A Startup is "Unmuting" the World's Food Crops. Here's What They're Saying About Climate Change

Amir: 0:13

Hi, this is Amir. Welcome to The Dejargonizer. For over 13,000 years, humans have farmed mostly according to set weather patterns. Farming knowledge brought down through the ages revolves around more or less predictable seasonality, winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Each region has its local adaptations, but all farming is based on the predictability of climate. That's not the case anymore as the earth heats up. Weather is rapidly becoming unpredictable. Extreme weather events, droughts, floods, and rising heat are putting the world's plant crops under intense stress. This can lead to smaller fruit ruined harvests and economic ruin for a vast number of farmers, both very large and very small. But what if we could talk to plants directly? Have them talk back to us in real time about how they're doing and what they need to be resilient. one company, Supplant, and yes, that sounds a bit like Wasup Plant is unmuting crops with hundreds of thousands of sensors deployed in farms around the world. They're tracking plant stress in real time, creating a global plant stress index. Supplant's founder Ori Ben Ner tells me it's like putting an Apple Watch on plants.

Ori: 1:44

Basically for 12,000 years humans have been doing one thing, and this is trying to guess what the outcome of their crop will be or the outcome of the season by looking at the weather, at the soil. Looking at everything except understanding the plant itself. Now this can work to a limit. as a matter of fact, it worked. civilization was built. farm, we have food, used to be like baking a cake. You have a recipe, you make some flour, some uh, oil, you put it in a pan, you put on a 180 degrees you bake a cake with simple recipe, the oven broke. it isn't sustainable anymore because, to really work around climate change, unstability of seasonality itself, the practice of doing something in spring, something in summer, something in fall, something in winter as a farmer isn't relevant anymore.

Amir: 2:55

Can you paint us a picture of the practice of farming for food, connection it has with climate change, food security, our food, our way of life.

Ori: 3:05

It is the largest market in the world. Farming is the largest sector in any country you can imagine, including the largest economies in the world. the largest problem in the world, which is global warming. These two interwind thing is creating one hell of challenge for humanity, is extreme weather patterns, bringing farmers to lose their know-how in practices. And it's extreme droughts, which are changing rain patterns, meaning that a lot of the, major staples of the world will have to become irrigated Can't grow wheat in the Indian wheat belt anymore. we have to talk to the plant in order to understand what needs to happen. It's, uh, the same as my nice Apple Watch on my wrist, which heartbeat higher, lower, and start calibrating my health according to it. We put Apple Watches on trees and fruits.

Amir: 4:00

Let's go a little bit deeper into that analogy. For, hundreds of thousands of years. only knew how we felt when, you know, we ate certain things. Now we have, and monitors, smart monitors. tells us a lot of things, our stress level, our sleep hydration, our, um, fitness levels, VO two max and all that. Now are able to do that with our crops.

Ori: 4:23

The best analogy I can find as a father to small children is this moment where they start speaking. You have your newborn and, the nice nurses at the hospital tell you, Hey, every three hours feed it, then he starts speaking and he said, I'm not hungry, I'm hungry. And then you optimize, nutrition you're giving him and, and time that fits.

Amir: 4:48

Your company has developed one of the largest plant databases on Earth. Can you tell us just the technology behind the database, how does it collect and analyze data?

Ori: 4:59

So we put sensors, the trunks or stems. You drill a small hole in the trunk you have a pin inside to hold the sensor. You connect the sensor to this pin and you stick it close as you can to the tree, and it measures most common, uh, movement on earth, contraction and detraction of the trunk or stem on a 24 hour cycle. it senses the movement of the trunk.

Amir: 5:28

Great. So we have the sensors in the trees and the soil. Then turn them on, they start to communicate. How do they communicate? Is it through, um, cell towers, WiFi, plant wifi?

Ori: 5:42

through radio frequency, RF to a main unit. connected to the cloud through wifi or a sim card. So we are working in Mexico, in Peru, in Australia, in South Africa, Morocco, in Israel, in the UAE deployed on tens of thousands of hecs. Around half a million sensors deployed globally.

Amir: 6:13

Great. Take us into case study.

Ori: 6:16

take an olive farm in Morocco. Morocco is one of the largest olive producers in the world. Growing olives in the desert, is something that, uh, Moroccans have mastered in the past, 3000 years, let's say. And still you can't grow olive in the, desertification that is going over Morocco in the past three, four years. The fact that they have 20% of the the water they used to irrigate with. Moroccan olive farm, you put sensing station. a trunk sensor, an olive, a fruit sensor, very small one, and the soil sensor. you have a sensing station that will produce growth patterns and recommendations and the daily status to the farmer. At the heart of it, it will give the best irrigation regime for the next day or week to the farmer, it'll be a different target for table olives that we eat to olive oil, oil, olives, which we put on a salad. In most cases, it'll be kilograms that you can weigh, pack, and sell.

Amir: 7:26

Cool. What kind of stress are you measuring and how do you see it?

Ori: 7:31

every plant on earth, the grass in your backyard or a lemon tree or anything that is green and grows, does a movement on 24 hour cycle that we all learned in biology class, photosynthesis. The plant will accumulate energy from the sun during the day. It'll utilize this energy at night pump water from the soil through the roots the trunk and expand through the day. It will evaporate this water and accumulate energy, and it'll detract because the water is evaporating. This cycle of expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting in the 24 hour cycle. Now, plant stress, back to your question will be the minimum. Amount of movement between the, the maximum point of contraction, the the maximum point of detraction, the closer they, they are, means the plant is utilizing most of its, its energy to where we want it, to the fruit, to the vegetative growth, and not to this cycle of open of expanding contracting. imagine a very high heartbeat. The plant will be in deep stress. Now you see amazing correlations. The more the gap is high, hence more stress. You see the actual growth pattern declining. You see smaller fruits, you see less oil in your olive. It is a very simple cycle of every breathing or living organism that the more you're stressed. The more energy goes into, the stress, the heartbeat of saving something, and like humans, you immediately start sacrificing something. For the farmer, the most important thing of the fruit the tree, the most important thing will be the survival. and the less important thing will be the fruit, and he will sacrifice the exact things that we as farmers would want him not to sacrifice. plants, we want to keep them as calm as we can bring us more growth, much more fruit.

Amir: 10:05

That was outstanding, Take a moment and just, that was great energy. I got it. You said you had about a hundred thousand, units deployed globally. can you give us any, trends of what you're seeing about plant health and stress across those deployments?

Ori: 10:20

today we can, understand and compare the amount of, table grapes that will come out the end of the season from northern Mexico, or the amount of avocado that will be exported to the US from Mexico. We are able to see correlations of, extreme cold event in the citrus region of Australia in July. We are working on to go sensorless, give some value to smallholder farmers dealing with the same challenges and need to prepare themselves to these extreme heat cold drought events, don't have the tools.

Amir: 10:58

I get this right at the moment, your main deployments and customers are, growers, farmers, exporters, maybe bigger farms. serve them, you have to put the sensors in the trees in the ground and get them to communicate, what it sounds like you're saying is you now wanna start moving into small holder farmers, which is about 70 or 80% of the world's

Ori: 11:20

98%

Amir: 11:23

of the world's farmers or small holder farmers, subsistence farmers. farm for themselves, for their families. Maybe they go to a, a small market in their location. How are you gonna, serve them without any sensors? I wasn't sure of how that's gonna work.

Ori: 11:38

We are able to collect weather data anyhow without sensors. And when you correlate, the weather data with our interpretation of the accumulated data, the result is what we call dynamic irrigation regimes. Can,

Amir: 11:55

I'm sorry, Ori, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I kind of lost you there. Um, I think, I think my, my question was if you're a small holder farmer Ori Ben Ner comes and, Supplant comes, says to you, look, we can help you. Just, just take us from the moment to the next moment, the next moment. very, basically, how would you help smallholder farmers without the sensors?

Ori: 12:17

we have the most light touch simple tool a chat bot for WhatsApp, for messenger, whatever you prefer. he will receive a daily message of what's the weather. Is there anything interesting I should know about and best practice based on Supplant's accumulated data irrigation recommendation for today, for tomorrow, for the week ahead. we can measure soil moisture through satellites. So I, I will tell him, Hey, you're, irrigating much Your soil is too dry, your plants are in stress. We very much focused on Mexico at the moment, and are starting to distribute this in masses and it's exciting.

Amir: 12:59

Great. We're starting to see trends and overview of how climate change is affecting agriculture globally. What are the major impacts that you You are seeing from climate change on farming right now.

Ori: 13:18

Olive oil this summer cost 60% more 10% less olive in Spain. Eggs in the United States will cost 72% more because chicken feed, which is basically corn, was impacted because of extreme weather events in the corn belt of the United States. And there will be a 30% increase in citrus prices, which is your lemons, your orange juice that you drink in the morning. there was 22% drop in global citrus production in the last two years. It is something that is interesting everybody, because it's our cost of living and it's everything that we put in our mouth three times a day.

Amir: 14:07

Great Ori. That was brilliant. When people talk about climate change, talking about, the planet is getting warmer, the seasons are getting more extreme. It's hotter. When it's hot, it's colder when it's cold. is o obviously will affect food production, but it doesn't seem like food food production. whole story, is at people's attention. It's more about the polar ice caps and tell us how you see change and food?

Ori: 14:33

Every time I find myself in a discussion about climate change, and every time I hear about climate change, what comes to my head is everybody's talking about air conditioning, when they should be talking about lack food. Nigeria, the fastest growing country in the world that will become the largest one somewhere in this century, has a spike of 24% in its food price index because of heat waves and droughts last year. It is a problem that all of us will meet soon. It is a problem that the rich world will suffer as well, and it'll be one hell of a challenge because when I hear climate change, I don't see in my head catastrophical pictures of polar bears and ice scaps in fires in Canada. I see micro changes in seasonality patterns dramatically affect the ability of food producers of the world to continue on producing enough food. this is already happening. It won't look catastrophic as a wildfire or a melting ice cap, but its implications will be much harsher if we don't mitigate it through technology and if we don't, do our best to stop global warming.

Amir: 16:07

Let's talk about the company. What are the company's goals and what role do you see its technology playing kind of in agriculture and climate change in the coming years?

Ori: 16:17

The bold mission of enhancing food security by providing farmers the tool to overcome water scarcity. Our vision digitally inform every irrigation decision in the world by doing that, to mitigate climate change and water scarcity. To tell the world how to irrigate in the realities that is unfolding of climate change, of droughts of.

Amir: 16:39

if we go back to the beginning of the conversation, we said that the past 12, 13,000 years, humanity has focused on agriculture and underpinning that agriculture was, seasonality, We know the, seasons, we know what to do. That information is passed down from generation to generation.

Ori: 17:00

The next step will be autonomous irrigation. Irrigation is the best mitigation, uh, to climate change, to the shift in seasonality. Take algorithms like Supplant based, live on data collect from the plant. The plant will tell the irrigation controller or computer open the valve now. the farms themselves will be fully autonomous. The crop will be irrigated autonomously. A driverless drone will spread specific plant treatments. The harvest will be at the specific optimized time per specific, plant, and will be fully autonomous by robots going to the packing house that are already autonomous. Fully autonomous farms. The second trend will be more and more shifts into indoor farming.

Amir: 17:54

The last question from me is what do you think is your company's communication challenge when you talk to business audiences, investors, customers? what does the media not get?

Ori: 18:05

Wow. That's a great question. It's extremely complicated to translate the plant, but we have mastered it. But to translate what the plant is saying media, to the world is extremely hard for itself. and it relates to the severity of the problem we're dealing with, the challenge, humanity is facing.

Amir: 18:27

If you were the voice of plants now that you're covering, the earth's plants, if you were their voice, unmuting crops, are they saying to us?

Ori: 18:39

It's not the quantity, it's the timing. Meaning you're putting too much fertilizers in the soil your money is being going to waste and the soil is being damaged. You're putting too much water in the soil. Drink it, utilize it for other things.

Amir: 18:53

Anything else you think that they'd be saying?

Ori: 18:56

I am hot.

Amir: 18:59

Yeah, I guess they are right.

Ori: 19:01

they're much more sensitive and they don't have air conditioning. They're already saying that global warming is already here. They are feeling it on a daily basis. And they will say that, climate change is here.

Amir: 19:14

And that's affecting them. It's affecting the food, it's affecting the farmers that the farmers do on the land, which affects climate change. It's all a system.

Ori: 19:22

exactly.

Amir: 19:27

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