Seedling Sessions: Agriculture Innovation

Unearthing the Power of Digital MRV in Agri-Food Systems

• Agri-EPI • Season 1 • Episode 38

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In this episode of Seedling Sessions, host Thomas Slattery welcomes Eoghan Finneran co-founder of Farmeye, a company that has developed a digital measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) platform for natural capital in agriculture.

They discuss the origin story of Farmeye, the importance of ground truth data, and the role of technology in driving sustainable and regenerative farming practices. The guest shares their background in agricultural research, education, and advisory services, and how Farmeye was initially a university-funded project focused on digitizing soil health. They explain how the company pivoted to provide value to both farmers and the agri-food supply chain, including food processing companies and retailers.

Farmeye's platform now covers soil health, farm carbon, water quality, and biodiversity, providing valuable insights to farmers, agronomists, and the wider agri-food sector. The guest emphasizes the importance of verification and ground truth data in ensuring the authenticity of regenerative food production claims.

The conversation also touches on the challenges of interoperability and adoption of agri-tech solutions, the role of agronomists as technical advisors, and the potential benefits of insetting over offsetting in the carbon market.

Farmeye Website
Agri-EPI Website
Tenacious Ventures Article

Speaker 1:

The podcast where we explore the latest innovations and trends in agri-tech. I'm your host, thomas Slattery, and today we have an insightful conversation with Owen Finneran, ceo of Farmi. Farmi is a digital measurement, reporting and verification, also known as MRV, platform for natural capital, focusing on solar health, farm carbon, water quality and biodiversity. In this episode, we dive into the origins of Farmi, the challenges and opportunities in agri-tech and how their platform is helping farmers, agronomists in the wider agri-food sector, transition towards more sustainable and regenerative farming practices. We discuss the importance of providing value to all stakeholders in the data supply chain, from the technicians and agronomists collecting samples in the field to the food processing companies and retailers. We also explore the role of technology in driving the shift towards return to agriculture and the need for a culture shift to consume attitudes towards food pricing. Owen shares his experience in launching Farmi and how they connect with stakeholders in the food supply chain. So, without further ado, let's dive into this fascinating conversation. Hello Owen, thank you very much for joining us today. So, before we kick off and learn a little bit more about Farmi, the organization, it'd be really great to hear a bit of your background as one of the co-founders and also a little bit of the history and the origin story of how Farmi came about.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thanks very much, thomas, and thanks for having me on the podcast. So I suppose, in part of my own background, it probably made sense to explain where I've come from. So I grew up on the family farm in the west of Ireland and it was a typical west of Ireland dry stock family farm, so quite small scale beef and sheep in the family for the last three generations. So I'd always had a big interest in farming and study agricultural science in college and went on then to study agricultural economics doctorate where I was looking at the modeling of different agricultural systems. And yeah, I've had various components of my career involved in agricultural research and education and advisory services to farmers, really, and that was all before Farmi.

Speaker 1:

So what was the inspiration? Was it you and your co-founders came together? Was it a particular event that inspired starting the organization? What happened?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the initial project started out in the university in Galway as a university funded project and I was asked. I had an advisory farm advisory business running in Roscommon at the time and I was asked by Brendan Allen, who was in the university working on that project, to come in and just give them some feedback as they wanted to commercialize this research project and I liked what I saw and the software that had been built at that stage. So myself.

Speaker 2:

Brendan and Joe Devenay the three of us. We effectively licensed that software initially back in 2017 from the university and spun it out as a commercial business, and the original university's project.

Speaker 1:

What was that? Was that focusing on soil, health or carbon? What was it looking at?

Speaker 2:

It was focused on digitization of soil health and it was very smart in a lot of ways and very advanced in terms of looking at infield variation of nutrients and how that could be digitally mapped, and I liked all that and the concept of it.

Speaker 2:

However, there was a couple of things two aspects really that I thought we really needed to pivot. So when we spun out the company, we changed two things around quite dramatically. The first one was that we moved away from that infield variation piece, and that was, I suppose, we moved more to a field level system that could be interrogated by the farmer to manage their nutrients across the farm. And the second one was that we kind of redesigned the whole system because it had been built as a farmer facing software too, and one thing I had learned from my previous career was that selling software to farmers is not simple for multiple reasons. So I decided okay, this is a great concept here, but there are other customers out there who need this data and also have the means to pay for us. And so we redesigned the whole system to be facing the corporates in the agri-food supply chain, so the food processing companies and the retailers, rather than having the farmer as both the customer and the user.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's fascinating. Actually, there's been a couple of really interesting pieces that have been written out of an Australian Ag Tech venture capital company who's talking about exactly this problem in Ag Tech, which is that the users, being the farmers, often are the beneficiaries of the outputs and the data and often when, and the question around who should be paying for these things. I think it's really interesting that you kind of pulled that out early on in the development of the organization, so I think that's kind of segues quite well into giving you an opportunity to talk about the sort of an overview of pharma as it's developed now and kind of what are the solutions that you offer to farmers, agronomists and the wider agri-food sector?

Speaker 2:

Yes, I suppose we've evolved over the last seven years, in particular at Thomas, and now we are effectively a digital MRV, so of measurement, reporting and verification platform for an agri-food sector and that natural capital includes soil, health, but also farm carbon, water quality and biodiversity as well. So we have technologies there to measure, verify and report on all of those, and a very important piece of that is the ground truth and technologies that we use for capturing that data in the field.

Speaker 1:

I'm really, really pleased to hear that. So one of the things that I think we've started to see over the last few years, particularly with net zero pushing itself towards us, is this kind of carbon myopia, and there's a lot of organisations focusing just entirely on how can we MRV around carbon, and you've obviously pointed out there that you're not just looking at carbon. I'd be really interested to hear a bit more about how you're doing MRV outside of carbon and then also how you then I think it's clear to everyone what the benefits are to the farmers and the economists of understanding those things. But how are you then taking that up, this food supply chain, when we don't necessarily have something like the voluntary carbon market for biodiversity or water?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely so. Maybe, if I take the example of soil health, that's one that we would have started off with. So all our initial services were focused around digitising soil health and being able to derive insights from what's happening with soil nutrients at a farm level, regional level, programme level, national level, and those insights they provide value to. The nice thing about it is it provides value to everybody in the data I hope we call the data supply chain, including the technicians and the economists who go out and take the samples in the fields. So the mobile applications that we provide makes their job much easier as regards record keeping and so on, takes all the paperwork out of it. It makes the laboratories job much easier because they're scanning veracodes instead of manually entering data.

Speaker 2:

The government agency or the AgriFood Corp are accessing data at a very large scale.

Speaker 2:

So it can be hundreds or even thousands of farmers that we can present that data to them in a nice graphical and map based format.

Speaker 2:

And the course then, most important of all, the individual farmer gets value from it because we can give them field by field recommendations, basically on nutrients, and we are ultimately, like I said earlier, a farmer myself, still farming the family farm organically at home and bringing the co-founder's also from a farm as well. So we'd be very strong in wanting to have any of the services that we provide giving a benefit to the farmer as well. Like we said earlier, the farmer might not always be the customer or be paying for the service, but we still want the farmer to get a benefit from it and in the soil health one, it was quite obvious that the benefit to the farmer. So the average you take the average dairy farmer, for example, using our system in Ireland we calculated that they're saving about 6,000 euros per year on the fertilizer bill through using our system, versus a scenario where they just spread the same fertilizer that they spread last year.

Speaker 1:

That's fascinating. So one of the aims I guess that you're looking to help here is sort of helping drive farmers and their wide agricultural community towards more sustainable and regenerative farming. Where do you think technologies like yours are helping push that transition? Is it more on enabling farmers to measure and manage on farm practices, or is it an equal balance with helping off-takers to understand the benefits of what the farmer's doing with these sustainable practices and reward them? Where do you see that? It's a great question.

Speaker 2:

Thomas, and it's a big area of discussion, but yeah, I will be very strong in the opinion that it's both so that there needs to be benefit to the farmer in terms of their production systems and ultimately benefiting their bottom line at the end of the year. And the nice thing about most regenerative agriculture practices is that there are win-win, so they'll benefit the environment whether that is water quality by diversity or soy carbon but also, at the same time, benefit the farmer's pocket. Ultimately, the pay master or the person paying for these services will typically be towards the other end of the supply chain, so the retailer, ultimately all us as consumers or taxpayers, and I think that's fair. Some people might not like the idea of having to pay more for food, but ultimately, if you want our food production systems to be more sustainable, we can't be buying a kilogram of carrots for 49 cents. That is ultimately unsustainable.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I mean the statistics that bounce around, is that those of us in the UK and Ireland spend significantly less than most countries in Europe on food and there has to be a cultural shift to that. And it was interesting that obviously came out of the national food strategy and Henry Dibblebee's recent book Ravenous kind of alludes to the fact that we just need a cultural shift in consumers to accept that we need to pay more for foods. Is there ever a concern for you, working kind of with both sides of the food supply there, that we will end up putting extra pressures on farmers to be farming in these more sustainable and alternative ways, which are inherently a little bit more complicated? And yet the and yet those the cost savings will the, the increase in prices don't filter down, but I mean, there's someone who sits kind of between the two.

Speaker 1:

What have you seen those conversations happening?

Speaker 2:

Yes, there's two big factors, I suppose, in terms of the benefit filtering back to the farmer. One is that you know a lot of the costs of shifting to a more regenerative farming system. A lot of the costs the farm level are upfront, so you know you'll have investment, whether it's in new tillage machinery or new fencing systems for livestock, and although those costs are upfront and while it will pay the farmer back, there is a time lag. So it could be in five or seven years time where the actual value of that change of system is manifested in the farmers accounts and so ultimately, that period of time in between is where there's a funding gap and that really needs to come from the marketplace.

Speaker 2:

And Secondly, the second part of where switching to regenerative agriculture systems can be, can be costly, is in the MRV piece. So that measurement piece the first of all I supposed to go back, and the reason I think that MRV is so important is because you know, we all know, that what's in order to properly manage something, you need to have measurements. And also we say you know what's measured can be managed, but what's verified can be trusted, and that's a phrase that we use in the verification piece is very important Because, especially in a food supply chain where you have multiple different Actors across the chain, you know for the retailer and ultimately the consumer to have confidence that you know these regenerative food production things are authentic. That Verification piece is really, really important.

Speaker 2:

The problem I suppose is such at the farm level is that that actual measurements, that on farm measurements and verification piece, that can be quite expensive in terms of base lining, farm carbon and so on. So ultimately, like I say, it really comes back to and those within the supply chain, the food supply chain, who have the funds and the Control as such open display chain, it's really Supposing come and tell them to be able to help the farmer to fund that gap.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's really interesting, and I mean we chatted prior to this call a little bit about some of the controversies that have Kind of happened in the last year around carbon offtake offsetting, sorry such as the various candle and there's also been actually last week there was a long piece in the grocer about how a lot of the big food brands are pulling away from From carbon just because of the complexities around it. So it'd be really interesting to hear a little bit about how far my are Approaching that and what your point of view is on that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so look at, ultimately, you know that ground, truth, data, that verification and base lining on farm. We don't think that there's any shortcut where you can avoid that if you want to do your Carbon measurement properly. So I mean there are companies out there who will provide you with a carbon certificate, for you know, carbon credit based on satellite imagery alone which, personally, I don't think is a very valuable thing.

Speaker 2:

In a lot of ways it's it opens up. It opens up the people and the company involved in that to you know accusations of greenwashing and also that the second weakness with it is because you don't have so as individual field by field level data, like giving back to the farmer.

Speaker 2:

Farmer doesn't get the benefit from it up it's. It's kind of a double weakness and it's why we see this ground truth in pieces is very important. Now Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that remote sensing and satellites don't have a role. They absolutely do and we use them. Great effects in farm I ourselves as one data source of many. But we do see that in field, ground truth in data has been the most important certainly once you have that baseline, you don't need to go back to the farm and measure every year.

Speaker 2:

Certainly you're talking about three to five year intervals and you know the gaps in between then can be very much filled by the models fed by that remote sensing satellite data.

Speaker 1:

You yeah, that's really interesting. I think it sort of plays back to what you were saying about the importance of verification. So we all talk about measure to manage, but that verification is just so important. Some of the things you were saying then sort of reminded me of particularly in the last couple of years. There's been a real kind of move towards insetting over offsetting, and a lot of what you described there sounded a lot more similar. Especially when you're working sort of quite closely between, let's say, a cooperative of dairy farmers and people up the food chain, Is that a distinction that you're starting to think about? Are you working with a mixture of offsetting and insetting?

Speaker 2:

Most certainly. Yeah, so we don't actually get involved directly, thomas, in trading of caravan credits. We are working to be ISO standards which would be similar to the Veran and the gold standard for caravan credit certification. But what we do is we will certify the credit as part of a program and then it's up to the customer whether they want to trade that or inset it. Certainly, when we're talking to customers we would in food supply chain at least we would encourage them to find out a lot, really to inform themselves about the implications of trading outside of the food industry and insetting we would see as much more beneficial to any of those food companies who are getting involved.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a really interesting response. So obviously we're looking at technologies here and this is an AgriTech podcast. I'd love to jump in on a couple of other topics which I think you've probably got a lot of insights on. One is interoperability, given that you are trying to pull together lots of different data sources, and the other would be adoption, and I think you've obviously got a lot of experience at that sort of farm level adoption. So, yeah, firstly, it'd be great to hear a bit about how you've kind of overcome some of the challenges around interoperability, different farm management information systems, et cetera.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we have multiple different, I suppose, doorways in which we can take in data from external people and agencies. So we pull data via APIs from multiple different sources. On certain programmes we would have maybe corporate AgriFood clients who might have had they might have a system for measuring, for example, ecology through ecological assessments and some of their farms, and we're able to pull in that data via APIs from other platforms.

Speaker 2:

We're also integrated with all the soil laboratories and several government agencies via APIs as well. So the API is a very, very important tool. The other ones would be weather data. So we pull in weather data from the ECMWF, which is the European Weather Model, so I think that's on a three kilometre square grid where we have weather data there four times per day, every day, recorded for every field. Satellite data as well, and then, as well as all the automated data capture, we also have the facility for both agronomists and other Agri professionals, and also the farmers themselves, to enter data through various dashboards. So there's multiple different ways that we can pull the data into the one map and the one platform.

Speaker 1:

And when you're. And we'll get on to the adoption side. But when you're onboarding someone let's say the farm side how much assistance do you have to give them? I mean, are you able to do it remotely? Are you having to do a lot of farm visits? Is it a big challenge to try and even with the APIs, to pull everything together and make sure the data sources match up?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, like in terms of onboarding, typically, or farmers will use our system, our software system, via a trained professional. So that's usually like an agronomist or a farm advisor who could have maybe say, 300 farmer clients and they can use our system to give online access to their individual farmers and tailor that as to the individual farmers needs. So some farmers might need to access the mapping system and some may need to get in there to enter fertilizers into their fertilizer plan, whereas others may just want to get online access simply to download a report for regulatory purposes. So you know, it varies across different farmers in terms of the needs that they have. But our model is always that we have a trained intermediary. So we're not so much training the farmer as such, we're training that agricultural specialist or agronomist who is subsequently dealing with the farmer after.

Speaker 1:

That's interesting and it's a bit of a sidebar, this one, but it's one I've kind of thought for a few years now, which is it's almost as if the agronomists there's was like a natural new role, solid, to form for them as almost like technical advisors. And it was. You know, it makes sense that they were from there, but I don't think they ever thought that that was going to be a new role for them and you so you've seen that then, that kind of the natural sort of person to do a lot of that technical assistance as it turns out to be agronomists.

Speaker 2:

Totally.

Speaker 2:

I mean, you know, it goes back to that thing that we mentioned at the very start, which is that when I first came in contact with Farmai, I didn't want to be selling software direct to farmers, for two reasons, and one was the one that I mentioned was that I think there's others in the supply chain and who have the ability to pay better than farmers do.

Speaker 2:

The second reason is that I think the last thing a farmer wants is another app and, you know, I think it's like a trap that a lot of agri software companies fall into is that you know they will design an app for the farmer, but you know, farmers are busy people by their nature. They're often family operations. The farmer has to be, you know, scaled in all sorts of different areas, and yet another mobile app is not top of their priority list. So, yeah, we see that agronomists are the every advisor as a critical link in the chain, because, you know, in general farmers will tend to outsource that kind of technological advice to their trusted advisor. Whoever that may be, you know could be from a state agency, or it could be an agronomist from their you know, their farm input company Interesting.

Speaker 1:

And then to try to make some predictions on that. I mean, do you, do you see, over the next few years, that being able to kind of provide this MRV data across whether it's soil, health, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, etc. Do you see the government support for that being something which is likely to increase? Do you think it's necessary? Do you think there's a, there is a role for government agencies to play in that. Yeah, so I think there's two drivers really.

Speaker 2:

One is via the marketplace, you know, like the SBTI and the, you know the corporate responsible trading directives, but also you have then, on the other hand, the regulatory drivers. So you know, across the European Union, you have 2030 emissions reduction targets and for the, you know, from the Paris Agreement, you know you have countries all over the world who have these targets, sectoral targets for their agri-food emissions, and you know these type of MRVs. They have to be the type of tools that are used and typically, yeah, the users are the state agencies or the large agri-food companies.

Speaker 1:

So so we talked about just theoretically about dairy farming earlier. Do you have a kind of a sort of good example that you'd be happy to share, of you know of a, I guess, what we call a success story that you've had, and just kind of paint a little bit of a picture about how that came about, how you work between those different parties and why you feel it's been really successful?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I can give you one example there. So Lakeland Deerys will be one of the largest dairy companies in Ireland and we've been working with them on their farmer soil heads program for the last four years now at this stage, and they've been you know their farmers have been very proactive in responding to the results of those soil head surveys that we've conducted and as a result, they've been able to improve their fertility by 25% in that timeframe. So they're now significantly ahead of the national average when it comes to phosphorus, collation and, in particular, lime and pH. So that's one good example. That's one program that we have, you know, very good work in relationship with the dairy cooperative there, lakeland Deerys, and you know it's very nice to see that their farmers are taking stock of the data and the information that they're getting from the program and they're able to make their own farming systems more economically efficient but at the same time they're improving water quality and reducing emissions at the same time as well. That's a really nice one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, amazing. So so, kind of quite uniquely, you're covering a lot of different areas as the, as the. How does the future look, I mean, in terms of kind of product development? Do you have any new product development or sort of integrations and things that you're happy to share, or talk about what that looks like for you as a company specifically?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we're looking at a few different programs going on in the R&D side at the moment, thomas. So probably two of the most interesting ones are the first one is based around biodiversity and particularly the measurement of hedgerows and above ground carbon on farms. So we have a project that are funded by the European Space Agency and we're just hoping to move to the second phase of that very shortly. But essentially what we're doing is using a combination of on the ground infield measurement using photogrammetry techniques, along with satellite measurements to measure hedgerows for carbon value and also biodiversity on farms. So that's one very interesting R&D project. The other one that we're looking at is looking at non-contact methods of making soil analysis more sustainable into the future.

Speaker 2:

So you know your traditional wet chemistry methods in the soil laboratory. They can be quite slow, quite cumbersome, not suited to dealing with very large volumes of throughput. So, for example, some governments and state agencies are looking to do, you know, national soil surveys. For example, the Irish government embarked on one just in the last few years but they took, you know, 90,000 individual field samples and processed them through the traditional soil laboratory. But that's a very, very slow process and you know the soil labs work and designs when those chemical procedures were.

Speaker 1:

I suppose initiated and first developed up to 100 years ago.

Speaker 2:

They were, you know, designed with sampling one farm, one research farm in mind, you know, not hundreds of thousands, and so we've been looking at techniques such as NIRS, so spectroscopy, as a means of taking out a lot of these dangerous chemicals that are involved in that process and making it up more speedy and cost efficient.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, this is an area which people have been trying to crack for a long time now. You've had various different startups. Stenon pops to mind as a digital soil sampling solution. We're working with another company, listio, who are trying to have a crack at putting these technologies on a ground-based robot. Why do you think it's been difficult? I think we all understand why it's difficult to do. Do you think with enough hard work and investment, we can realistically come up with digital infield solutions for this that aren't going to allow us to take a lot of the need for wet chemistry and expensive soil testing out of the requirements.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely think so, but it is going to take time. Thomas, the traditional wet chemistry soil labs, they're certainly not going to go out of business in the next three years or five years or even 10 years, I think. Even when the state of the art in non-contact NIRS analysis of soil has really moved on, it is advancing.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of people working on it, like you said at the moment, but I think even in three to five years' time, governments would still be falling back to the traditional wet chemistry as a kind of for two reasons. One, as a means of validating that the infield assessment is correct. It probably means that the traditional wet chemistry labs they will never be entirely replaced, but what it does mean is that they can be used much less frequently. Maybe a farmer will just need to do a wet chemistry test on the soil in a field once every 10 years, and they can fill in the gaps in between then with the combination of remote sensing and infield spectroscopy sensors through the NIRS sensor.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned biodiversity. We've worked with a number of different companies who are members with us. We've got an interesting project happening at one of our farms looking at remote 24-7 biodiversity monitoring, using predominantly these technologies are using sound. So you've got Chirrup sorry, chirrup and AgriSound, who are both using sound for birds and insects or invertebrates, and then actually DNA. You've got a company like Nature Metrics who are using eDNA and then Polynize, who are using DNA off, taking off bees to work out what plant species the bees have been visiting. So these four technologies there are all. They wouldn't call them remote sensing technically, but they kind of are getting better and better. Do you see a role for those technologies in what you're doing?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, certainly From the biodiversity and the things we have. We have kind of a couple of different projects going in the R&D pipeline and one of them is actually in production there now. At the moment it's effectively a survey tool, a digital survey tool for an ecologist. So an ecologist, for example, taking a survey of a wildflower meadow or a traditional grassland, so they can survey, take, take photographs and record species prevalence across a particular site. And the other one there that we're working on is, yeah, the hydro project again, so using photogrammetry and machine learning techniques to identify species of trees and plants from photographic imagery.

Speaker 1:

That's fascinating. So good to hear we've got some more talented people working hard on this. So take a kind of a bit more of a bird's eye picture, Like what's your outlook on this overall transition for the farming, agricultural sector towards sustainability, agro-ecology, regeneration, all of these things? Do you see a kind of like a rapid sort of transition adoption towards that? Do you think there's major hurdles and barriers that we need to overcome and like where are the opportunities? How can we sort of accelerate that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I think really, in terms of accelerating it, I don't think it's going fast enough at the moment and I think you know a lot of that stems from the fact that some of these programs from some of the larger food companies they're in some ways top down and so maybe the farmers are involved in the design until you know the program has maybe already been agreed on.

Speaker 2:

And I think the farmer really needs to be involved early on for a couple of reasons. First one being that you know the farmer having a benefit in terms of the outputs of the program is very important for engagement and you know if the farmer isn't engaged, ultimately it really will raise questions about the credibility of the program, because you know if it's benefiting, you know, maybe the larger agro-food corporate but not benefiting the farmer, then ultimately it's not really a very sustainable program. So yeah, I think definitely getting the farmers involved early, having a kind of a bottom up approach to development, is very important. And look, there's some fantastic groups of farmers out there who have gotten together and really the nice thing about regenerative farming in general is that it has been farmer-led in the main. But you know, certainly I don't think that should change and I think those farmer groups should be supported. You know whether it's from the government or from the food companies in the supply chain.

Speaker 1:

Yeah well, that's an excellent answer and I agree. I think the grassroots nature of the kind of sustainable regenerative movement has been really good and, if I remember the grounds well, there was a conversation which I found particularly interesting around certification and whether or not we should be trying to certify or create regenerative certification the same way we have an organic one, and one of the kind of arguments against that was it's going to take away a lot of that grassroots. All of a sudden it takes the control away from kind of practice and outcomes based on farm and the moment you start giving the hand of that over to a third party or, worst case, the supermarkets or something, then it takes a lot of control and you lose that grassroots movement.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, very much, so I can totally understand that argument. On the flip side, I suppose maybe a counterpoint to that is that you know the supermarket or the government agency they also do need to be involved at some point. And going back to what I mentioned from the very start, again, it's mainly because of money, you know. Ultimately, you know it's fantastic to see farmers getting involved in regenerative farming but, like I said, there is that kind of funding gap in the early stages of a system change and you know farmers really need to have support in funding that gap.

Speaker 1:

So keeping it a bit wider. What are the long term visions and goals for farmer? Where are we looking to go over the next few years?

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, I suppose the limit as far as we're concerned really like we would want to be in the next five years. We see ourselves as leading the way as one of the main digital MRV providers for natural capital internationally. And Thomas, that's the ultimate aim. And look, we intend to grow in terms of additional services that will provide to our existing customers and also grow in geographically over the next three, five years.

Speaker 1:

So, given that and we have a wide variety of people in the audience to this who are the kind of people that you'd love to hear from and the kind of ways that you'd like to collaborate yeah, look.

Speaker 2:

I mentioned funding a few times. I don't know I hadn't intended on mentioning funding, but it's actually happened to crop up in a lot of this discussion, thomas. But the banks are important in a lot of this as well. So, both in terms of traditional banks, funding of some of the food companies, but also individual farmers, and we see the concept now of these green book loans versus brown book loans, and I think that actually is going to be important in the next few years. So that's an interesting area that we've just gotten into earlier, those discussions with banks, and also, I suppose you mentioned earlier on the in-setting. So that's a service that we are starting to roll out now as a consultancy to our corporate clients in terms of how they can use that carbon credit that they'll measure as part of the program within their own supply chain to in-set against their production emissions.

Speaker 1:

I'd love to hear a bit more on your thoughts on the funding. Are you predominantly talking about, I guess, transition financing? Because I mean this is something which every conversation I have around regenerative is. We need to sort out transition financing and you've got some interesting mad ag, got some interesting models which they're bringing from the US over. You've got Stuart as well in the US, which is kind of interesting. There's a lot of thinking now around blended finance to resolve this. How are you at a point where you're able to talk a little bit about your thinking around what you might be able to offer in terms of transition financing?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I suppose it's early days there but no more than the food retailer or the food processor. What they want to see in terms of the banks is they want to see that verified data, that verified farm data. They can see that. Ok, here's Thomas and he has his dairy farm and he's engaged in this program for health or farm carbon, and here are his metrics over the past four years on that program. So that's the type of thing that I think is going to become a lot more prevalent in terms of farm level finance over the next few years.

Speaker 1:

And with that, given that you are able to bring in data from so many different areas, are you suggesting then that, in order to kind of pitch that towards financial institutions, you'd be looking at MRV around, while we've increased soil, carbon, et cetera, et cetera, but then also looking at, well, we've cut down on the costs for inputs and we've got more efficiencies here and we've got these contracts in place. So it's kind of pulling it all together in place and telling the story for the financial institutions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, very much so. So it's taken a number of boxes there for the financial institution, in terms of the financial institutions, of showing that the farm is not only, I suppose, economically sustainable, but also environmentally and socially sustainable as well at the same time.

Speaker 1:

Amazing. Well, what are the interesting and exciting areas? To kind of sort of start.

Speaker 2:

To wrap it up, do you have any other big sort of announcements that you'd like to get across, or yeah, so I suppose essentially our launch into the UK market has just, I suppose, arrived in the last number of months, and we have a very good guy on the ground there, kevin Fennelly, and yeah, look, he's willing and happy to talk to anyone in the food supply chain who's interested in this whole area.

Speaker 1:

So please, do get in touch. Great, and obviously we'll put contact details in the show notes and, as always with this, our kind of our role is to introduce people if they need to, so people can get in touch with us at the Agrippie Centre and we can make introductions. Amazing, well, look, thank you so much for taking some time to chat to me. I mean, it's such an exciting product and organisation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thanks very much, thomas. It's been a really interesting discussion. So, yeah, thanks for having us on.

Speaker 1:

Not at all. Bye-bye.