hello everyone we're going to spend the next 45 minutes or so exploring one of the biggest issues impacting our Collective future I think you may end up pretty amazed at what you're about to hear like almost all animals much of our time on this planet has been spent trying to figure out how to eat enough food to survive and thrive while avoiding becoming food elves for most of the first 300,000 years of our existence as Homo sapiens we lived as hunter gatherers hunting food Gathering food then we discovered a different way agriculture just grow it ourselves that discovery of course changed everything for better and also perhaps For Worse arguably agricultural land now is taking over huge sway of our planet endangering our forests and contributing massively to climate change but today there are a number of truly remarkable changes that just could possibly transform the way that we produce our food and I have with me someone who's been pioneering one of the most exciting of those changes David freedberg is a highly successful entrepreneur and investor with a strong strong scientific background on the popular Allin podcast which he co-hosts he's known as the Sultan of Science and for several years he's been running a funding partnership called the production board that has pumped large sums of money into startups that can increase the resilience of our planet one of those startups got him so excited at his potential to transform agriculture that he's now focusing most of his time on that as we'll here so David welcome Chris thanks for having me good to see you so why don't we start with this why why don't you give us like a worldwind tour of just the big picture of agriculture in Humanity's past well I mean I would argue that agriculture is the first human technology um you know the origins of humans as you pointed out as hunter gatherers is we would eat and have available have food available to US based on what the Earth gave us what was found lying on the ground what was growing where nomadic tribes found themselves and at some point in human history humans made the observation that they could put seed in the ground and grow a plant so we could start to engineer the Earth around us to make things that we could then consume to increase our ability to thrive and populations began to swell and as farming kind of grew and became a better understood system a better understood technology more investment was made in improving the produ productivity of that technology improving the output and new systems started to support agriculture like fertilizer production or the tractor or the plow and eventually in this modern era the understanding of the genetic sequences that make up the seeds that we're putting in the ground to help guide and direct our ability to do things like plant breeding and to make decisions about which crops to you know which plants we want to kind of continue to cultivate and so agriculture went from being you know something that humans didn't really grasp to being this tool that allowed our populations globally to swell without making enough calories we would not have been able to survive and grow our populations to this tool that started to become uh call it a critical uh factor in some of the issues we're facing with carbon being put into the atmosphere and now increased investment in productivity at all levels of Agriculture that are really transforming how we have a relationship with planet Earth as a species I mean for most of History the large majority of humans that's this is basically what they did right we we tried to grow enough food one way or another to survive that was what there were people in power who didn't have to do that and who uh lived off the The Bounty of that but this is what most humans did and in fact even today in many parts of the world half or more of the population is basically doing some form of small holder agriculture that's exactly right and in the United States we were largely an agrarian society if you go back 150 160 years 60% plus of the US population worked in agriculture they worked the Farms today less than 1% do and so that has freed up a large percentage of society to invest their time in the development of other Industries and other systems of economic uh Prosperity which we've realized in this country through the Industrial Revolution and that was unlocked because of techn IES that arose in agriculture for example the tractor the tractor gave one man the ability to do what it took 50 men or women to do prior to that um and it really unlocked this kind of productivity so so much of Agriculture can be measured in this productivity equation which is how much input and how much output do we get and it's really transformed society as we've made these technological leaps in agriculture and there's almost always been this this dance of Agriculture has allowed us to thrive and to grow population therefore but then that has often brought with it risk of catastrophe um there were moments in the middle of the last century where it looked certain that hundreds of millions of people would die from starvation um because we had overpopulated and would not be able to feed that growing number and then you had uh Norman bog and others founding the Green Revolution which which at least for a while um seem to solve that that problem I mean I think a lot of people today don't worry or think about agriculture at all it's it's like that is that is a thing that used to be what we were all about but we've kind of solved it we're growing food it's all okay my supermarkets full why isn't business as usual okay well yeah I mean I'll just double down on the point you made in the late 19th century most of the fertilizer that fertilized the farms in Europe and fertilizer we discovered was this critical input to f if you put fertilizer on the ground which is nitrogen phosphorus and potassium the plants can grow bigger faster healthier so we started applying fertilizer at some point in the history of Agriculture and we sourced all this fertilizer from um this kind of region in South America called atakama the atakama deserts and the guano Fields off of the coastline and that region started to run dry and there were all these clipper ships it was the most valuable real estate on Earth was these like guano Fields off the Coastline of Chile um and when the guano Fields started to run die there was a a theorized crisis brewing in Europe that we were going to run out of food and the whole world was going to die the whole of Europe was going to uh end up malnourished and this incredible Discovery invention was made called the hbos process and the hbos process allowed humans to make fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen nitrogen makes up 70% of the air around us they figured out how to compress the air to 200 times atmospheric pressure run it over an iron Catalyst with a spark of electricity and Boom Out precipitated ammonia which we then use as fertilizer and that is the technology we use today to fertilize Farms all over the world and that that crisis was resolved and similarly to your point in the mid- 20th century population was exceeding food production particularly in South Asia and Norman Vlog came along and used sophisticated techniques and plant breeding to solve that crisis so the industrialization of Agriculture has largely supported these crises and resolved these crises for Humanity but the industrialization of Agriculture has also driven us into a higher carbon footprint a higher energy footprint a higher land footprint biodiversity declines when we move into the Amazon take away acres and try to plant more Farmland so there's a lot of adverse consequences to the kind of growing industrialization of a particularly without enough gains in productivity and so productivity gains started to stall out and are still stalling out a bit we have a very hard time keeping up with the economic demands of food remember today on planet Earth there's about 800 million people worldwide that still live on less than 1,200 calories a day they are technically deemed malnourished by the UN by the FAO and so the FAO tracks these stats we got it down to five or 600 now it's Spike back up since covid um and so there's still a significant demand to increase production populations are continuing to grow particularly in regions where people are not getting enough calories today like South Asia and Africa and so by the year 2050 the UN estimates will need to increase Global food production by North the 50% so the way we're doing that is we're eating into the Amazon we're taking up more land that otherwise has these kind of diverse ecosystems and we're turning them into these monocultural kind of agricultural systems that's not a bad the monocultural concept is not a bad one in the sense that if we can be very productive with the land we don't need to go in and destroy the biodiversity that exists so the big push in agriculture needs to be around how do we increase productivity how do we create a technology that unlocks the ability to not have to put more in or take more land and get more out um and that's the big driving equation yeah when you look at the numbers it really does get scary I mean already today I think nearly half of habitable land which includes that you know forests and and so it's basically everything except like glaciers and deserts is devoted to agriculture already yeah so if we need a 50% food increase that's just really wiping out so much of what is precious to us and that we don't want to wipe out and spell out a bit more clearly that the connection to climate I've I've heard it claimed and what the numbers seem to suggest is that when you look at the overall emissions issue of you know too much carbon being emitted that agriculture is is said to be you know 25 to 30% of that problem how how is that how is it contributing to emissions well I mean to your point the whole of planet Earth is about a 100 billion Acres so I'll speak in acres for a minute 70 billion of those acres is the oceans okay and about 30 billion is the land and of that 30 billion that is the land about 15 billion as you point out is used for either growing crops or growing animals about 12 Acres roughly for growing animals about 3 billion for growing crops and so much of that 12 billion is not as carbon intensive as the small amount of the crop land that we use to grow crops for industrialized animal agriculture which we then feed to animals and to grow those crops we do use a lot of carbon to make the fertilizer that gets applied to those crops to then get fed to the animals so we're taking a large number of calories and reducing it to a small number of consumable car calories in the form of animals and the calories that we're growing takes a lot of carbon to make and it's not well offset today although that is getting much better actually because if you can get the plants to grow bigger faster healthier they suck up more carbon from the atmosphere than it takes to make the fertilizer that is used to grow them that's the big unlock in the equation um does that make sense that makes sense and that this ties into why people so many people care a lot about people eating less meat um if if we got most of our calories from Plants instead of animals you would need far the agricultural footprint overall could shrink because you need to grow a lot more calories in plant form to turn into animals essentially and then there are other issues like like the methane emissions from cows that's a hot button topic as soon as I say it the ranchers come after me like that's it but it is true that growing cows uh for human consumption is a disturbing amount of impact on the carbon footprint of human agriculture both because of all the land we have to use to grow all of the feed that we give to the cows plus because of the methane emissions of the cows and a lot of people will dismiss it and joke about it oh cars cows farting are causing climate change y yada but the truth is like the carbon footprint of growing cows is pretty significant it's obviously not the focus of our conversation here today but I'm I'm a lifelong vegetarian so it's also something I kind of um subscribe to as being an important step for Humanity going forward is that we move off of industrialized animal agriculture I think it's really important both from a footprint perspective but I also personally believe from an ethical perspective so there's many different pieces to this this puzzle um but what's what's clear is that um if if we need 50% more food than we have now it's it's pretty concerning if if that just means agriculture as we're currently doing it it's going to be devastating for the rest of the planet and now so there have been speakers who've come to Ted who've argued that you know this crisis is is absolutely extreme and that we have to act pretty radically um George Momo gave a TED Talk a couple years ago where he he said that and he almost apologized for saying it um but he said that actually the worst thing that humans have done to the planet is farming he's not anti farers he loves Farmers but um but farming as it's currently done has had the these unintended consequences and he he thinks he's argued that we need to have a massive move away from farming as it's traditionally been done to much more productive farming done inside industrial scale facilities um that that seems like a a stretch to a lot of people talk about some of the before you talk about your own amazing new company just talk about some of the other things that are happening right now that give you hope like talk for example about Precision agriculture what that is and and what that is allowing I'm very optimistic about what's going on and I'll walk through the four categories as I view them of technology and Agriculture and then I'll leave the one that's related to my business till the end but the first is this digital system right so my company that I started before is called The Climate Corporation making software for Farmers helping Farmers make better decisions on the farm that will optimize outcomes relative to inputs and so that company today that software is used on over 200 million Acres globally um there's iPads that sit in tractors and then Harvesters uh for row crop farmers in the US and Europe and Africa that help and Brazil that um tracks every seed that's puts in put in the ground How deep the seed is how far the seeds are spaced from one another and then we get all this data at the end of the year about what the yield was we see the type of soil the terrain the elevation the topography we know exactly how much rainfall fell what the temperatures were at every um day during the growing season all of that feeds a large simulation model that allows us to understand what variables Drive what outcomes on the farm and underlying that model we can then make predictions about what's going to happen in the future and make recommendations to Farmers back on what seed to plant wear what's the right amount of fertilizer a lot of farmers for example overly nitrogen fertilizer 30 % of it volatilizes into the atmosphere or runs off into the Gulf of Mexico and the US and creates this big hypoxic zone for fish so if we can be more precise about when we apply nitrogen fertilizer exactly how much you need don't overly put the right amount down to maximize yield and you'll save money you'll make more profit so Precision agriculture is the digitization of all the variables of farming and then the simulation models being used to make recommendations to Farmers to optimize their decisions one of the fundamental problems about farming is that it depends on things that are varying hugely every year like the weather for example weather that's right and and in addition to the very variability of weather year by year the the nature of your own soil may change because you've had a cycle of crops and and so forth and and for uh other reasons and so it's therefore it's impossible to in general give a general answer to the question how to farm it's it varies usually where you are and what the what the climate is and what the year is etc etc so so Precision agriculture is an attempt to to give people the actual data they need here and now to make the right decisions personalized recommendations So based on the data from your farm based on the understanding of the genetics of the seed and the way that water flows on the soil and all these other factors that go in here's the specific recommendation for you about what to do as a farmer on your particular farm that allows the farmer to make more money and it allows you know a higher output per in unit of input typically how much higher output do you think precis agriculture is yeah so I think that there's um a because what we care about as a species is aggregate output aggregate input um the farmer cares about profit per year right how much am I getting out how much can I sell and how much did I have to invest to make that and you know there is easily 30 to 50% um Improvement uh up to 100% Improvement and more depending on the crop in the region and the farmer and his practices in the profitability um significant up upside in in productivity one example is in row crop agriculture you have many choices of what seed to buy and a lot of farmers will buy the seed that their seed salesman tells them to buy but they don't really have a good sense of what seed will work best on my farm so that's a good example of the data can inform them on what seed to buy for their particular farm that would work best in their soil and their climate and their region for this particular weather year for example so there's a lot of different variables that can increase the productivity of farming by you know dozens of percentage points which is a big driver for adoption so digital is is one kind of area of technology that there's a lot going on there and I presume by the way AI is is adding to the potential here it is I mean you know um I don't like the generalizations of like AI right so um we've been you know we've been using statistical modeling to build to make recommendations in farming for a while and I'm I'm not sure that having a a chat interface changes that equation much or and I'm not sure that like you know there is like a back and forth of dialogue that that that I was I wasn't suggesting that a deeper database of data so that you can explore a deeper set of possibilities yeah a lot of people kind of conflate a lot of these terms but exactly yeah so more data uh improves the outputs improves the recommendations and that's hugely valuable so that's that's a continual kind of improvement um for sure um the other the other area that's super interesting in agriculture is Biologicals so historically we've made a lot of synthetic chemicals meaning man-made chemicals that we apply to Farms to uh to fertilize the Farms that's number one and then to protect the Farms that's number two that's called crop protection within crop protection there's three categories herbicide insecticide and fungicide killing weeds killing insects and killing fungus those are three big issues that destroy farms and so farmers have fought since the beginning of Agriculture to get rid of those things so we can grow the things we want to grow without the animals without the insects eating them without the fungus eating them and without the weeds taking over so within that industry there's a ton of synthetic chemistry a lot of chemicals many of which have you know proven to be not good for the planet not good for human health there's been a lot of um agricultural chemicals that have been banned uh we've got a long history in agriculture and our relationship with synthetic chemistry and what it's done uh to human health and to the planet and that's because a lot of these synthetic chemicals are permanent in the environment and we don't understand the offt target effects until many years later there's an effort underway and a lot of companies and a lot of success to use biological little microbes microbial organisms that are living organisms that can actually for example replace fertilizer by fixing nitrogen out of the atmosphere and attaching it to the roots of the crops so you can use up to 30% less fertilizer and you don't need to use the fertilizer because the little bug will suck the nitrogen out of the atmosphere and replace the fertilizer um and then in the herbicide Fungicide and seide world there's all these microbes and microbial proteins so these are little proteins made by the microbes that can be used in place of synthetic chemistry and so that whole world of products is called Biologicals and it is taking off it is really replacing a lot of synthetic chemistry in agriculture which makes the footprint the environmental footprint of Agriculture smaller because we're not using all this carbon to make the synthetic chemistry and we don't have all this permanent toxicity in the environment and impact to human health and so this is a burgeoning um industry Biologicals many all the big a input companies are investing in it all of them have departments in this um and it's it's we're finding amazing proteins because of DNA sequencing and Gene editing and all these other tools that humans have developed that allow us to make proteins and make microorganisms that can replace all of that traditional stuff so super powerful big shift so that's the second big category I'd highlight is a big one in agriculture that's underway and then the third one is is uh autonomous equipment so um this is to your question about it's sort of a relationship with the digital stuff but there's a lot of camera systems and vision systems going on Farm Equipment now the farm equipment drives itself through the field it looks at the field it's zaps weeds a Precision placement of stuff using cameras so we're not just kind of blindly doing stuff in the field uh but we actually put intelligence at the edge of Agriculture the edge of the network and so you know a couple of little camera based systems can replace um manual harvesting for example of strawberries and so the cost of strawberry production goes down by 20% that's a huge savings to Consumers and it makes strawberries more available so that's just one little example but like autonomous uh and Machine Vision based agriculture equipment is also this amazing kind of burgeoning industry that's happening right now and then the fourth genetics and some people are combining them we had a great Ted Talk this year from a guy called hiroi Koga his his um company o Oishi um makes strawberries in indoor facilities but using Precision using all this data um and you know mechanized um harvesting at exactly the right moment but but um yeah by doing lots of experimentation and so forth they they figured out how to automate growing of strawberries that are actually incredibly delicious and and it was it was it's a very compelling and exciting like I think the question in a lot of people's mind certainly in my mind is can that break out of Niche you know like there's lots of things that you can do effectively at the niche level but then can you can you scale them to actually impact the planet and uh I think that's that's the big question a lot of companies are asking let me just zoom back for a second humans get about 60% of our calories from carbohydrates so there's a couple of crops that make the starches that make up our carbohydrates rice wheat potatoes some corn that's kind of it right those are the major calorie sources for humans so we we have about a billion five 1.5 billion Acres dedicated to Growing those crops and so those are big fields we get free solar energy from the Sun to grow those crops we get free water for most of those Acres from the sky so um you know the the natural ecosystems of Earth fuel our ability to grow 60% plus of the calories then we get about call it 20% of our calories from fats and we get about 10% of our calories from proteins which again we're using a chunk of Farmland to grow food that we feed to animals to get the proteins and then we get about 10% of our calories from everything else which is the vegetables and stuff and so a lot of these markets where there's been a lot of investment they're high value markets but they're really luxury markets wealthy consumers wealthy people around the world can buy strawberries the vast majority of the world's population can afford strawberries and it doesn't solve a calorie problem and I'm not dismissing that company I think strawberries Inc strawberries a $25 billion year market so not to be it's a great Market um and it's a great uh there there's a lot of consumers that care deeply about it but in terms of like impact on the carbon footprint and calories we've got to think about the major crops where most of our calories most of our energy most of our resources are going in uh to have these kind of big unlocks for Humanity and I I think I heard in that uh argument there a bit of a push back on the idea that we couldn't should do all of this indoors and Industrial facilities because you're you're turning down there a lot of the free Bounty of Mother Nature the the the solar radiation you know the sun the sun the rain even though it's unpredictable it is so vast that you would need unbelievable gains and efficiency or so you know to to justify letting go of all of that free Bounty yeah there are high value crops that you can make an econ IC argument you could make money growing indoors because consumers will pay more you can make enough of it but I mean just to give you a sense you're probably spending over a million dollars per acre equivalent to create an indoor farming setup like let me just say that again so you have an acre of land right and we're farming three billion of them you got to go spend a million dollars per acre to get the same amount of output and and sure maybe that number comes down by 10x and we get it to 100,000 but then you've got to put energy into it where you going to generate that energy from you got to put water into it how you going to get that water so you know the um the the economic and the unit efficiencies don't quite solve our calorie problem and they don't necessarily solve our big environmental footprint problem but they certainly can create great businesses in other in some of the markets and the other piece I just took away from that notion if if 1 and a half billion Acres accounts for most of the calories that we need that is a small fraction of the total Farmland we have right now again this goes back to the plants versus meat uh equation but it but you could get 50% more calories you'll always come back to the animal agriculture problem yeah right you yes right but even that but but I think you want to argue that even that one and a half billion Acres that are just for those plant those basic crops that give us most of our carbohydrates that we could see significant yield increases on those if we if we did all that we could do talk about the genetic story so the the way humans have improved the genetics in Plants going back tens of thousands of years is uh through selective breeding meaning you put a bunch of seed in the ground and then we would physically visually observe the crops that came out of it the plants that came out of it we pick the biggest ones or the healthiest ones and then we take the seed from that one and we put them in the ground and we take the seed from that one and that's how we have evolved the plants that we Farm is through selective breeding at some point a couple hundred years ago someone may be observation that there were traits and you could start to break up those physical observations into traits is it taller is it bigger does it grow deeper Roots those are called traits and generally when we talk about the traits of a plant we talk about phenotyping the plant the physical characteristics of the plant and then we figured out that there was this mle's box you know there was these genetics that were underlying the inheritance of traits that there was something going on and we didn't understand DNA until much later but there was something going on that was causing some of the plants to be good and some of them to not be good with respect to the traits we were trying to breed for in 1914 a guy named George scha came up with a breakthrough system called hybrid breeding and he realized that certain plants you could breed them with themselves you could actually self-cross them and you do that over and over and then when you brought two of those what are called inbreds together it creates a hybrid and the hybrid suddenly have this explosion in yield the yield went up like crazy and it was a bigger healthier faster growing plant than either of the inbred parents and what he realized he had done is he had doubled the traits onto each of the sets of chromosomes in each of the parents so it turns out like humans we have two sets of chromosomes corn is the same and there's some set some genes on one chromosome some genes on the other chromosome and when you bring two corn plants together when you cross then what you're getting is a random sampling of half of the genes from each chromosome and we don't know which half we're going to get that's how nature works it's called meiosis it's basically like roulette there's a random wheel that spins around half the genes come from the mother half the genes come from the father and it creates an offspring and then years later when we identified DNA and we're able to um observe it and then sequence it we began to more deeply understand how this worked DNA sequencing unlocked this new era in plant breeding which is called marker assisted breeding so instead of Crossing two plants and looking at the physical characteristics we could DNA sequence all the plants and figure out which genes they had and that we knew the relationship between genes and traits and then we started to breed plants for their genes not necess because we knew what the traits would be and we started to cross plants that had the right set of genes and that became molecular breeding this ability to use genetics to guide the breeding that we were making in agriculture and it significantly improved humans ability to breed plants by reading the DNA across nearly every plant species we cultivate from vegetables to trees to um grains to Specialty fruits and vegetables it's and unlock this incred ability so that brings us to the last 10 years 10 years ago there was this new tool invented and this tool was called crisper and crisper unlocked this new ability where these plants will have specific genes that you want to make sure show up but they don't always show up crisper would allow you to make sure that they showed up because you could apply a protein to a plant cell and that protein would cause one specific Gene to be exactly what we want it to be and you know let's say we want the letters we want to change one specific letter in that genome um to make sure that it has the right physical trait and we were able to do that and suddenly this era of leveraging these sorts of tools was was upon us so that that brings us to ohal and if you want I'll talk about ohal but because you you you've been tracking all this for a long time and um you you funded you funded a company that got you excited and in the last year or so it's got you really really excited because it looks like it may be able to do something really remarkable so so tell us about the company okay so I'll go back to uh to plant breeding in reproductive biology in humans in Plants biological organisms make sex cells right in humans we've got sperm and ovaries right just to bring it bring it to the table for everyone every sperm is half the DNA of its father it's a random half so the of the two sets of chromosomes there's a fusion that happens and that Fusion creates one chromosome that ends up in the sperm and that Fusion randomly picks segments of each of the two sets of chromosomes same in the ovaries it's a fusion of the mother's DNA to one chromosome now you have one chromosome in the sperm one chromosome in the ovary they come together you have a new human and that's why every sibling is different because every sibling gets a different half of its mother's DNA and a different half of its father's DNA because every sperm is different every ovary is different that's how reproductive biology Works in Plants as well there's pollen and uh you know whatever other kind of um sex cells are produced by the plant each one of them has half the DNA of the mother half the DNA of the father so we asked the question a couple of years ago what would happen if we could get the sex cells to have all the DNA of the mother and all the DNA of the Father the complete genome and it turns out this is not an unfounded crazy concept because it exists in nature sometimes there's spontaneous creation of sex cells that have all the DNA of the mother all the DNA of the father when they come together you end up with a plant that has double the DNA it has all the genes of the mother all the genes of the father and then the plant goes on and does its thing and it goes through tradition reproductive biology but what if we could control that what if we could turn on the ability for all the SE for the sex cell to have all the DNA of the mother all the DNA of the father combine two specific plants that we think have great traits like let's say this plant is disease resistant and Dr resistant this plant is big and has Deep Roots we want them to come together every time we try and do that with traditional breeding we lose some stuff so it takes forever doesn't always work we lose other traits what if we could get them all together at once and that was the idea the idea was we could turn off the process that causes the fusion the reduction of the DNA and have it have all the DNA and so we did this it started to work we did in other crops it started to work and um to do this was very difficult we apply a protein to the plants that switches off those circuits uh in the plant and when it works the plant contributes all its DNA and The Offspring has double the DNA and that's not unhealthy it actually the way plants work genes segments of DNA in a plant are sort of like tools in a toolbox the more tools they have the more usefulness they can have in any given second to grow faster and and and be healthy um mammals are a little different humans are a little different because we have all these regulatory things that make it hard for us to double our DNA so it wouldn't work in in in humans or in animals there's by the way there's there's a couple of animals that do have this but I'll talk about that later um but all plants can handle this and so we started to do it and the results were incredible we saw 50 to 100% Plus gain and yield in The Offspring so that's that's remarkable so so say typically what 70% increase or something like that I mean that that if that was actually applicable to say a billion of those Acres you were talking about that that changes everything I mean it's it's an astonishing change what's the here's here's the puzzle just just hearing that that that so you do this the plants are are bigger healthier more yield and and and also you know fight off diseases and bugs better apparently there's a feeling that a lot of people have when they think about nature which is you know there's no such thing as a free lunch you know we think of evolution as being this incredible tool for looking at all possibilities and finding the best ones and if there if this possibility was there in the Armory why hasn't even Evolution produced these sort of super breeds of amazing plants with these sort of multi- deployed architecture that does what you achieved yeah so it has happened and um it happens spontaneously it doesn't happen recurrently because if it happened recurrently meaning it kept happening every generation eventually the plants have too much DNA and they their yields will go down and they stop being more productive so evolutionarily having the yield the the the the D inherit the full DNA from the mother and father for every generation would overcrowd the DNA circuitry of the plant at some point down the future and the yield would actually go down so evolutionarily it's not a good result but for it to happen spontaneously in nature has allowed certain crops to thrive for example modern wheat is a hexaploid it has six sets of chromosomes so it's got three times what diploid wheat has it's you know modern potato is tetrol it has four sets of chromosomes all the potatoes you and I eat french fries potato chips table potatoes they're all tetrol they have four sets of chromosomes so there was a doubling that happened at some point um or or an inheritance of all the genes that happen at some point modern strawberry is octoploid it has eight sets of chromosomes so we do see this in nature having happened at some point historically spontaneously but from an evolutionary perspective it's not a great recurring system because it happened all the time the DNA would get too crowded so nature is very good at trimming and optimizing the genes that the plant has but plants are hungry for Gen they want to have more tools so they have this incred ability to handle having gen combined and having more gen um in the system if I understand it right there's something else special about these plants which is to do with the seeds they produce so talk talk talk about this talk about what is different between like what is your vision for what's going to yes happen here and how it can actually make make a material difference to agriculture yeah this so this system we created we call it boosted breathing and so again we apply protein to two parent plants and it causes those parent plants to give all their DNA to their offspring rather than half their DNA so there's three things that happen the first thing that happens is we can combine traits so rather than randomly getting half the traits from the mother half from the father we can combine all the good traits together so we know that there's lots of corn plants there's lots of um rice there's lots of potato plants that have great genetics but when we try and cross them with other plants that have great genetics we lose a bunch of traits and it takes forever for breeders sometimes they never get there in being able to get this all together so we can get them all together combining traits so huge unlock and a trait like I mentioned could be like resistant to Drought the plant could be resistant to Insects it could grow deep so it could it could adapt to climate change it can adapt to new environmental conditions that's a incredible important point about agriculture is we have to adapt to a changing climate the second thing it does is it increasing genetic diversity in the plant this guy that I mentioned George scha who developed technology he identified this thing called heterosis heterosis means that the Yi of the plant Progressive heterosis the yield of the plant goes up when you have more genetic diversity and that's because the more genes in a plant there's this interesting thing that happens which is the genes start to regulate each other turn each other on and off in a more efficient way so when the genes are needed they're turned on when they're not needed they're turned off so more genetic diversity actually causes a network effect in the plant that causes for some reason a massive boost in Yi and health of the plant the plant grows faster it's healthier it's it's bigger um so that's very a powerful unlock and it's a big part of the reason that we're able to drive yield up in our boosted plants as we call them and then the third feature is remember how I mentioned that every sperm is different every ovary is different the same is true in plants every seed is different so when you end up with a fertilized plant you get seed and every one of those seed is genetically unique in most plant species so you can't really use those seed in agriculture because every plant in the in the field would be different they'd grow at different rates they'd have different features some of them would be drought resistant some of them so the whole seed industry is built around how do we get genetically uniform seed with this system every seed is the same that we can then use to sell you know for Farmers to plant in the ground they can sew it in the ground so that creates an unlock in making a seed industry for crops where there is no seed industry today like potatoes so potatoes are the third largest source of calories to humans on Earth today around the world people spend hundred billion dollars on potatoes potatoes are put in the ground every year by chopping up leftover potatoes and they vegetatively propagate we all did this in high school the potato has a little eye you know grows a new root and then you potatoes grow um that's how potatoes grow and that's how you so the the the when you chop up the potato you preserve the genetics the reason that we do that and the reason that's how we Farm potatoes is because if you took the seed of a potato potatoes actually make seed in their flowers the flowers grow they become berries and their seed every seed is different so if you took a potato at home and I encourage people that are listening to do this grow a potato grow the flour take the the berry with all the seed in it and then put all those seeds in the ground you'll get yellow potato purple potato red potato small big there'll be all over the map that the genetics get jumbled up so that's not useful for agriculture so in agriculture we've still been farming rusted Burbank in the US for 100 plus years that's a 100-year old variety we have not improved the genetic performance of the potato very much and we don't have seed so farmers use warehouses and warehouses the size of football fields to store leftover potatoes chop them up they got to fumigate them and spray all these toxic chemicals to keep all the mold and stuff away because it's you know a bunch of biomass sitting there then they haul that all back out with truxs and bulldozers and they put it back in the ground you have to use 10% of your potatoes to plant potatoes next year so it's a huge you know economic cost it's it's a huge carbon footprint so if we can improve the genetics of potato and make seed available it'll create a massive Improvement in how humans are accessing this important calorie most potatoes around the world are used as table people eat them at at their meals small holder farmers in India and Africa are farming one acre plots of potato that's where most of the potatoes are actually grown and they're chopping up leftover potatoes and putting them back in the ground um and using a bunch of chemicals to try and keep them from going bad does that mean that the farmer themselves will be able to harvest seeds from the those crops or is there a reason is it more that you will be able to or you or whoever you partner with we be able to provide them with a reliable supply of fresh seeds each year yeah so that's a great question they will want to buy fresh seeds each year because just like it happens in corn and wheat and other crops there's an improvement in the seeds every year so every year our job as breeders is to make better and better potato and so we'll bring better potato seed but the second because getting the seed out of potato is very hard it's a it comes out of a berry and then you got to like blend it up and get the seeds out and the third is that those seeds are all going to have um different genetics in what they planted because you still have this thing that happens in the field whereas with our system we can make uniform genetics and they can take it back out uh and so you want to you want to come back and buy your seed every year the reason the seed industry took off in the early 20th century was because of the system of hybridization that I mentioned earlier when you can create an inbr and you bring two inbr together you end up with a hybrid seed that launch the seed industry and that's why farmers go back every year because when they buy seed they get better yield than if they replant they can still replant if they want to but they're going to do better by buying the seed every year so at what stage are you at David are you saying that right now you have potato seeds that will deliver 50% 100% bigger yields than current potatoes yes so we have these all in trials in potato we're working in a lot different crops right now um we've shown some of our results on potato publicly and um we are running a you know a system of breeding new potatoes and producing seed from those potatoes for Farmers to try and see the results for themselves and then start to kind of adopt these uh these seeds so we're going through that commercialization phase now that we've talked publicly about what we what we've been doing for five years um we're going through that commercialization phase now and and do they just provide much bigger potatoes or more potatoes or a combination or so a lot of farmers don't want bigger potatoes they want potatoes that are the same size they just want more potatoes right so you know the the measurement of yield in potatoes is right how many kilograms per hectare are you getting or how many pounds per acre you getting and so you you want to try and breed for a potato that grows deeper and faster and makes more potatoes faster um and so the the total yield is what matters you also want them to be disease resistant you want them to deal with drought you want them to deal with heat you want to deal with cold there's all these traits that farmers care about because for their particular region there's something that's keeping yield down and you know the system can solve for that and so so you've been investing in this company for the last five five years getting it to where it is and of the many companies that you've been supporting this this is the one that like you've made a move to actually Focus fulltime on this what talk about what you see as the potential here um well it was a crazy yeah I mean my Investment Company you know we've made a lot of Investments and we started a bunch of companies and we we basically run this thing called a Foundry where we start a business we put money in and we fund it till it's proven or it's real and then we'll bring in outside Partners to invest in it with us so we started ohal in 2019 and I started it with a guy named Jud Ward who previously ran molecular breeding at driscolls the big the big berry company that's why we know that the strawberry industry fairly well we have a lot of folks from that company that work with us at ohal and we weren't if this crazy idea would work we weren't sure if it was real we weren't sure if we could do it and then we weren't sure if we would see the results that we predicted we finally did it and it finally started to work we got it to work we got the results that we predicted and we were blown away it's like consistently positive results consistent performance it's it was really incredible so last year we as as more and more of this data started coming out I said my God like this business we could boost everything we could apply this technology the system to nearly everything that humans grow from rice to wheat to corn to potatoes to berries to fruits to vegetables even to seaweed and kelp even to trees that were growing for Timber which would increase carbon uptake and increase the productivity of our Timberland that's the set of opportunity that emerged when we started to think about what we could do with this and that's when I started to say my God like what else am I going to do with my time like I got to make sure this thing works and so um you know I swore I would never be a CEO again but after uh cuz you know that the heartache and the tension and the pressure I got very unhealthy being a CEO last time around um but you know it's such a talented team and it's such an incredible opportunity upside is providing you know billions of humans with the calories they're going to need over the over the next 30 Years that is a pretty good motivation um I think one could say but what would Skeptics say though like someone this this there's an aspect to this nature Mr Monsanto don't mess with nature Mr Monsanto yeah it it feels too good to be true um you are so there's this whole you know this is genetic modification um so the these these I presume will be considered by people who hate GMO um crops as as as as an example of GMO what what would you say to them yeah so these will actually not be GMO that's an important thing to understand so GMO as a definition is actually transgenic meaning what happened and I'll just I'll talk about GMOs for a second um the concept with GMOs was that you could take DNA from somewhere outside the plant and stick it into the plant's genome and that DNA didn't exist natively in the plant's genome and by sticking it in there you would get that plant to make that protein that that Gene codes for that was the basis of so there was all these great save the world ideas with GMO technology we could put a gene that could make proteins that could kill bugs so you don't have to spray insecticides anymore super powerful idea we could put a gene that makes vitamin A and put it in rice and we would have rice that now has vitamin A so that people that are subsisting on Rice wouldn't go blind anymore because they're not getting the nutrition they needed there were all these great save the world ideas with GMOs people got freaked out about this concept and um the anti-gmo rhetoric really won the day but the concept of GMOs is to take foreign DNA and put it in in the Genome of a plant one of the first big breakthroughs is what I described which is the gene from a that was discovered in a bacteria that makes a protein that kills worms that eat corn okay so let me just go through that again there's a protein that kills worms doesn't affect humans doesn't affect any other animal or species it just is a protein that kills worms because it binds to a particular site on the worm's belly in inside their intestines so this protein was discovered they were trying to figure out how do we monetize it and they said you know what why don't we take the gene that makes that protein and put it in the corn plant and then the corn will make that protein so now the worms that are trying to eat corn will eat this corn and they'll die and we don't need to spray insecticides to kill the worms anymore get rid of all that synthetic chemistry it's actually a very great product it's called BT corn billus thog genous corn and it's widely adopted most corn farms around the world use this Gene in the gene in the in the seed that they're buying um and it's it's it's reduced insecticidal use like Farmers used to go out and spray chemical insecticides seven times a year now they don't need to spray it anymore to get rid of this worm it's super super powerful I'm just saying that that is not GMO right so that is GMO that is all what I just descri I was gonna say so anytime you're bringing foreign DNA into the plant that's GMO right but there's this system called Gene editing or new breeding technique is what it's being called NBT where you can apply A protein that causes the the genome to change in a way in the plant that is native to the plant you're not bringing foreign DNA in you're just turning genes that are already in that plant on or off you're you're basically activating or introducing um the inheritance of a gene that's native to the plant and that's what our boosted system does it doesn't bring any foreign DNA in there's no GMO it's not transgenic It's A protein that induces this change in the plant that's got all the native DNA of the plant I mean it feels like like Psy psychologically it's going to trigger some of the same reactions in some people people who don't like humans intervening in nature as if we weren't already I would argue if we didn't intervene in nature you're exactly right and if we didn't intervene in nature we wouldn't have antibiotics we would sit here and we'd let the bugs kill us if we didn't have intervene in nature we wouldn't have agriculture we'd be sitting here waiting for food to drop off the tree and when it falls to the ground we'll eat it we wait for the animal to drop dead and then we'll eat it carcass that's how humans started our intervention in nature or our involvement in nature allowed us as a species to progress the company ohalo is named after a site discovered next to the Sea of Galilee called ohalo 2 it's an archaeological site 23,000 years ago the villagers that lived in this little little site they were actually cultivating seed they found little clay pots with seed and they had organized the seed in a way that they were keeping seeds that when they moved they could go PL the crops they wanted to plant in different regions it totally changed our idea of when humans understood what agriculture was and how we were gring seed and and um and planting seed and nomadically kind of moving our crops around and so that's what we named the company after was this big discovery that happened in at the ohal site but that is the nature of human's involvement with nature we are either going to participate in it or we are going to be absent in it and I think that if you think about plant breeding going back 10,000 years ago there isn't an organic crop or anything that humans eat today that wasn't involved and wasn't touched by the hand of humans doing breeding humans selected the crops we wanted to cultivate and we progressed them and we kept selecting and kept selecting we just didn't know what the DNA was at the time and then when we got DNA sequencers we suddenly knew what the DNA was that was driving those changes and now we actually have the ability to influence which of those genes are getting inherited as we as we select those plants so you know this is part of a a Continuum of 's relationship with nature I wouldn't argue messing with nature right you would argue that you you're taking an accelerated step forward in doing what humans have been doing for thousands of years and in a way that the planet urgently needs importantly because the planet is changing whether we like it or not we have created changing climate conditions on Earth it is happening right now we have to create agricultural systems that can succeed and thrive or else people will see calorie reduction right now we are on the wrong side of the malnourishment curve malnourishment is increasing on Earth we spent 30 years getting it to decline it's now going back up and climate change is making things more difficult in Brazil they had a massive heat wave a massive drought this year we see it all the time all around the world that things are becoming more difficult for farmers and so this is an important tool that we need to embrace we are moving down a a CL five rapid I need to use an ore to maneuver myself as I move down that rapid in the boat that I'm in two two other two other questions I think some people will have one is that you know people are rightly wary of vast monocultures in agriculture and the unintended consequences that have come from that some people may hear what what you're saying even though you're saying that there's more diversity of genes in the plant nonetheless every seed that comes out is the same it feels like you're you're changing Nature's Way of deliberate jumbling things up to create diversity in the Next Generation isn't there a risk of unintended consequence from from that well we're not changing anything about the seed industry where Farmers want to buy a seed that creates causes the plants to all pop out of the ground at the same time to all grow to the same height so you can use a tractor to farm so you can use one field to get the same thing and you don't have to have 60% of the human population involved in farming right the the fact that we have a seed industry that we have seed that Farmers plant that allows uniform Fields is what's allowed us to reduce the cost of food increase the availability of calories and have fewer people involved in agriculture and that's important because we're not going to go backwards the concerns about monoculture is an important one that can also be addressed with systems of regenerative agriculture that can also be addressed with systems of crop rotation there are other systems and techniques that can be used in agriculture that farmers are separately rapidly adopting to ensure that there is greater biodiversity that there is a rotation in crops so that we're improving the quality of the soil the soil microbiome all these other factors are a different part of the farming equation but we do need to have uniform seeds so farmers can Farm 60 Acres with one person that's the way farming Works um and I think that it's a little bit misguided to think that everyone should Farm one acre and have three cows and two sheep and a goat in their backyard people don't have the real estate to do that we have centralized agricultural production because it's unlock prosperity for Humanity people can spend their time in a house they can walk down to a market and pick up food that's increased our prosperity as a species we can't go backwards to everyone farming one acre that's different let's think for a minute though about those people who are farming one acre because there are probably what a billion of them Plus on the on the planet still they by the way it's the number one job on planet Earth people don't realize if you ask someone what's the number one job on Earth the the the highest job in terms of total number of people is farming individual small yeah those people have a long and kind of tragic history I think many people would say of having to be on the brunt of Western farming practices that that basically crash prices and bring in cheaper Imports and you know the West has Western North have farming productivity tools that make it incredibly hard to compete in a global market and so farmers in in Africa parts of Asia and so forth are constantly fighting to get any economic value out of what they are growing isn't there a risk that something as sophisticated and Powerful as this is going to end up again benefiting the uh the farmers in the north who have access to it potentially at the cost of the billion plus 1acre Farmers the bigger problem we have right now is this calorie availability problem where we we we make about 3500 acres per capita on Earth every day but 800 million people are living on less than 1,200 calories a day so there's something wrong with the way that system works and a big part of it is we're not able to grow crops in regions where people want to consume them we import a ton of wheat into Africa from Ukraine from Russia uh that wheat import dependency Finds Its way all the way through African continent to produce all the bread products and in the absence of that particularly during the spiking at the beginning of the Ukraine war um there was a significant uh you know kind of malnourishment episode famine episode that took place and I think it's a big part of what's driving the current um inconsistency in the supply chain so we need to give local farmers the ability to grow crops in these regions and they can't grow them today separately I would encourage everyone who has found one of these anecdotal stories about some small holder farmer who's feeling you know distraught about Western industrialized dag to actually go to these regions and meet with these farmers and ask them about improvements in technology and Agriculture and you will see them cry with unlocking value stories about how their their small farming operation had this incredible Improvement in profitability so they could live they were no longer subsistence but they now have a business because they could plant less they could spend less and get more out of their that's what they care about and like a really great case study for this is cotton farmers in India there was a technology that was brought over for cotton farmers in India that was like a GMO technology and there was like all this up in arms oh my God it's so bad farmer it absolutely improved the condition of the cotton farmers in India in a way that was like so impactful a lot of people rose out of poverty because of it I think that it's very easy for everyone to tell a sad story about one side or a good story about the other side but I think if you look at the aggregate statistics improvements in agricultural productivity look at China right the the majority of those people over a billion people were brought out of poverty the majority of them were farmers the Improvement in these Tech in these Technologies in farming has allowed um an improvement in the condition of life on Earth for the majority is there anything you can do David to accelerate the process though by which the magical seeds that you are creating it would seem can get distribution you know to somewhere like Africa to something somewhere like the one fund Who present like there's all these interventions where we've shown that by giving even small smaller Farmers one acre Farmers better seeds um and a few other things that their yields can go up is is how how is there anything that limits the ability to get there these are going to be radically more expensive are they going to be affordable how do you see so this is this is going to make everyone more money so all these small farmers and we're working with Nos and we're working with nonprofits to find ways to get these products distributed into these regions where they're mostly needed and I think that there's a lot of opportunity to do this in a cost-free way for some of these markets so I I don't want to share too much now but that's a big motivation for us absolutely there's plenty of ways to build a business I don't need to think about you know the small holder farmer having to pay and invest and so on if there's ways to get them access to something that's going to improve their livelihood and you can make a business elsewhere well this has been um an amazing conversation I mean I I I've been amazed just like personally I was never remotely interested in agriculture and farming I I I didn't you know seemed a world away from technology over the last few years it's often seen like the single most exciting stories about the future have come out of this space um I should let you say something by the way about Farmers themselves like often I think the environmentalists tell a story that almost presents Farmers as villains of the peace that their destructive practices are destroying the planet I don't think that's what you would think how do you think we should think of of farmers how do you think of of farmers themselves and the role that they need to play in all this well first off I'll say I'm an environmentalist so I'll start there and I think that if people take the time to understand these systems that we use in agriculture and what we've used and how there these systems have evolved and allowed us to progress as a species I think we can be really thoughtful about the fact that technology and agriculture can be both more productive and more sustainable and better for the planet so I'll start with that now the average farmer has a family they want to take care of their family like everyone they want to make more money that's their motivation they're not Farmers because there's some so philosophy they have about farming being you know the thing that God sent them here to do many of them relate to that concept but they're trying to make a business whether they're a small holder farmer in South Asia or there a 600 acre Farmer in the Midwest of the United States they're trying to take care of their family and the great thing about increasing yield and reducing cost is that there's an alignment between profitability and sustainability and in this agricultural system if you put Less in the ground you put less synthetic chemistry on the ground you spend less and you get more out of the ground because you're leveraging that amazing solar resource we have in the sky and the amazing water that falls out of the sky and you can get more food produced because of it you're going to be aligned in adopting that so there's a relationship where technology unlocks this beautiful relationship between the productivity in farming and sustainability in farming and that's what Farmers focus on is how do I improve the condition of my family how do I make sure that I'm not going bankrupt every year um and so that's where I think these systems that's why these systems have been adopted over the last you know couple thousand years as a species well this has been a a really exciting conversation is there any final thing you'd like to any seed you would like to plant in people's minds David as we as we wrap this up I'm really glad we're having this talk Chris because a lot of people I think the only way to get people to really understand rather than allow themselves to be trained by some short form narrative on agriculture is to really spend the time to understand it to take it into context to take into context the macro and the micro to understand what is the system of plant breeding and technologies that have been used what are the big drivers for agriculture and when you take this all into context it becomes a little bit more nuanced that it's not just about everyone growing a 1acre farm in their backyard with two go goats and a dog and a couple acres of you know wheat and corn that there's a system here that evolved that actually drove human Prosperity from Millennia and when you take that into account we can still address the environmental issues we can still address the sustainability issues and in fact improvements in these systems go hand in hand so yeah I just want people to take the time to understand that and not allow themselves to be trained by you know a five minute kind of short or real which has unfortunately I think really damaged agriculture all right okay okay so we'll wrap things up there I think if people want to know more they can go to for example your your company website has some video interesting videos on there that explain pretty well that is oh.com is that right o h l o. yeah and on and on Ted there are plenty of other resources on many many aspects of Agriculture including these issues like what might replace meat how meat could be produced more efficiently whether there's ways of um you know interventions with cows for example that can make them more climate friendly many many different things are are there it's an absolutely fascinating topic David good luck I think this work is incredibly important and it's been an absolute Delight to speak with you Chris thanks talk soon bye