What happens when agriculture stops guessing? With Agzen

The food system underpins our entire society. Its stability is crucial: when it starts to wobble, prices rise, availability becomes uncertain, and stress travels quickly from farms to household. 

Yet, much of modern agriculture still operates under deep uncertainty. Farmers spend tens of billions of dollars every year on crop protection chemicals, largely without being able to see how much of what they actually apply reaches the plant. 

When you don't have that visibility, the rational response for many is to manage risk with excess. However, overuse of pesticides has far-reaching impacts not only on ecosystems, but also human health.

In this week’s episode, Felicia speaks to Vishnu Jayaprakash, founder and CEO of Agzen, an MIT spinout that has developed an AI-based system that measures and controls the amount of chemicals being sprayed on crops. Its technology helps farmers cut chemical use by 30-50 % without sacrificing yields.

The conversation explores the intersection of climate risk, food systems, and the role of technology in making agriculture more efficient and sustainable. Vishnu shares his personal journey into agriculture and what led him to develop Agzen.

Sometimes, the fastest, deepest changes will not come from tearing systems down, but from seeing them more clearly and addressing them differently. Whether making industrial agriculture more precise is a bridge to something better, or a way of prolonging a model that ultimately needs bigger change, is an open question. What is clear is that visibility, accountability, and better information shape what's possible.

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Transcript

Felicia Jackson (00:41)
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Shaken Not Burned. When we talk about climate risk, we often focus on energy and transport or even finance. But as we also frequently explore on Shaken Not Burned, the most immediate place instability shows up is in food. A stable food system underpins everything else, whether that's social cohesion, political trust or even economic security. When it starts to wobble, prices rise, availability becomes uncertain,

and stress travels quickly from farms to household. And yet much of modern agriculture still operates under deep uncertainty. Farmers spend tens of billions of dollars every year on crop protection chemicals, largely without being able to see how much of what they actually apply reaches the plant. When you don't have that visibility, the rational response for many is to overshoot, to manage risk with excess. And that's a problem for the ecosystem.

So today's guest is Vishnu Jayaprakash, who's the founder and CEO of Agzen. That's an MIT spin out that's developed AI and computer vision technology combined to measure something that's been effectively invisible until now. How many drops of agricultural chemicals actually land on leaves when they're needed? So Agzen's technology is already helping farmers cut chemical use by 30 to 50 % without sacrificing yields, which is critical for farmers.

the company recently announced a partnership with Corteva Agriscience to actually help to scale their approach globally. But this raises a bigger question that we're also going to touch on today. Is making industrial agriculture more precise an effective way to stabilize a fragile food system? Or does it risk entrenching a model that ultimately needs more fundamental change?

and in a world facing increasing climate volatility, is less damage enough or is it actually the only realistic place to start? So we're going to have a chat about what AgZen does, why it matters, and then take that out to actually explore what that tells us about resilience, about waste and power, and how food systems actually change. So Vishnu, welcome to the show. Let's start with you.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you ended up working at the intersection of agriculture, AI and spraying technology? What made this feel like a problem worth tackling and you had a solution that was going to work?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (03:09)
First off, let me say thank you for having me Felicia. This is incredibly exciting to talk about both the specific problems that we're solving and the perspective on Ag as a whole and the environment as a whole as well. I've had a very serendipitous journey into solving this problem. So I grew up on my family's 11 acre

farm in southern India. ⁓ So I was born in Chennai. Our farm is about 18 miles outside of Chennai. And we grow mangoes, rice, and coconuts. My mom believed in incorporating hard work as part of growing up. she...

took my brother and I both to the farm very often. And during both the summers and the winters, we would spray our mango trees, especially, the tools that we had, which was a backpack sprayer. So most of what we sprayed ended up back on myself. And that was my first exposure to spraying. And my immediate reaction was, I hate this, and I'd never want to do it. And I'm going to leave and become an engineer.

Felicia Jackson (04:09)
could understand

that.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (04:11)
Yeah. And so, I then went to college in California, and then I got to MIT for graduate school.

And I found my co-founder's lab. So Kripa Varanasi is a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. And he was working on runoff, because he had a project that was funded by a few different entities. It all actually came from an initial conversation at the EPA and the USDA, where they brought up this problem of, hey, look, runoff is an issue. We need to figure out how to get

droplets to stick better to plants and, you know, prevent these chemicals from ending up where they're not supposed to be. And when I found his lab and I knew that they were working on this problem, the reason I joined this lab was I knew that the problem was real from my earlier days of having most of this brand up on me. And yeah, that led to about six years of my master's and PhD studying droplet leaf interactions and how sprays work and how we can make spraying more efficient.

And part of that was talking to farmers and asking them, hey, how do you spray today? What's the guidance you receive in order to spray better? And very, very quickly, it became apparent that no one had any visibility into this problem. So the question I asked to our initial farm partners and customers were, hey, look, I want to make

More of the product you spray end up on the plant and less on the off target. Do you know how much you get on the plant so we can start out with a baseline? And every single farmer said, no, we have no idea. And that was the light bulb moment for us. And we started diving deeper into the problem. And it turns out we've been spraying agrochemicals at scale since World War II, effectively. And it just.

was baffling to me that, we've never measured what's actually on target. We've never had the tool set to measure that. And that's affecting what is currently today a $60 billion pesticide market and also a $120 billion fertilizer market. And all of these agrochemicals have never actually been measured. And where they're actually going has never been measured. And we thought that that is

not just a small problem, but an existential one that we needed to solve. that's what we ended up doing. So yeah, a little bit of a serendipitous journey to get there.

Felicia Jackson (06:33)
And it is an existential question because one of the things we do know is that runoff from farms is, whether it's fertiliser or chemicals, it gets into the water system. It's a huge problem in lots and lots of different ways. I'm actually stunned at the markets, the size that it is without any form of measurement, because I can understand that those producing them want to sell more of them. But that seems like a really bad deal for the farmer. So in effect, are we saying that

Since we started spraying chemicals onto the land and onto plants to grow our food, we've been guessing about what we've been doing.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (07:06)
Yeah, the way we describe what we do is the entirety of chemical application has had a blindfold on since the 40s. And we're the first system that provides a way to remove that blindfold and create a real-time feedback loop. And it's actually interesting when you think about the history of farming. This is not the first time that this has happened. planting, which is how you get the seed into the farm,

also used to be done relatively blind 20 years ago. 20 years ago, all you would say is, hey, I want to get x number of plants in a field. So you would have a population count. And you'd go out and try to achieve that. 20 years ago, the first companies that opened the blind or removed the blindfold on planting came up. And now every farmer controls precisely how deep the seed is, what the.

Counts they get, how often the seed's getting planted, either this, all of it, right? You have 20 different things you can control now because a company came along 20 years ago and said, hey, look, we want to remove the blindfold out planting. Same thing in combines. People had no idea what was actually happening when they were harvesting. Then people added a way to measure that. And it turns out to give a tremendous amount of efficiency. What was missing until we came along is

the equivalent for spraying and spreading. So two of the ways in which farmers have to put chemistries on the ground. Because I know we'll touch on this later, but there is not an option to not do this. at the moment, in any given year, 20 to 40 % of yield is lost to some sort of pest disease or weeds. so not applying chemicals isn't really an option.

while wanting to keep a sustainable food ecosystem alive. part of that is figuring out, how can you be more efficient with it? And when I talked about the existential part of it, you touched on the environmental side of it, it's also existential for farmers. For a lot of farmers, their chemical budget is equivalent to their profit margin. That is literally one to one. when you're thinking about keeping a farm alive, being more efficient with chemistry,

is a direct way to do that.

Felicia Jackson (09:28)
that's a fascinating way of looking at it because I think there are challenges around our understanding of what farming is about, about the role of industrial agriculture both on an environmental

and on an economic basis. the reality is that farming lies at the heart of an awful lot of different societies and their function. It's fundamental to our ability to feed people. So we do have to find a way of solving these problems, which is why I'm so interested in what you guys are doing. Now, I believe what your system is called is real coverage. Can you explain to me what it actually measures in practical terms and why the gap?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (09:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (10:04)
between what's sprayed and what lands on the leaf matters so much. I know we've touched on the expense and the sort of profit and margin, what does it do and how does it do it?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (10:15)
every time a sprayer drives over an acre of land, it's creating more than a billion droplets over that acre. And as I touched on earlier, no one in agriculture knew where these billion plus droplets were landing, right? And when I say no one, it's...

everyone involved in the ecosystem, from the people who make the chemistry to the people who ensure the crop, and everyone in between, especially the farmer, right? And so we built the world's first system that actively measures and controls how many droplets are on every leaf, right?

The system can bolt onto any sprayer. So the oldest sprayer we've gone on is from 1997. And we're the first digital technology that went on the sprayer. And the newest sprayer we've gone on is from 2025, it's essential that technology is accessible to any type of farmer, right? And so.

Felicia Jackson (11:03)
and it's got to be able

to be retrofitted to whatever they've got.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (11:07)
Exactly. that was very critical for us. And what the system does is, be it on the weeds that you're trying to spray or the crop that you're trying to spray, it's measuring droplets as small as 150 microns, so about as thick as your hair, as you're driving through the field at 18 miles an hour. And the system can look at how much product is on every leaf that it's seeing.

Give the operators an idea of how much is off target and what's actually getting on the plants that they want to spray. And then in real time, provide actionable adjustments to their spray, their chemistry, things of that nature, so that they are more efficient with their spraying. So just for, yeah. So yeah, that's a great question. So we can enable automatic readjustments. A lot of farmers actually want to be in control.

Felicia Jackson (11:44)
So it's an automatic readjustment.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (11:55)
So 95 % of our units are we provide recommendations and then the farmer decides you could change 10 different things. Which of those 10 do you want to change? But the future we're building to is autopilot, where the farmer is just getting in and driving the sprayer and everything else is getting adjusted as they go. And having that flexibility of being able to do both has allowed us to scale very, very quickly.

We launched this product commercially in 2024. And thanks to the fundamental nature of the problem we're solving, the impact that it can have, and the fact that we could go on any sprayer, in two years we've gotten to a million acres of deployment already all across the US. That's probably one of the fastest trajectories for any ag machinery product. And this year we've already signed 2 million acres.

you know, for 2026, so thank you. we're going from strength to strength on that regard. But to sort of close that out, I just want to say why farmers are using it, right? From the aspect of first of all, knowing, it's really important because you're trying to cover all these fields with chemistry and you have no idea what you were doing before, so that knowledge brings with it a lot of great management. But the bottom line of it is,

Felicia Jackson (12:46)
Congratulations!

Vishnu Jayaprakash (13:09)
hey, we can enable you to spray 30 to 50 % less chemical while keeping the same outcomes on your field or improving them. That second part is super critical to enable adoption of technology. So that's fundamentally why farmers are using us.

Felicia Jackson (13:26)
one of the questions that obviously arises, because you mentioned earlier the fact that nobody knew what they were doing. How do you know what's the right amount and where?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (13:35)
That's a great question. And it kind of leads directly into why we announced our partnership with Corteva Agriscience, right? Because we have a host of different chemicals that you can spray, trying to get onto a variety of different plants. And every single one of those, if you think about it from a fundamental level, why would you want the same amount of product, A, on plant species?

Felicia Jackson (13:43)
Okay.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (14:03)
one versus plant species two, because those plants work very differently. They might absorb chemicals very, very differently. And so every acre that we go on, we learn about what the right amount is. And this is part of the revolution that we're bringing to application as a whole, is learning what is the right amount. Where we're starting is to say, to every one of our customers, we ask them, let's just go out and spray the way you normally do.

Felicia Jackson (14:07)
Absolutely.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (14:28)
And let's figure out where you're at, right? Let's set a baseline. And then we adapt around that baseline. If customers say, hey, look, we have been struggling with weed control, for example, then we say, look, probably your baseline isn't good enough. So let's get you better first. And then let's figure out how to cut back. And so that's how the tool operates. The first thing it does is figure out how to get more on the plant specifically, lessen the environment.

and then cut back on the overall volume sprayed. And then you could have the other side where customers say, hey, look, my chemical program's working great. Then we say, hey, your baseline's looking good, so let's optimize around that. But the future of this and bringing it back to why we partnered with Corteva and why we're working closely with chemical manufacturers is to understand this at a more fundamental level. It's to tell farmers when you spray chemical X onto your plant, Y,

What is the correct amount, given all the other conditions that can play into it, right? Given the wind, given how old the plant is, given where you are in the world, what is the correct amount? And that is a sea change to how people think about spraying and chemical application in general. I think the easiest way to understand it is the terminology that people use now is gallons per acre or liters per hectare. We want to get to

Felicia Jackson (15:50)
Yeah.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (15:52)
micrograms per millimeter squared. That's the shift that trying to do.

Felicia Jackson (15:57)
and almost by definition, precision agriculture because you're being very precise about what's going on. one of the key questions is what actually changes in farmer decision making? Because you talk about the fact that it gives you this baseline knowledge, that you'll have awareness and understanding. What does that actually mean to the farmer and what they have to do?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (15:59)
Yeah. ⁓

Yeah.

a sprayer is an incredibly complex piece of equipment, right? So you have all of these levers you can turn of how fast are you driving, what pressure you're using to atomize the droplets, what rate are you spraying at on a gallon per acre basis, how high above the crop do you have the spray boom, what nozzle tips do you use to actually atomize the droplets, and are those nozzles actually any good at what they do? What sticky chemicals can you add to your

a tank mix to make the droplets actually stick better on the plant rather than have them bounce off. So the reason it's so complicated is because you're trying to do a fundamentally complex thing. You're trying to get chemistries that are mixed in water to stick onto things that fundamentally repel water, leaves fundamentally are water repellent. When you go out in the rain, you see the rain droplet hitting it and falling off.

Felicia Jackson (17:03)
Yeah.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (17:09)
That's the fundamental challenge of spraying. By measuring it at that level, at the droplet leaf level, you can now figure out how to tweak each of those parameters. Hey, should you actually be spraying at that pressure? Should you be slowing down or speeding up? Should you have the boom higher or lower based off of what you're spraying? And all of this is happening in real time because should the wind speed change by three miles an hour, then you end up with different amounts on the plant.

And you've never really thought about that. And you've never really had a way to adjust your spray based off of all those changes. So the real-time feedback control is what we provide. for someone who is not used to farm equipment, the best way you could think about it is cruise control on your car. When you're driving your car, your car's computer is measuring speed and telling your engine what to do. What we're doing is measuring what's on the plant and telling the sprayer what

Felicia Jackson (18:06)
Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. One of the questions that does spring to mind, you mentioned that, your first experience of farming was at home on a small farm. This level of precision, is this something that's going to be accessible to farmers, you know, outside the US? How is that going to play out? Is it simply a US focused

Vishnu Jayaprakash (18:15)
Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (18:25)
or do you expect to see it expanding?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (18:29)
No, we've already seen it expand. So we had our first customers in Australia sign up for the tool. We're going to Argentina in the southern hemisphere this year. So it's expanding very, very quickly. The smallest farm that uses our product is 1,800 acres. And the largest farms that are using our products are 400,000 acres, right? So across those acreage scales. Our goal is to get this approach,

in every farm, because this has to come back to every farmer regardless of scale. And the knowledge is already starting to get there, right? knowing what the right amount is on every plant is fundamental to any person in the world that's spraying. And that's what we're unlocking now. So, yes, at today's moment, the hardware that's required and the compute that goes on it and things of that nature makes sense for a small...

as far as 1,800 acres. It doesn't make sense if you have my family's farm of 11 acres, right? But eventually it will because this knowledge is going to get into, our vision is instead of the label saying at the moment, hey, look, it's going to have this many gallons per acre. If it could say you need this many micrograms per millimeter square at some time in the future, that would be incredible.

Felicia Jackson (19:42)
something to work towards. I'm thinking about you know how farming develops on a global scale, what it means to the food system, the haves and the have-nots, the impact of the choices we've made because industrialized agriculture does have issues beyond just the chemistry, know the health of the food, the health of the animals, whatever else it might be.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (19:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Felicia Jackson (20:05)
One of the challenges is obviously that agricultural chemicals are incredibly effective. They increase yield. They've enabled us to feed hundreds of millions of people more than we anticipated in the 70s. But they're also one of the most controversial parts of the food system because of their expense, because of the runoff, because of the challenges in using them. So from your perspective, what do you think the actual problem is?

Do you think it's the industrialization of farming? Do you think it's the chemistry and the way that it's been used? how do you see the bigger picture?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (20:37)
industrial farming didn't develop in, know, people just said, hey, look, we want to do this, and therefore we did it. It came out of a need of, the global food ecosystem. It came out of a need of how food is delivered to every single person on the planet. And it's a requirement at this point. going back to...

trying to make food affordable for the demand that we have today, you have to be more efficient with every single acre that you have and try to use every tool that you have in the most efficient way possible, right? So whether that be chemistry, whether that be equipment, whether that be the land that the crops are grown on, and do it in a sustainable way so that we're not just thinking about, hey, how can we make it through this year? But how can we still maintain this trajectory

2050, right? Where just with global calorie requirements growing along with populations changing, we still have to make more food on every acre that we have right now. And if we want to maintain that balance between farming and the ecosystem, the best way to do that is not just with more farmland.

because we don't have that much more arable land. It's how do we get every acre that we're on more efficient, right? So I it's true that maximizing the productivity of every acre at minimal cost is an existential problem for farming, for global food production.

Felicia Jackson (21:49)
you.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (22:09)
That is an existential problem. So anyone contributing to that in any way, be it the way we're doing it of making chemical use more efficient, whether it be the multitude of companies looking at it from planting, from harvesting, from all the other tools that a farmer needs in their tool belt in order to grow the food that we all need, I think is the way to go. We have to become more efficient.

Felicia Jackson (22:34)
I think there is a degree of tension between is this goal of optimizing efficiency while at the same time recognizing the impact on things like soil health, because obviously that has an issue not just to do with nutrition or the ability of plants to grow, but also carbon sequestration, flood defense.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (22:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (22:53)
does the ability to minimize the distribution of necessary chemicals result in things like increased soil health because it's not being, for lack of a better word, poisoned. will try to find a better word. don't, poisoned is wrong because it sends the wrong message. But you know what I mean.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (23:07)
Yeah,

I know what you mean. the unintended consequences of chemical usage are, they impact every part of not just the soil ecosystem, but the waterways, things of that nature, human health. These are things that we need to recognize and acknowledge. They're not, things that you sweep under the rug and not think about.

the first step to making anything better is to actually look at the problem. So understanding, how much of what you're spraying is actually getting where it's supposed to be and not getting where it's not supposed to be is very important to try to handle this very large issue of soil health, runoff, things of that nature. that's where we think that at the moment we're immediately

in the first year helping farmers with their chemical costs. But look, at the same time, spraying 30 to 50 % less, that's 30 to 50 % less that's ending up in the environment. So there is a direct impact of that on things that are not just happening at the farm level, but happening on a larger ecosystem level. And we do want to continue to measure that and continue to look at the impacts of that. fundamentally, we think, in any problem,

the first thing you want to do is look at it. So by enabling us looking at it, we can then unlock all of these benefits.

Felicia Jackson (24:26)
it's

one of the old tropes of the sustainability field. You can't manage what you can't measure. So you know by measuring it I suppose you're bringing in a new lens through which to look at what is happening with chemical use in farming. Okay.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (24:32)
Correct. Yeah.

Correct, yeah.

It's so great to hear you say that, because a lot of farmers have the exact same mentality, right? They've used that exact phrase of you can't manage what you can't measure, because just on a daily basis, you're trying to manage 20 different things on your farm, a lot of which you can't measure. And so whenever you bring in a way to lend a light or move a blindfold onto a particular part of farming, it's

it's looked at as a extremely welcome tool. I think my funniest phrase in farming is every farmer knows this phrase, coverage is king. Coverage being how much of your product is actually on the plant. But no one's ever measured what coverage is. So somehow they know that getting it on the plant is really good, but no one's actually measured it. So we come in and say, OK, let's measure it.

Felicia Jackson (25:31)
Yeah, no, mean, that does make a great deal of sense because we are seemingly getting towards an inflection point where we have to find different ways of doing what we do if we're going to be able to sustain doing them into the medium term, let alone the long term. Now, one of the things about partnering with Corteva that I'm interested in is obviously this is an approach.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (25:47)
Yeah, long term, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Felicia Jackson (25:55)
We've discussed the fact that they have information about the plants that will be incredibly useful, but it's also a means to increasing your scale. So why is it so important to work with an incumbent in agriculture? And I suppose the key question is always, what does your ability to scale change about the impact you have?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (26:15)
we bring, like we've talked about right now, a lens and a set of expertise that hasn't existed in this field before. But working with people who have the other end of that is incredibly important, right? We are not agronomists by training. We're engineers. We're not plant pathologists, or we don't have the...

decades if not centuries of experience that a partner like Corteva Agriscience has. And so working with them provides us the best opportunity for systematic change, right, for the biggest impact on not just farming but the ecosystem as a whole. just as an example, we can tell you what's the amount you're getting onto the plant at the moment.

But correlating that with the outcome that you want is something that we want to work with the chemistry providers on. Because that changes with what chemical you're spraying, what you're spraying it onto, where you're spraying it. And so it's fundamental to combine skill sets to scale the value of every single droplet. And then beyond that, scaling to larger number of acres and taking this approach that we have an incredible ability to scale as a startup.

But partnering with one of the largest chemical companies in the world has a lot of benefits in terms of, hey, look, we are asking you to change something that fundamentally affects your profitability on a farm and affects your ability to keep that farm going. Well, we want to bring you the best possible information then. That means working with incumbents. And then to answer your second question, every acre that we're

we're learning from, right? Because we can learn from one of our units that are in Australia on what led to the right amount on the plant in Australia and immediately translate that over to a farmer in Iowa and say, hey, this is what that farm did. Here's the AI has processed it, and now it's giving you a recommendation based off of that. So yeah, absolutely.

Felicia Jackson (28:17)
Can I just interject and say is that related

to similarities in geography and climate or just more generally about the plant?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (28:23)
Yeah.

Both. In certain areas, you have different types of weeds, and those weeds have had different levels of resistance develop over time. And in other areas, you don't have those. But what ties it all together is how you put it on the plant. Every single person on Earth is mixing these chemicals on water and spraying them onto plants, right? And pretty much using the exact same tool to do it, which is a large...

Felicia Jackson (28:27)
Okay.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (28:50)
industrial sprayer. So being able to measure that in real time and then combining that with the expertise of a large chemical provider has the largest potential for change in the future. So yeah, that's why we did it and bringing those two sets of expertise together is incredibly powerful.

Felicia Jackson (29:09)
do think that's an incredibly important point, this idea that no one can solve problems on their own, the idea that you have to have different areas of expertise and knowledge and experience that you bring together in order to facilitate change. But Shaken Up Bird is a sustainability podcast. So one of the things I do have to mention is the controversies around Corteva, the issues that people have around

pesticides and bluntly trust in what corporates do because anyone looking up Corteva Agrisciences can see the court cases and the articles this that and the other. How do you think about that tension?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (29:49)
obviously on the legal side of things, can't comment on any of those. Of course, yeah, I can comment on those. But yeah, from a broader context, I could speak to. Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (29:51)
No, no, no, absolutely. Really, I think what it boils down to, yeah, I mean, I think for

me, what I'm really trying to get at is that you have built a business which is about improving how people do things and talking to farmers, making their lives better, making it easier to be economic with what they do. But in order to reach the audience you need to, you've partnered with a global giant that

Vishnu Jayaprakash (30:11)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yep.

Felicia Jackson (30:20)
is closely associated with the issues around pesticides and fertilizers and so it's that question of positioning Agzen as a company and trust.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (30:29)
How do we do that? Yeah, yeah, Yeah?

Yeah, no, that's a great point. So you have to acknowledge the things that they have done and the things that they're trying to do, right? So.

Part of the reason for them working with us is also to understand this better and figure out how they can make better chemistries and have a better impact not just on the farm, but for their business as a whole. And so I think it's a marriage that not just brings together strengths, but brings together key business goals for both companies. How do you make chemistries work more effectively and have them and have less in parts of the environment where we don't want them?

I can't speak to their motivation, but that's what I think we both got into this for. And what's very clear is the amount of trust that they have with farmers, right? So they're still a company that's innovating all the time and creating incredible products for farmers to use to actually tackle this incredibly hard challenge of how do you grow crops in a way that can meet demand while still

you know, being sustainable. So that's something that they do all the time and we're super excited to partner with them on that aspect of it. But fundamentally, we have the same goal. Every droplet has to become more efficient. Every droplet has to get to where it needs to be and less of it needs to get up where it doesn't need to be. So that's where the marriage of those two goals is what led to the partnership. Does that make sense?

Felicia Jackson (31:54)
what I do like about that is this idea of a large corporation going, okay, we need to improve, we need to change, we need to move with the times, we need to think about what's necessary in an uncertain world where the environment is constantly changing. And I don't mean that in terms of just the environment environment. I mean the political one, the social one. But I think the question that brings to mind for me is whether or not this is...

Vishnu Jayaprakash (32:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Felicia Jackson (32:21)
about making a harmful system less damaging, which in and of itself is a positive, I'm not denying it, or do you see this as part of a shift towards more sustainable or even resilient agriculture?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (32:35)
Yeah, I think this is a very massive shift to the latter, right? going to this very, very small scale of how many droplets are on every leaf is fundamental to get better at agriculture, right? So I think it's much more towards shifting, shifting to make not just ag more resilient, but all the processes involved in ag more resilient.

not just from a cost standpoint, from an environmental impact standpoint as well. yeah, that part is pretty obvious and fundamental.

Felicia Jackson (33:07)
bringing it back down to the farmers, I think there's a question here, which is in a world of increasing climate volatility, what exactly does precision and better measurement change how farmers manage risk and uncertainty?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (33:20)
I think it ties back to every single year, the cost of growing crops is not really going down. And what they could sell crops for isn't really going up either. So they're operating on a tighter and tighter knife edge. This is what the reality of farming is, is that input costs go up.

with global supplies and things like tariffs and stuff like that, selling grain and selling product is...

as hard as it's ever been. So getting more out of every acre, like I said in the beginning, is existential from farming as a whole, but also in terms of every single farm's balance sheet as well. So that's where bringing in an efficiency gain that can say, hey, look, if my entire chemical budget is what my profit is, if I could save 30 % on my chemicals, now all of a sudden my profit's getting better. Or if I could kill my weeds better so that my yields are not getting

affected and they're actually going up, then that's another way to get back profitability and keep the farm running for another year and build towards the future, right? So yes, I think that is core to why our product has been as popular as it has been and why it's gotten adopted so quickly. It's because it offers both of those options to farmers is, you know, look at how you can make yields better while being able to cut back on input costs.

Felicia Jackson (34:41)
Okay, and I can definitely see how this would have appealed to farmers. my question then is are there limits to this kind of approach? what can precision agriculture and approaches like yours actually fix and what can't be fixed on its own?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (34:53)
Yeah.

I think that kind of brings it to also who all we need at the table to solve larger problems, right? I think what it can do, there's order of magnitude inefficiencies in a lot of these things that we do, right? So one of the stats that I love coming to is less than 2 to 10 % of all the chemistry we spray actually end up finding their way to their target, their intended target.

I think, focusing on these inefficiencies while it, you know, sounds like, ⁓ we're tinkering around the margins, no, no, it's actually order of magnitude changes that we can bring to the entireties of how we do crop care and how we grow crops and feed the world. So that's the perspective that I take.

Now that's not to say that, look, that's all we need and we don't need to worry about anything else. There's a lot of things that need to come together. And yeah, I think we could speak for hours on things like farmer support and all the programs that we need there, ⁓ labor challenges, food waste, regulations, insurance. There's an infinite number of things we could talk about.

Felicia Jackson (35:58)
Food waste.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (36:06)
Yeah, I really believe, and the proof is in the data, that efficiency gains are not about tinkering around the margins. It's about creating orders of magnitude improvement. And that's what we're after.

Felicia Jackson (36:21)
That again, really I think says something about how change actually happens. Because when you're talking about that level of magnitude of change, you can have serious, serious short term impact while other things are going on behind the scene. So I'm really interested in how you think change happens in food systems.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (36:44)
I think it has to start with the person who you're trying to serve. If it's a product like ours, it starts at the farm. If it's a product that is looking at products at grocery stores, it may start there. But for us, it starts at the farm. It has to make economic sense for a farmer to adopt it. And it has to have our product. pride ourselves in being able to pay for the unit in a year for the farmers that we target.

Felicia Jackson (37:11)
important.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (37:12)
That kind of ROI is critical for the farmers that get our system and any system like it. And then on top of that, the value can't just stop there. When you're bringing this sort of lens to a problem that's existed, it can create value for everyone in the ecosystem. So we've talked about how it's very symbiotic with people who make chemistries. But that's the same thing for people who make sprayers.

That's the same thing for people who make nozzles. And then if you take that out, it's, OK, how can countries as a whole start thinking about application practices, how these things are regulated? The EU has some mandates to cut back on rates, but how are those rates actually defined? What's the baseline? How are they measured? So you could take it all the way there.

Felicia Jackson (38:00)
what's the baseline and how are they measured?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (38:06)
And yeah, the impact can be tremendous, but it starts with being able to have a tangible economic impact for the people that you're trying to help out the most and who are directly using the tool. And so once you have that, and if it can lend itself to all of this, then you have a pathway for broader scale.

Felicia Jackson (38:23)
What that's talking about really is how we achieve change in the food system on a much wider scale. What, if anything, gives you optimism about...

how we're going to go about doing that. Is it that we found a way of encouraging the association of increased yield with protecting the farmer or what is it?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (38:44)
I'm incredibly optimistic because every single year, farmers are the biggest experimentalists that I know. They're the biggest scientists that I know because they're running experiments live.

along with an enormous amount of risk to their livelihood every single day. So I think we have them to thank. Exactly, we have them to thank more than anyone else for any sort of advancement that we're making. And to me, that's what makes me most optimistic. We didn't exist as a product two years ago. And if you solve a real problem, we got to a million acres in two years.

Felicia Jackson (38:59)
They're really putting their money where their mouth is.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (39:18)
That's what's really exciting to me is that farmers are thirsty for knowledge and thirsty for new ways to do things. And when provided with that way, they will be the first ones to put their money on the line and their livelihood on the line to try it out. And yeah, we've been blessed to work with incredible growers all across the US and across the world. And so that's what makes me really optimistic.

Felicia Jackson (39:38)
That's a wonderful idea in and of itself actually that if you have a real solution for a real problem that affects real people, there's a market, it's gonna work. is there anything I haven't asked you about that I should have done?

Vishnu Jayaprakash (39:46)
Yeah, it's gonna work.

We touched on a lot of different things, which you did an incredible job of covering the breadth of what we do, both at the dropout level and for global ag as a whole. So no, think this was incredibly exciting for me to talk about because it provided a different lens to a lot of conversations that I'm a farm boy, and most of the time I spend it on the farm talking to growers. ⁓

taking a step back to talk about larger impacts is also a lot of fun for me. So I appreciate that.

Felicia Jackson (40:22)
Well, I'm glad. Not

very much so. I think that then is the perfect place to draw our interview to a close. Thank you, Vishnu, for joining us today. it's been great. what's important for our listeners is this discussion actually has brought up the fact that we don't have neat answers for the challenges that we face.

Vishnu Jayaprakash (40:29)
Fantastic.

Yeah, yeah,

Felicia Jackson (40:43)
What we need to face is that we need to get more comfortable with trade-offs and the fact that we have to sit with an uncomfortable reality that food system stability depends on decisions made under uncertainty. And actually, sometimes the fastest changes, the deepest changes are going to come not from tearing systems down, but from seeing them more clearly and addressing them differently. So whether making industrial agriculture more precise is a bridge to something better,

Vishnu Jayaprakash (40:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (41:10)
or a way of prolonging a model that ultimately needs deeper change? That's an open question. What is clear is that visibility, accountability, and better information shape what's possible. So if this conversation has raised any questions for you about food, climate, technology, or who gets to decide how systems evolve, that's very much been the point.

So if you found it useful, please share the episode with someone who'd appreciate it. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and even leave a review if you're able to. It really does help more people find the show. Thanks as always for listening, for thinking along with us and being part of the Shaken Not Burned