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Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head on. I'm Molly Wood. Today, we're talking about sustainable agriculture and food production, by which I mean food production that emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions and uses less water and land resources.
But also, food production that can be sustained even when the impacts of climate change make agriculture much more challenging. Also, there are robots. But indulge me for a moment and you'll see why I was reminded of this story in a few minutes. Almost 10 years ago, now I have this conversation with a friend who made this kind of dark off-handed comment that climate change was going to get so bad someday that we might not have like fruit and berries.
And a few months after that, I was in a hotel room on a business trip in New York and I had ordered room service and it came with a side of berries, which I wasn't that excited about. I'm like more of a savory person, I guess. And I was about to walk out of the room and head to the airport and leave them there. I know, I know, I know a lot more about wasted food now.
But for some reason, I suddenly thought of what my friend had said and I was like, what if someday I don't have berries? I better eat these. And so I stood there next to my suitcase and ate every one of the berries and they were so delicious, maybe because I was imagining never having them again. And for some reason, that memory always sticks with me and it definitely did during this conversation.
Hi, everyone. My name's Gio Lili. I'm the founder and CEO of Zordi. We are an architect company building autonomous growing solution combining green abses and robots in AI. To really bring high quality, sustainable food to everyone. Spoiler alert, their first crop is berries. You get it now. I love this because I have really been trying to focus on food and agriculture as almost I feel an under under understood part of the climate universe.
Definitely. Yeah, so tell me about that part of it. Did you comment this as a climate solution or a food solution or a pollution? You know, all of that? Yeah, actually came interesting as a climate solution. So I my background is in robotics in AI. And I wanted to bring that to feel to an industry where I thought could make a big impact in terms of like with the climate change and food and ag and indoor farming.
Every thing that we'll talk about today like what an egg is one of the sectors that will be most impacted by climate change. And also at the time, there's a lot that this sector can do to be more sustainable. So really I started this as with the climate angle. And as you said, I realized that when I talk to investors or climatic people, we are only on the boundary. So despite the magnitude of what we have to do and what we can do, we're still at the boundary of the climate stuff.
That's so interesting because it is a re I mean, let's just take the different parts of this right one at a time from the sustainability perspective. Agriculture, as you mentioned, has a lot to do and is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. So talk about just that part of it first. Yeah, there's so many pieces to this.
Totally, totally. So at a super high level, right, about 70% of fresh water is being consumed by agriculture. And typically, especially when it comes to fresh produce because so much of fresh fruits and vegetables have to go through cold chain long distance cold chain.
And it's about 67% of the total carbon footprint coming out of fresh fruits and vegetables come from just like the cold chain. So the more you can bring them closer to the market and do some success to actually sustain the management of the production, you just immediately get to significantly reduce that.
And this even more prominent in more in its countries because people are willing to pay that premium or to bring in high quality food, meaning typically unless they're available locally, you just the customers end up kind of requiring the retailers to bring the bring them from somehow somewhere right from Mexico, Canada to the to the US, for example.
And lastly, despite all that, you know, about more than 33% of the fresh produce can get spoiled by the time they reach the retailer. So everything here ends up just creating a lot of carbon footprint. So by making these a lot more sustainable, we can make big impact in overall, kind of a global carbon footprint coming out of fresh food.
And then, okay, so you have the sustainability impact upfront. And then as you mentioned, you also have agriculture being impacted by a changing climate and you have a food security question.
Totally, yes, yes. So that's then the bigger big part of it as well. We have to figure out where it's going to be impacted the most and really figure out how to remedy that and how to make a more climate resilient way of food production, just to give you an idea, you know, even just in 2022, about 50% of California farmers had to remove multi-year crops due to drought.
And it's not just about the world's getting warmer. It's really more that the frequency of these extreme weather conditions become more and more frequent so the fields end up just having a lot more impacted by those frequent weather changes.
And we expect about, you know, 77% increase of average area for it to 5 buyer in California through from now to like 2,100. So we're just losing a lot of probably year to year. And we have to start building, okay, how do we protect our way, how we do the farming, how do we bring enclosure to the market.
So really everything has to be, you know, started to be thought and done in a different way. And I don't need to say that field agriculture will no longer exist. It's more that we have to start complimenting them and supplementing them with different ways of production of food.
And even for the field, you know, there are, I know that a lot of huge genetics and new breeding and new way of farming happening that are being tried to be a lot more climate residency. It all has to be happening at the same time, but really big question that we have to address is, okay, how do we make it sustainable at the same time? How do we make it kind of resilient? And both of them are just like the two big key things that we need to solve in agriculture.
Right. Okay. And so it seems like step one of your solution is bring it indoors. Of course, greenhouse. And greenhouse agriculture has, of course, existed. But what were the problems you identified with it being a bigger part of this mix?
Yeah. So the core thesis and mission that we're trying to achieve with our company is how we make these high quality system produce to available to everyone and into farming as you mentioned from greenhouses to vertical farms is really a spectrum and even in greenhouses there are these will cost greenhouses that have been existing in like high tunnels or go pulses since 1700s to the really glass glass,
that glass matter structures greenhouses that have LED and all of those. It's all like a really big spectrum. Now our core question is, what is the right mix of technologies instead of the arts and what's been proven out in the history that make it truly hyper scalable and be able to get to the point where in terms of cost of reaching retail,
end up being equivalent to the field. Otherwise, you're just only stepping the niche market and you're not able to actually able to feed the world. So that's where I saw the bigger opportunity where the robotics and I combined action with low cost greenhouses can really work. Okay. So tell me what you are building and what you have built. I am guessing that your background suggests you created some pretty cool robotics.
Thank you. Thank you. So what we've been building is really just to repeat what I just said, but to get into a little bit more details, combining, starting with a low cost lowest cost type of greenhouses, what's called food houses and high tunnels and bringing in automation of automated irrigation automated,
you know, environmental control, all of that and on top of that, actually bringing robotics and AI robots and AI to really do all the management and the manual labor and and to really continue to make the decisions for these firms and what really robots,
they are getting cheaper and cheaper the AI is getting better and better. So it's actually very low cost way of automating in the sense that previously when we talked about robots say in the 1980s, 1990s, these are all big robots factory robots cost, you know, millions of dollars, these days, these robots are less than 50k. At least the ones that we're going to be building. So these are actually very a lot cheaper than the high tech industrial automations.
So what do what are the robots capable of doing? Are they planting, watering and even harvesting? Yeah, so some version. Yeah, so what we've been focusing on is really reducing the doing all the most challenging works in these greenhouses. So we have mainly two type of robots that are currently developing.
One of them is actually a scouting robot and those are like experienced growers and farmers that are just like relentlessly monitoring the plants every day and making decisions about, oh, this particular section needs more water or this particular section is developing maybe early nutrient deficiencies like making all these observations and really kind of getting to a kid.
This particular section soon needs some truly all of those decisions are being made based on these scouting robots observations by our AI and really replacing what a, you know, 2030 year experienced growers in that particular region would not only be able to do.
And that's a really important part because typically farmers that are top 20% is able to generate two small revenue that average and that's really because they're so, and they can only do that after the decades of experience for us to make this truly scalable.
You have to really be able to do these repeatedly over and over and that's really how how big stealable businesses have involved right you figure out the right recipe and you figure the right process to copy paste that that's what the AI and started what is able to do.
Now the other part is that the robots able to do harvesting, sorting and packing on the fly all at the same time without actually even touching the fruits sometimes because they go for the spin instead of touching the fruits that's extremely food safe and they know exactly where these fruits got picked.
Now on top of that we do have additional commercialized robots that are that we're incorporating as part of our system as an spray robot and we also utilize automated irrigation system and we're either developing or sometimes just buying some of these that environment of controlling environment of control equipments.
So a lot we're definitely integrating some of the things that's already been proven out in industry and then really building the core technology that don't exist that doesn't exist in the world yet but it's so critical for these freehouses and in their farms to be scalable. Got it. So it sounds like you're using kind of off the shelf robot parts and what your special sauce is is building in the ability to do this to replicate the knowledge base of you know.
A farmer with decades and decades and generations of experience and then of course also do the manual labor. Yeah, definitely we our secret sauce is in the AI and how to make these decisions and some of the parts of the robots are developed in his property to our to Zority and that we develop the core pieces of the group first or the core pieces of the robot that really enables our robots to perform a lot better than can existing our robots in the market.
And then what are the crops that you're going to ask you a lot of berries on the website. Yeah, so we are started with berries for two reasons one is that it is one of the crops that you know the customers are market like loves and it is also highly perishable in a very short shelf life so you end up just throwing out a lot so what you're being starting with berries and being able to deliver it is a big commit big sustainability boost for our and getting closer to our mission.
Now the other part of it is that it lets us bears are pretty delicate so and and as a plant it's also very sensitive so if we get it up or berries it's a lot easier for us to move on to other crops like tomatoes to converse peppers and things like those so just to answer your question.
Our main product line and the only product one right now are berries is a strawberry product line however we have demonstrated when it comes to harvesting on the ability to transfer our core technology to two conversion trade tomatoes and within less than a month. Oh wow amazing and then are the are the berries.
What is your commercial availability now there in some stores right yes there is some stores we've been getting really great feedback we are mainly selling in and in the little bit in New York and New Jersey area depending on the volume that's available we have a pretty small two pilot farms one in western New York and wanting south and New Jersey.
We have exclusive genetics that are naturally just very sweet and are all awful that we're selling in a few stores and including butter field, fragments, H-Marts and very recently we started serving a fine dining restaurant called 11 Madison Park. Oh yes no no the rest of the day actually that's a good get that's a very good get.
Yes we actually were very excited because they reached out to us their sous chef just found out our very strong fragments and they were just love dark flavor so we started serving them right now we are not fully year round yet and that's part of our growing throughout trials so we have seasons going from like a tour through May or June and they were now adding in more you know a variety of pests to get to year round next year.
With restaurants I wonder 11 Madison came to you because of flavor or did they also wanted to tell a sustainability story I feel like both of those things are happening in restaurants these days. Definitely I think so the they first came to us with the flavor but they I'm pretty sure they knew that we were local and we're serving you know directly locally every day so that's already kind of you know thing.
Overall we haven't been reaching out to the restaurants too much except for like the short term marketing kind of events but I think overall the benefit or what we love to engage more with restaurants because a lot of restaurants are looking for that local fresh and fresh produce. Time for a quick break when we come back more on the immediate future of robotic greenhouse fruits and berries and where you can find them if you happen to be in New York.
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$45 a month plus tax is a piece promoting for new customers for limited time unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month slow full turns at mint mobile.com. Welcome back to everybody in the pool we're talking with Gil Wouley the founder and CEO of Zordy building robotic and AI controlled greenhouses to help make sure we still have berries and all kinds of other food in the future.
So how big are the greenhouses and how big can they be yeah so greenhouses can be actually as big as you know 38 girls 58 girls typically the glass greenhouses that are built by a built that school like that green houses they would be like a multiple chamber. And big chambers each of them would be like two acres and roughly any of them come with their own climate control we intentionally actually by sticking to low cost.
I turn up we know says our greenhouses are way more modular they're like point to acres and what that lets us do is to really build them in less than three months and build them in parallel with very minimal kind of foundational work.
We can build you know 100 of these you know all in and parallel and get it done in relative with we're certainly not at that scale yet but we know that that can be done and a lot of people do it as they scale and we are standardizing our own set of greenhouses and it can must truly be able to do that.
But yes, so right now what we have in southern New Jersey is only about point six acre and we're building try we're going to get up to two acres by the end of this year which let us deploy about seven robots and really show all robots in action and that will be exciting part of our our last. You look really happy when you talk about robots. I see where the passion lies here.
They would always love to think more berries so it's good to know that our clients we as a result of our automation get to deliver the best fresh produce. That I mean that's amazing how did you get interested in food I mean it obviously you said that it was an interest in climate solutions but you know how did this evolve what's the origin story for you.
Yeah so honestly this might be really first time ever like saying it outside of my family but there was also a little bit of a personal reason to and I'm serious because I don't actually get to talk during these this up to investors a lot in that as a kid growing up I had a history of eating disorder and I basically took myself to brought myself to eating disorder treatment center in sophomore year in college and found out that it's actually pretty common.
Thank for these highly competitive kids and to me before four years to really get to what is considered to be normal however in the process of that recovery or just like learning with a lot of behavioral treatments I became very sensitive to how my body and mind reacts to the availability of fresh fresh food or food that makes me feel good and I traveled and I lived a lot across different.
I lived across different countries and different cities and I lived in Boston I lived in Sunnyvale I lived in LA Seattle Pittsburgh and even in Jackson Tennessee and Japan Korea and I got to cut to just observe the availability of fresh food whether that's you know produce or seafood or whatever is just so different and different part of this country and also just in the world.
I knew that this was just something that I thought deeply personal about and once I and then I realized okay this is actually where you know the passion of my baby my robotics in AI and sustainability and my personal motivation all can come together so it's not that I started with food but the ones I found out that agriculture is one of the sectors that are climate change is that can impact a lot and then I just
the more I just included the more I felt also very personal about it to really get passionate. Well, thank you for trusting me and us with that story that's a remarkable way to come to this. Yeah. So when was this when did you found when did the company start and what's the stage now? Yeah, so I started this company in the middle of COVID 2020 as I was graduating from my PhD at the University of Washington and back then it was just me in my family.
And my first kind of goal was to get I got to go find my co founder and in the process actually got to got the investment from Kosoa Ventures and Kosoa actually very committed to sustainability and climate related. So I started off as well so and then my co founder joined early 2021 and he was head forward at a vertical farm called Plenty before joining me and he's a six-grain farmer so he came with a lot of being a breast and death of expertise.
Now fast forward we have about 15 people many of them are engineers some of them are plant scientists and we have two forms of the running both of them. Highland and R&B now we're getting into slight to more scale version by the end of this year we're going through and we're finishing up our fundraising for a plus round in the next few months. Got it. And then who are the customers like who installs and operates and sells the produce eventually from greenhouses like this.
Right, right, so yeah for us right now we are still in the phase of really demonstrating with our own solution and out with our own kind of production and delivering to the whole food and all my teammates and eventually we want to continue to own an offer some of these greenhouses because it is really important for us to really keep pushing the state of the art technology and testing those out with our own farms.
However, as we reach out a certain scale we will be looking for partners to really franchise these solutions out and we will be giving them the entire system and entire genetics and entire automation so that our goal for these partners is to really make it as easy and exciting in the sense that you know this is relatively little risk because the robots and AI provides all the decision making for them and all the all the manual labor is reduced.
So it's very minimal as long as you're very good at operation and as long as you're very good at keeping passion about your your the farm. I want to make sure that these farms are asked as well as our own and that will those will be our future clients now there's the other part of it full food and like when so all what's all of these retail partners will continue to be our clients as well as we can introduce new crops.
And what is the sort of scale of farm that you imagine adopting this like I'm I'm wondering if like the friend you know the French laundry sort of dated reference but would a farm to table restaurant operate their own or would this really work within small to mid sized farms commercial scale how big or small.
We would certainly be starting at the kind of commercial scale farms of and we expect about 10 to 30 acres of these farms to to make most sense as we scale up that it could actually get smaller I think the key idea here is can we start now we we don't expect to deliver directly to restaurants or direct individual stores.
Our strategy is to be close enough to the regional distribution centers of retail partners which guarantees us to really make deliver within the same date all the other all the stores that they carry their fresh produce and that's actually the most efficient way of doing it and for that the volume of these each of these farms to be about an attempt to 30 acres at the penny of the crop.
So with that I think it's not super big but it's still like a decent sized commercial can throw or is that will be working with us right man I love a decentralization story how I mean it just is such a it really is a profound story right when you think about globalization the potential for deglobalization because of climate or other factors like the idea of localizing these solutions in a really real way.
It's really powerful definitely yeah how I wonder how much energy do they take could they be do imagine that they'll be combined with renewable energy generation now I just want everything to be its own little.
I would love that I think that the overall the we're always very excited about the renewable energy and new technologies solar farming everything combined and right now or technology doesn't have any kind of is very independent of the energy source and that's very intentional and but once we are able to start using more renewable energy it does make the farm even more sustainable even more efficient and what work our
AI can we do is optimize the use of energy overall what's that really optimize when to use natural ventilation when not to use you know heating like so overall the use of energy which is certainly optimizing if once we start pairing that with renewable energy then it'll be even even however the first of
the most thing at least for now with is demonstrating the profitability of these fires the nice thing with a lot of states really pushing for EST is that there are a lot of really good energy really renewable energy really ingredients that will help us and help our future can farm partners to to utilize as they built these farms. And have you how do you quantify the climate impact are you thinking of emissions avoided like how how are you doing that math if at all.
Yeah so we're only getting started in that so we only get to really make the kind of high level calculations the way how we think about it is how much carbap of a print do we get to reduce by
the living getting local getting like not hyperlipical but in the distance to the market and what is the average kind of fields to the farm versus what we are able to produce and deliver and the other portion is how much water do we get to say relative to the field farms how much energy do we end up spending
in the colder days in colder regions like relative to field farms everything has to be taken into a comes that way we lose a little bit when it comes energy consumption to the field however we do gain a lot in the in terms of the water efficiency chemical efficiency a lot of those days as well as the carbon footprint of delivery and the shelf life and the the amount of food waste that we get to our safe.
So people can find you it sounds like at least now on the east coast and some of the stores that you've mentioned or and then talk unit economics you mentioned that you're you're getting to cost pair how much your strawberries right now cost compared to the competition.
Yeah so our cost is a little bit I guess we're improving a lot on the yield and to get to the target yield so it is heavily dependent on the weather we can meet the target yield this year or not we are we know what we can say for sure is that as we reach the target automation and as we reach the nominal target yield our goal we will be able to get to less than about five times faster payback period than conventional indoor fire.
So we're going to get to the conventional indoor farms that are targeting premium markets where we'll be targeting more like a conventional to organic markets like there's a super premium ones and then the kind of mass premium ones and the conventional ones we're kind of going down the ladder and really want to make sure that we can at least get our farms we paid back in less than three years and typically the range of indoor farming kind of payback period is more like 15 12 to 15 years if you're lucky and you it has to commit a lot faster a lot heavy or topics investment than all.
And then finally what is the what's the hardest thing about this are you finding for me personally what's been rewarding and challenging was really understanding and breaking the agricultural kind of cycle what I think is really hard about agriculture is that it is a long cycle and the robots are also harder and they are hard and takes several cycles with hardware but they're ways to penalize it with agriculture is a limit and I think that's a good thing.
So you also don't want to risk your production to watch so there's things that you just can't do at a given point so that's been the biggest challenge and biggest kind of learning card for us as a company we do work we work very closely with the breeders and growers of these genetics that we carry and we also work well try to work very closely with industry experts to really continue to learn the industry is moving very fast especially with the company.
And we're going to ask this especially with the control indoor farming control environment agriculture so a lot of new trials are coming results are coming up that said I think so we're really proud about no conflict last year even from the same kind of square footage that we're getting will be likely be getting up of five times more yield for the last year that just shows how much we're able to improve year over year but we're still a little bit far from we're kind of getting there far from the target either we know that we can get to knowing the plants of what these plants are capable of.
Right, right, the hard part with code you can iterate quickly you can develop things at the same time but with strawberries you only heart you only know if it worked when it comes to harvest time right and there's a little always a bit of a time delay right you get to see them with you know in a few weeks and there's a little bit that one I know I know now with a lot of trials that there's certain parts that we have to wait and see.
Yeah, life is tricky. In the meantime, if you happen to be in New York on a business trip or you know because you live there you can find Zordy's berries at Butterfield, Wegmans in Astro Place and some H. Martz in New Jersey and Manhattan with more to come unclear yet whether they're on any room service menus.
Alright, that's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool.com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool.com the website. If you'd like to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, please hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice. Thanks to those of you who already have and together we can get this done. See you next week.
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