based MarTech stack and we're running our website, our e-commerce and our social promotions, which might not sound like farming, but if one of the challenges of a farm is increasing the food pound, how much they can sell and having direct-to-consumer retail, then we're going to want the right technology solutions to support that. Your online shop needs to work. Yeah, exactly. And I suppose the point here is that this is now available, right? I spent three years investing in SaaS and cloud-based technology companies from 2013. And before these companies existed, this was really only in the realms of the very large enterprise companies and it's now available.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

So you're really saying something has shifted over the last five plus years that a lot of this technology now is available at almost any price level, let's say. Obviously, not if you're farming half a hectare in Liberia, it's different. But for most in the global north, let's say farmers, a lot of this technology Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

And of course there are underlying mega trends, right? There are trends in the cloud, development of the cloud, development of open source software. There's a whole bunch of miniaturization, mobile, social. There's a whole bunch of mega trends which enable this to happen. But it means that software startups are, you know, on a daily basis popping up to solve different problems. And whilst they might not be agriculturally focused, they can certainly be used by agri-food businesses to accelerate their growth. And that includes things like data management, data collection, online sales, point of sale, and using that data to accurately predict things like stocking requirements in your farm shop or planting and harvesting schedules in your greenhouses. There's tech to support loyalty and consumer-facing traceability of food products. So when someone walks into your farm shop, they could point their mobile phone at the piece of lamb or the apple, and they can see the name of the animal where the joint came from. They can see where the tree is located because we've GPS tagged the trees. they can see the traceability of the food products. We might be using HRM software to support the people in the training, onboarding, learning development, or contractor management. So forget that for one second. The point is, not all ag tech is necessarily ag tech. But when we do move down into the field, we've got some great things. We want to integrate trees, okay? Well, when we integrate trees, we're not integrating them in nice, even lines where people can go and pick them in a monoculture. We're going to be integrating them maybe on key lines or using some agroforestry like silver pasture or alley cropping or any number of things, which is going to make it really difficult to know where the trees are for the pickers. So maybe we can use RFID tags and GPS to improve the efficiency. Now, if we've done that to improve the efficiency for the pickers, then we can also send them out with mobile phone apps to take photos of the trees. And they're non-specialists, right? They're not tree surgeons. They're not specialist arboriculturists. But the mobile phone app with a picture could use AI to identify diseases or problems that the trees are having, and then we can deploy specialists into exactly the right location. So it's a huge efficiency gain, but we're not replacing humans here. We're simply augmenting humans, right? And I think that's quite key to our sort of philosophy. And how much

SPEAKER_02 14:03

of this is already happening in the sense that it sounds amazing? I haven't seen a lot of it. I mean, some of it we've discussed, I think, in an interview with Abby Rose, they've been doing with RFID tags on their olive trees in Chile, if I'm not mistaken. Like how much of this is super edgy? How much of this is already happening in just I don't know about it and how much of this still has to be completely developed and you'll be experimenting with?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

I think nothing I'm going to say in this interview, apart from the imaginary or philosophical questions that you might ask me, none of the tech that I'm talking about is not available, whether it's a software startup, whether it's technology that you might need to integrate yourself and build into a technology stack, or whether it's open source and you need to do a bit more manual integration. Nothing's particularly edgy, I would say. I'd say maybe it's not main use right but it doesn't mean the technology is not available so you might have say livestock monitoring you know the fit bit for cows where new foundation farms are promoting our animals to be outdoors as much as possible maybe all the time right with overwintering so being able to monitor manage and measure animals to optimize for their health and well-being becomes a useful tool knowing where they are being able to plan rotational grazing or holistic plan grazing using software with field maps understand stocking density calculating how much time to graze each field based on you know we know what cover crops are in that field or what the herb rich lay looks like and then scheduling manual moves maybe remotely opening gates or sending an alert to someone's phone to say please go and move cattle from field a to field b and then we get to something like drones or autonomous robots right and everyone gets a bit scared that they're going to have their jobs replaced well actually nobody really wants to do mechanical weeding right there's i've spoken to many farmers and nobody wants to do mechanical weeding or non-chemical weeding right it's it's quite a labour-intensive process. So if we can use autonomous robots like the small robot company are developing, or others, if we can use drones equipped with optical and multispectral sensors to monitor crops from the air, monitor farm boundaries, survey damage from weather, or even act as a security measure, then these are relatively sensible things we can do.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

So where do you start? Because you're building a large farm, and we were talking 1,000 acres. I think you shared probably 20 or 30 technology pieces, which also essential honestly but you cannot like they might not all talk to each other incorporate they might be building on different platforms etc exactly what's the piece where you like when you would have purchased the land i mean mentioning in the design piece first but what's the most essential piece okay if i had to choose that would be first because that's where we need to start and that's the most essential building block and then the drones will come later or then the robots will come or then the app for the pickers will follow in year four or

SPEAKER_01 17:23

something okay well in reverse order i I think the robots are going to come later down the line, right? I was just giving it as an example of a process. And again, mechanical weeding might be much more relevant if you're growing field vegetables, right? Of course. Where you need that kind of inter-row weeding, as opposed to, say, where you've got field crops and you've got undersown, some clover undersown, so you're avoiding bare soil and you're not allowing weeds to dominate. So I'm not saying that robots would be everywhere. The technologies that would be looked at initially would probably be based on the farm so tree integration or agroforestry might come later down the line it might be a planting process over the first five years so you might just do a GPS tracking of where the tree is you don't really need much technology right you just need to know there's been a tree planted here and this is what it does it's more of a software solution you're much more likely to look at sort of mainstream farming machinery and start to sort of ponder whether we need what's our rotation gauge going to be. We might want to look at things like mobile fencing and polypipe water feeds for cattle, right, if we're doing holistic plant grazing. We might look at a complex, again, the complex rotation itself of the crops will be built up over time, but let's imagine we have a complex rotation so we can get a four-year herb-rich lay, we can integrate our animals, we can build soil.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

That's a complex question on a thousand acres, obviously. That's where I see software. I mean, we had eAgronom on, I think, the now yeah exactly very simply planning the even the non-complex rotation like they mentioned like how to make sure you don't rotation yourself into problems because certain crops cannot follow each other exactly and you need to know that some cases eight nine years before you might end up especially if you have different fields that are not connected you end up in a big mass because your similar crops are too far away from each other or they have to be followed by another crop that you really don't want to plant there and you need to have a long-term view there which is where so can really, really help just to make sure that you don't rotate yourself into big trouble.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Right, exactly. You've got the knowing where you have planted things, knowing when the things you've planted need harvesting or tending to, but also knowing why are you planting the thing there, right? What's the soil nutrition or the soil physical qualities or the soil biological needs or resource constraints, as Gabe would put it. And also then how are you going to market what you've planted there? right? Like regenerative agriculture becomes a knowledge economy rather than a merely farmer as operator. And it takes a while. I'm certainly not figured out yet if I were to plant linseeds or beans or peas, exactly what the best off taker is for that. Are we going to, you know, we're not necessarily going to sell everything in the farm shop. There might be some cover crops that can be grazed. There might be other cover crops that could be taken off and fractionated, right? So I've seen peas being fractionated into pea starch and pea protein, and then the pea protein going off into some energy bar or something. Well, that's not a terrible way to use your peas if they've achieved their soil goal. And on the soil, I recently wrote an academic business plan for a soil health intelligence platform. So it was imaginary, but it would use nanotech to detect soil microbial life and infer soil biological health. How would it work? Because

SPEAKER_02 20:44

when people say nanotech, I never understand what it means.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Well, basically you've got solid state nanotech sensors, which can detect things like gases and things that escape from the soil biology, and then you ingest it. A very precise sensor, basically. Yeah, and then you ingest all that data. It doesn't tell you anything on its own, right? But you ingest all that data into the cloud, you apply some machine learning algorithms, you figure out looking at training data and other soil samples that you've done where you know the results, and then you can infer what the soil health issues are. And then maybe you simplify everything, push it down to the farmer's app and say, oh, here are some regenerative ag techniques you can use to improve these soil conditions. Maybe this is the next crop you should put in your rotation and it might sound far-fetched but um as i was writing it and researching it a lot of the companies that would be required already exist or in development at one stage or another development to make this a reality right and so you a highly portable lightweight device that can do the work that would currently require taking samples into a lab and having a soil microbiologist look at it through a scanning electron microscope being able to do that on site in real time you know super exciting and here's where we get to one of the principles right we're working with nature science and technology to make better ecological decisions that drive economic performance on the farm and i think that's a key guiding principle are we really working when we're choosing regenerative ag tech are we really working with the best natural processes the best scientific understanding and appropriate use of technology you might say we're not using a sledgehammer to crack a nut right so

SPEAKER_02 22:18

as an investor because you're an investor as well and i think a lot of investors that are listening to this get really excited when you mentioned that but also get like they get flooded with decks with ag tech companies that claim all sorts of things about soil because everybody now puts obviously some sdgs here and there some things in their deck etc would that be a question you ask or how would you phrase that as a question to a company that's pitching to you to get you on board as an investor to see if they are really truly focused on building soil health how would you ask how would you tease that out of a pitch

SPEAKER_01 22:50

well the challenge with a lot of ag tech i think and i haven't actually deeply looked at investing in the space for the last couple of years. I've been busy doing other things, but my understanding from the market is that occasionally these technologies built in some form of isolation, right? And whilst there might be some great research scientists or some great business development people or whatever, the on-farm application or the having a farmer on the board, for example, is a missing gap. So they're also looking at, you know, let's go back to nanotech, right? There's nanotech companies building technology to deploy say fertilizer and wrapped up in sort of little nanoparticles in order to like radically reduce the amount of fertilizer needed that's great but what if the cost of development plus the cost for the farmer to purchase and you wrap all that cost up is actually not the most efficient way to solve that problem and we're just using technology to solve problems that could otherwise be solved in another way similarly if you've got a soil health sensor and i came up with this problem in my research is where do you measure and how often do you measure do you take a reading every day do you take a reading every day at 10 points in each field if you're over a thousand acres then that's a full-time job or more and what's the data actually telling you right like that you didn't know already just from looking at the soil so we work with 3LM and one of the Savory Institute partners and they use the ecological outcome verification which is mainly an observational you know there's obviously some looking for earthworms and stuff but it's mainly observing the ecosystem and you can use technology you can use acoustic technology to listen to bird life, for example, or insect life, which uses AI again to analyze the ecosystem health. Have you seen companies doing that? I am super curious about it. some stuff that we've covered on our course, genetic manipulation, right? As soon as you think of regenerative ag and GMO, you think that they're a million miles apart, right? And maybe so they should be. The horrors associated with mixing animal and plant genes together in some kind of Frankenstein experiment. And I'm not a fan of those types of crops, right? That said, if you actually follow the genetics in agriculture, there's some advancements that are a bit less Frankenstein that make use of genetics. And one is a modification technique and one is not modifying the plant. And so the first one's called CRISPR-Cas9 and that's like a highly accurate genetic tool akin to a scalpel and precision surgery where they can literally open up a piece of DNA and insert a tiny strand. And they're saying that when that's done, it's almost emulating, that mutation could have happened by natural selection or random mutation. It's that tiny level of detail that's so small that it could happen by mutation.

SPEAKER_02 25:53

Which suggests that we know how that exactly happens in nature, which I think is an interesting...

SPEAKER_01 26:15

I mean, we're still selecting for, we're still trying to make something do something that it hasn't naturally done. And I'm not fully made my mind up on it yet. And of course, it could be used, I'm sure, for not such good ways, but...

SPEAKER_02 26:27

I think there's a risk in a sense that it assumes that we fully understand the gene part and thus we can make changes

SPEAKER_01 26:34

in it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 26:35

And I think time and time again, we show that we actually don't fully understand the gene part.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Exactly. And

SPEAKER_02 26:39

thus we'll make mistakes and we'll mess up stuff that we don't know.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

Which is why the second one I'm going to mention is less scary, right? This is called marker-assisted selection. So for hundreds of years, we've been doing plant breeding and animal breeding, and now we have marker-assisted selection, which means we can effectively do what we've always done, but we can see the observation we're doing is not just, oh, this plant is bigger or this fruit is juicier, but we're looking at the trait at the dna level and so dna markers allow marker assisted selection so that we can then breed for things like climate adaptation right we might want to breed something that's drought tolerant or and with dna

SPEAKER_02 27:21

markers basically the markers have no influence on the dna or at least we don't know yet no exactly but you can follow them like as fluorescent lights basically following through

SPEAKER_01 27:29

exactly my understanding is it's just a way to select certain seeds or whatever to propagate plants that are faster yeah exactly with a depth of insight that we beyond and you might say well how is this natural right we're new foundations of a radical natural farming well farming naturally for me is about working with nature using natural cycles the ecosystem knowledge of synergies and so on you know mycorrhizal fungi all the synergies that we can work with but most food that we eat is not natural it's been domesticated just like animals were domesticated plants we eat pears are in corn everything grapefruit chestnuts walnuts wheat barley oats rice corn watermelons if you look at the original natural version, you wouldn't eat it. You wouldn't recognize it.

SPEAKER_02 28:13

Apple's the same, probably.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

And, you know, we've taken that too far in some examples. You know, Dan Barber talks in the third plate about his corn that they've bred, a more ancient corn. And of course, it's still nothing like the natural corn, which was a strand of corn, but it's certainly not the massive corn that you get today. So there are examples of us taking that too far, and we should be careful not to... Shout out to the book. Definitely, if you haven't read

SPEAKER_02 28:39

it... a good book it's a few years old now but it's fascinating

SPEAKER_01 28:42

so i think the point there and i'll probably come on to this in a later question is that we shouldn't be against plant breeding right then you should stop eating basically at the moment yeah yeah in such challenging times if we can work with an understanding of science to look at the restorative qualities of plants maybe right look at how mycorrhizal fungal synergies work and have plants that can help restore soil under certain climatic stresses right so we can both mitigate and adapt to climate pressures wherever we're growing food. I've just been doing a paper on Southeast Asia, and that's hugely vulnerable to climate change. And so I thought, oh, maybe the UK is not as bad, right? But actually, in the last decade alone, lots of farms have really struggled with heavy rain, storms, and long dry spells. And various articles have suggested that farmers are just not adapting to these conditions. So we need to look at technology both from the regenerative viewpoint, as well as the kind of macroecological context of climate change, which we're in, whether we like it or not and we whilst we might suggest that regenerative ag can solve that problem it can definitely contribute to carbon sequestration and biodiversity gain and all of the great ecosystem services we also need to adapt right we're not going to do it in time for the average temperature not to change right it's just not realistic so I think all farms everywhere even in the UK will need to think about technology in both of these contexts regenerate the soil and also adapt to

SPEAKER_02 30:08

changing climate climate. And looking at all these technologies, let's say we switch you from being the CTO of New Foundation Farms to being in charge of a one billion dollar investment fund or one billion pound. You got lucky. It's an investment fund, meaning no grants can be super long term. You can come up with the return target you want. But what would you focus on in terms of even maybe not technology? I mean, I'm making an assumption here. What would you focus on as an investment strategy?

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Well, assuming that everything I said about agriculture is true and it's an And it's where I want to spend the next sort of 20, 30 years. Let's keep it focused on agriculture. Probably, let's also keep it focused on the UK. Just, of course, it would be an international fund, right? Probably, but... Whatever you want. I mean, it's up to you. There's probably three or four categories. Obviously, coming from the tech background, it makes sense. I probably would have a portion, maybe 25 to 33% of the fund would be regenerative ag tech. So that would be investing in early stage, mid stage startups, and possibly even a startups into the portfolio that can accelerate the adoption of transition to regenerative or otherwise practices, right? We have to understand that the term regenerative agriculture is very similar to other terms like conservation agriculture, climate smart agriculture, nature-based solutions, ecological-based adaptation. Depending on whether you're coming from a climate perspective or an agricultural perspective, depending on whether you're coming from the agricultural industry or the agricultural research sector, lots of language and actually they have more in common with each other than they do with conventional agriculture, which is I think the most important thing. So startups acquire and invest in startups that are accelerating that space. The other thing is I think an agri-food company builder. I'd build an agri-food company builder which invests in the physical space as well as the investments in the companies to build agri-food companies from the ground up that can use the kind of off-take things like cover crops or things that are the outputs of the farm and produce food designed from the ground up to be regenerative in their supply chain. Rather than being like, oh, I'm going to invent this burger and then I'm going to go and try and source ingredients. It's like, oh, actually let's invent this burger because we know that we can get pea protein from this regenerative farm. We can get regenerative meat from this farm and we can build a regenerative burger, which is like 40% beef, but it's 60% plant protein, which means that our meat eaters are happy the flavour's great, but we're reducing our beef consumption by 60%, right? For me, that will be, well, at least in our beef burgers, that would be a cool idea. So an agri-food company builder that builds, you know, weird and wacky things that I just talked about to improve human health, but use regenerative products, regenerative ag tech VC fund. And the third point would probably be some kind of land acquisition and partnership strategy, not dissimilar to the way New Foundation Farms are looking to acquire land and work with partner farms and support the challenge we have in succession plan for farmers. A lot of farmers in the UK are 58, or I think the average age, or more than a certain percentage, but effectively support the acceleration to regenerative farming through supporting the challenge in succession that we have in the UK, supporting new entrant farmers to come on board and work with some kind of share farming scheme and profit share, or basically a new model that we've alluded to in our New Foundation Farms framework conversations that you'll have had with Mark. and form this kind of loosely coupled network, right, of regenerative farms that share data, share equipment. And effectively, new foundation farms in 15 years, I'm sure will look something quite similar to that third part of the model. And then finally, there's probably a fourth part around transition finance. And I've not fully worked out whether, how necessary and exactly what purpose that serves. And I think it does serve a purpose for certain parts of the market, but in other parts of the market, for whatever reason, social, cultural, policy-based, it might not work. So yeah, agri-food, company builder, region ag tech VC and some kind of land acquisition partnership concept.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

Sounds good. Probably it sounds like you need more than a billion, but that's... Yeah, it wouldn't take long to spend. Which is not, I mean, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. And to end with a few questions I always like to ask, I mean, this is one of them, but if you could change one thing in the food and ag space, so you have a magic wand, you no longer have the fund, unfortunately, but there's one thing you could change also beyond the food and ag space if you want to do... I don't know, nuclear fusion, et cetera. But one thing, tomorrow morning we wake up and Wayne has changed. What would that be?

SPEAKER_01 34:45

It's interesting. I might be allowed to say something around education or policy, but the American ecologist Aldo Leopold, you probably know the book Sand County Almanac. I've heard about it. In the book he says, education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another. And that just seems so true. Reading that, it just seems so true of our kind of humanity human evolution. And I think if I could wave a magic wand, it would be to reverse the damage done with industrial agriculture, or let's say the industrialisation of agriculture, right? We're not blaming farmers here, we're saying the process itself has been damaging. And do that by placing a deep ecological understanding at the centre of all agricultural education, management, policy and investment. Somewhat of a North Star, right? So that we can guide the way we work with nature. And effectively, referring back to that quote, opening the eye that may have been closed by many of us restoring our connection to the earth that said we don't want to hark back to like days gone by where farming used to be amazing because you know we know it wasn't it's just not true in many ways realistically this is a transcendent include approach bringing the best of our ancestral knowledge together with the latest soil science and technological innovations to build the future of farming for the benefits of rural communities human health and the health of our ecosystems so yeah it's basically opening that eye And

SPEAKER_02 36:10

we touched upon a few ones, but maybe you have another one as well. Where are you contrarian in this space? What do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't or most others don't? And this definitely comes from interviews with John Kemp that often asked this question on General Ag on his interviewees. So where are you contrarian in region ag? Maybe the fact that you think tech is essential in many, many won't, but what else?

SPEAKER_01 36:34

I think it's something around, if take religion as an example, example, right? You have monotheism and you have polytheism, right? And you have monocropping in agriculture and you have polycropping in agriculture. And similarly, we have this kind of monophilosophical view sometimes in regenerative ag, which is, this is regenerative ag. And actually having written papers on regenerative ag, nobody agrees on the definition, all the principles, all the practices. What they do agree on is, you know, it's based on the context of the farm you're on. And when we look at the whole process involved in doing the right thing, you draw on many philosophical frameworks, right? From permaculture to agroforestry to bits of conservation agriculture and no-till, which in itself is a practice often associated with glyphosate, right? But of course, we're talking about a different kind of no-till or maybe we occasionally use a shallow plow. I think it's key to not be too stuck in the mud with philosophical frameworks, right? And use the best of each framework and throw away the bits that don't work for you in the context that you're in. Tinkering on the land. Exactly. You know, for every farm and every field, there's a unique challenge and a unique solution. And I don't think, you know, anyone can tell you that you're doing it wrong. The overall health of the planet, the ecosystem, the field, the soil, right, should be the guiding North Star. And hopefully we can use technology, nature, science and farming knowledge to go in that direction. I think it's a perfect place to end. Thank you so much, Wayne. Thanks, Ken.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

So welcome back, Mark, at the end of this technology episode. And I'm very curious about, first of all, your general thoughts on this episode or on the discussion we had with Wayne on AgTech and all the technology pieces, but also how the conversations are going. How are investors responding to this kind of conversations on CRISPR, on market assistant selection and things like that? Is there interest in tech or is it a bit scary for them?

SPEAKER_00 38:36

Hello, Koen again. I get the pleasure of listening to all of these sessions. So the tech side is really interesting. When you listen to Wayne it really emphasizes the point in my mind of the heart of what we're doing about building a scaled disruptor enterprise. And to do that, you need this kind of breadth of expertise sitting, if you like, on the farmer's side of the fence, looking at that world of technology and making hopefully better choices about what we deploy when and how. In terms of response, we are roughly, I guess, halfway through the focus period of the raise, which heads towards a an initial line in the sand at the end of the month. And I would say we're about halfway there now. At least that's the advice I'm given.

SPEAKER_02 39:19

We're talking June 2021, just for everybody listening in a year or so. This is where we're at and let's see in a month. But yeah, you're saying you're about halfway there.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

So we think, you know, the advice I'm given is that we're about halfway there in terms of the raise of 20 million pounds. And what's fascinating is I would say roughly nine out of 10 people that we reach out to take the call, which is perhaps not necessarily a And Wayne, do you see

SPEAKER_02 39:52

that bringing the scale we're bringing here, you're bringing here with new foundation farms, does that change the discussion on technology in a sense that for many farmers, we were discussing in the pre-interview as well, technology is something obviously essential, but also massive investments and massive potential mistakes. Like what do you see there in terms of the interest in this sector? space. I mean, everything is possible. You can buy the biggest drones. I remember a farmer buying one of the first drones and spending 15,000 euros. That's a lot of money for a lot of data. And then what do you do with it? So what do you see that, what's different in this case, a new foundation farm?

SPEAKER_01 40:26

Well, I think initially the scale shouldn't have any effect, right? Like If you're going to have some horticultural controlled environment agriculture, some sort of greenhouses, you might look at what's there and maybe adopt some small scale irrigation to support the humans that are doing the work. Maybe it's as simple as an on-off time system and then you might evolve to time system plus sensors so each section of the greenhouse gets watered to the appropriate amount. You might have controlled lighting. These things don't all need to be done at the same time. You can use a thousand I've got one in my cupboard, DJI Mavic Pro, and we can stick that on drone deploy and we can look at our land. We can then push the data into some software online and we can get all sorts of great things around topography. And we can layer that onto Google Maps, which is free. So Google Earth. So there's nobody saying go out and spend a million quid on tech, right? Now, the point is, as you see efficiencies and as you grow, you can replicate those efficiencies across different farms. You can share software platforms. you can share machinery at a bioregional level you can send someone from the farm around to other farms with that equipment and again share the access so I'd say it's not about taking big huge risky leaps it's about iterative observation based iterative design and expansion of this right so I'm actually quite against spending half a million quid on the latest combine harvester because it has yield mapping built into it you know built into a system maybe rent one, see how it works. But yeah, I think there's a risk in taking too bold a step. But as Mark said, there's a huge breadth of solutions and it's picking the right solution at the right time based on the context and what problem we're trying to solve, right? Maybe there is no problem. So don't throw some tech at it. Let's not create problems that need solving. And then do

SPEAKER_02 42:22

you see that with investors? Like what's their knowledge? I mean, really depending, obviously, Mark, but on the ag tech side, are they excited? Are they interested? Are they not asking any questions on it? Are they just assuming we go back to the old days of farming like we discussed with Wayne that we're not really there but are they interested in that high-tech region part basically?

SPEAKER_00 42:41

There's a real mix in level of knowledge and understanding. We bump into investors in the space who are predominantly ag-tech investors and their whole DNA is to try and understand which magic technology wand is going to become the next unicorn and transform the world and they'll ride the back of that to financial nirvana. That's on the one extreme. On the other end, you get people who are just deeply, deeply focused on the question of how do we change the agri-food system so that it's ecologically sound and have a very limited knowledge of the detail of any of the technology that can support and enable that, and are more focused on just the general sort of ethos of a more regenerative approach to farming. So there's no neat answer to it. But from our point of view, it's really clear that it's critical to be able to accelerate the transition into do it cleverly and well. And I was thinking, as you were talking, you know, most big companies have a CTO for a reason, not because they're the person who's brilliant at writing the code, but because they're the people who do the job of interpreting what technology is best for the application. And if you sit there and just rely on the supplier to persuade you what's good, you kind of end up in the mess that we're in in industrial agriculture today, which is the suppliers control the knowledge and tell us what to do, and the outcome is we get the system that we now have. And so for us, it's why it's really important to have this knowledge in-house.

SPEAKER_02 44:07

So every farmer needs to have at least part-time a good CTO that chooses, or it should be the farmer, or it should be shared, or it should be, you need to be able to make those choices.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

Yeah, or be in, that's part of the logic that we see in collaboration is that not every farm is going to be able to have a CTO, but our philosophy, make what we know open source, share the knowledge, and hopefully other people can piggyback on the back of kind of insights that we are developing and will develop in the future.

SPEAKER_02 44:37

I think it's a perfect way to end this conversation. Thank you both so much for the time and obviously for the plan to checking in. 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 membership community to help grow this platform and allow me to take it further you can find all the details on gumroad.com slash investing region egg or in the description below thank you so much and see you at the next podcast