Pushkin. Let's talk about fertilizer. If fertilizer disappeared from the world tomorrow, we wouldn't be able to grow enough food and billions of people would die. The key ingredient infertilizer is nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere. It's in every breath we breathe, but plants can't get it straight from the air. In the early twentieth century, people figured out how to get nitrogen out of the air and into ammonia, a solid form that plants can use.
It's called the haber Bosch process. Was an amazing breakthrough, one of the key innovations of the twentieth century. But getting that nitrogen out of the air and into solid fertilizer is wildly energy intensive, a big contributor to climate change. The process is also inefficient on the back end. Farmers wind up putting tons of nitrogen rich fertilizer on their soil that winds up just getting washed away. In other words, it's been about one hundred years since the last big
breakthrough infertilizer, and we could really use another one. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Carston Temmy. He's a bioengineer and the co founder and chief innovation officer of Pivot Bio. Carston's problem is this, can you use modern genetic tools in order to get microbes that live in the soil to grab more nitrogen for crops? So how how did you get into nitrogen?
Well? I worked on this problem as the core focus of my PhD research. Graduate school, I got attracted to the West Coast to study a field that was brand new. It was called synthetic biology, and the premise was that we now know enough from sequencing genomes and from being able to apply all of the modern discoveries of the technology discovered by Silicon Valley to think about microbes in
their DNA as a new type of programming language. We could reprogram microbes to do really useful things for humanity, maybe make better medications, or to be able to help make more sustainable building materials. And for me, one of the biggest challenges was right here at the crux of agriculture, how do we make better performing fertilizer? And synthetic biology offered a brand new set of tools that we might be able to go tackle that problem.
So is it right that your first notion is to essentially engineer plants so that they can grab nitrogen directly out of the air, sort of a cut out the middleman strategy.
It's been maybe an aspiration of academia of science for the last fifty or sixty years really since the first tools, the enzymes of genetic engineering, were discovered. It was one of the two or three examples cited as a real big holy grail for the field.
Because you could just solve the problem. You wouldn't need fertilizer anything, exactly, if we could just literally the nitrogenists right there in the air all around the plant, if only it could grab it somehow exactly, Let's just put the DNA for that enzyme into the plant, and the plant can make its own enzyme, it can make its own fertilizer.
VOILA will have solved everything.
Very appealing, So tell me about your your efforts toward that end.
Well for us, these seventy years since the first examples of DNA were discovered, the first enzymes from genetic engineering, collectively, scientists have reverse engineered how a microbe in its DNA that program for making the nitrogen producing enzyme is encoded, so they reverse engineered the whole blueprint of that program.
I just happened to be in graduate school when we had the chance to complete the final last piece of that puzzle, and so we showed you could package up all of the genes, all of the DNA in a way that could make it transferable to a plant. The challenge was that we realized it wasn't the best, most efficient way to actually build a product that could change agriculture. It was a great example of scientifific discovery, was a great example of how to understand the beauty of nature
around us, and there was actually an easier way. Rather than putting the whole program into a plant. We could just get microbes to do more of what they're naturally capable of doing.
Was there a moment when you realized that going straight to the plant wasn't going to be the best way to do it.
I definitely remember one day early in the days of Pivot, where my co founder and I had been working on some research for a grant. It had been our initial funding for the company came from the bill, and momited the Gates Foundation just a very tiny amount of money for us to explore the possibility of this blueprint from graduate school and turning that into a crop that could fix its own nitrogen. And we were having this challenge.
We said, even if you could take the best of those new tools from Crisper and apply them to this challenge, it's going to be so many years before we can build a crop that can fix its own nitrogen. And how do we make this go faster? Because the farmers
around the world need a solution faster. So we were walking to the coffee shop and we just stopped in the middle of the kind of grassy open space between our lab and the coffee shop, and we said, you know, let's let's get back to the thing that inspired us most, the microbes that have this capability already, and maybe we can figure out what stops them from being the solution
and just attack that as the problems. Let's enable these microbes just to do what they're already able to do, but do it better.
So let's talk about the microbes for a minute, just how they work in a state of nature. Tell me about these microbes like in a world, you know, pre fertilizer, non fertilizer, Like, what's going on? Where are they? What are they doing?
Yeah, So, just like you or I have a microbiome when we hear about it related to digestive health a lot, and we can take probiotics, a plant has a micro
biome in its root system as well. And the plant is part of photosynthesis, is taking some of that sugar that it produces and it actually exudes it out of the roots to feed the microbes in the soil, and in exchange, the microbes are supposed to be doing useful things like making nitrogen, or producing anti fungal compounds, or helping go acquire some of the other nutrients that are typically found in the rock. But the microbes can help
make some acids that degrade those amazing. So they're an extension of the plant and its ability to survive all the different types of challenges and stresses it faces while it's growing.
And this particular microbe or probably more than one, but whatever, this particular microbe or set of microbes that are you say, fixing nitrogen for the plants. Like, what are they? What's their deal? What do they want out of life?
That's the most important thing that the microbiome of the crop is responsible for is is fixing nitrogen, so turning nitrogen gas into ammonia and an exchange for sugar from the plant. They're food source. They're doing something in return. So it's a nice symbiosis that exists between the plant and the microbes. And when we fertilize the soil, those microbes aren't shielded from all that nitrogen that enters the soil, and they sense the nitrogen in the soil and they
can serve their energy. They stop making the enzymes that fix nitrogen. They don't give the plant any ammonia, and they just consume the sugars that the plant exudes for free.
Because they have some whatever, some sense of equilibrium that says, oh, there's enough, there's enough nitrogen in the soil. I'm going to stop doing that now, that's right. That's right. And in sort of a state of nature, that's fine because whatever corn doesn't need to grow seven feet tall in a month or whatever it does in Iowa now, and
it's fine and it's no problem. But in the world we live in, that's the fundamental problem is, well, those microbes don't fix enough nitrogen to grow the super sized crops we need to grow.
Now, that's right. So crops go through growth sprits just like we do when we're growing up, and as the crop enters the kind of the middle part of its life cycle, it needs to grow very rapidly before it starts making the grain. And that's where the disconnect comes from. The mineralization rate, the rate of just background nitrogen availability from the soil can't keep up with that growth spurt. That's why we need fertilizer today because we've bread crops to be just so productive.
So okay, So you have this idea, it's an elegant idea, it's an exciting idea. Do you choose as you're trying to make it work, Like, do you choose a particular microbe and say this is the one we're going with, Like, what is the process of actually making it work well?
So we started Pivot in the fall of twenty eleven. We started the company and some of the first things we did is we wrote letters to different farmers around the Midwest, friends and family, anybody who owned land, and we said, hey, send us just a bucket of soil, and we want to use that to discover microbes that can change agriculture, and so we'd pay everybody for a bucket of soil, and then we'd start growing little baby corn plants seedlings or wheat plants in that soil, and
the plants would act like a sponge. They would attract the microbes that are really important to be part of their microbiome. And so when you take a seedling and you uproot it, you can then take and the dirt off of the roots kind of get the microbes that live on the roots of that crop. And it becomes a great way to take the billions of different microbes that are in the soil and find just the ones that have a very close symbiosis with the crop.
And so what do you find when you do that.
Well, there's always a lot of great microbes. Some do nitrogen fixation, some do other types of functionality for the crop. And so we had to look at the DNA of all of those microbes and find the ones that have
the program for making this enzyme for nitrogen fixation. And then we had to be able to figure out how do you reverse engineer what that DNA says, How does it control when that microbe operates the enzyme and from that process it gave us the first microbes that really could become workable for products.
And do you end up arriving at one microbe at a suite of microbes like where do you land?
Well, we have dozens of different species of microbes. They're all kind of distantly related that we work with today. But in our products, our very first product that launched in twenty nineteen, it had just one species of microbe and it's actually something that in our second version of the product, it's become two microbes, So two different species
that work together. They eat different sugars provided by the plant, and they live in a little bit different parts to the root system, so they work together as a team to produce even more nitrogen for the crop.
And that first one is it for corn? Is that right?
It's part of our product for corn, and it's also part of our second product that we launched that that works on wheat. On the label you can use it on sorghum, on millet, and oats, barley, sunflowers even so, really something that associates with a range of different cereal crops and it has a different, a little bit different relationship with each of those crops.
So okay, So you find these few microbes that seem like, yeah, these are the ones, but you need to you need to change them, right. The problem is that in their natural state they're not making enough nitrogen. How do you get them to act the way you want int act?
Well, so let's dive in a little bit more on that very first product. So one of our earliest team members, Sarah Block, she had some farmland in the family that we got a pail of soil from one of the corn plants we grew had an amazing microbe living in its root system. It's a species of microbe called clubs Yella varicola, so a distant cousin of the Club's yellow pneumona that make us sick, except this one is not virulent. It is a beneficial microbe for crops, and it has
the capability to fix nitrogen. The challenge though, is the way it's wired. It has a nitrogen sensor that it makes and it's part of kind of the cell membrane, the outer surrounding membrane around this microbe, so that when that sensor senses any sort of nitrogen in the environment, it stops the DNA from producing the enzyme for nitrogen fixation. And so the very first thing we said is how do we how do we get the microbe to unlearn
this process? How can we disrupt that wiring, the genetic wiring, and how do we do it in a way that doesn't require building a transgenic organism, because we don't want to release any crazy GMOs into the environment. And so we used the modern tools of gene editing to make a very precise break in the DNA so that that nitrogen sensor doesn't stop the microbe from producing the nitrogen
fixing enzyme. And so our approach at pivot is is really a concept of saying, we want to simply remodel the wiring of the cell so that it can still do the same exact things it did before, it just might choose to do them under a different set of conditions.
Now you have a number of products like how does it work, what are you selling, who's buying it, and how does it work?
Well, so let's talk about what it means to be maybe a modern sophisticated corn farmer across the US Midwest. One of the challenges is there are half a dozen different types of fertilizer and timings when you might apply fertilizer. The first big one you face is should I apply fertilizer, specifically anhydrous ammonia in the fall after I just got
done harvesting my last crop. It's probably one of the cheapest forms of nitrogen you could go buy, but you're also going to expose it to all of the winter snow and all the spring rains, and so a lot of it is going to be lost, Maybe up to eighty percent of your investment is going to wash away before the crop ever gets planted. So there's uncertainty because who knows whether it's going to be a wet year,
a dry year, a hot year, a cold year. And that same challenge persists every decision point a farmer makes. And they're also completely subject to the crazy volatility of the commodity pricing markets. So for anybody paying attention to commodity prices, across the last couple of years, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and all of the supply chain consternation
sent fertilizer prices to record levels. So that ripple effect means the challenge of managing one of the biggest expenses on a farm is not just stressful, but it also could be the thing that separates a farm from being
profitable or being underwater each year. So that's the challenge that we're operating in and what we try to do at Pivot is design these microbes that it makes everything easier and it reduces risk, and it means that what we're delivering is not just the best performing nitrogen, the best way to get that nitrogen into the crop when it needs it during its growth spurt, but it also is the most resilient when it comes to the return
on investment for the farmer, imperviousness to the unpredictable weather, and also then the best as a ripple effect for the environment for the soil health, the water, no runoff, and no greenhouse gas emissions.
So in more specific terms, like you know, just just more narrowly, yeah, what does it do? Like what are you selling and what does it do?
So we've made two forms of our product today. One is a liquid and then the other is a dry powder. The liquid can get added to tanks on the machinery that plants the seeds for that crop, and as the planter is going across a field, a little squirt of microbes gets added on top of the seed and that furrow before the soil gets closed back up. And with the other product, before the farmer even takes possession of
the seed that they're going to plant, are microbes. The little dried powder can get it added as a coating onto the seed. So then when the seed gets planted, our microbes are already present and the first routs that that form start forming that symbioso with the microbes. So in both cases simplify what it means to use our product and just kind of add it into an existing step in what it means to manage a farm.
I want to read you aligned from this University of Minnesota study of proven some version of your product. It's said proven can have an impact on corn growth, but may not reduce the rate of nitrogen required by corn across all locations and benefits maybe specific to soil types and specific environmental conditions. Is that consistent with what you've found.
What we've found is is the ability to improve how we use fertilizer and to lean on products that pivot makes the microbes that fix nitrogen as the new foundation for a fertilizer strategy. It really there's there's two big challenges that are important. One is these are living microbes. They require more TLC to be able to use effectively than that big bulky tons of chemical fertilizer that are
farmers normally going to use. So we need to make sure that when our customers are using our products, we're keeping those microbes alive so that when they're in the soil they're growing in symbiosis with the crop.
What does TLC mean in that context, Well.
It's something where we want to make sure that when we're delivering our microbes, from the time we ship them until they get in the soil, the microbes aren't freezing, they're not left out in the sun to bake in one hundred plus degree weather.
They're sending a living thing, right, that's not just sending a compound. Yeah.
Interesting, And if it's our liquid product when they get put into that tank on the planter, we're not mixing in some sort of a anti micro all agent with the tank as well.
Which could totally happen in this kind of totally totally.
And that that's to be expected in some respects because this is a new technology that that we're we're introducing so just.
Execution, just lots of just like nuts and bolts, logistics, execution stuff that is that's totally hard. And the environment is heterogeneous in a way that is hard.
That's right. And and then the second thing that's important is when when we add fertilizer to a field, there's a point when additional nitrogen doesn't lead to more crop yield. Something else becomes limiting, whether it's the sunlight or a different nutrient, or or maybe the total rainfall that that crop receives. And so there's there's a point where you get diminishing returns on the amount of fertilizer you can add.
Right now, the challenge is always trying to figure out what that best balance is, and that perfect point changes every year because of how much fertilizer can it's washed away by the rain since the amount of rain is
different every year. And so the biggest challenge we have is trying to figure out how do you get a farmer to get the best possible experience when they're first using our product, to really build up the confidence in getting to a better outcome each year, when the most variable thing in that whole equation is fertilizer.
You really want it to work the first time, Like, that's a big one for you, right, the first year, you really want it to be great.
Yeah, And so there's a lot of things that can separate the perfect amount of nitrogen and the crop from turning into a perfect amount of yield, whether it's pest
pressure or droughts or other types of nutrient limitations. And so everything we try to do is to set that farmer up to see the healthiest possible crop and put them in the best position to realize the potential yield of what that crop come pretty use, and do it in a way that really can overcome the unpredictability of the fertilizer involved.
So how big is Pivot, Like, how many acres of farmland are have your microbes in them? You know? This year?
Well, so Pivot has been around for a bit more than a decade and our products have been in the marketplace for just about five years. We've been able to deliver nitrogen on more than ten million acres across that time, So millions of acres of products being used just this
year alone. And we're in a spot that our products are used on corn crops across the US on wheat and sorghum, sunflower, barley, some other small grains, and we're in the process of being able to establish an international presence in places like Brazil, with an eye towards Canada as well.
Is it right? I mean, the idea at this point point is not to replace fertilizer, but to supplement it.
Today, our microbes are supplying about a quarter of the nitrogen that the corn crop needs, Okay, And it's something where we have the ability to keep improving our microbes, improve their ability to make that enzyme and share the ammonia back with the crop, and improve their ability to match up perfectly with that life cycle the growth spurts in the plant, so we'll see that our products can become even a bigger portion of the total nutrient supply
the crop needs and allow farmers to really start focusing on what's the next big challenge that prevents them from reaching the full potential yield that's baked into the crop genetics.
After the break the best and worst things about trying to sell a new product to farmers, What are you trying to figure out next? Like, what's the lab side of your business look like now?
We've been breeding crops for many, many years, for decades, for centuries, and especially over the last century with an intensivity and a set of technologies that have been unprecedented in our history. And we've underappreciated and not even known about the microbes in the roots of a plant until
just recently. So our ability to tap into getting microbes to capture as much of that sugar that the crop can provide, being able to efficiently grow in tandem with the roots of the plant, being able to share ammonia back with the crop, and do that in a way that is really tuned with the metabolism of how a crop produces green and yield. There's a lot of opportunity to not just discover new science, but turn that into products that really can supply all the nutrient needs of
the crop and beyond. I think we are very much in the early days of what can be a transformational technology and segment of the industry for decades to come.
What's an interesting constraint you're trying to solve for at a technical level.
And if you have a new idea for an app in Silicon Valley, you can program it and launch it or test it out as fast as the pace of thought. And in agriculture, everything we do is centered on how fast a plant grows. There are many parts of the world where you can grow just one crop every year, and so if we had a new idea and we wanted to test it out, it might be just one experiment per year that.
We're so your rate living e step is that you got to wait for the plants to grow.
Now, one of the things we've done at Pivot is we have built the most sophisticated models of how a micro behave and how what we do with the gene editing rewires when it chooses to make nitrogen, and we can integrate that with all the world's best models of how crops grow and a footprint that allows us to do real world experiments at a scale never before seen.
Those things let us be able to tackle problems in a more efficient way or experiment digitally long before you ever do something in the physical.
But you still got to grow the core and see if.
You still got to grow all those crops.
I mean, well, let's talk about sort of the future of chemical fertilizer and in particular ammonia. Right, super energy intensive would be wonderful if you could put it out of business. But like, what, what's that? What's that story?
Well, I don't think that the fertilizer business and the Haberbosch process of making ammonia will go away anytime soon. And that's that's not a bad thing. It's it's not a thing where I think we are successful only if the fertilizer industry goes bankrupt. I think this is something where this is an opportunity to be able to do better and reach new places through a very innovative, disruptive technology.
We're a better way to spend new capital. Our ability to expand our footprint our supply chain is radically cheaper than building a new Harberbosh facility that's going to cost billions of dollars and take you know, a decade to get operational. We're really just like a micro brim making a handful of Baker's East and I and and that
is transformational. It means there's a lot more efficiency both in dollars uh and and and just physical time invested to be able to complement what the fertilizer industry is set up to be able to do.
I know that the context we're talking about. There's a ton going on, and there's chemical fertilizer and there's pesticide, and the plants themselves are these weird superplants that we've read. And yet still I wonder, when you're changing the genome of this microbe, like, is there any worry that you're going to mess up the microbiome in some unintended consequences kind of way.
There's a lot we do to make sure that we understand how our products work, that they are fitting into the crop system in a very smooth, elegant way, that they go back into the native microbiomes where they came from, and they're performing just like before. One of the things we know is that when we do the gene editing to turn on nitrogen fixational it makes the microbes less resilient, less robust than their original parents. That means that they
die off more quickly than the native microbes do. So when we do testing, we don't see any traces of our microbes left in the roots. Once the crop really gets to the point of harvest that I just natively the crop. When it's harvested, it stops making those sugars. So the microbes in the soil die off when there isn't a parent crop to defeat it. But we especially see that with our products.
So still a small company, what might go wrong? Like, what are some reasons you know things might not work out the way you hope.
Well, I think the mode we're in right now with Pivot is we have this great disruptive technology. We have built a business model that is innovative and allows us to get our products into the marketplace when it's typically
been very hard to innovate in agriculture. And now we have the challenge of how do we bring that to scale and how do we touch as many lives around the world as we can, all while we're trying to manage our cash reserves and what it means to have a growing team that needs to figure out how to work in more places around the world. That's a lot of operational risk, and I think the challenge that we face is there's a chance that that all might not
work out. I think that the real risk is that we're not able to move fast enough to be the leading innovator in the space, that there becomes competition that slows us down and trips us up.
So in that universe, somebody's going to do what you're doing. The question is is it going to be you or is somebody gonna.
One hundred percent? Like what we've been successful is really showing the potential of where microbes in general and nitrogen fixation specifically can change agriculture. It will happen, We will see a transformational shift in how our agricultural systems around the world operate. And I think the operational risk for PIVOT is all about whether we are going to be the ones who lead the way in bringing the change to the world.
So if you think about the work you're doing and project ahead, you know, often I'll say five years, but given as you pointed out that you got to wait for the cornder grow every year, let's say twenty years. You know, if you think I had twenty years and things happen the way you want them to happen, what's the world look like.
I'll hit on three things that I think are going to be important to pay attention to, either because it's places we're investing internally to improve what we do, how we bring that a spotlight to these topics, or the potential of where this could could ripple. One of them is I think we're going to see a continued trend of improving agricultural productivity with better efficiency and especially better resiliency.
And when it becomes even more challenging every day to be a farmer and turner profit every year, I think that we're going to have a big impact on the continuity of our agricultural system. So that's the first one, and the second one for me is we're seeing a
massive potential impact on the entire sustainability of agriculture. So just in the last two years, we've seen that replacement of fertilizer by our customers has translated to nearly a million metric tons of avoided CO two emissions, either the CO two from the hybrid wash manufacturing process and the transportation of fertilizer, or the prevented nitrous oxide emissions from
fertilizer degrading in fields. And we're just getting started. So that sustainability impact, whether it's clean air or clean water or healthier soils, is going to have the the potential
to really multiply across the decades to come. And then I think the third is about really food security, whether it is the ability of more industrialized agricultural regions like the Midwest in the US being even more capable of producing a higher efficiency independent of some of the uncertainties of global supply chains, or places like Sub Saharan Africa where there are very uncertain supply chains for fertilizer, the chances that a farmer there may not even be able
to acquire fertilizer, and if they can acquire it, usually at a price point that far exceeds the value of using fertilizer. So it's an ability to take many parts of the world and have access to the nutrients that are needed to fuel a crop in a way that can decouple many of the limitations of the traditional supply chains. So I think those are the three big areas that I see some really exciting opportunity in the decades ahead.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round almost done. We'll just do a lightning round and then we'll be done. Do you have a garden, I do. What did best for you this year? What was the hit of the garden?
Well, my kids. I've got a seven year old and a ten year old, and we love gardening together. I think pumpkins are always fun. We grow a lot of flowers that my daughter loves to grow, So zinnias and dahlia's are the ones that are high on her list.
What's your second favorite element?
Well, I will go with oxygen. I think it it is both such a fuel for keeping us alive. But I also I love wine and everything from viniculture and analogy, and oxygen is usually the enemy of wine. So oxygen is both powerful and also something that can really be a challenge for not just wine but the enzyme of nitrogen fixation itself.
When was the last time you played the trumpet?
Oh, man, that's a good question. It's been a while. It's probably been a decade.
There was another version where you were like, it's right here. That was my dream. What's the best thing about working with farmers.
In a world where so much seems more virtual or digital all the time? Being able to get back to something physical, something that just requires a lot of hard work in person. That makes for some really invigorating conversations and just a lot of times that I shared appreciation at the end of a day, end of hard work, to sit down together and spend time together.
What's a hard thing about working with farmers?
Well, on one hand, a farmer needs to be risk averse. So any new technology, any new innovation, it's not like you can just download a new app, try it out and delete it right.
There's a huge downside if it's not.
You might go out of business and lose that family farm that's been around for generations if you make the wrong bet. So the hardest part about trying to bring new technology on the farm is figuring out the risk portion of trying something out. So farmers want to experiment, but just do it in a way that is risk averse.
And then the challenge with a lot of us that don't live on a farm is we don't appreciate just how sophisticated that farm is and how sophisticated that ability to experiment without risk or without unnecessary risk really is.
And so how do we talk to each other in a way that moves ideas as fast as possible, especially when we only grow one crop a year like that is the hardest part about this whole thing bringing innovation into the world is there's a fundamental slow pace, a need to be able to minimize risk to the negative, and a real opportunity to work with some of the most innovative forward thinking entrepreneurs and business owners that exist in this world, if only we can figure out how
to all communicate in something that isn't common terminology and familiar for most of us.
Thank you, it was great to talk with you.
Thank you as well.
Carsten Timmy is the co founder and chief information Officer at Pivot Bio. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lyddy jeene Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob Oldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.