Soil Builders, for robots not all weeds are created egual

A check in with Brent Kessel, investor in the New African Farmers bond, plus a deep dive with Ben Scott-Robinson of the Small Robot Company into the role of small robots in regenerative agriculture and why not all weeds are created equal.
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In the Soil Builders series we welcome back previous friends of the podcast to understand their progress and we discover new companies, startups, farmers, investors engaged in building soil all over the world.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:01

Welcome to Soil Builders, a series where we follow who is building soils at scale. This is an experiment, so please share any feedback. Why this show Soil Builders? I believe that most change in regenerative agriculture and food will come from and is coming from entrepreneurs building ways to regenerate soil at scale. I call these Soil Builders. Soil Builders are entrepreneurial farmers, ag tech companies, investment funds, food startups, new seed cooperatives, teams within food companies, robot startups, investment vehicles, etc, etc, etc. All regenerating soil beyond their own farm gate and with more than their own money. This series allows the community of the podcast, which is you full of funders investors and fellow soil builders to follow their progress their challenges and their breakthroughs i hope you enjoy it and please reach out with any comments feedback and ideas Welcome to Soil Builders, a series where we follow who's building soils at scale. Today we're checking in with an investor in the New African Farmers Bond Emiliano has raised in Ghana, which we featured a few months ago. And we go deep into the role of small robots in regenerative agriculture and why not all weeds are created equal. But first, impact investor Brent Kessel on why he invested in the New African Farmers Bond. Hi, Brent. Thank you so much for agreeing on sharing your story. Could you please briefly introduce yourself and what brought you to impact investing?

SPEAKER_01: 1:23

My name is Brent Kessel. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Abacus Wealth Partners, which is an impact investment advisory and financial planning firm in the U.S., We have clients all over the country and a few in Europe. What brought me to impact investing is I'd say originally growing up in apartheid South Africa and seeing the inequity of that systemic racism. And then, you know, more recently, well, when I was an adult after graduating from college, I really wanted to combine heart and purpose and meaning with finance and impact investing as a term anyway didn't exist back then. But as I initially started with negative screening in public securities and then moved on to microfinance investing and other kinds of impact investing starting in the 90s, really, I really I could help myself and help clients have meaning and purpose and earn appropriate financial returns, oftentimes better than the alternatives.

SPEAKER_02: 2:29

How did you meet Emiliano and how did you get in touch with Wark?

SPEAKER_01: 2:32

I met Emiliano originally, oh boy, I want to say it was like 2015. 15, maybe 14, somewhere back then, we were introduced by a mutual friend, Christiano Cardenaire, who I had met in my Tibetan Buddhist meditation travels. I actually met him in Kathmandu, Nepal, where we were both on a pilgrimage together. And I loved Christian. My family loved Christian. And we had actually traveled the world, my family, in 2013 and stayed with Christian in Argentina. Anyway, he's an impact investor and a philanthropist and we just really hit it off on lots of levels. And so when Emiliano was making a trip through the States a year or two later, he said, you guys have to sit down with each other. And we did and really did connect very well.

SPEAKER_02: 3:20

What attracted you as an investor and made you decide to invest? I

SPEAKER_01: 3:24

really believed and still believe in Emiliano and Jorge's passion and vision and sincerity for helping the West African subsistence level farmers help themselves to what originally attracted me to impact investing 20 years ago. And the fact that they were there so soon after the Civil War that had devastated Sierra Leone and had just started to build, walk up, and then Ebola hit and everything shut down and they had to leave. In my mind, that would have been an easy time to just say, look, we gave it a few years. We gave it a really good shot. Let's go back to our higher paying jobs and our families and our country of birth. But they didn't. They came back and continued trying to help these farmers and still to this day. are continuing. And I think they're just incredibly bright. It's rare that you find such a great combination of intelligence and worldly experience along with heart, along with this incredible empathy and compassion to solve one of the world's most pressing problems. So that's what attracted me and made me want to invest in work. And I was born in Africa myself, so I have this heart connection to the continent, hung Where do you see the biggest risk? I'd say the biggest risk are things outside of the company's control. So political risk is one. It's a different kind of legal system and property rights system. I think they're managing that very well in terms of their relationships with communities and chiefs and things like that. But, you know, that's a it's a part of the world where another civil war could break out or you could have a large foreign power come in and put a lot of capital to work or disrupt things in some kind of way. So I'd say systemic risks are the biggest ones. And I don't see risk with management or Emiliano Jorge's capabilities, obviously, in regenerative ag, there's always risks around whether and which seeds are going to take or not take and work out. You know, at the more kind of unit economics level, I think there's some risk around repayment. And because so much of the foreign money that's come in has been philanthropic money or development aid, I sometimes wonder if this really does well and the farmers are feeding themselves and are able to make money from the excess crops. Would they perhaps some of them renege on their repayments to work for the inputs that they've been provided and the training they've been provided and sort of take the stance that this is really like aid and why should I pay it back to you?

SPEAKER_02: 6:40

Up next, Ben Scott Robinson of the Small Robot Company. I'm always very, very interested in technology which makes farmers more profitable and regenerative at the same time. So I was very happy to check in with Ben. Hi Ben, welcome to the show. Could you briefly introduce yourself and what brings you to work on soil?

SPEAKER_00: 6:58

What brings me to work on the soil? Well, I've been working in digital tech since 1997 when the UK government very kindly paid for me to do a six-week course in how to build internet pages after I had been unemployed for about a year after university. And then in 2000, I'd progressed to working for a Boston-based digital agency called Digitas. And And they kindly sent me on a course to MIT to understand what was then called human-computer interaction. And that just caused me to catch the bug. I just got into the idea of user-centered design and the importance of designing and developing digital products and services, starting from the needs of people rather than starting from the technology. And because of that, I was lucky enough to work in some really groundbreaking places. Hutchinson Telecom in 2001 which became three, to design the first mobile on-phone app store, the first mobile mapping applications, the first mobile music applications, all sorts of amazing stuff which had only really been made possible by the speed of 3G telecoms. I started an avatar-based messaging startup called TagText, which predated personalized messaging like Instagram, was completely designed around the needs of tweaking and what they wanted to do with their phones. And that allowed us to partner with people like Sony and Cartoon Network and a number of youth fashion brands. We were also invited to be a trial app on the iPhone 2, which dates it. My agency that I started a little bit later called We Love Mobile built some of the very first interactive multiplayer augmented reality games. And we were lucky enough to be able to build them for clients like McDonald's and Coke and Peugeot and all sorts of local large brands and companies who wanted to try this, and they were really successful. We had tens of thousands of users. Certainly, it was most successful in the Nordics, which at the time and up until maybe about 2011, 2012, were really leading the world on the mobile charge. And all that predated Pokemon by about eight years. And so the success of my products or my clients' products has always been driven by not adopting the latest technologies, but by understanding how those technologies best fit into people's lives. And it's something that technologists and entrepreneurs tend to forget in the excitement around this sort of new wave of technology that behind it, there is a sophisticated need that somebody needs to answer before you can start building something to make their lives better. So when I was introduced to the problems in farming and the potential methods and technologies that could possibly resolve those problems, it really struck me that one Once again, the answers existed, or at least the nascent sort of structure for those answers existed. You know, there are emerging technologies around robotics and AI that could carry out precision crop analysis and application. And there were a number of universities that were exploring this. And there was also a number of farmers and agronomists and growing networks that realized on the other end of the scale that reintroducing more holistic practices, practices that had maybe been abandoned in the last 50 or 60 years would allow soils and ecosystems to regenerate while being part of a farming process. And by aligning those soils and ecosystems and listening to them, you could build a sustainable farming system. But they are both a huge challenge to implement in a cost-effective way. The technology is expensive, it's unreliable, and it's difficult to get value out of it, certainly to start with. Farmers have fearful of this technology breaking down or becoming obsolete. And certainly for a long time, there wasn't the early stage support to go through the pain of making that technology reliable and safe. And then at the other end of the spectrum, regenerative approaches require a very deep understanding, not just of the complex systems that allow regeneration to happen, but how they apply to your specific farm. And they also take a long time to get right. And it takes a while before you know if you're even on the right path. So while there are an increasing number of farmers who are going down that route and all power to them, ultimately, that will always be limited. So what was needed really is a system that could sort of bring those together, that could simplify the process of implementing soil saving, chemical removing, and sustainable farming practices in a way that removed the risk for farmers. So that's how we came up with the concept of farming as a service, as a model, and per plant farming as a concept and started to put it into action.

SPEAKER_02: 12:08

What is the Small Robot Company?

SPEAKER_00: 12:10

Well, Small Robot Company is the brainchild of myself and Sam, who is a fourth generation arable farmer. And it was formed as a result of six months worth of extensive interviews with farmers looking to improve the way they grew arable crops. And those interviews allowed us to develop a model, a system that we call farming as a service, and do that through an integrated platform of robots, AI, and and software. So we've been going for nearly four years now and we've delivered the first part of our service, the per plant monitoring of wheat plants and weeds since October last year. We've got a team of about 42 engineers, roboticists, scientists who are building our service, the robots, the AIs and the software and who are also running the service part, so getting the robots out to the field and making sure they do what they need to do. We have 35 farmers who prepare for our service in advance. They include the UK supermarket Waitrose and the UK's largest landowner, the National Trust, and a further 160 who have signed letters of intent. On top of that, we have 600 farmers who've invested in us through three crowdfunding rounds.

SPEAKER_02: 13:27

How is your approach with integrating robots into regenerative agriculture different from other approaches? And what do you mean by per-plant farming?

SPEAKER_00: 13:34

So the first generation of agricultural robotics is driven by a need to simply automate existing tasks. And there are significant financial gains made by reducing labor in higher value crops. This, however, doesn't really answer those existential problems the world's staple crops. So what we wanted to develop was something that is transformative, a real sort of breakthrough in using this technology in a new way. And we call that per-plant farming. So this is a radical approach, and it's focused on using lightweight, autonomous vehicles to provide a near real-time view of each crop plant as it grows through the season, and then using this view to deliver precise timely interventions to make sure that that plant reaches its full potential and by doing this we can strip out all the inefficiencies and the vast overuse of herbicides and pesticides and fungicides and fertilizer and because we don't disturb or compact the soil we allow the ecosystem of a field to do what it does best which is fix itself and so So this radical but simple vision ultimately can increase yields, it can increase nutrient levels within the food, it can reduce the cost of production, and it can also support the regeneration of soils and sequester carbon dioxide. And with this combined with an integrated agronomic system based on the data from a specific farm, it can can allow for regenerative farming to be applied at

SPEAKER_02: 15:31

scale. So conventional

SPEAKER_00: 15:39

farming has a very specific view of weeds. In essence, anything that is not a crop plant is a weed. And the approach to weed control has always been one of complete systematic destruction of anything in the field that is not a crop plant. And even Even other robotic systems out there are using either tillage to take out non-crop plants, which obviously also damages the soil structures and releases carbon dioxide, or they use the precision spraying of glyphosate or similar herbicides. Ultimately, this is an incremental improvement on what we had before, but it's not really understanding the ecosystem system of a field in its entirety. It's still taking this very old-school farming approach to things. Now, in the UK, arable fields, there are around about 23 weeds that commonly occur. Ten of those are nasty, things like black grass and cleavers and brome, which out-compete crop plants that spread rapidly and are becoming increasingly resistant to herbicides. So, for example, black grass on its own in the next five years is looking to be a problem that removes a quarter of the wheat production from the UK a billion pound problem so it's massive Interestingly, four of those sort of bad weeds are actually volunteers from the previous year's crop. So that's where that's barley or all seed rape, and they need to be controlled as a weed for this year. Three, things like chickweed and fat hen are only really a problem if they're allowed to get too competitive. If you allow too many plants per square meter to grow, if they get too dense, or also if they get too close to the crop plants. in that 23 are either little threat like dead nettles or field pansies or like clovers are actually beneficial to the soil and the ecosystem and leaving all of those nine in field actually has the advantage of creating a diverse ecosystem that supports the soil matrix and pollinators and simply by being there they create an ecosystem that is more attuned to a meadow than a monoculture. So our target is to use our per-plant view to recognize the different species of weeds as they emerge and take out the bad ones completely, thin out the ones that are neutral, and leave the beneficial ones alone. Now, to do this, we've developed a weeding system that uses electricity. We work with a company called RootWave, who've developed this electric weeding probe and automated it. so that we can aim it at the target weeds that we have identified in field. And then we can use these electric probes to literally blow out the plant. So it systematically kills the plant, taking out the roots and the leaves, with no real damage to the surrounding plants or soil. So that means at a stroke, we can convert this wheat field, we can convert this green desert monoculture into a vibrant, diverse and self-regenerating ecosystem that also happens to support the crop.

SPEAKER_02: 19:15

What has been your progress so far as we're speaking at the

SPEAKER_00: 19:26

of our robot types. The TOM robot, the monitoring robot, is at a commercial specification. So we've spent the last four years working through a number of different iterations, making each one lighter and more reliable and smarter and more capable of working at a commercial pace. So this TOM, for example, is quarter the weight of a NIO robot and has an operating width of six meters. It puts a third of the amount of pressure on the ground as your foot and a a tenth of a tractor. Dick, the non-chemical weeding robot is third generation prototype. So we have spent three years understanding the most effective way to deliver non-chemical weeding as a service and how to create a modular system that allows this to be delivered. As for Wilma, it's commercially deployed and in use. It's capable of handling terabytes of data and converting it into a geospatial information and then allowing us to create a per plant map of the field. We can differentiate between the crop plant and the broadleaf weeds at emergence. We can also identify grass weeds at emergence that are indistinguishable from wheat visually by using specific light spectra and AI techniques. We can also convert the weed locations into a route for the dick robot and a targeting regime for the electric weeding. So the rest of the season will be spent evolving our AIs for greater subtlety and picking up other information around the crop plant, pests, soils, and working on other elements of the robotic parts of the cells.

SPEAKER_02: 21:06

Where would you like to stand in 12 months? What will 2021 bring you?

SPEAKER_00: 21:10

So 2021 is a big year for us, as well as working through getting Tom ready for manufacture. We will also be developing and evolving the commercial specification DIC robot and the electric weeding capability so that we can deliver our first full weeding service. There's lots of subtleties within that and lots of other part that we aim to be included in the platform and the service, but we have to be a little quiet about those for the moment. But with any fast-moving hardware startup, we have a funding round that we are starting now with an aim to close in the next few months, probably June or July. And that money will get us to having a complete per-plant service for key arable crops in Europe and allow us to be collecting the data for a rollout in North America and Brazil.

SPEAKER_02: 22:11

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