Can Solar-Powered Robots Make Farming Chemical-Free?

[Music] hi Kenny welcome to the green New Perspective Spotlight hi thanks for having me glad to be here so for starters can you tell us more a bit about yourself and ien the company we are dedicating this episode to ien our mission is to regenerate Earth uh using Robotics and AI starting with agriculture which we're very very passionate about and my name is Kenny Lee and I'm company co-founder and CEO can you tell me how did you you know get into Agriculture and like you said regenerating the Earth how did you get interested in doing that and um starting the company this is my second career uh I'm a uh repeat entrepreneur so I actually grew up in cyber security space and um after having a successful exit in in my previous company in the cyber security industry I was really looking around for the next big challenge uh I had two criteria in in that search for the mission and one was it had to be really really hard um to really push me and that's a personal goal and then as a company um the goal was to be really impactful and in search for that goal I came across climate as being one of those industries that really needed help but it's not just climate as a single industry there isn't a climate industry per se it's climate challenging is combined with a existing industry and as I was searching that out um realized that agriculture is a pillar of our society uh I knew very little about it if you move the needle it's one of the most impactful industries that you could play in there's about a quarter of our Global emissions we all eat three times a day and it is one of the most underfunded Industries um even with the climate Investments that are going into the various Industries and how does ent Works to solve these issues our first goal was to actually just get on the farm um look around and see where can we play in the vertical space and we really like the fact that all food starts on the farm and um the goal was to really search for an opportunity and work with Growers and Farmers to figure out how we can we can deliver value to them and with our mission to decarbonize and remove chemicals we found that weed control was one of those areas and challenges where Farmers really needed help because there weren't alternatives to scalable alternatives to the current solutions that are out there today the current Solutions are either you use chemicals to destroy the weeds or use manual labor and those were a really difficult set of solutions to work with from a farmers cuz one is is you're making a trade-off between Effectiveness and efficiency and potential impact on the climate and and our and our human health now we know long-term effects for some of the chemicals that are in our food and then secondly uh manual labor is prohibitively expensive or they do not exist um in certain parts of the world I talked with quite a lot of agretech companies here um on the podcast and one of the challenges is actually educating farmers and introducing them to this new technology so how do you deal with the way that we solve the problem in conversations with the farmers is that we didn't really view ourselves educating the farmers we had an open mind and we allowed them to teach us of how they would like to for the solution to be designed again we're delivering an alternative to chemicals the most effective way that existed before wide use of chemicals was actually using what we all know as the hoe which is essentially a stick and a blade at the end of it there was this literally one time I said hey Mr farmer how would you design the robots and they took me to the back of the shed and said here's my hoe from back in the ' 50s this is what I used to do when I was a kid um use this and then dig dig out the hoe and then it was it was a fun and playful conversation but it was like if I put that onto a robot that we designed that is autonomous and solar power is like would you pay me money is there exchange of value and they answer was like hell yeah that would be an amazing uh product and so having an open mind like that uh enabled us to be successful in our customer acquisition strategy and you have some examples how your Solutions your robots improved F operation and reduced Reliance of chemicals yeah the real challenge today is what we call herbicide resistant weeds so even if Farmers go through and spray let's say glyphosate which is the number one chemical in the world that it's the weeds are not responding or or dying as well as it used to and so you got these escapes that are growing all over their field and so this just past this growing season we worked within close to 500 acres and deployed about 50 robots the robots been able to live out on the farm which what I mean by that is it slept on the farm and it woke up on the farm uh throughout the entire growing season uh removing the weeds and what were some of the challenges you face while developing the de the fact that farming is like outdoor manufacturing you got big heavy machinery going through manufactured soils and and you're trying to force nature to be uniform yet you're fighting against mud you're fighting against wind rain animals insects all different type of pests and temperature and you're you're not in a controlled environment and that is an incredibly difficult challenge you know not only for our team but anybody that is any farmer that is working Outdoors that is why it's so hard and taxing and and very difficult job and so the elements of the of nature uh is something that we found to be some of the most challenging and helped us really think through the edge cases of the automated system when we talk about the market itself which marketing strategies do you use or communication strategies to position yourself and differentiate yourself within the the whole agretech field yeah so specifically with the The Growers and the farmers we do not push the agenda of clean energy or clean tech up to the Forefront the reason why we're we're not doing that is cuz first you have to deliver value and the value is not the fact that it's using solar powered right the real Innovation from our perspective is that we're cramming all of these advanced technology into a 100% solar powerered robot like it's amazing like that that is that is something that only um some of the best engineers in the world would be able to design which we believe we have on our team but from a customer perspective if that does not deliver value none of it matters so what we really talk about is the fact that you do not have to go out into the field to refuel and uh recharge batteries of a robotic system cuz imagine you're uh these robots in a in a 100 Acre field right like where you can't see from one in of the field to the other end and then on a daily basis imagine you having to go out or send somebody out to constantly babysit the robots or or or take manual intervention action against it you know that that does not deliver value to the customers so we talk about the fact that it is self- sustaining that you do not need to have human intervention and it removes the chemicals or removes the weeds without chemicals or without input costs so it saves money for them and well since this is is a short conversation this is basically an introduction to what you guys are doing and if people want to learn more where can they go or get in touch with you my email is kenny. Le .io a .io and come to our website and check us out cool well Kenny thank you hopefully our our audience is going to like what you guys are doing and explore more about your company thank you for being our Our Guest here on this Spotlight series thank you so much thank you for watching New Perspective Spotlight series if you like our content please consider subscribing to our social media channel and follow our podcast on your favorite streaming platform thanks