Episode 56 Transcript: Cutting-edge tech to keep food growing, no matter what

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

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.

This week let’s talk farming. Agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change, accounting for nearly 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions that comes from things like deforestation, livestock production, synthetic fertilizers. But climate change itself is also a major threat to our ability to grow the food we need to survive.Heat, droughts, severe floods, an increase in pests and diseases, all threaten global food production. So more sustainable agriculture represents an investment in survival on each end of the climate conversation and lots of scientists and startups are trying to figure out how to grow better, including today’s guest.

Poornima Parameswaran:

So my name is Poornima Parameswaran. I am the co-founder and CEO of Trace Genomics. What we do at Trace, it is all about stewarding agricultural land and creating a lasting legacy for future generations.

Molly Wood:

Using a bunch of cool tech that’s only been possible in the last decade or so.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Our mission is to unlock soil's hidden potential.

And we're empowering farmers worldwide to make the best decisions for their farms, for their fields, based on the data that we're providing to them. And really the goal for providing this data is to make it actionable, to translate it into action so farmers can improve their own yields on their farms and alongside the planet benefits as well. In other words, you know, we're bringing 21st century data to soil.

And we're using DNA mapping, data science, machine learning. We are analyzing 10 million plus data points from every field that we touch. At Trace, all of this is analyzed using a combination of different techniques, but it's really touching upon a range of different properties of soil. There's biological properties, there's chemical properties, there's carbon, and we're analyzing all of this put together to create essentially a very comprehensive approach for our farmers and their agronomists to make better decisions around what to plant, when to plant, where to plant. So it is really about choosing the right seeds, traits, fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, nature-positive solutions, you know, climate-resilient solutions.

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Molly Wood:

So let me unpack. There are lots of kind of amazing parts of that story to unpack. Let's start all the way back at basics. What got you interested in this and what got you interested in soil and soil health in particular?

Poornima Parameswaran:

Yeah, a couple things. One, I think there's always a technology part to all of this. And then there's also a personal reason. One of the main reasons why I started Trace is extremely personal to me because my uncle used to own a shrimpery in India. And we really watched him and his business ride the waves of disease. Some years, there would be amazing, incredible yields.

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Poornima Parameswaran:

And then other years, his yields would be completely decimated by disease. And it had significant economic impact on his family. And so one of the main reasons for starting Trace and we're really hyper focused on delivering profitability back to farmers, because I firmly believe in this, it's very much linked to our core values and mission as a company is to make farming sustainable. You've got to deliver value back to the farmer and you've got to make the farmer a livelihood sustainable. Um, so there's that piece. 

The second is I don't know, almost 20 years now, ever since the first, um, genomic sequencer came to Stanford. When I was a PhD student there, um, I've been smitten, I've been bitten by the bug of genomics and really the transformative power and that the applications of genomics data can have.

for decision-making in the real world. And so that's really where my journey started, was when the first genomic sequencers came to Stanford, it cost about $20,000 to create data from 12 samples. So it was really inaccessible, right? The power is huge, but it was extremely expensive and just not accessible. 

So one of the first things I worked on as a graduate student, along with my graduate advisor, at that time, was to develop what we termed a barcoding technology, which allowed us to combine, to really pull together more than 4,000 samples in the same run. So instantly dividing up that $20,000 price tag across 4,000 plus samples. It's a 50x drop in cost, right? To create this data. So that's really where my journey started. And we use very similar technology at Trace to make this technology and the data created by what we do at Trace accessible to our farmers worldwide. 

And along the way, met my co-founder at Stanford, we really were brought together by a shared passion to make genomics data actionable, walk the fields with farmers. And one of the primary asks that we heard from them was, hey, ou know, we're using all of these solutions with chemical and biological. There's a lot of regulation coming down the pipe. And we're concerned that some of these solutions are not going to be available to be put into use, like in terms of risk management on the farm for managing and mitigating disease risk. Can you help us?

Molly Wood:

So when you say solutions, are you talking about fertilizers and pesticides that might get less effective over time or be regulated because of pollution and things like that?

Poornima Parameswaran:

Absolutely, because of toxicity, because of pollution, because of environmental effects, really, and impacts. And so, you know.

Molly Wood:

And so they were like, we need a way to grow more resilient crops without all these chemicals. And that's where you come in.

Poornima Parameswaran:

We need a way to grow more resilient crops, becoming more proactive about risk management on the farm and on the field. And honestly, it is about that optimal combination of synthetics and biologicals. You have to have both, but you've got to be able to do it in a way that is sustainable and that's optimized for that field. Really that personalized medicine approach, bringing that human personalized medicine approach to agriculture.

So yeah, so that's where, you know talking to farmers, we really heard from them this burgeoning need to become proactive about disease management, especially in their soil. And we started TRACE in 2015 with a goal to really creating that platform to help bring this data to farmers, to help them take action as soon as possible, really what to plant, where to plant, how to plant, those decisions, starting with disease management.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Poornima Parameswaran:

We launched our first set of products in 2016 for the lettuce and berry industry because those two crops are grown in rotation with each other. So it just made sense to launch essentially a disease risk diagnostic prognostic offering for lettuce and berries. And since then, we have expanded to now service more than 70 different crops.

We help farmers manage both chemical deficiencies, so the fertility needs, what kinds of macronutrients, micronutrients, pH, organic matter decisions do you need to be making on your farms, but really integrating that with information from the DNA, from the disease risk profile that we're creating from their fields. We're also doing carbon analysis, so really providing a very, holistic, comprehensive approach that includes the chemistry, the biology, the carbon, and the soil health indicators that are, you know, again, what's needed to grow a healthy crop from that piece of land.

Molly Wood:

So let's ask some super basic kind of layperson questions. To what are you applying the genomic analysis? Is it an analysis of the specific soil that the farmer is working with? When you talk about the DNA, are you talking about the DNA of the soil or of the specific plants themselves, the seeds that they're using? What is the data specifically that you're able to provide?

Poornima Parameswaran:

That's an excellent question. So what we do is create all of this data from soil, soil samples that get sent in. When you take a look at farming practices and soil sampling regimens that farmers are already doing for their fields, I'd say the overwhelming majority, over 80% of farms in the US, get some amount of soil sampling done to understand the chemical makeup of their we're plugging and playing right into that paradigm. So we're not, again, changing too much about how things are being done on the front end, if you may, plugging and playing into that. And part of that is our customers send us soil samples from different production zones on their field. And the soil samples come into our labs.

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm.

Poornima Parameswaran:

We split the soil sample, you know, a bit of it goes towards creating the chemical data, the macronutrient, micronutrient profiles, pH, organic matter, et cetera. And another part of it goes towards extraction of DNA from the soil. And it's this extracted DNA from soil. And we have done a lot of work to really set this up at, with cost speed scale accuracy. 

So that scalability component bringing in robotics where needed, et cetera, put in a lot of time and effort into making sure that we're creating the best data at, you know, cost speed, scale accuracy. And so we're reading, so we're, we extract the DNA. We convert it into a format that's readable by the sequencer. All of this put together creates 10 million plus data points from every field. This data gets uploaded into the cloud, into our AWS servers, and we run algorithm over this data and convert this data into indicators that really matter for driving decisions. 

And those indicators could be very specific diseases, very specific biological indicators related to phosphorus, the ability of the plant to take a phosphorus from the soil, or the ability of the plant to take up nitrogen from the soil, for example. And the last piece critical because it's very similar to a blood test, right? When you receive your blood test results, you get your value and you also get a little note that says, are you high, medium or low compared to others for your age or demographic, for example. And we do something very, very similar and that is absolutely key to making this data actionable. We give farmers the value for their fields.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Poornima Parameswaran:

And we also tell them whether they are high, medium or low compared to other fields in their geography and other, um, and especially those that are growing their crops.

Molly Wood:

Got it. So the real power in some ways is that you're able to sort of say this, give this actionable list. These plants are going to do better in this field at this particular time. You should use or not use, for example, this pesticide or chemical. But more importantly, it sounds like you're creating a baseline of data for understanding soil health writ large. And has that really existed so far?

Poornima Parameswaran:

That's absolutely right.

Poornima Parameswaran:

We've come a long way, just even in the last couple of decades, even in the last five years, I feel like we've come a long way. I think there's always been knowledge and understanding that the microbiome of the soil is absolutely critical to understanding soil health and has been the key missing data layer in terms of understanding how to fully...

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Holistically, comprehensively manage production on a field. And at the same time, the technology to analyze and turn it into actionable data at scale, at a price point that makes sense for farmers, it's only now that we're bringing this technology to the market, to the industry. And one of the main reasons for that is obviously making sure that the sequencing technology is affordable so we have that checked.

But the second, it is about creating the right computational data systems to be able to analyze all of this data, again, with cost-speed-scale accuracy, validating this information before we provide it to our farmers. We put so much emphasis at Trace on the science, the validation, really the behind-the-scenes work before we release indicators to farmers.

And then this last piece is again, farmer awareness, right? Creating that awareness that yes, you know, this is not the future. The future is here. It's now this data is available to you and you can make some very clear decisions based on this data to improve your yields, to reduce your costs, and for their advisors and agronomists to increase their trust and their credibility because they are providing advice and products to farmers based on data from their fields.

Molly Wood:

Right. It seems like that creates a second very valuable trove of data as well, the outcomes. Because it is hard to get farmers to take a risk knowing that they're going to have one shot, maybe one to two harvests to see if something works. And if it doesn't work, it's catastrophic because they're so close to the line.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Yeah, and I think there's two components to that. The one component, it is about that economic returns, right? The farmer needs to be convinced about the benefits. We have to, it's like our responsibility to show our customers, farmers and their advisors, what the benefits are for using this data. It's not just another data layer. No, this data layer is incredibly important and invaluable. 

Critical cannot be replaced in making these very important decisions around inputs for your field. The second, it really has to do with ease of doing business. It's that operational piece. Are we helping our customers overcome any implementation barriers that need to be made in order to adopt this technology successfully? And so I think those two combined are again, going to be extremely important for us to not lose sight of as we continue to grow and scale.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about how better soil health is aimed at better outcomes and not a whole new carbon offset scheme.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking about using cutting-edge technology to help farmers grow food more sustainably and more reliably, but with the reminder that changing soil composition and growing practices is a slow process even in a super high-tech world.

Molly Wood:

So there are a couple of key pieces to this that you mentioned. One is, of course, improving yields and resiliency for farmers in the face of extreme weather events and regulations around toxicity. The other that you mentioned is carbon, which we're starting to see as sort of an emerging question and potential revenue stream for farms. So talk about how you're measuring and trying to sort of enable that relatively new economic opportunity.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Yeah, you know, the carbon space is evolving so rapidly, right? And I feel like, you know, it's really hard to keep up sometimes in terms of, you know, where are we? Like, what is the market? Thinking, how are we feeling? I think the key, it's really about asking, are we building the right foundation, the baseline from the soil? that we can then track year over year, rather than waiting five, 10 years to track, can we look at new indicators in the soil that give us a more robust and more easier to track picture of soil health and of really carbon health even in the soil, right?

And so our approach to it has been, let's first help our partners, get that data around carbon. So we're creating the best in class carbon data from the soil to create that baseline. And we provide it to our partners who are then running MRV programs, measurement, reporting, verification programs, or for whatever other purpose, they want this foundational carbon data. So that's one. 

The second, it is about innovating and building new indicators that allow us to really track, is the soil moving in the right direction? Is your field moving in the right direction without waiting five years, 10 years? Because right now the paradigm is you do one carbon test and then you wait five years or 10 years to really do the next one because it takes that long to see any type of movement, positive or negative movement in that carbon metric that the whole industry is currently using. And so using the microbiome. Yeah.

Molly Wood:

Can we back up actually, can we back up and even explain that part of it? I will confess that I don't totally, I didn't know it was that long to understand it and what we're measuring. It's we're measuring how much carbon the soil is storing and able to store, right, to sequester.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Yeah.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Right. And so what we're measuring is total carbon in the soil and then there's an inorganic piece and an organic piece to that total carbon and it's in many ways essentially a combustion like a chemical analysis that you do in the soil to measure inorganic organic element organic components and then the total carbon component of soil

Molly Wood:

Okay. And then why does it take five or 10 years to see if there's been any change? It's just super slow. Yeah.

Poornima Parameswaran:

it's really, yeah, no, it's very slow. It's a very, very slow process in terms of changing up management practices, or even the products you use, and actually seeing that impact and move the needle on the total carbon and organic carbon takes five to 10 years or more, even like much longer time horizons, which is why we tell farmers and farmers know this right like building soil health.

It is a long-term goal, which is why you want to start, and farmers are doing this already. And what we're doing is really enabling them to get this data so that they can fully understand what are the risks in their soil that they need to be aware of and mitigate so that they can build soil health in a more intentional manner. Maybe some things that take decades. If you know what your risks are that you need to manage, Maybe we can help them move the needle in a matter of years, not decades, right? So it is about constantly enabling farmers to get the information that they need from their soil so that they're managing their soil health on short-term, medium-term, and long-term time horizons. I did wanna mention the second piece about the carbon, because you had asked me, how do we really help in this carbon space? The second...

Molly Wood:

Gotcha.

Poornima Parameswaran:

It is about the microbiome of the soil. That is a key missing part of this equation when we talk about carbon today. But the microbiome of soil is extremely instrumental in many ways. In one, it actually helps to create very strong plant roots. It helps with nutrient cycling. It helps with, in terms of the soil to be able to bind together soil structure so the soil doesn't erode away as quickly. Soil erosion is a pretty big issue that's facing our planet. The microbiome of the soil really important for soil structure and eventually preventing soil erosion. But it's the same microbiome that is also extremely important in terms of understanding how carbon gets processed into different long-term and short-term pools.

Like when we talk about carbon sequestration, how long is this carbon going to be sequestered in the soil? Is it short-term? Is it long-term? The microbiome is a really important component of that equation. And so there are indicators that Trace is innovating on, developing, that allows us to measure this microbiome component of the carbon cycle that will also provide a lot more visibility into this long-term versus the short-term sequestration components of carbon.

Molly Wood:

I want to go back to something you said about how this is kind of changing because I think this conversation is shedding a lot of light on. I'm trying to say this without casting aspersions on some of the startups I've talked to. I think there has been a sense that Carbon sequestration in soil can be an offset mechanism and can be a way for farmers to have additionality in revenue streams, self credits, because they're sequestering carbon. It sounds like what you're saying is that market is very much in flux, not least of which, because it's very, very hard to measure that on anything approaching a reasonable timeframe.

Poornima Parameswaran:

I think there's, you're seeing a general movement towards the end setting piece, which is really, hey, let's make sure that we're bringing technologies to the farm that give direct ROI back to the farmer. And we're farming with data first, because honestly, like from my perspective, Tracy's perspective, if you're farming the land with data first and that data first approach, all your questions about sustainability should melt away.

Is this farm being managed sustainably? It should all melt away because you're using this data to optimize the use of your farming inputs to optimize your farming practice adoption decisions. Yeah, I think again, keeping farmer profitability front and center and enabling the optimization of

what we put into the soil to grow a crop out of that land is going to be really driving the industry forward. Yeah.

Molly Wood:

Right. What they need is successful crops, food for all of us, yields that is reliable and resilient as opposed to like a new offset scheme.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Yeah, along the way, right? Like you are going to be minimizing waste, you are going to be minimizing fertilizer use, you are going to be combining optimally synthetics and biologicals, bringing nature-positive solutions in. So I think all of those environmental benefits around nitrogen, carbon sequestration will absolutely happen along the way. But let's not lose sight of the goal that the farmer profitability is front and center. Yeah.

Molly Wood:

Yep. And then let's put a finer point on to how you see this in the kind of landscape of climate solutions. It's simultaneously, like you're saying, a mitigation solution and also an adaptation solution as growing conditions get harder, right?

Poornima Parameswaran:

Yeah, absolutely. And it has to come down to soil resilience, right? Like helping to build resilience soils so that our farmers and the food system, honestly, can weather all of this climate, you know, all of the climate change components, building that resilience to really help tackle climate change or even the weather related events. 

And so a lot of what we do is about let's make sure that one, we are helping our customers drive decisions on their fields. But at the end of the day, it's about risk management and this risk management, whether it's changing, emerging pests, diseases, due to changing weather patterns, you know, climate change. Staying one step ahead of disease is going to be so key for all of us.

The second is it is all about also just combining those, when I think about that transparency from farm to fork, right? Where is your food grown today? And how is it delivering economic returns to the farmer and still continuing to be produced from that piece of land all the way through the consumer, right? The consumer needs to understand where is our food come from? Is it grown from a field that understands what it takes to optimize the inputs required to grow that crop in that field. So there's that whole farm to fork this ability that is going to be so important for us to really provide to the whole world.

Then there's the second piece around how can we cultivate soil to be more resilient? How can we cultivate land to be more resilient? in the face of changing weather patterns and changing climate change. And this baseline foundational data is going to be so important for us to get a handle on in order to address that pinpoint.

Molly Wood:

And then can I ask you to be more specific about disease management and how that is also changing in the face of climate change? I think people probably don't understand that like it's different pests, it's different molds. It's, you know, it's not the same stuff maybe that farmers were used to dealing with for so long.

Poornima Parameswaran :

Yeah.

Poornima Parameswaran:

No, absolutely. And there are so many examples of this, right? Even when you take a look historically, for example, the potato famine in Ireland wiped out almost an entire nation because it wiped out their food supply and it was caused by a pest. It was caused by a disease and that affected potatoes specifically. And, you know, if you fast forward to today,we hear from farmers about new diseases that they're seeing in parts of the country that never existed before because climate patterns are changing. 

Certain places are becoming a lot more erratic in terms of weather or there are other geographies that are becoming warmer or not getting as much rain. Rainfall is an issue. And so when you have these differential weather patterns than what you're used to. When you are starting to see certain geographies become warmer than they'd ever been in the past, new pests move in. You're also seeing pests being moved around. 

Just with farming becoming a lot more, farming being done at scale, I think that is also creating some challenges in terms of either land being moved around or equipment being moved around or even seats, right? Like being traded across borders that can also bring in pests, which is why, you know, the USDA has a lot of inspection points in place to make sure that when we're bringing soil in or when we're bringing seeds in or trading across borders, that we're also not bringing in diseases.

But I think, again, making sure that we are using data.

to track these emerging diseases that are crossing borders or that are emerging in new areas is going to be so important for us to stay one step ahead of them.

Molly Wood:

And then finally, that actually gets me to my last question, which is who is your ideal customer? I mean, obviously there are farms of all sizes. We sort of have this idea that what we really want to change is the big commercial farming operations, but there are still lots of small and mid-sized farmers. And so I wonder who are you selling to now and who would you like to be selling to?

Poornima Parameswaran:

Yeah, our customers are usually agronomists who are working very closely with farmers. And agronomists, you can almost think of them as the pharmacist-doctor equivalent in agriculture. And that is really important for us to be able to not only scale, because each agronomist typically works with many, if not dozens of farmers. 

But also when we talk about converting data to actionability, the advisor, the agronomist is really important in that decision in terms of helping the farmer make decisions based on this data and turning it into action and ROI benefit for the farmer. So our, again, our approach to the market and to the industry has been to work very closely with partners with retail distribution, agronomy partners who can really help take this data, make it actionable for farmers. 

In terms of what we're excited about right now and also looking ahead, it is about commercial momentum, commercial growth. We're seeing a lot of excitement, interest and uptake by the industry in terms of our offering which our flagship offering is called Trace Complete, which offers a full risk profile of disease chemistries as well as soil health indicators. And we provide this data through our own web portal or we provide it as APIs into our customers' farm management software systems. And yeah, we're very excited about the momentum that we're seeing out there. And I firmly believe every acre, every field benefits the trace. And that's really what we're on a mission to.

Molly Wood:

Fantastic. Poornima, this is so great. Thank you so much for the time today.

Poornima Parameswaran:

Thanks so much, Molly.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

There is a lot of money in what’s sometimes called the digital agriculture market. It’s a 22 billion dollar market that’s projected to more than double … over the next 10 years. There’s more information and sources  in the show notes on your podcast app of choice.

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 dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description, as well.

Thank you to those of you who already have and I'll see you next week.