This conversation from Davos with Indigo Ag Inc CEO Ron Hovsepian touches on Indigo’s mission to help farmers address climate change and how AI could play a role.
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TechTranscript
00:00Ron, you're a very, um, you're like a hired gun to be a CEO of an important company.
00:08Why are you working in agriculture? Why is this important? And is this the pinnacle of your career?
00:16Like, like, is this, is this, are you proud to be doing this? And what are you doing?
00:21Yeah, uh, we're on. Yep. Thank you. Uh, very excited to be here and why I came to Indigo
00:28had all to do with the planet and the challenges. Indigo. Indigo Ag is our company and that's right
00:33why I came to join the company. And what we do is really focus on the science and technologies
00:39that allow us to really bring the farmers to play a huge role in tackling climate change.
00:45Inside of there, what motivated me was we have six years left before we have to address the two
00:51degrees and it's climbing at this current rate. We have to put value on all these natural resources
00:57that we have inside the planet and that has an economic impact. Putting those two things together,
01:03it has been far and away the biggest personal challenge I've ever taken on in my career. And
01:07I've run a bunch of different companies. I've worked with open source early on in the Linux
01:11world. So I've seen a lot of different things. This one is the most complex supply chain that
01:16we have in front of us. So yeah, I just wanted, you know, we're going to edit this into a documentary,
01:20but I wanted to highlight that you're someone who could be, you're, you're in demand to run
01:26a lot of companies and you chose agriculture and you chose now. So AI is your intervention
01:36with farmers and with the land and with the planet. Does it involve AI? Is AI an afterthought?
01:44Is it core? And how's that going? Yeah, AI and ML are absolutely core to what we're doing.
01:52And what we see there and what our scientists, our data scientists and our physical sciences folks
01:57who work with the farmers are working on is really great, exciting technologies that allow us to
02:03actually measure for the first time true outcomes of what's happening in the soil when people make
02:09regenerative farming practices. So we actually have these scientific capability by using AI and ML
02:15to gather all the data, to put the data together using hybrid, hybrid model with
02:21sensoring, sensing, remote sensing, combined, combined with physical soil samples to actually
02:26go through a life cycle of what's happening as the practice changes get made to the farmer.
02:32Now, when this country was formed about 250 years ago, there were a lot of farmers.
02:36Yep. I think today less than 1% of 1% of Americans identify as farmers. I'm, I'm curious
02:44how can this idea scale to have impact by the end of the decade? Because if, if this is going to
02:51kick in 100 years from now, I feel like it's a nice to have, it's not going to be part of the
02:57solution. And I'm wondering, do you feel passionate about the strategy that you're developing that it
03:04can be one of the things that makes a real difference? Or is this just a vanity play that
03:11you can say you're trying to do something green, but it's not clear if it's going to go anywhere.
03:15So elaborate. It's a, it's a fun question. So yes, the number of farmers, there's less of them
03:20out there. And that actually creates one of the problems that AI and ML play a role in helping.
03:25They don't have as much time in their day to service it. If you focus on North America,
03:30there's about 2.2 million farmers we're down to, and they produce in about 200,000 of them produce
03:3580% of the crops in the US as an example. We're past actually just testing and doing that from a
03:42vanity perspective. We're actually able to deliver, and we've delivered now five classes of scope three
03:49work at Indigo Ag for the businesses. We've brought money to the farmer, five to 8% premiums are what
03:56the farmers are now seeing for taking on these practice changes. And we've also let the farmer
04:00monetize this another way with carbon insets and offsets. So there are two choices.
04:06All right. So last question. You see that camera over there?
04:10Yes, sir.
04:10I want you to look into that camera and say something counterintuitive that people don't
04:16realize or say something that you think is really important that people need to tell their friends,
04:23their spouses, their network about what you're doing as a way to help get it momentum, exposure,
04:32and mindshare.
04:35We have to valorize the farmer. The farmer is the person who does the work, and we need to pay that
04:41farmer. So we have to make sure the incentive structure that we're giving the farmers is a
04:46durable one, both in length of time, as well as that journey that they go on for regenerative
04:52farming. We can save four to six billion tons we can sequester of carbon into the soil by 2030
05:00using roughly the 38% of the land mass that's out there today for farming. Farmers can make
05:07the difference for us. We just have to put the system in place, and a lot of people want to do
05:11that.