DCS 09: Anastasia Volkova of Regrow

In this episode of Developing Carbon Stories, we are speaking with Anastasia Volkova, CEO & Co-Founder of Regrow - a science and technology platform that unlocks the power of resilient agriculture to combat climate change and help farmers grow profitability.

• Listen on Spotify.
• Listen on Apple Podcasts.
• Listen on Google Podcasts.

More about Anastasia.

More about Regrow.

Transcript

Pauline Blanc: Hello, my name is Pauline Blanc and this is Developing Carbon Stories, a podcast about product developers developing the most innovative and impactful carbon projects around the world.

Developing Carbon Stories is a project by Abatable, a carbon procurement and intelligence platform that enables companies to purchase high-quality carbon offsets.

During each episode, we speak with an entrepreneur from a different part of the carbon ecosystem and talk about their journey so far and how they are acting on climate change.

In this episode, we are speaking with Anastasia Volkova, CEO and co-founder of Regrow, a company that empowers the Food and Agriculture industries to adopt, scale, and monetize resilient agricultural practises.

David Reside: Anastasia, thanks so much for joining me on this episode of developing carbon stories. How's it going?

Anastasia Volkova: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me– excited to support the development of the stories. There are so many stories to tell.

DR: That’s what I like to hear. We want to hear as many stories as we can, and to start the stories, it would be great to hear yours in terms of your journey on the way to being involved in the climate industry.

AV: It's a long journey. Where do we start with the story? I guess it's a very good story, it's a, it's a windy, windy journey with, not necessarily some personal perils or planetary perils, so I guess it's not a secret that a lot of us have, you know, found ourselves in this work because of some personal experiences that we had that really got us to realise what climate change could do to individual lives and livelihoods– and for me it was growing up in the arid South of Ukraine and really seeing complete dependency of everything we grew upon water and availability of water, and it's not too uncommon for an arid environment. You can compare that area of the world, it’s quite similar to certain areas in Italy or California.

Very similar requirements exist, but there was definitely this realisation that I had. I didn't necessarily have the full reasoning for it, but it felt like the system was very fragile and seemed like something was wrong, and you know, people talk about climate change and you could just see the heat waves and those shocks and you know, many years later, I’d be in different countries, studying or working or doing both usually in parallel, experiencing the same, that heat waves in Europe it became increasingly common.

They were really not a thing, not really a topic of conversation. I'm not saying statistically, they weren’t, but they definitely were not the topic of a conversation when I was growing up.

No one would think about, you know Paris going into heat wave every year earlier than the year before, or going into a completely new weather pattern that wouldn't be predictable or expected and you can say humans have short memories, and your baselining things from, you know, just a few previous seasons like, well, “lucky we were here and this was like this.” But of course, if you look at the rising average, we really see the trend, and the trend does point to we're going to have gas emissions correlation in the atmosphere, and I always wanted to do something that would build a little bit more resilience into it. It felt not fair, it felt not right, it didn't feel sustainable long-term to have systems that have become so fragile, especially in farming, and we weren't in subsistence farming. We were, you know, there was a hobby farm.

And my godmother had more of a larger-scale farm where she kept these and experimenting with pollination habitats and some other biodiversity features.

But I definitely didn't realise the extent to which commercial agriculture has kind of commoditized and scaled some of the practises that we've learned practising in our small farm when Mom was raising food and on we marched later on when I was playing sideload imagery and analytics and my PhD with some models, I saw that maybe that data that I was accessing was one of the first few people at scale that we're really working on that problem. Maybe that data could help people make better decisions.

And the pieces of the puzzle have come together that for me, that fragility can be counteracted with resilience via more regenerative, more sustainable agricultural practises.

Maybe the key is to give people this visibility into it so we can manage what we can measure.

DR: Hmm, that's interesting that if you come from a background, I guess connected to farming and connected to the land and in the way that you outlined.

Was that always the intention? You know, when you started to Regrow Ag to use, you know, satellite imagery, modern technologies to kind of solve these problems that you were seeing growing up or was it more sort of a happy coincidence?

Because I remember, like, you know, when I was out, you know, doing a bit of research on you on LinkedIn and saw that you had a PhD in aerospace engineering and so the connection between that to sustainable agriculture wasn't immediately apparent. At what point did you make that connection?

AV: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think about it as connecting the dots looking backwards as Steve Jobs put it in his Stanford address.

AV: It is definitely the case. Early on, as I mentioned, you know being a teenage girl growing up in Ukraine, I just felt like this solution had to exist. This problem was worth solving, but I had no idea how you go about solving such a problem and why hadn’t someone solved it already.

The advice I got from my family is to go and get a technical engineering degree, so I would learn how to solve problems in general.

That was quite good advice I would say.

They definitely talked me away from some kind of more general degrees and majors and the point that my family was making, that Mom was making, she said, you know, if you really want to run an international project with scale and impact with you know, the people to make some change happen and maybe, you know it wasn't so crystallised in my head as climate will be the way that we would call this industry, climate tech, of course not. And it was more of I would welcome something impactful. I really want to work on something that matters– and if I can put all my energy, which there's a lot, towards something, it would be definitely worthwhile.

But I didn't know where I would find it, and so I kept going down the path of pursuing problems around the data information analytics interpretability of the planet that we have through satellites, eventually, through remote sensing building models for interpretation of that data so that people didn't have to comb through it manually.

And I think at some point it occurred to me that once you get good at something, you get this inside that only so few people in the world are working with that data at such level of intimacy.

I saw a lot of land in that imagery, I saw a lot of pictures of change. My PhD was literally around measuring change by building sophisticated visual systems to interpret this data.

But you could see, you know, I would map out the forests and would map out the farmland, map out the rivers, and those maps would be compared over time and originally it was for localization of a surveillance drone that would ensure civil safety, but at the same time, that same map shows change in the landscape, and I was a lot more passionate about that.

And ultimately, I started asking more questions around who could be given this data, but I think just the core of it is that people don't associate aerospace with anything more than rockets and jets. And actually, there's a whole beautiful area called Earth Observation and it's to do with remote sensing and saving planet A.

DR: And so, you've got the PhD in areas-based engineering. At what point did you decide, I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna start the company. You know, it's gonna use this technology. And there's the problem I want to solve?

You know at what point did that crystallise?

AV: It might seem like a linear journey when you look at my LinkedIn, but it's because LinkedIn doesn't do parallel pathing.

DR: If Linkedin's listening, that's a little tweak that could be made on the platform.

AV: It should, it should. I think if we really want to present more whole selves, it's not like these different buckets, it's different paths and I think it’s important to unpack so for me, alongside my studies and pursuing a little bit more skill development on the intellectual front and science front just really learning what is the cutting-edge technology out there? How can it be applied? How can it solve really meaningful problems?

And I really want to emphasise the fact that it's so much more important to be in love with the problem than in love with the technology hammer. You started asking this question that I didn't fully unpack, but really, the business wasn't fitted for the technology that I was working on. The technology gave me the insight as to its own limitation, and we've always used it as an input into a broader system that could actually deliver value– the most important thing is it delivers value, solves the problem, and we weren't trying to, you know, use that little hammer instead of a saw instead of a screwdriver.

And we see it a lot in the industry even now because it’s so nascent and people are trying to bring something to market that maybe is you know, still early stages of development and say, “Oh yes, you can throw all the satellite imagery into a machine learning model and you will see how much carbon is in the soil.”

Well, if only it was that simple. And if only it helps through, you know, the different atmospheric and environmental conditions and soil moisture conditions and the different farming management practises, but because it's not, we actually need more, more rigour in that process, so I just really wanna emphasise the point over and who's listening and is excited or interested or excited in starting the business I think it's just so, it’s such a long journey and it will take you places, but it's important to be passionate about the problem and that's the real anchor, because the problem is with you can really solve for.

If technology is your anchor, it will limit you and it will not really build the community around you, because the community usually shares problems, and can be varying in those perspectives on how do you approach those types of problems? I thought it would be an important point to make.

DR: That is an important point to make. I guess it's about being mission-oriented in what you do and, in some ways, passionate about what you do.

It's a great wholesome message and it's very helpful as well.

AV: In terms of parallel pathing on LinkedIn, it's as simple as in parallel to make them for degrees. I’ve worked for start-ups and because I started out as that teenage kid wanted to learn how do you make a difference?

And having seen a little bit of the work in government and a little bit of the work in corporate, it felt like those two places would not change at the speed and the pace that I would want them to move or for me to feel satisfied with the progress and the efforts that I'm making and start-ups and where they discovered the world is faster pace environment in which you could create change, you could experiment with things and I've worked for a number of start-ups and number of founders– we started some of our own project before our story first happened and Regrow to learn the start-up kitchen, so to speak, to learn what it takes to build a business from all the different perspectives.

You could see me having different roles and all sorts of roles in a start-up to know how it works.

And then eventually, that skillset is a more professional skill set, you can say was married where the scientific inside to the acumen around what remote sensing and modelling could do.

To create a business together so it was really, really parallel rather than, you know, it did dive into academia.

I realised I wanted to commercialise something but more like I wanted to learn what the cutting edge is and figure out what was the biggest problem.

I can apply it whilst figuring out how to be better at solving people's problems and making a business case which would create sustained change.

DR: Yeah, sure. And I mean this problem we're talking about… would you define that as the big problem, like climate change, or would it be more sustainable agriculture or would it be even more specific than that?

Perhaps how we can use remote sensing to improve supply chains or things like that? How do you define this problem you're solving?

AV: We think about it as the agricultural relationship with nature that contributes to climate change. That's the piece of the pie of GHG, of greenhouse gas emissions, that we really are tackling. We recognise the importance of the other pieces and other industries and other hard to evade sectors.

But we don't really, we're best placed to stretch across and we're best placed to deliver a deeply grounded sense of a clear, vigorous yet economically scalable solution to an industry that needs to be served on its own because of its own complexity and enormous scale. So that's the problem we're focusing on– really helping anyone who interacts with agricultural supply chain measure and reduce their scope of emissions.

Maybe I’m opening a can of worms by saying that, but that's the shortest way I can describe it.

DR: No, that's good. I mean it might be worth speaking a little bit more about the work that Regrow does and, you know, how that emerged from FluroSat. In fact, perhaps we could touch on the journey in terms of FluroSat and how that became Regrow and the development of the Regrow Ag that we know today as opposed to, you know, the idea that you started out with.

And there's a lot in there. I understand that'll potentially be a long one. But we can take it piece by piece.

AV: Yeah, hopefully I'll be able to thread the needle here and show you that the main idea was still the same. We started with realising where the decisions that were impacting the agricultural resilience and the environmental outcomes, where were they on farm? Who was making those decisions? And what decisions you could inform with the data that has become available that wasn't available or with the modelling that became available and wasn't available until recently.

To us, that problem ended up being the use of fertiliser on the farm. This is not the only problem, it's connected to a whole set of other decisions that are made on the farm that have to do with crop monitoring, the evaluation of its performance, stress management, management for yield of course, and profitability.

To meet the world “resilience” captures both environmental and financial stability. So FluroSat as a business started with that, there was a mini use case of how you can tie together on found data, remote sensing and crop simulators, which is effectively a subset of the impact models we're using now, into a decision support system for a farm set of decision makers– which are producers themselves, their advisors, their economists and unless we started with the programme nitrogen management B, a little bit more focused on just about how expensive it was and the margins within the main idea behind solving that problem.

Even some of the early investors that we attracted from the medical organisations that supported the farms, they definitely wanted to see this problem solved for environmental reasons equally, as is for economic reasons, and thankfully the world has evolved a lot in the last six years with a lot more clarity and authenticity and transparency of the climate conversation, and the realisation where the problem originates and the fact that we have optimised agricultural system at scale for commodity production and there is nothing wrong with it with such a goal after several world wars, and we've optimised the system for it and it delivers on that objective we have set 50 years ago, or 60 years ago, you know, or 70 depending on which conflict you take.

But now we're saying that it has some adverse effects on the environment and we need to incorporate externality into optimization and to how we solve this problem.

In reality, we're solving the same problem just on a much larger scale and are now connecting a lot more stakeholders to enable the change happening. So pretty, pretty proud of that to be honest, that at the core of it, it's being passionate about the impact of Land Management and nature and now there is such strong buy-in from across the food system that we can really see change happening at scale.

DR: And the sort of change that, you know that land-based systems need to adopt agricultural in general, are we talking about like a paradigm shift away from industrial agriculture to something more regenerative or is it more about identifying the adverse effects that you mentioned and internalising those externalities to more of a targeted approach?

AV: I know it's both and they actually have positions in the support that we offer to the sector in these two buckets. On one hand, you have the top-down approach. So as businesses are getting more clarity on the importance of the environmental effects of doing business as usual and when to set more Net Zero targets. They also are confronted by the challenges of needing to know their scope 3 emissions, because most brands interacting with agriculture would most likely have most of their emissions tied up in this bucket called Scope 3, which truly means somewhere upstream in the supply chain you have a farm.

And this is where most emissions come from. And so, the top-down version of solving for this is understanding how for each brand or each supply chain, the emissions stack up and where do you have opportunities?

But then the bottom-up version of solving this problem is really looking at the practises on farm as well as the outcomes tied to it and finding the transition. So, if you look at these two pieces, this is really measured at a large scale to then manage, to reduce, gaining visibility into this allegedly black box of Scope 3 emissions to know where to invest to reduce emissions.

So, the practises and outcomes from your question may actually play two essential parts of this. And yes, we can talk about what's more important to fund, but I think that's not necessarily the question we need to be asking.

We need to see the transition; we see the transition we have more certainty that it’s happening because there's always some ambiguity about how you measure and model outcomes in natural systems.

Yes, let's face it, even if we take a bunch of soil samples and take them to the lab, we will know exactly what is the soil carbon level across that farm because there is you know uncertainty in that measurement. There's some metal margin of error that creeps into it. If you scale it, conjure intuitively, making the assessment of the sold carbon change on a large scale actually gives you more clarity, more certainty, because you are capturing the larger variation and you know what the error would be across the variation.

The reason I'm talking about that is because that type of insight, how to run the programme, where to scale it, gives us the ability to bring the best offerings to the farm, and give them the programme that would be economically viable, as well as give the brands that they're working with that are the buyers from downstream the supply chain, to invest on the farm. So, it's really a twofold approach: you really need the numbers to know where to go, but then you need the numbers to invest in the change. Those two pieces need to work together.

DR: Sure, and so which part of the well, which direction is Regrow working in? Are you working at the top of the supply chain you know with the brands? Or are you engaging directly with farmers as well or how does the supply chain like Regrow’s work fit together?

AV: Yeah, we do both, so we cover the entire supply chain. We have farmers in a growing list on staff supporting actual farmers and advisors, coaching them, giving them training, because we found that that's the most scalable way to not re-invent, re-state, redevelop the relationships that farmers already have with their advisors or their buyers, their demand customers, but really to strengthen those relationships and strengthen supply chains because we need a lot of trust and a lot of investment into future resilience to build the system of the future to enable a transition.

So, we have both the top-down and the bottom-up version of this motion where we engage with both, we as you can see have a lot of customers as known brands either in Consumer-Packaged Goods categories or upstream on the farm– the companies that enable the farmer to actually grow by providing them with inputs. For all those companies, the farm is Scope 3. That's where they need to come together to enable the farm to make the change happen.

How we would go to that farm oftentimes is the brand introducing us up to the partners of the supply chain. So, we can get more accurate specification of their scope 3 as well as deploy programmes with their partners later on.

In some cases, you have of course distributed and not vertically integrated supply chains which is good for the resilience of the system as a whole, so both in those vertically integrated, we would not have as much resilience and buffers in the system. But when you have such a system, then it's a mix of bottoms-up and top-downs. So, let's for example say a brand says I know I'm sourcing over here because this is where my processing facility is, but I don't know where exactly the farm is.

And Regrow would trace it up the chain a little bit or work with that region with that supply shed to enable the impact that the brands or the companies are looking for.

DR: Right. And do you ever see much of a conflict there between an upstream brand and perhaps a land manager or a farmer in terms of how they approach or how they would like to manage the land? Like if a brand has a climate goal in mind and they go to Regrow Ag and say we would like you to get in touch with these farmers or this particular region. Do you ever get a sense of pushback from farmers? Or perhaps the other way around when you're going from a bottom-up approach?

AV: Not really. I think the farmers are very interested in undergoing the transition on their farms.

I think they need to be understood and respected– they're in a very high-risk business. One can say that they have been buried under risk or the supply chain and this is where financially it needs to be shared with climate smart practises to really share the risk with the farmer across the transition years. Most farmers we– I mean, all farmers we talk to really care about protecting their land, supporting the next generation, they all care about their families staying on the farm and continuing that lifestyle and the livelihoods supporting local communities that they run.

In order for us to collectively achieve that for agriculture and food industry as a whole, we need to invest in transition on the farm to protect it from just the wild swings of weather that will becoming more and more, as well as hopefully to extract ourselves from, would look like a vicious cycle where we make environment worse, which makes climate worse, which has adverse effects on coal production, which then has to resort to more artificial measures of crop production rather than self-reliance, and maybe use of synthetic fertilisers or use of some plant species that are not well adapted and it goes into a cycle making the emissions higher, making the temperatures rise again.

So, the opportunity there is clear and it's no matter how you how you call it. This is a protection for the future, and everyone's motivated by it, because ultimately, if we don't invest into perpetual planet together there is no industry, there is no food, there is no fibre and then there is conflict and we need to really avoid that problem. If there is a very strong unifying message that everyone across the supply chain is aligned to, is still potentially some, you know, small misunderstandings or conversations would still need to happen, but ultimately, we all depend on one another.

And of course, there's an inherent tension between– those that have something want to sell it for the higher price than those who need it, who need to buy it for the lowest price possible. I believe that we're a little bit elevated away from that tension when we're investing into resilience and into the future and there's opportunities for us to find different margins in it.

For example, if you see that the brand of course wants to buy low price commodity at the same time the farm wants to sell it for the highest price because they believe they're doing a good job and they're using the right practises and through the transition of the system into our generative system, we are now seeing the farms that have transitioned, some of them transitioned decades ago and they have very low emissions.

Some of them have transitioned a few years ago. We are seeing lower cost of imports almost guaranteed, higher yields in high stress years where there's going to be flood or drought because the system is so much more resilient, the water holding capacity, the water infiltration of the soil is so much better and the cover and there is not a runoff of residue of the farm because of the implemented cover cropping, crop rotation, diversity and natural practises that together really enable financially, very meaningful outcomes for farm and we need more farms to cross that little chasm, if it even exists, because some studies are showing that you can really start seeing the cost benefits of transition in year one and so the brands of course in the entire system need to figure out a financially sustainable model for this, and I think some of the benefits are baked right into it. So, it's not like we will have to figure out a completely new way of paying the premium for all commodities and that can be one of the tools that we use for a certain time over a period of transition.

Ultimately, the economic studies are showing that the farm will be economically better off through this transition, which holds the promise for us to go over to the other side and have sustainability in our financial and environmental state there.

DR: Yeah. And you mentioned, I guess quite a whole suite of impacts which Regrow Ag’s intervention can create on land.

You know, being a carbon heavy podcast, we're generally talking about carbon credits and things like that, Spec 3 or Spec 1, what are some of the other environmental benefits that we can see on farms and supply chains because of Regrow Ag’s work?

You mentioned a few things there before about water filtration and soil quality and a few other ideas. Do we see any benefits in terms of biodiversity and other perspectives like that?

AV: Yeah, great question and love that you're asking it. There's definitely an emerging trend that has been, I don't want to be misinterpreted, has been around forever.

But just like carbon and other ecosystem services and benefits and gotten to a support wide relatively recently with COP action on biodiversity and going really beyond carbon.

Before I answer your question, I do want to share that I do think the phrase like carbon tunnel vision is really overrated and people can, you know, ping me on LinkedIn with all sorts of ideas on this.

The reason why I think so is that it's important for us to not get into analysis paralysis and I think all the connoisseurs of this space, you and I can talk a lot about how important biodiversity is, but also it's important for us to really bring the whole industry forward and we don't yet see a mass transition happening because there's a lot of confusion and people want to set unreasonable standards for themselves and try to reach them, and then that does get you into a space of paralysis where you really have to accept progress over perfection and be relentlessly focused on it, because we truly do not have time.

We only have 7 harvests until it’s potentially out of control and into that spiral of worse and worse. So, we've set ourselves targets. We should be trying all we can to meet it, and I believe in a concerted effort that's targeted and focused. I'm not saying we should forget everything and focus on carbon. I am saying that if carbon is a unifying metric, it's not just CO2, it's tonnes of CO2 equivalents, which we're translating from the nitrous oxide emissions into the methane emissions.

And so all of those are more potent molecules that CO2 than the carbon emissions, but you take them as a bundle and you say let's optimise the net GHG on the farm because that's something we can measure, model, verify to a better level than we ever could and that's worth investing in that's the good that we shouldn't be the enemy of that's the action that should take place. I think it's not in conflict, the practises we're looking to we're incentivizing farms to implement the practises we're looking at here, they're not in conflict with the practises of biodiversity as we talked about, the code benefits of colour cropping pollinator habitats have direct benefits to the landscape all around the farm and own farm, as well as creating better environment for biodiversity.

The fact that we are not yet able to quantify it in some consistent way because we're really talking about nature and it is that first and so where we start counting birds or other animals on the land and there's so many approaches that are emerging, whatever look at the soil microbial biodiversity, whether we count worms that are a very important step in the chain of that biodiversity on the farm and in the landscape.

All of those are valid things we need to advance without forgetting that we should be making progress on a daily basis as well as adding these important factors and considerations around co-benefits, when you really implement something but not feeling like we have to measure them perfectly in order to even include them in the conversation or that if we don't analyse this very comprehensively, we should not take the first step. Taking the first step and then figuring out what the second and the third is may be a good place to overcome fear.

Of course, we'll know where we need to be going. We all have goals and those goals, I believe will include biodiversity while way before 23rd, specifically on the measurement side, not just the ambition that is already being set now, but truly how we can measure and monitor the effects of Land Management and biodiversity at scale.

DR: Sure. And I mean, even aside from biodiversity metrics, do you get much demand from your clientele in terms of measuring impact other than carbon? You know whether that is landscape health in some other format, do you get a lot of inquiries about that?

AV: Yes, we generally have a more holistic view of the landscape and we can be looking at a combination– it’s like a good OKR framework, you look at inputs as well as outputs you look at practises as well as outcomes and how that would apply to that applies to general agriculture and so our sustainability inside product for example that allows you to do landscape monitoring and we do all the monitoring and modelling bottom up.

So from a field farm to a supply shed county region, state country scale, you can see through that entire letter across scales how the factors such as each of the practises change as well as each of the outcomes so while may change the outcome in carbon equivalents may be a good factor to equate some of the outcomes to, the customer’s also really interested in leading the root coverage in the coverage of the soil, in how diverse the ecosystem is from which the crops that they're purchasing or the products that they're buying are coming from.

There's emerging or understanding, and they have been developing signs in this space for a very long time, detecting other areas on the farm like buffers and shaded areas. For example, where the trees are planted or areas that are set aside as non-productive acres from the farming perspective, but they're set into a pollinator habitat which launches a whole other abundance path for biodiversity to bloom on these landscapes, we're we're seeing all of these angles and and aspects that our customers are really interested in seeing as important.

Again, signs on all these different aspects in terms of how you can measure and monitor it as a different state as we have to accept that that's the case rather than, you know, preventing any progress from the carbon tonnage equivalent until they catch up on measurement and monitoring of adversity– like that's something that we're still learning about.

DR: Yeah, sure. I mean, you mentioned like you're touching on these, these emerging and emerging and potentially disruptive technologies that you're seeing in this space.

How does that impact, you know, Regrow Ag’s work on a year-by-year basis as you see all these technologies changing and developing so quickly?

How do you operate within a space that seems to keep changing? It's so dynamic.

AV: It does help when you have a very dynamic team that initiates, I believe, a lot of this change from our end. We’re very close to policies and protocol creators to really be closely aligned in with what is impossible to do in the landscape and what would enable and be incorporated into the business model.

At the same time, we have a very large R&D team. A quarter of Regrow’s staff, only a little less now that they have grown, has PhDs in related areas across ecosystem modelling, health remote sensing, irrigation and the opportunities for us there are to push the boundaries around the scientific questions we have just been discussing by partnering with both public and private institutions.

So, we drive a lot of that internally because our company has dedicated to this industry. We want this industry to ultimately capture the entire set of outcomes that it is creating an offering. In order to do that, we definitely want to provide the same scalable, cost-effective, high-quality tools that we have been offering for some of the accessible aspects of ecosystem benefit monitoring right now.

So, from our side, we're both innovating internally, looking at where kind of the regulatory puck is going, pushing ourselves from the stock leadership perspective for partnerships in R&D, where the advancements are palpable, as well as collaborating with external parties.

So, if someone developed something completely new for a supply chain where we feel it can make a big difference when you're very interested in collaborating with them, integrating and opening some path to the markets for them that we already have. So, it's a combination of these pieces.

I guess we stay on top of this changing landscape, changing and pushing some of it ourselves, and closely listening to our partners and customers and those influencing our space.

DR: Yeah, sure. I guess almost acting as leaders rather than followers and that's sort of, I mean that fades into my next question. I like to finish up with this question.

Where do you see Regrow Ag in five years? I think if you're at the front of all these changes and emerging technologies, you know, it must be really interesting to get a sense of where you think the industry is going as well as Regrow within it.

AV: Yeah, great question. Given the pace of change right now that we're definitely hoping also to see accelerate, but it has been a reasonably good pickup in this case the last few years. We believe that in five years, we'd be able to make a significant dent in the goal defined by our mission to make resilient agriculture available on all arable land globally.

We're going to be making an announcement about the number of acres we have the milestone crossing. So that's going to be something to look out for.

And from the town's perspective, I think really abating the emissions from agriculture, reducing in the first place, and then helping farmers remove more is where we want to see ourselves. We have specific goals around it internally, around 1 gigatonne. I think in five years from now it's probably achievable given the types of programmes that we're supporting and the speed at which they're growing. We want to see the majority of companies involved in agriculture and the food industry to really make visible incredible progress towards their targets and in five years you know it's going to be 2028.

So, there's going to be almost no time left to really get it done. So, I would hope that we would be able to cover most of the gap between their current conditions and their goal statement level of emissions and that amount of time and regrow will be supportive infrastructure and trusted advice that we've been providing this space as to how to evolve.

And hopefully by that time we'll also have all the other metrics on the water quality and their ability by diversity incorporated into the system and what we put our energy into.

DR: Yeah, I hope so too. It's a lot of work to be done and it's great to see organisations like Regrow Ag working on this and to see really clever and innovative people like you in the space operating there.

And thanks for coming today and talking about it, it was great to hear your insights into this, hear about your journey and what Regrow Ag does. Because it's been terrific talking to you.

AV: Thank you so much for having me and so glad to share this story with more people that may get excited about this work and joining us in the car. Well, thank you.

DR: Hopefully we can borrow a few. Thank you, Anastasia.