S7. E18: Shely Aronov: Google Translate for Plants
“Our entire food supply is completely dependent on chemicals and completely dependent on four to eight companies around the world to produce all these products.” – Shely Aronov
Shelly Aronov is the founder and CEO of InnerPlant. InnerPlant is kind of like Google Translate for plants. They’re bioengineering plant genes so that crops can send messages to farmers, and the farmers will literally be able to understand what's going wrong with the crops. So that when they're under attack, the farmers will know much earlier than they do now.
I'm so excited about what Shelly and InnerPlant are doing because once they're launched and scaled, this will greatly reduce the use of pesticides in farming. And the faster we move away from pesticides the better, as they are destroying everything in their wake.
“Plants communicate all the time, sending chemical signals to warn each other about threats. InnerPlant makes it possible to understand what plants are saying.” - InnerPlant
“How do you increase biodiversity and how do you increase the microbial density of the soil? You just stop killing everything out there. Right, if we stop killing every single weed, if we stop putting a ton of chemicals that are really toxic on the soil, then everything's going to bounce back and nature is really good at bouncing back.” – Shely Aronov
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In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
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Transcript:
Shely: [00:00:15] Our entire food supply is completely dependent on chemicals and completely dependent on 4 to 8 companies around the world that produce all these products.
Elizabeth: [00:00:33] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Shelly Aronov. Shelly is the founder and CEO of Inner Plant. Inner Plant is kind of like Google Translate for plants. They are bioengineering plant genes so that crops can send messages to farmers. So when they're under attack, the farmers will know much earlier than they do now. The reason I'm so excited about what Shely and Inner Plant are doing is because once they're launched and scaled, it will greatly reduce the use of pesticides and farming and pesticides are destroying us, many species as well as the planet. Shely, thank you so much for being here.
Shely: [00:01:51] Thank you, Beth. Great to be here.
Elizabeth: [00:01:53] So we're going to talk about Inner Plant. I want to first learn a little bit about you. I want to also really learn about what's happening now. I was saying to you before we started, I really know very little about big real farming. I would love for you to teach me a little bit about it and what Inner Plant is really solving for. Like what's happening now that is why this is really going to be so life changing for farmers and food. But let's start with you.
Shely: [00:02:23] I grew up in Israel. That's where I was born and raised. I went to the army, studied industrial engineering, and then started a couple of companies. So probably the first one I was really not qualified for, but it was a good experience.
Elizabeth: [00:02:35] What was it?
Shely: [00:02:36] It was a marine construction subsidiary building a sewage system for the city of Cartagena. Yeah, no, it was random and I was 26 and not an engineer. But, you know, I had the opportunity and I said, why would I not? This sounds fascinating. I might know Spanish, so this makes complete sense. I also knew I was going to business school eight months later, so I knew it was going to be a rapid transition and then started a food brand after business school and grew that into a small business and then got very frustrated with having a small business because I wanted to build something that matters. I wanted to create some kind of difference in the world, and I think you can do that. I do believe that every individual person, if they choose to, can change the world. They just need to believe in themselves, hire people that believe in themselves, and then design the business that could be a standalone business, meaning it's not going to get acquired. It has its own way to exist in the world. Then you can start changing industries and lives and whatnot. Definitely drank the Stanford Kool-Aid, now that I hear myself. .
Elizabeth: [00:03:42] Yes, you definitely.
Shely: [00:03:44] I'm remembering that change lives, change organizations, and change the world.
Elizabeth: [00:03:48] Let's first talk about how this even got sparked in your head, that this was going to be how you change the world.
Shely: [00:03:54] The first thing that happened is right around the time I wanted to transition from my other business and they found someone to acquire it. My father in law came to visit us. He's a professor and he said I figured out how to communicate with plants. So that was literally how everything happened, super condensed. Then I heard this idea and I thought, Wow, making plants into living sensors is a very intuitive idea. Unlocking this knowledge that crops have makes a ton of sense, you know, if this works, it should exist.
Elizabeth: [00:04:25] Why was he looking at this? What was going on with him?
Shely: [00:04:28] He's an innovative person and he actually does electronics, not biology. Was working with a biologist. So kind of the interesting thing about the story is that and this is actually good for probably a lot of founders out there, the concept that they created was super novel and if you think about academia, it's all about novelty. It's not new and interesting, you can't publish. So their concept was very novel and not very commercially viable. It has clips on the leaf that if you're ever going to a soybean farm, you can say immediately that's not going to work. But then once I started digging in and with the help of my co-founder, who is a molecular biologist, we understood that this technology has been around for a long time and there's actually older ways that are more commercially ready. So we pivoted really rapidly into something that makes sense for the customer.
Elizabeth: [00:05:20] We're going to talk about what it actually is, but I want to talk about what's happening in farming now and why there's a need for this to begin with.
Shely: [00:05:27] One of the biggest challenges that we have in agriculture is that we don't farm with the plants, we farm around the plants. So we like to say that agriculture is all about crops, but in reality, we don't know what crops need. We have no clue. We have no way of seeing anything in the field except for weeds, because everything is very, very, very small. So what we end up doing is we essentially over nurture them and over protect them, if that makes sense. We give them too much fertilizer, we give them too many pesticides. We don't actually get that great results out of that. So we have a very inefficient system that uses too much.
Elizabeth: [00:06:06] And it's causing a lot of damage.
Shely: [00:06:07] I think people need to understand that our entire food supply is completely dependent on chemicals and completely dependent on 4 to 8 companies around the world that produce all these products. So this is one of the problems that we need to solve is that we need to move away from that and into something different now.
Elizabeth: [00:06:28] How did you connect, though, from when your father in law came and said, Hey, I know how to make plants communicate, to wait, this could solve major issues in farming. I mean, that's still a pretty gigantic leap.
Shely: [00:06:41] Yeah, so that part happened from talking to farmers. Right. So there are two other things that we did in the early days alongside building the technology. One was talking to a lot of farmers and people within the industry to understand what they want? What did they not want? I always joke about this because farmers are very vocal about what they want. They don't want to change their operations. They don't want to do additional work and they're inundated with products and they have very low margins. So they don't want additional costs. Now, you can say that's unreasonable or you can just take all that feedback and give them what they want. Right. So our goal is to give them what they want, something that makes their life easier because farming is hard and making their life easier is a huge benefit. Then the other thing is just understanding the industry dynamics. So, for example, we started talking about the problems with chemicals, but I think most people don't understand the nuances of it, let's call it. So basically after World War Two, we had an excess of chemistry and we decided to distribute it to agriculture and other things that's what happened. We had synthetic fertilizers, then we had pesticides, but it was all used in a certain way that still wasn't scaled completely. Then around the nineties, especially for pesticides, we had the introduction of genetically engineered seeds. Even though I'm a big proponent of genetic engineering, I'm not one not a proponent of the way it was used so far.
Elizabeth: [00:08:21] What's the difference between, what you're a proponent of and what was happening?
Shely: [00:08:26] What I believe in is that we need to create tools. We've technologies that will enable us to farm more resilient, more sustainably, more efficiently into the future. But the tools that we had through genetic engineering all came from chemical companies. So they're thinking about essentially either replacing or complimenting their chemistry. Is a very narrow mindset, if you think about it that way. That's how we got to the results that we had. Essentially all of the use of seeds is completely connected to pesticides and it really doesn't have to be that way. Then there is one more layer of complexity, but this is really what changes everything is that the technology, because of the way they use it, which is so uniformly is expiring. So over time the same chemicals are less useful and we need more of them and they provide less results. It's degrading so fast and in about ten years it won't be useful at all. That's really what opens up the industry to a new system with using chemicals in agriculture for a very long time, about a century. But over the last 30 years, we've been using more and more and more because of the coupling of genetic engineering with chemicals and just the distribution of these products. We've been using a huge amount, and the more we use the chemicals, the less they work because nature very rapidly evolves to fight back. So we're seeing the demise of the chemicals that are coming towards an end, and it has nothing to do with what people think or feel or want. It just has a lot to do with the fact that they're not working very well.
Elizabeth: [00:10:03] Like antibiotics, like the same kind of thing.
Shely: [00:10:05] Exactly. So this is the analogy that people need to understand, this is what we're doing in AG is exactly what we're doing with diabetics.
Elizabeth: [00:10:13] The chemicals aren't going to work anymore anyway. But also you guys were special mentioned in Time for Best Inventions 2021, even though you're not even out there yet, which is pretty cool. But it said that 20 to 40% of global crop production is lost to pests and pathogens.
Shely: [00:10:34] I mean, in countries like the US, we lose about 20% of potential yields to pathogens and that number is constant. It's pretty much the same every year, which is another fascinating aspect to it.
Elizabeth: [00:10:46] Well, and even though we're dousing them.
Shely: [00:10:49] Exactly, yeah, we've increased chemical use significantly. We're not getting better results.
Elizabeth: [00:10:55] Ok so then you get this idea from your father in law. You know, there's these massive problems in our agriculture system and you start talking to people connecting the dots. I love that you talk to so many farmers. I mean, that's who you should be talking to, clearly. But I think a lot of people skip that step. Right. Like in every industry. They skip the people actually in it. Talk about that in the sense of when you came to them and said, hey, we have or are developing or have developed this seed, what were you actually saying to them in the beginning?
Shely: [00:11:30] We would go out to them and tell them, well, we're creating plants that can tell us when they're stressed so they can signal when they're stressed and what's attacking them. We're using the plant itself, we’re modifying the plant itself to do it and the plant is going to give us all the information. I would expect them to be like, no way or something and they would be like, Yeah, sure. When you ask them why, they're like, Well, because we've already seen magic happen with genetic engineering. Why not this? Right. The other part was that they do truly believe and this is really what guided me, this was my North Star for someone who doesn't come from this space is that they believe that the plants hold all the knowledge. We just cannot access it in time. So being able to provide them that information directly from the source of truth, which is the plant itself instead of everything around it, right? Instead of environmental data, soil data, whatever, you can give them that information, then that's going to give them the best results. It's that conviction that they had essentially the knowledge and the power of the plants that made me believe that we're onto something.
Elizabeth: [00:12:39] How cool. Of course they do. Right. Of course, plants hold all the knowledge. But again, like, we're just not conditioned to think that way. Now we talk about exactly what this is in ways that are easy to understand, but without, like, dumbing it down.
Shely: [00:12:57] That's my job, number one job. So we're emerging to technologies to make this happen. On the one hand, it's making biosensors or living sensors, plants that can communicate their needs and I'll explain how that works. Then, on the other hand, how do you see this in broad daylight, in large, large fields? Because you need to understand that an average soybean farm in the US is probably 1000 acres and in some other regions it could be 100,000 acres. It's massive, right. That comes from remote sensing technologies for optical signals like ours. So those are the two technologies that are emerging. The way this actually works to biosensors is the plants when they're attacked, they act to protect themselves. That action that they take is happening on the biological level. So we can see it. But they're they're expressing something and it's both early and it's specific, meaning they react very fast when, for example, a fungi starts attacking them, the plant within hours is going to start doing something to protect itself. Then it's also different. They react very differently to drought or fungal pressure or nitrogen deficiency or whatever it is that's hurting them. So we know those sequences and then what we do is we code the crops so as they're reacting to that stress. They're also going to start creating a new protein in their leaves, and that protein creates a fluorescent signal, meaning now as like, for example, if you have a fungal disease in the field, the plant knows and starts to protect itself. Alongside that, it's going to start creating, let's say, green fluorescent protein in sleeves. Those leaves are going to start emitting some optical signals that we can read from very far. So we can see this from, let's say, a sensor on a tractor, but we can also see it from space, from satellites. That's the key to that scalability factor that we're looking for.
Elizabeth: [00:14:50] Explain how, is there something in the seeds that gives them the fluorescence.
Shely: [00:14:55] So no, so we're basically teaching them how to do it in a sense. That's the recoding part.
Elizabeth: [00:15:01] That's what I didn't understand. Right.
Shely: [00:15:03] So what we're doing is we're going into the seed and we're telling the seed to do this. When you're protecting yourself against fungus, also start making this protein and we teach it how to make the protein. So then the seed now knows how to make this new protein, and that protein is connected to that stress that we told them to do. So we know what the protein means. So that's how there's really no other step in there. You don't have to add anything or change anything which goes back to make it easy for farmers. They're going to plant seeds and harvest data and that's the end of it.
Elizabeth: [00:15:37] So it's different colors for different reactions.
Shely: [00:15:41] Exactly. Yeah. So it's going to be up to three colors from satellites and probably six from sensors on the tractors. So we can create essentially a little platform in every plant. Keep in mind, you can't see this. You know, this is an optical signal. You need equipment to see it. The plants look exactly the same.
Elizabeth: [00:16:00] What's the equipment that you see it with?
Shely: [00:16:02] It could be a spectrometer or it could be a multispectral camera. Pretty kind of standard equipment.
Elizabeth: [00:16:09] Does the farmer then go out and check on his seeds? Or there's someone else doing this.
Shely: [00:16:14] No, no, we're going to collect it through satellite imagery or through a sensor on a tractor that gets embedded into the data platforms that they already use and then eventually becomes just recommendations for them. You should do this here. You should do that there and simple.
Elizabeth: [00:16:28] How much faster do they learn? I mean, clearly when they're learning, the crops have all been attacked. They're learning it too late because the plants are dying now, that's kind of how it works, right? So how much advance notice do they get?
Shely: [00:16:44] Right. That's the holy grail of questions. The answer to how this plays out is that in the first few years, it's going to be more limited. The idea is just to catch something earlier than too late and do something around it. The ideal scenario with pathogens is just be able to spray a smaller part of your field instead of the entire field and also prevent that spread of the disease so that it doesn't start affecting everything. But then you can imagine over time, as the equipment gets better and the data collected is better, the algorithms, the products that are delivered to farmers, everything can then start to evolve and then it can be earlier, better, right? This is a system that will essentially grow in value every year as more data is collected and analyzed.
Elizabeth: [00:17:26] It's really cool. Now, are you still in the lab?
Shely: [00:17:29] Yeah, we're in the lab and in field trials. We're going to be commercially launched in 2024 in North America and then from there scale it. Right. So the first year is going to be a relatively small launch and then every year we can add more and more acres as we make more seeds.
Elizabeth: [00:17:45] How was it when you first went from lab to field? I mean, that must have been massive, scary.
Shely: [00:17:52] Really scary question. So here's the honest truth about startup land, right? It's like technically every time we do an experiment, even if you fail, you learn something, but really you want to succeed. So I wouldn't say we succeeded every single trial, but we succeeded in three out of four. One of them, we got some infestation that killed all of our plants, and it wasn't something we're trying to look for. So that was a problem. But yeah, I mean, we I think knock on wood, we got lucky many times and what we expected to see as results were the results. My belief is that when we start doing this, we're going to find out that there's not a lot of stress and that mostly a lot of the chemicals are just over-applied and misapplied and the plants are really not that stressed. So some plants are going to be stressed and they're going to be in regions that tend to be more stressed. But I think there's a lot of clean fields, quote unquote, these places where we're doing things to be ahead of the problem. But we didn't really need to do anything at all.
Elizabeth: [00:18:55] Oftentimes it's not even working. Right.
Shely: [00:18:58] Right, mostly it's not working because think about it. If there's no problem and you're putting something in, then you're not going to get better results. This is one of the biggest challenges in agriculture, is that the feedback loop is really long. So how farming works is that you farm for 4 to 5 months. That's the season. You do many, many things throughout that season. Then the only feedback you're getting is what's the yield in harvest? That's literally the only thing you know. It could be anything you did over those four or five months that is going to impact what your yields are. So it's impossible to say this was helpful. This was not helpful. Right. It's just a big guessing game in that sense.
Elizabeth: [00:19:38] In a lot of ways, it's really stressful to be a farmer because so many things can go wrong. Right and that means that's your whole income. So it takes a lot of that out of it as well.
Shely: [00:19:49] I think it's all about risk reduction completely because it's really stressful. I always joke that if we can control the weather, that would be what I do, but I don't know how to do that. So this is the next best thing. Weather is tough and getting worse all the time because of climate change, so farmers always will have to deal with weather. But if we can take away all of the other uncertainties, that would be amazing.
Elizabeth: [00:20:12] Well so now it completely makes sense why farmers are so on board with this. It doesn't sound like it scares farmers off at all.
Shely: [00:20:19] No, the opposite there. First of all, they love new technologies. They want to be excited, but also they want to see more competition. That gets them excited. They're sick of being stuck with very limited options for everyone they buy from or sell to. So just in general, they want to see a more vibrant environment in their supply chain.
Elizabeth: [00:20:42] This could change the whole food system I hope.
Shely: [00:20:46] Thank you Beth. I hope so, for the better.
Elizabeth: [00:20:48] For the much better.
Shely: [00:20:48] Yeah. I think one of the really cool things was understanding that there is that everyone can benefit, the farmers can benefit, people selling to farmers can benefit and then the environment benefits. You don't have to ask anyone to do anything they don't want to do. There's no bleeding hearts here. It's really just the farmers doing what's better for them, which is to use less and get more. That happens to be better for the environment because the tools that we use are bad for the environment. So just using less of them is better overall, right? That's when we can back up to the topic here, which is how do you increase biodiversity and how do you increase the microbial density of the soil? You just start killing everything out there. That's kind of the rate. If we stop killing every single weed, if we stop putting a ton of chemicals that are really toxic on the soil, then everything's going to bounce back. Nature is really good at bouncing back. We just have to give it a moment.
Elizabeth: [00:21:52] And stop pouring all this crap on it. I mean, everyone's pretty aware of the pesticide problem. People complain about, you know, have been complaining about it for decades that everyone is aware that it's destroying the planet. But you literally just don't hear about solutions, right? You hear about small organic farms, which are very small and not feeding nearly enough people. But don't hear solutions for the big picture. I mean, you guys are a solution to a massive problem.
Shely: [00:22:22] Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's one thing to say, okay, chemicals are bad and it's another thing to say use alternatives, biologicals, microbial. That's a great concept. But in reality, to be honest, it is hard. Those products are not as effective in the field. The supply chains are harder. They require farmers to do things differently. There's a lot of barriers to entry to just say, let's just do that and replace chemicals. What we want is a safe and affordable way for farmers to get off the pesticide treadmill.
Elizabeth: [00:22:54] You have the map and you're doing it right. It's happening.
Shely: [00:22:57] We have the map. We have a great team. We just got to scale it. This is more fun than day one where you still don't know if it's going to work or if anyone's going to want it.
Elizabeth: [00:23:07] I love it, Shely, thank you so much.
Shely: [00:23:10] Thank you Beth, I really appreciate it. It's been really fun talking to you, too.
Elizabeth: [00:23:21] To learn more about Inner Planet and to learn about Shely, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and you could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we'd greatly appreciate it. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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