Sustainable farming is all about people with Anastasia Volkova - Regrow

Anastasia Volkova discusses sustainable farming, incentives for behavioural change, and  the importance of understanding the farming system when implementing regenerative agriculture. 

When it comes to sustainable food production, we are all responsible. 

The world forced farming to be this way because we wanted to support growth that is not sustainable. 

Regrow is the infrastructure for decision support and incentive exchange in sustainable agriculture. Regrow is working with farmers and food supply chains across over 200 million acres in 45 countries to reduce the climate impact of agriculture and improve yield resistance. 

I recently caught up with Anastasia Volkova, Regrow CEO and Co-Founder, to discuss the challenges, opportunities, and myths in transforming global food systems. Her deep understanding of their markets, customers, and the science guides how Regrow creates value across the whole supply chain. She explores the nuances around regenerative agriculture, which is a huge opportunity but must be applied in context. She also discussed the potential perils of limiting the sustainability conversation to carbon and overly simplifying the system. Anastasia dispels the myths that farmers are unwilling to share their data, declaring all that is needed is the right incentive. 

In this conversation we explore how realistic is cheap food and the why the current impact on the global food system due to the war in Ukraine should not be a surprise to those following history. You can listen to our conversation here.

Transcript

AS

Hi Anastasia thank you so very much for joining me here today. Agriculture and soil carbon and using agriculture to address climate change. You've chosen a very easy and not very ambitious goal for your company. Can you tell us how you got there?

AV

Definitely. Thank you so much for having me. It's easy to get caught up in solutions that don't actually get humanity to the point where we can preserve the planet or potentially save the planet that we live on. How we got here I think it's all started very long time ago where I felt like something wasn't quite right. I did grow up in a drought stricken region, where pretty much all the crops that we grew on the hobby farm were very much subject to the water availability. Although we weren't subsistence farmers in that sense that we could just go to the shops and get some food I was pretty exposed. In that semi arid area, if it gets worse, then I'm not sure how we're going to grow food here. The amount of snow in the street was as tall as I was when I was five years old, and I've never ever seen snow that tall anymore in Ukraine. And that to me, felt like one of the effects of climate change that I really could have experienced in my own perspective in life. The more I started engaging with agriculture, having grown up in Ukraine studied in Poland, France and Australia, all the big agricultural exporters. I felt like some of the knowledge and information that was out there was not delivered to agricultural and agri food decision makers in the right form.

 In order for them to really be making the best use of it. And then, when I was kind of mature in that idea, I realized that it's not just the information in the way it's present. It's also the business model. You really need to shift the financial incentives in order to shift the mode of production and I'm very happy to see that you know, all the turmoil in life, like everything from COVID to supply chain disruptions to recent conflicts, it has really made the world stop and understand what it means to invest in supply chain resilience and so I'm glad that we're having this conversation and there's a lot of reasons to be positive about the fact that the voices of the people who care about resilience and climate are being heard.

AS

The concept of using soil or agricultural soil to capture carbon in some ways, it's quite straightforward. You get more carbon into the soil and you drop the carbon out of the atmosphere, but with millions and millions of acres around the world that are farms, it's huge, and where do you start? 

AV

Yeah, and then the question becomes, where do you start? How do you scale it? How do you build a system that actually is equitable and accessible and at the same time is scalable because the old way of doing things was okay, let's just like tell everybody to do farming the same way. And that results in that environmental damage and climatic loss of resilience, which is not great. So when you fast forward, that is, you see all the different experiments like with all organic farming in Sri Lanka that results all sorts of horrible things things. So I think where you start is with acknowledging that it's really important to go with first principles again. And it's shocking when you read or listen to a book like Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel was like, we are just the same first people. We are going to plow the land, planting the wrong thing in the wrong order, trying to get the most out of the land. And having to move on because we destroyed it and have to leave it behind us. And when you see that Fertile Crescent, Easter Island like a package of deforestation plus agricultural practices, where it starts thinking, have we not intellectually matured to the point where we need to stop this like there is a pattern we’re just decided not to see it or to look somewhere else we're still we can survive and we're all like those not saying that any of us is out of that circle will prefer to live in lush areas where we do not see drought, where it's pleasant to go outside. It's better to have a have a walk. Where do you start with implementing regenerative agriculture with first principles? What are the things that are really important for every system to be regenerative?

There's five principles of regenerative agriculture that lead to improved soil health. Those are keeping the living root in the ground all year round, keeping the soil covered, it's a minimization of your chemical and synthetic inputs to make the system more self reliant, though, which also leads to the need to integrate livestock, so that there is better circularity and another principles that can kind of be teased out all packaged up together to make this construct of regenerative agriculture. Whilst that all sounds very understandable, when you start applying it to different regions, you got very different realities of where it's actually possible to say do no till and where it's possible to cover crop that's not equally distributed in the world. Australia and Canada would be really good examples. There are areas where everyone's no till but no one is called a cropping because that extracts potentially extra moisture from the ground that you need for the next crop that you want to grow to how do you deal with that, or the temperatures are so low that there's no point in cover cropping? So I think generally, from those principles, you then need to accept that it's not one size fits all, but it is working with every system that currently developed in that region and understanding how to improve it because even in those places where you can not switch to cover cropping or you can not switch to no till farming, you're still using some kind of nutritional support for the crop. So it must be some kind of fertilizer, input manure, whatever it is. So how can we go from the types of inputs that are more emission heavy to those that are lighter in emissions, have less transportation, mining associated with them, either more local or come from natural sources compared to synthetic sources? So I think how do you get this to the whole world? It's really a question of incentives and the financial models but how do you pragmatically envision this being available to everybody is through this agronomic financial social economic lens on what is working here? How can we enhance that? How can we take it to the next level without saying, Here's a prescriptive list, this is what you need to do, because whenever that happens, it all breaks because Nature doesn't work like that.

AS

Thank you. Thank you very much for that. That's some sort of way. I guess. One of the things that I have been constantly reinforced throughout my career and throughout my life is that frequently the cultural and the social challenges, are harder or more challenging than the technical challenges doesn't mean checking the stuff is easy. But frequently, that's the case from my observations. How do you balance the energy for solving the technical problems plus the energy for the social or cultural challenges?

AV

You're absolutely right. And I think every entrepreneur learns this relatively quickly in the entrapreneurial journey, that you're really working on behavioral changes more than you're working on just improvement on the technology and now aspects of technology and science that can make behavioral changes smoother we can reduce the hurdles to those behavioral changes. But I think when I was at the beginning of my journey, I thought, okay, it's really about that tools, and then people would adopt them but that only lasted a glimpse in time compared to to a my entire journey and our journey as a company. On the realization that, no, it's all about people. It's all about the adoption. It's all about what the real problem is about the problem that they care about solving. And if you are not in that list, then you know you've been given time and time is money, like, they're not gonna give you money either. They're gonna give you the time. So it's not important enough for them. So think it's a little bit of a question of product market fit, how do you actually find product market fit and I think all of the energy should be spent on that until it's found. Like when you have the realization, okay, think there seems like a product market fit. And through it, we can improve through the relationships that we have with customers who really care about it, we can improve the technology. That's I think when it comes back, not necessarily into the fore but at least into like equal parts like you have to have a competitive solution in order to go and try to get market share. But as you kind of hinted, without actually spending a lot of time getting clear on what are the barriers to adoption and what are the socio economic strains that foster current behavior that you need to either undo or change or evolve? I don't think any innovation stands a chance like there has to be either a regulatory requirement and push or financial incentive like there should be a reason for people to change thats big enough to overcome the hurdles of not changing, which is always easier. So I think spending enough energy at least equal parts energy, if not more on the product market fit and the adoption upfront as you're building tool. is something that I would choose as my way of approaching it and can do their own thing.

AS

And Where are you at in with regards to that stage of the journey? And I guess a bit of nuance to that is, you know, your website says you're in more than 40 or 45 different countries. So that's not only different physical or climatic conditions, but also different cultures, different languages, different religions, different socio economic levels. So where is Regrow at in, in that part of the journey?

AV

Yes, we have been, I think fortunate enough to find out product market fit through relentless search and I think we will still need to work for it and fight for it, keep it moving forward, because nothing stays the same. And I think there's two pieces to it. There is the top down approach where you're really working with companies that shape the industry agri food industry to really try to impact a large percentage of, of arable acres of agricultural production, to really move the needle and get market share. On the other hand, the kind of the 45 countries come from our more kind of self serve a solution which is bottom up which is agronomic decision support where anyone can log in their fields and say, well, they're growing or who would be able to kind of help fill that the history of that and support them with information that is globally available like satellite imagery, weather based biogeochemical models, that then could help them see, okay, my crops are not performing the same way or here's potentially an issue that was detected here are the things I should pay attention to. So I think this comes back to the fact that because we started with the first principles and started ground up in a way that supports the building of the product that is available globally.

We’re able to really offer up the solution on such a scale without necessarily getting into what does it take for them to adopted and then we go more kind of top down solving that adoption challenge in key markets very specifically, if that makes sense. So it's a dual strategy. We don't necessarily spread ourselves into like 45 countries for our go to market strategies. It's more like hearing it's openly available users in 45 countries prefer to get access to this product and do some crop management support with it. And then for the Americas, Australia, Europe, and Brazil. This is where we have this kind of more top down with a regulatory framework, who are our main partners, how are we getting to the farmers, how we’re working with the government on what is the regulation, how is it changing? That's kind of more of a high touch approach. To those key markets but balanced with availability of the software that can really help anybody and everybody if they choose that they would like to get those insights.

AS

Thank you for that and how do you see the balance I guess, between engagement with directly with the farmer because they're the ones who are using the decision support that they have less market power or less power to actually monetize better environmental outcomes, compared to engagement with other potential partners within the food and agricultural supply chain be that the processes slash retailers or further upstream with the suppliers

AV

So the way we approached it is basically making the tools available and relatively self serve so that the advisors to farmers and farmers themselves could make use of them if they chose to get access to these tools. And but in terms of the go to market, our strategy is more top down on getting the forces that are downstream in the supply chain. So the retailer's, the processes, engaging with their supply chains and pulling through that incentive. So arguably regrow is the infrastructure for decision support and incentive exchange in the space of regenerative agriculture, sustainable agriculture. This encompasses things like you know, the scope three insetting programs for food and ag companies, but it could also be used to generate scope one could have carbon credits, so called offsets that can be leveraged by companies outside of the supply chain. It's the same infrastructure the fundamentals are how can we measure the ecosystem benefit that the farmer is delivering? And how can that be traceable, transparent, quantified in a way that when taken an aggregate farmers not losing lot because of the uncertainty and the quality of their data, but make if they're grouped with other farmers, the downstream player that provides incentive has enough certainty in how that was calculated and transparency to kind of trace it back when they needed audited or verified. So we've gone and said okay, instead of trying to aggregate the farmer power, what regrow was really good at is engaging larger downstream plays to bring those incentives forward into their supply chain because we know how to interact with upstream and often is a mystery for the downstream. So how do you interact with ag retail companies that provide input to the farmer work with the farmer? For some folks in the middle like processes, and traders, this is not a secret, they're equally well versed in upstream and downstream, but still, we act as an infrastructure for them to pull through those incentives and outcomes and exchange them. So for us, our way of bringing these opportunities to farmers is partnering with brands downstream and supply chain and we're going forward those incentives because that then enables fathers to participate in have options as opposed to trying to aggregate for good farmers can do and to try to offer it off. Like it's always assumed to work better when you have a demand and you need to kind of aggregate and acts as the supply to fit that demand driven and trying to find the demand for the supply that you've generated and there's a limit of a chicken and the egg I'm sure you understand it's a dance where you have to like do both at the same time. And I think our partners are doing a great job, marching towards that net zero goals and engage in their supply chain. So what that enables us to do is to bring as opportunities to more farmers globally.

AS

Thank you. Thank you once again, more great, great insight, the balance between two different industries so row cropping, horticulture, livestock, they have many quite different operations from a farming perspective, different impacts on the climate, different levels of I guess the intensity of production, how I guess how do you see that from your perspective and back to what you're saying about the people that are coming to you? How are you seeing the demand of your products across those different sectors?

AV

Yeah, great question. I think it gets into how ready are the solutions for the different sectors because for cropping, and the data availability is so much higher than for other systems like livestock sector, generally, you had Justin on the podcast before, right. The AgriWebb has really moved mountains in terms of the adoption of digital record keeping software by grazers or by ranches. And I think generally that part of agricultural production is just a little bit behind the adoption curve simply because cropping handled the machinery and started capturing data by itself and you needed to add a little bit more to make this a complete picture or maybe sometimes you didn't even do that whilst with livestock. We only recently got you know, smart collars and all the things that could at least track the actual movement of animals, and then you can add additional observations like the pasture was this high when when we got in the pasture was high when we when we got out or away in the animals when they're entering and exiting. So more measurement has entered that space fairly recently. And I would put horticulture and perennial crops after that even I would say dairy is there in some way in that broader livestock sector with the grazing with kind of the the ranging, the beef supply chain, so to speak, because there is of course dairy on pasture that follows a similar pattern, that there is also dairy in any kind of also beef operations that are not pasture based. And this is where you have fewer opportunities for really emission sequestration reduction given you don't actually have animals on the on the land sequestering carbon. So for us that maps to the maturity of our solution, so we have great r&d That is ready to be commercialized and has been could have used in a number of ways with the government and the regulators in the dairy or in the beef sector. And now we are getting enough interest from the market and of interest from the brands from the producers to actually jump in and commercialize that but it is going to be a collaborative process where they would need to be willing to collect more information to feed the decision support support for it to be smarter and the decision support will hopefully guide their data collection efforts. So they can be more efficient with their time. And it's the virtuous cycle that we have started seeing and operated in cropping for quite a number of years now. And I can successfully I can see that. We successfully did that we survived it and industry has caught up with that kind of data collection. And everyone really treats it as situation as normal, not as like oh my gosh, the fact that you're doing designing and application of nitrogen differently across your field that you have machinery to actually do that variable rate as extraterrestrial like this is normal. Now, just more normal. I'm not saying this is like 100% the basis for the market either. But it's a it's a entered on that adoption curve. More of a you know, it's definitely closer to being fairly available. So I think for the other sectors, we see demand emerging more strongly now. And we're definitely going to to commercialize this solutions as part of the roadmap planning that we have later this year and early next year.

AS

There's a lot that's been written and discussed around the, I guess the willingness or are farmers to share their data. Is that a challenge that you've also faced and is there any insights on how it can be better addressed? 

AV 

Can I say it's overrated?

AS

 I think you can say it's overrated I guess. There's an interesting people talk about the lack of, of capital, especially in Australia, I guess for venture and that's one of the reasons why there's less innovation there. And with my experience, I've seen where there's where there's a profit to be made money always seems to be able to find that whether that's the deepest, darkest part of Africa or the middle of a convict zone it’s a matter of  providing the right incentive. So I guess by saying it's overrated, and we're putting words in your mouth if if I say that it's all about having the right value proposition

AV

Exactly, that's what I where I was gonna go with that, but like, I think it's all about having the right value proposition and of course theres also the understanding that sometimes that message comes from the businesses that have built this service around really high touch engagement with farmers. That does include kind of constant boots on the ground, and there is definitely that, I mean, this is not a secret. We're talking about innovation and technology and there's always this threat that Oh, is going to displace some workforce from somewhere it's actually all a very interconnected discussion because we find ourselves in places where people say Oh, but literally aren’t you finding it challenging that, you know, satellite imagery, you're able to translate that and the weather data into a fairly accurate estimate of what grew on the farm. And what were the impacts of that and farmer with only a few inputs, additionally, can provide you kind of the full picture. And we say, why would the farmer do that because they what is the rationale and what are we trying to do here? How are we using that data outside of engagement with the farmer, we are not to use it that data outside of the engagement with the farmer and the engagement with the farmer is created in a way that reduces the hurdles does not ask them to enter more data that already can be gathered either from our management systems that they use do us all from open sources, and everyone ultimately wants to be the editor, not the initial writer. So if they come, and they see a prefilled table that says it's a 70% chance and certainty that we understand what your grow here. And would you like to confirm or give us the information from your farm management system? So we know exactly what was there because it's going to improve your chances of getting higher ecosystem payment outcomes. And that is the only way that is that data is used. And it's used also, I guess, in aggregate to look at the whole project for someone who's invested in it. That I think is very fair and transparent conversation that reduces the farmer data burden to such an extent that that is a value proposition they really care about like if I can only with a few clicks understand where my father where my farm is at on the baseline of carbon and what is my potential? I want to do that or do I want to regrow to make it really hard for me and pretend like they can't pull this information? I don't think I'd be as willing to adopt. Then I think that is the balance of how do you do the dance so, you know, bring the information that's available that's objectively out there that people do know is out there, to the table in the most useful of ways and you're in being transparent about how it's used and how it's not being used. I think that's where you create the value proposition that extinguishes the discussion about a better one to share their data, okay, well, there's a checkbox for it. If they want to share their data, they should not share that data and then how without the data, you're going to prove your ecosystem service existence, and therefore acts as these benefits is fine if you don't want to, but that is the equation here. That's  data on better practices means better incentives.

AS

And essentially, you're doing the lion's share of the work for them and asking them to confirm rather than saying, Here's a blank sheet of paper, can you do our work for us? So let's make it easy for them and make it worthwhile for them.

AV

Exactly. It's like, you know, you're using a tax payment solution. you're uploading your data from your employer and it passes all the information for you and says, Ash Can you confirm that this sounds reasonable? It's ultimately your claim, but we try to make it easier for you. And the solution is not bulletproof. So maybe if you had like a typo, or there's lots of line slips away, it's gonna pick that up, but ultimately, it's your choice to use it or not use it even. But I think it's that lion's share of the work that if it's done for you, you're feeling like someone cares about you and wants you to be successful. And that's what we want to say we want all of the acres or hectares of arable land in the world to get incentives to make them more resilient because we know climate future is tumultuous for the next few decades, and it's better to induce that resiliency and if it means that the conversion and the adoption of by farmers will grow if this is the work that we did, we will do.

AV

Thank you very much. At the end of the day, you're a technology company. So I probably have to ask you something about technology. And what's the what is exciting new technologies or innovations are they're currently in your sights or on your radar that you're looking to bring into your system and think could add extra value.

AV

Yeah, absolutely. Great. Great question and we are Regrow is a technology company. We offer farmer first, agri food, decarbonisation software so the things that we really care about and really get excited and I think, you know, how could have regrow got to be formed through the merger acquisition of like, an agronomy Decision Support Company and a carbon modeling. And that merger really meant that you took the best of the agronomic decision support and merged it with a really good understanding of the soil carbon modeling and ecosystem outcomes. And what sits in between these two things is application of plant nutrients. So it's an application of fertilizers synthetic and biological. And we have some of the best sets of modeling and crop and soil simulators to be able to grasp this problem and the team has been working on this specifically. So we're very excited to look into the future where normally the farmers who are eligible for new notill and new cover crop adoption but all of the farmers that have to all of the commercial farmers that have to use synthetic fertilizer, have options to reduce that you target that you and also potentially switch to biological in time as those solutions come online. And the data on the effectiveness of those solutions becomes available. We use it for modeling and introduce those solutions as options for farmers to adopt. I'm really excited about what it means for agriculture to decarbonize its use of synthetic nitrogen because nitrogen ultimately is 300 times more potent than carbon and we calculate everything in carbon equivalents but if agriculture can get off of the synthetic nitrogen treadmill gradually, it would be such a relief for the system on the you know, the world will have to change the mining will have to change the whole supply chain around it will have to change and I think you can see the input companies adopting that and moving towards it that acquisitions by chemical companies or the biological companies and innovation and  search for the new molecules and solutions. All that is very exciting. We look at it with a lot of hope into that future that we have the tools to model it. We are working with partners to help them understand what data we need to bring those solutions to farmers because ultimately it would mean alongside other solutions like livestock integration, etc. And, you know, looking into water quality quantity bio diversity, increasing our pool of ecosystem outcomes that and benefits that farmers can get payment for. That is the world we want to live in, like make it accessible to a broader pool of farmers outside of you know, just a few kind of starting practices that are easier for the market to trust for us to monitor, measure and verify into a more expansive pool where we're looking not just you know, emission free world but at a biodiverse and ecosystem restored world and technology plays a vital part in that because ultimately, we have a measurement and management as two parts of the same whole. You can't do one without the other.

AS

So many wonderful questions that follow on from what you've just said. They're also big questions. And I think one once you mentioned about the fact that sustainable food production is about more than just the carbon side of things. There's the whole there's the biodiversity side of things. I guess that also links back into the nitrogen discussion. And, you know, crops need 15- 20 odd different nutrients to grow, but a huge part of the world's farming is dependent is dependent on two or three nutrients put on so in many ways, I think it was Carl Wepking from University Wisconsin was saying that many people are considering that kind of farming almost an extractive industry like mining rather than a certainly a lot of regenerative industry. So any comments on that side of things?

AV       

It's unfortunate and it's unfortunately true. I think I have a little bit of a personal history background I want to bring into this We were asked by one of our supporting ecosystem kind of catalysts that like with startups, like Do you consider yourself coming from an extractive farming system where it's really about doing all it takes to grow the yield and putting on the synthetic things? Or do you consider yourself coming from a more regenerative system by the way, you were kind of born and raised and what you saw, and for me, it's quite a mixed experience because mom farms are regenerative and like she's still even, you know, playing defraying coming here to California like she still housing you know, composting practices already implemented in our apartment, balconies already a great green home, because that's just the way she thinks and when we went to visit regenerative farm recently, she said isn't America ahead of the world in thinking of most things, aren't all farms regenerated here? And I said, Mom, I should probably not take it to the Midwest. You probably will not like that kind of experience. At least not to the heartland. And on the other hand, like in Ukrainian just next to our little you know, garden Veggie Patch production area that was like one hectare total. Across the road was a commercial farm you will see sunflowers you will see potatoes will say Good, good rotation, but conventional practices not necessarily regenerative and Ukraine has extremely rich Chernozem black soils. And I think you can ride that wave for long enough time, but then you start losing the water table water holding capacity, and suddenly, things seem to yields seem to wither. So I think there's not necessarily a framework that we need to be coming from that okay, let's put all the blame with conventional farming like the world forced farming to be in this way. Because we wanted to support obscene growth that is not sustainable. So we've seen some some data recently that we've picked the max agricultural production area in the world already and we're actually decreasing it and I'm really hopeful that the trend could continue that we’ll return some land to or regenerative practices to actually to nature to restore itself, but also are able to kind of measure this two sides of growth appetite that we have as humanity with the need to feed ourselves. So I would really think about it from the perspective of have we created a new paradigm where the food system can enter more regenerative and that becomes the norm not yet. We're just starting to talk about it. We're starting to do it but I think no, we were on the clock and 2030 is not very far away and all of those you know from 19 to 24% of emissions coming from the land sector will have to go in everyone's very incentivized to decarbonize because otherwise there is no certainty of everything. No certainly of production no certainty of  food supply chain or certainty of food on the shelves, nothing, and I think people don't necessarily see that during the gloom in the immediately as clearly but it's starting to create the common consumer of field of view with the Ukrainian supply being blocked and prices rising across the board and you can see the energy connected to fertilizer connected to food productions, and these are the chains that people should start connecting and we need to continue the education the fact that the alternative paradigm will take time to shift to start on this now. And as soon as cheap as it is in America should be to purchase shouldn't happen like I understand for many reasons. That was done this way. But we do need to accept that the food should be a higher portion of our disposable income. Distribution than it is now in order for the system to actually be able to self restore in some years.

AS

Thank you very much. This. There's a lot there. And you mentioned Jared Diamond and guns, germs and steel and I think there's a lot we can learn not that history's gonna repeat itself but there's a lot of lessons from history, anything from when you look back to soil regeneration, or you mentioned the Ukrainian soils being some of the best if not the best in the world, and then you look back to older societies and the Egyptians were probably or the ancient Egyptians were probably one of the most sustainable societies but the Nile flooded every year and regenerated their entire agricultural land. Whereas if you look at the Tigris Indus River, not Tigris and Euphrates River sorry, which is the edge of the Fertile Crescent, I guess. And after irrigation there for a number of hundreds or 1000s of years the salinity is what led to a big decline there. So there's there's a lot of prior lessons in that regard that we can we can learn from.

AV

Definitely. And I think those are the lessons we have to learn. If we were to claim that we're, you know, the most developed species because I don't think we have as much buffer, as we previously had to experiment with this planet and not really considering the implications of our actions and we're doing a very big scale and the whole system is changed. And I think there is a lot of momentum behind the change that we now want to see. So I think it's really important to learn the lessons to understand what what can happen and those things happen very quickly, quicker. Than we all know it.

AS

And obviously the.    your your Ukrainian you grew up in Ukraine and so the Russian invasion of your homeland is us obviously, and the the all the horrific things that are going on there is is a very personal issue for you. Because your your mom was there and you obviously have friends and family there. But there's the other side of that and that's how that's affecting the food supply globally. And there's I think there's we go back not so many years to 2008 9 10 11 and the Arab Spring and a lot of the political instability that that led to was basically around food price spikes be that induced by by local droughts or by countries stopping or closing off or nationalizing their food and preventing exports. So we've got the, I guess the the first step of that is suddenly the sanctions have taken so much of the trade grain off the world. Market. But then we've also in many ways, got the fact that the Russians Putin is essentially weaponizing food, so deliberately preventing the export of grain from Ukraine to try and put further pressure and you've got food crises in Africa. You've got a current political crisis in Sri Lanka, largely linked to food. The Middle East is always going to be unstable there. Egypt, the large world's largest wheat importer, has only recently recovered from the Arab Spring or regain stability from the Arab Spring.

So I guess, both from regrow perspective, and from your personal perspective, how do you see this? I guess, playing out

AV

I think you've covered it really well. And those are kind of the previous times that has taken place in the history. So think the fact that Russia is taking the grain out of Ukraine occupied territories as soon as they have a bit of a hold on it, and actually transport it to to Russia. The fact that this regime, it's impossible to think is now going to collapse, where 21st century and this is like medieval techniques of you know, like, on one hand, the thinking was medieval. On the other hand, it hasn't been such a long time that the First and the Second World War have seen probably similar techniques, some, you know, un humane treatment of societies, but I think focusing on the food crisis aspect of it is playing out in very much a predictable way. Like what are the levers that can be pulled and given Ukraine is too big exporter, that is an obvious one to gain control over it. The European dependency energetically or like on energy or resources from Russia is certainly not helping here. And I think there's overall a big conversation started a long, long time ago, and now is kind of swinging in all directions as to how Europe will decarbonize and and how US will help it decarbonize especially the energy sources to lessen or release them from from that dependency. So they're not being held over a barrel with this weaponized food supply, and, frankly, that energy dependency, and unfortunately, what we're seeing is there was a there was a spike in attention and action when it all started, and now it started, late February we now beginning of June. Really what everyone is pretty afraid of is this turning into a long term lasting conflict, that is not something that Ukrainian people should pay the toll for, with having done nothing, just because that's kind of the power struggle on a global scale. And Ukraine is not the first nation to experience that and that type of aggression, as you discussed, but I think it's one of the most prominently producing nations that has been captured into this clutch the way the food is really a part of the conversation right now. The solutions to this I think they have to be the steps have to be taken on the political, very high political level to try to resolve this as agri food industry. We have to invest in resilience. Well, if we expect that lead to come out of Australia, or to come out of places in the US, I don't think we have a lot of buffering there. And plus, with the fertilizer prices going up. There is a need to invest quite heavily into innovation on decarbonize sources of nutrient inputs that are affordable and potentially local. So they don't create this dependency and popularization of inputs into food either. To really try to break these dependencies between energy mining food production, how currently they're completely interlinked for for all of us. I hope that the food system will continue to be as global and we want to fully swing into a cave. We all need food sovereignty, because I think it's not sustainable for the planet. We're a global community and the weather just doesn't work. In the favor of a particular nation. It just keeps swinging because we all have one atmosphere that we're warming up so the food system has to be globally balancing and I think it's that cut off and shut down of the Ukrainian supply that really shows where it puts the strain on other elements of that cool system that is not balancing anymore. And, you know, I'm not a political expert, and I don't have any idea how to negotiate with someone who's inflicting that type of war. But I can say that from the innovation technology perspective, supporting the solutions for enhanced resiliency at the farm level is a must and if governments are not taking this seriously enough, that's probably the

it might seem that we evidence is like the second most important thing after really being energy independent or decarbonizing the energy supply the sources because, arguably, we've figured out how to produce some food with just the energy sources and some basic ingredients, which is great. We're reinventing supply chains, but I think for as long as we're farming on land, and that land needs inputs of some kind. Creating the fallback options for providing those inputs is what will create more stability across the geopolitical landscape because war and famine always go together. War somewhere means famine elsewhere or there's always that dependence.

Unknown 8:33

Most definitely, most definitely. Thank you very, very much. I would love to stay and talk for longer, but our time is up. So thank you so very, very much.

Unknown 8:47

Thank you so much ash for for thoughtful conversation for the reseaerch that we do in the background. And I think we need to keep getting better educated on the on the lessons of the past and what are the potential solutions that have worked and will work I guess the departing words from me  would be that I think if you open any greek philosophy book to really understand how you're no different to that human, and that is a very, very big lesson. Probably shouldn't look at the past and really see that fundamentally the human parts of those equations the motivations are the same. So we should try to learn from what worked in the past and try to apply it to save ourselves in the planet for the for the long term.