Seedling Sessions: Agriculture Innovation

Harnessing Technology for Sustainable Grazing

• Agri-EPI • Season 1 • Episode 37

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In this episode of Seedling Sessions host Thomas Slattery is joined by Johannes Scheibe, the co-founder of Ruumi, to discuss the progress Ruumi has made since their last conversation on the podcast in October of last year.

Ruumi is a technology company on a mission to build a future where farming enriches the Earth, and they're doing this by creating infrastructure for the global sustainable farming transition. In their previous conversation, they learned about Ruumi's origins in Berlin, where the founders were inspired by farmer protests to explore opportunities in the agriculture and farming sector. They eventually focused on grass, the world's largest crop, and developed a free-to-use grazing management app that helps farms improve their grazing practices, soil health, and profitability. A significant bonus of using Ruumi is the potential eligibility for carbon credits.

Since the last episode, Ruumi has secured a sizable investment, grown their team, and undergone a significant rebrand. They now have over 1500 farmers signed up on the Grazing app, predominantly in the UK and Ireland, and have started working with their first corporate insetting customers.

In this episode, they discuss the challenges of scaling an agtech startup, the importance of listening to farmers, and the future of insetting and offsetting in sustainable agriculture. Join them as they catch up with Johannes and learn about the exciting developments at Ruumi, their vision for a future where farming enriches the Earth, and the role of technology in driving this transformation.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to another episode of seedling sessions from the AgriEpic Centre, where we dive into the world of agri-tech innovations. I'm your host, thomas Slattery, in this episode. We're excited to have Johannes, the co-founder of Rumi, back on the show to discuss the progress they've made since our last conversation. Rumi is a technology company on a mission to build a future where farming enriches the earth, and they're doing this by creating infrastructure for the global sustainable farming transition. In our previous conversation, we learned about Rumi's origins in Berlin, where the founders were inspired by the farmer protests to explore opportunities in the agriculture and farming sector. They eventually focused on grass, the world's largest crop, and developed a free-to-use grazing management app that helps farmers improve their grazing practices, soil health and profitability. The significant bonus of using Rumi is the potential eligibility for carbon credits. Since our last chat, rumi has secured a sizable investment, growing their team and undergone a significant rebrand. They now hire over 1500 farmers signed up on the grazing app, predominantly in the UK and Ireland, and have started working with their first corporate insetting customers. In this episode, we'll discuss the challenges of scaling an AgTech starter, the importance of listening to farmers and the future of insetting and offsetting in sustainable agriculture. Join us as we catch up with Johannes and learn about the exciting development of Rumi, their vision for a future where farming enriches the earth and the role of technology in driving this transformation.

Speaker 1:

Hello, and today I'm back with Johannes Scheiber of Rumi, who we last spoke to back in October of 2022. Johannes is the CEO and co-founder of Rumi, a technology company with a mission to build a future where farming enriches the earth, and they're doing that through building infrastructure for the global sustainable farming transition. Johannes, thank you so much for joining me almost a year later. Probably worth me giving a quick recap because I guess not everybody will have heard the episode that we did back in October.

Speaker 1:

But very quickly, rumi, you and your colleagues were working in Berlin in technology in automotive, I remember correctly and saw the big protests that were happening. That inspired you to look into the agriculture and farming sector and, after some considerations around different areas, you realized that the world's largest crop, that being grass, was where there was a real opportunity, particularly around grazing management, for you to apply technology. After working with some different business model ideas, you landed on a free-to-use grazing management app, which we go into quite a bit of detail about how that works and how that's beneficial for farmers to improve their grazing and their all profitability, soil health, etc. But the big bonus to Rumi being the ability to potentially be eligible for carbon credits. That's where we left off nearly a year ago. I'll stop talking now and I'll give you an opportunity to give some updates on where Rumi's come in the last eight plus months.

Speaker 2:

Hi Thomas, thanks for having me again and checking in on what we've been up to Since we last spoke. First, we got quite a sizable investment into Rumi to help us achieve our vision, which was this mouthful that you talked about earlier. We're trying to really build a future where farming and ridges the earth and kind of reverse the exploitation that basically has happened over the last decades. Because of that, we managed to grow our team substantially as well. We've undergone quite a big rebrand. So, for those who have checked out our website before and I would encourage you to do it again Maybe we're better now at communicating what we're actually trying to do. We have more than 1,500 farmers now signed up on our grazing app, which we think is a pretty big achievement. Also, we've started working together with the first corporate Inserting Customers and we've been able to refine our offering to those corporates Also the biggest achievements. Basically, we have the money to execute and we're on a good path on executing on our vision.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, on a personal note, as someone who comes from a past life in marketing advertising, your website is very good and really does deliver, and some of the case that is really nice on there as well. 1,500 farmers that's really I mean even for a free app that's really quite impressive. We talk about this a lot on this podcast, but getting farmers to try new technologies, let alone become active users of technologies, is difficult. That is quite an achievement and it's so right. Is that still predominantly within the UK and Ireland?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, it's still our geographic focus. You're absolutely right. Getting farmers to sign up is step one, then entering field information like where are your fields? We're trying to make that easier by allowing farmers to import their geometry files and integrating with AgriWeb. But then also metrics like weekly active users and monthly active users doesn't quite work as well to measure engagement with farmers. There are weeks where you just cannot look at a computer because you have other stuff to do and then suddenly you see drops right or your retention numbers don't make any sense. That's something we've definitely learned and 100% agree with you.

Speaker 1:

A large portion of the audience to this podcast is other AgTech, either startups or scale-ups, or people looking to get into this sector. Have you got any top tips for one of a better word for how you've managed to scale? In some cases, once you get a certain community of farmers, word just spreads. How does that work for you? Again, 1,500 is a lot to achieve as a fast startup.

Speaker 2:

I don't know if I have any tips. I don't know if we're experts. I think what we're trying to do is we call every farmer who signs up. Right, just try to understand what encouragement to sign up. What did you hope to get out of this? If they don't want to be bothered by us with phone calls, then we stop. If they say they need two weeks because they're busy right now with lambing, okay, then we won't bother you. Also, we listen very carefully in what value we can bring. I'm hoping that that's what it is essentially. That's helping us grow, actually listening to farmers and trying to figure out how we can not use more of their time and not giving anything back, but just figuring out how we can be of use, take jobs or make things easier.

Speaker 1:

In a secret source of offering genuine value and listening to your customer and taking their feedback, which feels like pretty solid advice, if you ask me. Obviously, the 1,500 active farmers using the platform in the different ways is a big part of it. In your little intro update, you obviously mentioned the other side of this, which is what you term sponsors. Do you want to go into a little bit more detail about that side of the app and also the company and how that works?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. We call sponsors anyone or any entity essentially that wants to sponsor a farmer's transition towards sustainable practices. Initially we focused on offsetting only. Anyone can essentially purchase credits on the voluntary carbon market. This money, or 80% of that, would go to the farmer. The rest is a fee that we take to cover costs like soil sampling, issuance and so on. That's actually only maybe 10% of the money available for this transition is coming from offsetting. We estimate the rest is coming from the supply chain of the farmers themselves. That's also termed insetting.

Speaker 2:

This term is quite difficult to define in a way that it actually covers all the activities and all the players that might be in the supply chain. That's also why we kind of widening our offering, or let's say where our approach to go to corporates and to work with them together is very important and that's also where we have most of our focus right now. Yeah, so we think. Basically, just to kind of summarize that again, we are still doing offsetting, but we think, but we're focusing on in-setting and we think that over time 90% of all the financing that goes towards the sustainable farming will come actually from in-setting. Right, yeah, it also. It makes economic sense from on the one side like. So reducing emissions within a supply chain is cheaper quote, unquote and then creating and selling conquerors on the offsetting market. It's more efficient, right, and a lot of farmers wouldn't be eligible for carbon credits to begin with, right. There are a lot of hurdles or barriers for farmers to be able to participate in this carbon offsetting market.

Speaker 1:

So the in-setting, offsetting topic is one that I'm very passionate and interested in and it's not an official Agri-Epi center point of view. But I completely agree with you personally that there was a lot more legs, I think, to the in-setting, and part of that comes from the ongoing controversies to kind of traditional carbon MRV and offsetting, which we saw 10 years ago, and we've seen a sort of another wave of happening and we discussed kind of prior to the call. But I know that back when we've spoke previously you'd been using Vera to verify your carbon credits. Now Vera, of course, quite publicly, were caught up in sort of investigation by the Guardian and people, and I think it is worth us touching on that because I think we'd agree that the type of in-setting and offsetting that you're doing as an organization and we as a farming community on the whole are doing with these transitions is very different to those controversies and I think it's good for us to have a little chat about that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely agree. So I think, and we had really think, that offsetting, if you do it right, it's a good thing, but there are what does right mean? Okay? So you need to really make sure that all the practices are additional, that the price of the carbon credit is high enough so that, first, companies reduce their own emissions before they buy tea offsets from wherever on the planet. And they need to be permanent or as permanent as you can possibly be, yeah, and it needs to be verified by third parties and we need to think about the whole ecosystem impact and not just one subpart, right, like focusing only on one type of emission, for example, on a subset of emissions, we think that there are good concrete and bad concrete. There are good authorities and bad authorities, good and bad standards, and so on. We think that GoldSanit and Vera are the best ones out there on the voluntary market, but that doesn't mean that every single project and every single methodology on Vera and GoldSanit are great. It's obviously there's a lot of projects and there are a lot of project developers. There's a lot of different types of projects as well, and it's like we can't compare them just like apples and apples, because it's apples and oranges, right.

Speaker 2:

So this, what you mentioned, is controversy that was uncovered by the Guardian and so on. So that was a credits that are issued for preventing the cutting down of trees, essentially and one big difficulty there is to prove what this forest really have been cut down or not, right, and that's one of the main arguments that Guardian is making why those credits shouldn't have been issued. So that is one type, right, so preventing a loss or preventing the cutting down of trees. The other one is planting trees. And then what we are doing at Rumi is soil carbon credits, right, so we are actually measuring differences in soil carbon over time, right, and we measure at the beginning of a project period and then over time again and we can see the difference over time. So this carbon is actually in the soil, right, and we need to show that this is not coming out again.

Speaker 2:

Essentially, there's a low chance of reversal and we think that with sustainable grazing methodologies, you're going to be more profitable as a farmer because you use fewer inputs, right, and you're also more driver-sistant and so on, right, so for you to change your practices back to high-input system is very unlikely, because you're essentially spending money to be worse off. Yeah, so that's why we think the chance of reversal for our farmers that we work with is very low, and that's why we think our offsets are good. Yeah, we can also price them high enough. We can sell them at above 50 euros per tonne, and yeah, so that's on the offset side.

Speaker 1:

So, on the insetting side, another organization I know who are different to you guys, but who have also done insetting, has been soil heroes, for example. Now, their insetting model, to the best that I can understand, would be to partner with, let's say, a big food company. It's a sustainable food company and they will reward farmers transitioning to regenerative practices or sustainable and regenerative practices, but they're rewarded on practice-based, not outcomes-based. It sounds like your insetting model is more outcomes-based, am I right?

Speaker 2:

It depends on the customer, and so, on the offsetting side, obviously it has to be outcome-based, right, and on the insetting side, like you actually write, so it's a bit more open, right. So it basically depends on what someone within the supply chain, where the insetting customer is, wants to claim and what they're willing to pay for what they feel like they're confident in. And so one issue is that the outcomes they will happen a couple of years down the road, right? So spending money now for a potential return on invest, for a potential, without knowing basically where you are, it's very difficult to defend for someone in a corporate, right.

Speaker 2:

But monitoring practices where you're confident, where you have research that those practices are in fact positive and have a lower emission in fact, yeah, have lower emissions then you can say, yes, we are on track, right. So we can test the compliance from day one, essentially right. So we know, hey, this farmer has in fact seeded a diverse grass mix, he has in fact reduced nitrogen fertilizer usage and so on and so on. We can see it immediately and you know what the outcome should be, right. And then periodically you test whether that's actually true. So that's why I think it's completely viable to also invest or to incentivize farmers on a practice basis, not just on an outcome basis.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I love that yeah.

Speaker 2:

One reason is also that. So for offsets we have a very high burden right of proof because essentially it's a certificate. It's a right for someone else to emit a ton of CO2, put it into the atmosphere right, so this better be have been taken out by someone else already. But with insetting it's different right, it's different strategies for reducing emissions, rather than this kind of certificate trade.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and again to reiterate, it's one of the reasons why I think it's such an interesting model, but I see the importance of having a balance of both. So I think you mentioned earlier again the introduction that you managed to close around back in around investment, to be clear back in February. Obviously, this is an area a lot of the startups that we work with, they work with Agri Eppi to go through various rounds of grant funding and the next stage often is moving into kind of seed and then later stage venture capital. Could you talk us through kind of as much as you're prepared to that process and learnings that you might have got from it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely so, if I were to compare it. Or it's on the grant side. You have a lot of documents, pages that you need to fill out, forms that you need to fill out and bureaucracy. Essentially, you focus more on kind of long form writing and planning many years ahead. Even though often as a startup, we felt like we don't have that much certainty, we can try to explain why we have certain assumptions and say this is how we're planning.

Speaker 2:

On the venture capital side, I would say it's a lot about storytelling and showing the potential and showing traction in what we're saying. It's a very different ways of looking at it. The pitch deck is often enough to get to a point where you say, okay, this sounds cool, we want to invest. And then you get to a diligence phase where, at least at our stage, right C-Stage it just then goes into some looking at legal documents Do you have any loans outstanding? Do you have this and this and this? So then they're investing a lot more, also in the team. Okay, they believe that you are smart or not? This is a great idea, this idea has potential. We buy this story. We think that this market is right, your solution is right and you're solving a real problem.

Speaker 1:

A couple of months back we organized an event in London with our collaborators, barclay EGLE Lab, where we brought in some AgriTech investors to talk to an audience. One of the questions that came out of that was is there a point where it's too early to approach angel investors or venture capital? The argument obviously being there is you don't want to necessarily shoot your shop too early, but the counterargument was actually these experienced professionals are in a position to potentially validate or not validate your idea. What's your feeling on that one?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's difficult. I think it depends on you as a founder and also on your own personal financial situation. I think for what we see, it's never too early. So you can go there with a pitch deck and you can raise a million euros with that, but you will give up a lot of shares for that already. You're already in the hands-to-wheel. Basically, you make those promises come true. If you go to the ground route, you will have more freedom and you can go a slower pace, but you will probably not be able to pay yourself a salary for a couple of years. That's our probably character. That's the difference. We did the second thing, so not paying ourselves much for nearly three years, I guess, or two and a half years. Then we took VC money in when we thought, okay, that needs to stop now on one side. But also we are really ready now to ramp up. We feel like we have found our market and we feel like we have understood the market and we know what to do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So the key points there being, obviously you were well past an MVP, you felt you had a product market fit and, importantly and I think you mentioned this earlier and it's always almost the most important one, I guess which is traction, demonstrable traction. Yeah, so close this round. Obviously, a part of that has gone towards growth but at the same time and I've had interesting conversations with your CTO has gone into building the tech and obviously, I agree, I think that's a big part of what we look to support. I'd love to hear a bit about AMA, your smart plate meter, and then also potentially some of the developments you've made around the satellite technology as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so in the very beginning we got a grant and then afterwards we got support from a foundation in Germany. This foundation comes out of a manufacturer of sensors for agriculture. This has now been our partner essentially in developing this plate meter, which was very lucky for us. Yeah, so we've obviously come across plate meters from the very beginning of when we started working with grass and we learned those farmers who measure grass they tend to have 20% higher profitability. So that's kind of also what we thought in the beginning that that's the value proposition, right, that we, as a roomy, can offer with our grazing app. Even if you don't have a plate meter, we can help you get this 20% extra profitability and what so? What? What are a few issues with this?

Speaker 1:

Is it worth so I was just going to say, because I often have to remind myself that not everyone listens to this is it worth just quickly explaining what a traditional plate meter is and why it's so?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Yeah. So a plate meter, it's essentially exactly what it says, right? So you have a plate and it's on a stick and then it measures compressed grass height. So this plate can move up and down on the stick and you walk over your field and as you work and put the stick down as you do, the weight of the plate will compress the grass slightly and then you measure the height to the ground. Yeah, that's essentially how a plate meter works. And then you've got to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazingly simple, but essentially, if you're using the same calibration, it allows you to make a have a figure around a bit of bulk density, I guess, or make an estimation of essentially how much biomass of grass that you have within particular fields on average. And as simple as the technology is, it's worked very well for people for a long time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, exactly it works, and it was developed for systems with a lot of regress on this, predominantly ryegrass, right, and that's also where the limitations come from. It works well for a ryegrass, but it also mainly works for a ryegrass, and if the grass doesn't get too tall because of this calibration that you just mentioned, right, and it's worth mentioning Rumi as a company.

Speaker 1:

One of your big things is helping farmers transition from these quite I guess we'd almost call it conventional monocultured ryegrass grazing systems, where you've just got ryegrass and basically nothing else, to much more complex, and I think when we spoke last time you were looking at species mixes of up to eight to nine different species in order to have a kind of more diverse and not profitable not the right word, but more efficient and effective grazing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So better grass mix means you can use less fertilizer, because some grass species that can fixate nitrogen themselves, basically without the help of that. Different root depths, some grass species, they can have meters of roots, right, so it's, whereas ryegrass is pretty shallow. So you'll get more root mass, meaning more organic matter in your soil, yes, but with this diversity, right, and these benefits also comes to you, okay.

Speaker 2:

How are you going to ensure your the productivity of your grazing platform, right? How do you still regain or like, stay within this optimum of making sure your animals are fed but you don't kind of ruin your soil or your? And so the issue that you can't just use the same plate meter anymore on these diverse grass mixes and use the same calibration, right? So essentially, for every grass mix and every type of I would even go as far as every different types of soil, you would have to find a new type of calibration, because the compression will be very different depending on the grass mix. So if you've seen many different types of grass like, so, for example, cotswolds, they're really good at presenting that Like they have very different thickness of the stem right, and so on and so on.

Speaker 2:

Like, the compression will be very, very different. So that's why we thought, okay, we need to bring out our own plate meter, also after we realized how comparatively cheap it is to manufacture one, compared to how much farmers have to pay to have one themselves. Right, and we essentially. Also, we know that we need to calibrate this plate meter to each individual field or grass mix, right, and that's not really possible if we try to integrate with someone else who's already manufacturing a plate meter. They also they like this closed system that they have currently. Right, why would they not? That's yeah.

Speaker 2:

So that was kind of the reasoning behind the plate meter and that's why we want to develop it. So we essentially combining the plate meter, right, not taking away the need for the farmer to go out and walk his fields, right. So it's basically it's a really glamorous walking stick that you have there with a plate. That's how you should think about it, and you can measure at least part of your grazing platform, but not, as you don't have to measure it quite as frequently thanks to satellite support. That's how we look at it.

Speaker 2:

Maybe that's a good segue also to talk about satellite how, where we've been going with that. So we've managed to hire another person who used to work on autonomous cars, who is an absolute expert with kind of image processing and especially also radar, and thanks to that we have a much tighter integration now with these red radar satellites were not inhibited by clouds, and next year also, the European Space Agency is sending out two more satellites with radar, meaning we will have a lot more satellite support, together with the plate meter and yeah, so we think that that's really going to improve the accuracy of the data that we're showing to our families.

Speaker 1:

So, to put it in layman's terms, the state of the art of where you've got to with Rumi is you have a very easy to use, both mobile and desktop app which can be set up across the farm so that we know what the field boundaries are for different fields, what the soil type is, what the grass mix is in there.

Speaker 1:

Using the satellite technology at a variety of different satellite technologies fairly weather-independent, you can use that to give an understanding of what the vegetation levels are like in various different fields across the farm. The farmer can also go out and walk his fields, which this comes back to this question around technology and how. We don't want to take the farmer out of the mix. We still want the farmer going out to the field and walking fields, but while he's doing that, he can use an automated plate meter which knows what field is in, what the soil type and the grass mix is in there. So while taking plate meter readings around the field, that's automatically updating into the app. This all then feeds in and helps to advise the farmer where particular herds of sheep, dairy or beef cattle should be moved, at what point to most efficiently get the best growth no overgrazing, etc. That's where we're at at the moment.

Speaker 2:

I would definitely like a transcript of that. That was really well thought out.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's good. I mean it's amazing to see how far along it's come. So I mean you talked about the comparative ease and obviously we've worked with lots of manufacturing hardware technologies, whether it's drones, robotics, and so when you say it was comparatively easy to create your own custom plate meter, I know that you did some rapid prototyping and stuff using 3D printing. Do you want to talk a little bit about the comparatively easy nature of building a hardware product?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so for me, for us as a headroom, it was easy because we didn't have to hire anyone, we didn't have to buy any machines or anything like that. We could just directly talk to engineers in this foundation that supported us already. They already understood what we were trying to do and they looked at other containers out there and with German reverse engineering we figured out okay. So we can simplify this here in order to make it fit really well with the roomy app and, yeah, so I know that they have just used 3D printing to also make some adjustments to the knob at the top. So we just gave the first version to a couple of farmers and farming consultants that we worked with Understood basically what a good shape is and what the shortcomings of current business is, and then we just had some iterations and then, okay, this is a nice knob.

Speaker 2:

And then the same with the kind of housing where the sensor is in, how you can attach and detach the plate itself, Kind of these steps. Yeah, I mean I don't think you could do that without 3D printing Just quickly change that, and then same with colors as well.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, look, I mean, I saw you guys at Ground as well and I got to handle the plate meter, so I can attest to the fact that it is indeed a solid piece of German engineering. So we talked earlier about kind of the ecosystem for the farmer in terms of management, and it's a really impressive setup. But obviously there's this other side to it which is talking about, I guess, the health of the farm, or at least you know and that. So do you want to talk a little bit about kind of how all of this comes together, not just for helping with the grazing management and more effectively managing the livestock within the farm, but also how you then use all of this data on this other part, which is understanding the overall health of the farm and how that kind of moves into measurable outcomes, yeah, I think.

Speaker 2:

So. One thing, like we talked about kind of the carbon market and about in-setting and there's a lot of focus on the CO2 or CO2 equivalents. So a lot of talk about methane how bad is it really carbon in the soil, and so on, but oftentimes there's not enough conversation about biodiversity, which we're introducing with more diverse grass mix and reducing nitrogen fertilizer, meaning you're actually creating a better environment also for microbes and fungi and about water quality. So all of these things kind of fit together. So we know that all the practices that we recommend, they improve not just your carbon balance essentially, but also improve the diversity of the biome, having more species use and what's going on below ground. So some things are quite difficult to measure and we know I mean some ways to kind of measure outcomes is like okay, you count worms, these kind of things you're not going to be able to replace with technology. In our opinion, we think that technology can help in kind of implementing and also monitoring this kind of improvements to the ecosystem overall.

Speaker 1:

So you were talking about importantly, you were talking about carbon myopia and how the overall health of the farm cannot be just about carbon sequestration and, as we've talked about previously, and there were these co-benefits that come from these practices that include above and below ground biodiversity, water infiltration and many others, and it's super encouraging to see that that is in the overall kind of philosophy of the organization. I mean, interestingly, we've actually been in the process of one of the projects that we're working on with one of our innovation farmers, where we've teamed up with the likes of Chirrup, polonize and AgriSound and also the Dorset Wildlife Trust, in order to try and get a benchmark of biodiversity using those sort of remote technologies, and so there's the beginnings of trying to see you together. And then, I guess, for below ground biodiversity, you have companies like Nature Metrics who are trying to see how they can use their EDNA technology, although it's a slightly higher price point than your average farmer or tech company, but there are emerging ways coming out and they're getting better day by day.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah, I wasn't aware of them. You see how much is happening in this field that you can't keep track, but that's great. I hope it becomes measurable and economically feasible, as you mentioned. That's also important.

Speaker 1:

Otherwise we can't measure whether and so what I'd love to do is an area that we take a lot of interest in at Agrippi is, obviously and this is what our conference was about last year is what is the role of technology and innovation in driving us towards more sustainable agriculture and farming? And obviously Rumi are working very hard on a very important area of that. I mean just to be a bit more philosophical for a second. What are your thoughts on this in general? We've just talked about some other technologies that are looking at biodiversity, but are you generally optimistic? What do you see as our role as technologists and innovators in this pushing this drive and this transition towards sustainability?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean. So. I studied math and computer science. I always love computers and robots and stuff, so I definitely believe that technology can help us in a lot of ways, but I don't think that it will solve all of our problems. So hopefully technology will take away all the boring things that we don't like to do and it will help us objectively measure things, but I don't think it will replace the fact that humans still need to go out and experience nature, because I think that evolutionary right.

Speaker 2:

So we have a we have all our senses are built around kind of understanding. Is this ecosystem healthy or not? Like, how does it, what does it like? What are the colors telling us, and so on, what does it sound like? Do we hear a lot of insects and birds? And yeah, so I think that will be very difficult to replace. Maybe it will be possible one day, but I don't think it will. Yeah, so I think it's going to help us do the tedious things, technology being it. Technology will help us do the tedious things and measure things objectively, right. So I think that that's the role that technology should play. Maybe it can help us scale these two things as well.

Speaker 1:

I think that's a really lovely answer and I think it is important to sustain and we mentioned it earlier actually this idea when, with a lot of technology innovation in this sector particularly as opposed to lots of other sectors, we're not often looking to try and remove the human from the system.

Speaker 1:

It's like you said, it's often trying to remove the boring and dangerous tasks.

Speaker 1:

It's about augmentation, it's about giving better reliable data in order to measure, to manage more efficiently and you're also being able to scale Like a big one. For me around, sustaining one of a generative systems is they're often more complex. You either, as you said, adding more diversities to the system. You might be adding livestock, but you didn't have livestock you might have more complex rotations, and so, moving from conventional, more simple simple in one sense of the word to these more complex systems that are trying to work more in tune with nature, technology has a clear, easy role, and this is what Rumi's about about helping manage these much more complex systems where previously it might just be a bit too much to understand all of the different fields and where the cattle have been and what the exact amount of biomass is in the different fields and what the different types of grass mixes you've put in there. That's a lot to manage on paper and keeping your head, and that's where technology has a beautiful role to kind of augmenting and aiding in that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, 100% degree. I think over the last decades we've been trying to simplify and kind of remove labor as much as we can right. Simplify, in a sense of get rid of every plant that we don't understand, every piece of biology, by using herbicides, pesticides and reducing the number of species that we have. And we now know that that's the wrong path to go down. And we also know that the planet is warming, which is going to create more weather extremes. We don't know where exactly and what and so on. But it's going to have to be more knowledge based rather than input based, and that's also, I think, absolutely right. Computers are good at that, at helping us consume or make sense of a lot of data and different information.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, it's so fun, so generally quite optimistic. Do you have any sort of upcoming innovations or collaborations at Rumi that you're able to talk about?

Speaker 2:

For us, the displayed meter rollout is really big Right. We're in the phase where we have the first prototypes with farmers and grazing consultants and also some corporates to see how it can help also them in reaching their sustainability goals. That also means we need to improve our apps to make it easier and easier and easier to use the plate meter. Combining that with better satellite data yeah, so that's kind of the biggest things. One new feature that's coming very soon is what we call a feed budget planner, so that's hopefully helping farmers to better manage the feed budget over the whole year Understand when grass growth is basically enough to cover all the needs that your animals have, which will then essentially show you when you can cut for hay or silage and when you can have your animals turn out in the spring or when they should come in in the winter, and also what your feed needs are for the winter. And hopefully that should help you kind of manage your farm more holistically. Right, Think about the whole season and plan better.

Speaker 1:

That's super exciting Because I remember last time we spoke, a big part of what we were trying to do is extend that season how long you can have livestock out, but realistically, in some cases, even with transitions, you're going to have to plan for some sort of feed, and being able to plan ahead and know what's coming is vital, yeah absolutely, and we were talking about complexity, right.

Speaker 2:

So imagine, right, so you have a farmer, you have a couple of hundred sheep and some cattle as well, and you're going to have a lambing period. You have a calving period, right? And each of these animals, they have different food needs or feed needs at different times, right? So are they pregnant or not? Are they lactating or not? What is the daily weight gain of a lamb versus a you? And so on and so on, right? So planning all of these things ahead is quite complex, and if you have a lot of different types of animals and fields, yeah, it's difficult.

Speaker 1:

Amazing Well, like this has been such an exciting update, and it's sort of one of the pleasures of doing this podcast and being able to speak to people again is to see how things have moved on in what is comparatively a relatively short period of time, particularly within this sector, where sometimes you feel things move on either one season at a time or even slower. We have quite a diverse audience on this podcast, everything from other kind of early stage innovators, from farmers to kind of policymakers, ideally, who are the kinds of people that you would be interested in speaking to around further collaborations or anything like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we're always interested in talking to farmers. Every time you talk to a farmer, you learn something new and also corporates within the food supply chain, who understand that reducing emissions in their scope three is really important, which means that you're going to have to work together with farmers and understand what you can actually do to reduce emissions and how you're going to monitor that.

Speaker 1:

Perfect. Well, look, johannes, we'll share all of the content details in the show notes of people can either get in touch with us at the Agrippie Centre or get or contact you through your website, I'm sure. But again, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day and to give us some updates, and it's very exciting, cheers.

Speaker 2:

Thanks a lot.