Advancing Eco Agriculture: A Vision of What’s to Come

Hi friends. Good afternoon. Welcome to our webinar where I want to describe what I see coming next and how I see AEA evolving into the future. I'd like to begin by expressing gratitude and a big thank you to everyone who has invested into advancing Eco agriculture up to this point. Our with our We Funder campaign. At this point, we've raised some over $2 million with a total of 450 some investors. Over 450 investors. And this is, this is a very, it is, you know, it's a good feeling to feel the support and encouragement of a community, but also to have a larger community that is invested as stakeholders in AEA success that comes from our customer base, our farming community and our employees, and everyone that is surrounding AEA that is a part of AEA success. So thank you tremendously for your vote of confidence and for the investments that you've made. And I am optimistic that after this conversation we're about to have, you might want to consider investing more before we wrap up the public crowdfunding campaign in other two weeks. So I want to speak a bit about how we see, how I see agriculture and the regenerative agronomy space evolving generally, and the role that AEA can play in that space. But to communicate this clearly, I want to begin first by offering some historical context, historical context about how agronomy has been managed historically and then what has set AEA apart and why. This sets the platform for another significant step forward in evolution of what regenerative agronomy is going to look like. So for the last century or longer, agronomy and managing plant nutrition has been defined almost exclusively in terms of chemistry. We look at soil analysis of chemistry, of nutrient profiles. We look at plant analysis, again, a chemistry analysis looking at nutritional profiles. And this has been true for the very good and the very simple reason that that was the piece that was easy for us to measure. In fact, if you go back 100 years ago, it was the only thing that we could readily measure. But that's not true today. Today we have technology that gives us the capacity and the ability to measure the microbiome surrounding the plant, in the plant rhizosphere, in the bulk soil environment, within the plant's vascular tissue, on the plant leaf surface, within the seed. All technology that we didn't have even a decade ago, that we now have. And we also now have the technology to measure what is happening inside the plant, not just from a chemistry and nutritional chemistry perspective, but also from a biochemistry perspective and even from a biophysics Perspective to understand what is happening inside the plant. You know, we've developed this diagram that we call the Plant Health Pyramid. And the Plant Health pyramid describes how we observe crops becoming increasingly resistant to diseases and insects at different stages of physiological development depending on what is happening inside that plant. From an immune system, system function perspective. And these processes, these physiological processes within, within the plant, are now easier than ever to observe and to quantify exactly what is happening, exactly how well the plant's immune system is functioning, how resistant it is to diseases and insects. All these pieces are pieces that we will be able to quantify in the future much more precisely than we have up to this point. When we think about advancing eco agriculture has been a pioneer in the regenerative agronomy space for the last 15 years. In 2011, to the best of my awareness and knowledge, we were the first company in the agronomy space to begin deliberately using the term regenerative agriculture to describe what we were doing. And I believe we get a great deal of credit for popularizing the term to where it is today. Today we're not a small company anymore. That is, that needs to establish its credibility and that needs to show growers what is possible. We've done that for the last 15 years. We've demonstrated credibility, we've demonstrated results, which is why our customer base is evolving and shifting. We still have many. The majority of our customers in number are still family farmers and growers, fruit, nut, vegetable, broadacre, crops from all over north and South America and growing internationally. But our customer base is shifting to where now. We are also getting requests from land management companies and investment funds and people who want to facilitate the adoption of regenerative agriculture across the acres that they are responsible for on a significant scale. And the reason we're getting those phone calls and the reason we're having those conversations is because of the track record and the credibility that we've established over the last 15 years. And this is something that I'm very proud of. I think the reason it's important, what is it that has given us that credibility and that foundation for success? And there are a few pieces that I think we've done very well. One of those pieces is a focus on delivering immediate economic results. Today, there are two very different schools of thought, two very different paradigms about how you should approach regenerative agriculture from a practical implementation perspective. The one approach is a perhaps more idealistic approach that gives a broad set of rules for you need to include these practices, you cannot include these practices. You need to go through a transition period of three to five to seven years and make significant investments and expect to get some type of future rewards five to seven years in the future. And that during this transition process you should expect to have yield drag, you should expect to have a yield decline for the first three to five years that then gradually recovers. And this is not a point of view that we align with in our work at aea. Instead, my what I have said publicly in several occasions is that if we expect to have a yield law, a yield loss during a transition to regenerative agriculture that is a result of bad agronomy, our focus for the last decade and a half has been how do we deliver immediate economic results the first year. So that means we have to, as we are in the process of rehabilitating soil, rehabilitating plant health, it really is, it is a rehab process where it is wisest to not do an immediate cold, harsh kind of cold turkey, cut off on fertilizers, pesticides, etc, but to transition off, to have a rehabilit rehabilitation and a transition rather than a cold stop. And in that process we expect to not see yield losses, we expect to not see economic returns drop off, but the exact opposite. We expect to see yields increase and profitability increase immediately in the first year, in the first 18 months, depending on the crop and the context. We, we, we, our expectation is to not wait for results until five to seven years in the future. And then the obvious question becomes, well, how do we do that? And if that's possible, why are not other people doing it as well? And the second question is a more philosophical question. I'll leave that for now. But the first question of how do we achieve that? And the answer to that question is actually quite easy. We make decisions and we make agronomic recommendations for growers based on data. We do not guess, but we test. And what has been foundational to our success and the reason that one of the reasons it features prominently in our campaign on we Funder is our use of plant SAP analysis. Now there are perhaps other technologies that could have been used similarly to plant SAP analysis. I personally don't believe so. But the the value of SAP analysis for us has been that we measure a crop's nutritional integrity and nutritional performance throughout the entire growing season and are able to respond if we see a nutrient going into decline. Were able to respond during the growing season and make a course correction so we don't have to wait until the final harvest to determine that this year we had a yield loss. Instead, in the season we can see exactly what's happening and what's going on, correct any imbalances and prevent any yield losses from occurring. And it's for this reason, it's our, our dependency. Our, our dependency is not the right word, but our focus on using good data to make agronomic recommendations through the growing season is what has given us the ability to establish this kind of track record and to establish the confidence, to develop the confidence and the reassurance that we can work with any grower in any context, any crop, help them through a transition and not expect to see a yield loss. Why does this matter for the future? Because in the coming years we are going to have access to better data and different data than we have ever had before. And I am almost salivating at the opportunities that I'm sure are going to come forward from this data analysis. So over the last we started using plant SAP analysis experimentally in 2011 and 2013. We started using it on all the farms that we were working with and we've continued to do so up to this point. So that means we now have an extensive database across the thousands of farms that we have worked with on dozens of different crops. We have an extensive database of plant SAP analysis that and a lot of field experience that we can associate that SAP analysis data with crop performance and with disease and insect resistance, with yield performance, et cetera. But we're about to take a significant step forward. We have two technologies that I think we mentioned in our disclosures historically in the we funder elaborate on them in much detail as you. In September, Dr. Laura Kavanaugh joined our team as our chief science officer. And one of the pieces, one of the reasons why I'm so excited to have Laura join our team is because of the technology that she brings with her microbiome analysis technology. So in the future, in the very near future, we will have a microbiome lab where growers are able to send samples of and in my understanding at this point, almost any substrate, we have to figure out how to extract DNA from those various substrates. But a lot of those pieces have already been figured out for plants, for soils, for soil microbiomes and so forth, where we'll be able to measure the microbiome with third generation DNA sequencing technology that as of this point, to the best of our knowledge, is not being used anywhere else in agriculture. And what this allows us to do, it allows us to see this is a bit outside my domain of technical expertise, but it allows us to see almost an order of magnitude more data, more depth, more clarity than what is existing with the current second generation DNA sequencing technology that is being used. So we're going to have a much deeper view into the microbiome of the plant and everything that's going on that ecosystem than we ever have before. And then the second piece that is coming is we are. We've also made significant investments and are partnering with a company called Croptics. And Croptics is developing sensors that will be handheld or benchtop sensors that can be taken into the field or be used locally on farm in whatever context makes sense that we'll be able to measure not just mineral profiles, but our intent, our expectation with some of the spectroscopy signatures and patterns that are being used is that we will be able to measure an extensive range of phytonutrients in a plant secondary metabolites. So we'll be able to directly measure chlorophyll, for example, or carotenoids and terpenes and a broad range of different compounds that will allow us to directly measure what we have heretofore been indirectly observing with disease and insect resistance. So what I'm really excited about, I've. I've shared this vision in several presentations of what happens once you start doing data analysis. And what we have already learned with, with the existing SAP analysis database that we have, we have already learned we're already a decade ahead or more of where many agronomists are in understanding nutrient interactions. There are, there's not a single other company that I know of that is suggesting they have the ability to produce crops that are resistant to diseases and insects with nutrition management. And this is something we have been doing successfully for a decade. And as it, and this has been an outcome of us being able to manage nutrition with much greater insights that have been revealed by SAP analysis and by understanding the nutrient relationships that are revealed when we look at large data sets and look at large databases. Now imagine what that will look like when we not only have plant SAP analysis, but we also have phytonutrient profiles, amino acid profiles, carbohydrate fatty acid profiles, and we have microbiome profiles as well. All of a sudden we will be able to gain insights that one. One of the pieces that I expect to happen is we, we now know that we have soils, let's say we have soils that have similar phosphorus levels from a chemistry perspective. But crop absorption of phosphorus can be radically different on soils that appear to be very similar from a chemistry perspective. Now we will have the technology that will be able to collect soil samples, measure the microbiome, measure the plant's phytonutrient profile, and after a certain point of data collection, we will be able to, to observe and to see actually all these soils that do a very good job. Where the soil microbiome does a very good job of delivering phosphorus to the plant has this consortium, it has this group of 50 or 100 or a dozen different microbes, and we don't know that information right now. There are many different soil microorganisms that are known to have specific benefits, that they can do specific things. But the multitude of what we don't know far exceeds what we do know. And there are many different microorganisms for which we don't know what their benefits are. And the good news is, with this type of data analysis approach, we will be able to match plant performance, what is in the plant's microbiome, the plant's phytonutrient profile, the plant's nutrient profile with the soil microbiome. And I believe this will open the pathway for a completely new frontier, a new domain in the regenerative agriculture space and just agriculture more broadly. One of the challenges that we have right now with the existing microbial analytical techniques that exist using either microscopy or using first or second generation DNA sequencing technology is we haven't yet figured out how to turn that information into practical application. When you get a lab result back, what do you do with it? How do you interpret it? What do you do next? That knowledge is missing right now largely. And one of the reasons that it is missing and that it is not being developed on a practical level is because no one is associating the microbiome data with actual plant performance From a microbial integrity and an nutritional integrity perspective. This is something that we propose to do, that we will do, and we. I expect that that will lead to what happened when we introduced plant SAP analysis in 2011 and started using it widely in 2013. It led to a revolution in our product lineup at aea because plant SAP analysis allowed you to see very clearly and very quickly exactly which products performed and which did not. That's an interesting anecdote. There were a number of existing large scale agricultural input providers who used SAP analysis for a year or two and then discontinued because they didn't like the results they got. And we had a similar experience. We also didn't like the results that we got. But instead of discontinuing to use the SAP analysis, we changed our product lineup to products that performed. And I expect the same thing to happen, but on an even greater level and even greater magnitude once we incorporate these additional technologies. What I expect to happen is that we will have a completely new generation of insights into how the microbiome interacts with plants and how to translate that into practical management applications and how that translates into effective product applications and effective agronomy. Right now we still have, I don't know the exact numbers, but with our, with our focus on delivering results, delivering economic results to growers, that doesn't happen 100% of the time. It happens a great majority of the time, maybe 80, 85% in some crops. In some contexts where we have more experience, probably 90% plus, it still doesn't happen 100% because there are, there are variables and factors that are outside of our control, weather conditions and so forth. But there are also the things that we haven't been able to measure yet. We haven't been able to measure the microbiome differences in soils yet. And so I expect this next generation of data to close that gap even further and allow us to achieve an even higher level of consistent performance for growers that is reliable and to the degree that can be controlled with all of the exogenous factors like weather and so forth. And so, in conclusion, the foundational piece that has allowed advancing eco agriculture to be so successful over the last 15 years and establish the, the reputation that we enjoy is making decisions based on data. And with what, with the work that we've done for the last 15 years, we are now a significant step ahead of where mainstream agronomy is. And with this work that we are expecting to happen with the microbiome lab and with the crop tick sensors in the field, I expect that to take another giant leap forward. And I missed mentioning within the case of croptix, we have an agreement with croptix to be their global distribution partner for this technology. And I'm really excited by the possibilities of both of these technologies coming together in combination and being able to measure actual true performance of what is happening in the field and the soil in real time. And I expect the combination of those two pieces is going to put advancing eco agriculture into a very different place over the coming next couple of years. So with that, I'm going to switch to Q and A. If any of you have any questions for me, feel free to type them into the Q and A box and I'll respond to any questions that you have to the degree that I'm able to. From a regulatory perspective, our we funder campaign is closing on April 26, which is exactly 14 days from today, and we would love to have you consider investing further if you have already invested and if you have not yet invested. We wanted to share this additional information on what it is that we're currently working on to give you more insights into where we expect AEA to go in the future. So thank you all for that, for being here. I hope you found the information useful and interesting. And I'm going to switch to the Q and a. Comment from Ed. I've been noticing the decentralized science moving movement focus on health is becoming aware that health starts with soil health. Is this a big opportunity for regenerative ag? And they also desire to use AI and technology for good. So Ed, when we think about the rapid emergence of large language models and artificial intelligence, this is a topic that I've already given a great deal of thought, given that we will have a data set, not will have, but that we already have a data set that is a significant a step ahead of where most people are. And one of the pieces that we already have existing tools inside advancing eco agriculture that we're using internally and testing in the beta stages that allow our team to analyze large amounts of data very quickly and make recommendations in a very streamlined manner. And the way that I think about developing these tools for the future, democratizing them, making this type of information digital and democratizing access, making it readily available globally. The way that we, that I think about software and technology generally is that, and in the case of, of AI, is that it needs to be designed, it needs to be built in such a way as to make people better. Not to replace people, but to make people better. Because I'm of the persuasion that while technology tools can, when you think about having drones to monitor wavelengths in the field and so forth, they have perspectives that humans don't. But humans also have perspectives that technology cannot replicate. There is something about the footsteps of the farmer being in the field. So the, the best, the highest and best use of tools and technology is to guide people to ask better questions, to give them better information and to help them be better rather than seeking to replace them. And that is how we are. We are thinking about democratizing access to this information and to the insights that we have been developing. Question from Scott Will these investor webinars be a regular occurrence? Um, I'm. It's a good question, Scott. I'm hesitant to make any specific commitments. It would be my desire to do so and I expect to have them be regular updates but at the same time, I know how life can go at occasions and I don't want to make any specific commitments that I will then be responsible for delivering on the future. So it's my expectation intention to have regular updates for all of our investors. Because the, the reason, when you think about the fundamental reason that I wanted to go in the direction of a crowdfunding campaign at this stage of our company's development, is because I believe relationships are important, relationships with all of our stakeholders, our growers, our employees, our supporters. And I wanted to have a closer alignment of those relationships. And so when you think about in that spirit, in the spirit of maintaining and having good relationships with all of your stakeholders, then less communication is usually not a great thing. So it is certainly my desire and intent to continue to have these have these conversations regularly. Question from John Warmerdam hi John, is the crop ticks technology price wise in the ballpark for being affordable for use by small farms, larger farms or consulting companies? Yes, all of the above. The the company is still in R and D phase, pricing is still being developed, but it will be accessible and affordable, perhaps to a group of small farmers rather than one individual small farm. But it will be if we want to, if we're truly committed to having information be democratized and digitized, then it needs to be accessible to companies or to countries and to regions of the world that don't have the economic wherewithal that we do here in North America and in the more developed regions. So that is part of the intention. Question from Scott Given that not all DNA picked up by sequencing is derived from living active microbes, do you see microscopy playing a role in complementing genomic measures of the microbiome? Scott, I don't have enough information, enough data at this point to have a qualified opinion. I don't know. There is an element. One of the questions that I have is even if DNA is detected, but it's dormant, in other words, it's not alive, do we care that it's not alive? Because there is an element of, from a management perspective, needing to change the environment. And when we change the environment, when we change the soil management processes, all of a sudden things come alive that were there, that were dormant. So we will just have to learn how to interpret that data and how to understand it. I want to say thank you to all of you for being here. I hope you found the information useful and I look forward to chatting with you all again in the future.