MSU Research Foundation Podcast

Modeling Smarter Farming with Bruno Basso (Part 2)

• MSU Research Foundation • Season 1 • Episode 6

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In part two of our conversation with Bruno Basso, professor at Michigan State University and co-founder of CIBO Technologies, we explore what it takes to scale scientific innovation into a venture-backed company. Bruno discusses his role as Chief Scientist, pitching to investors like Al Gore, and the importance of grounding technology in rigorous, transparent science.

We also dive into the intersection of AI and agriculture, the challenges of sparse data, and how CIBO is combining process-based models with machine learning to improve decision-making in food systems. Bruno shares his thoughts on the Midwest’s innovation ecosystem, what makes East Lansing an underrated tech hub, and why he remains optimistic about the future of climate resilience in agriculture.

Host: David Washburn
Guest: Bruno Basso, Professor at MSU and co-founder of CIBO Technologies
Producers: Jenna McNamara and Doug Snitgen
Music: "Devil on Your Shoulder" by Will Harrison, licensed via Epidemic Sound

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David Washburn:

Welcome to the MSU Research Foundation podcast. Today I'm talking to Bruno Basso of Michigan State University. He's an internationally recognized agricultural systems scientist and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences here. He's also the scientific founder of a company called CIBO Technologies, a company that was formed to apply these advanced techniques to help farmers. I hope you enjoy part two.

David Washburn:

Did you ever think you'd be an entrepreneur in the sense of the sort of startup world, versus an entrepreneurial professor building out a research program?

Bruno Basso:

I guess I must answer that one thing that characterized me is the curiosity. I mean I just I have a weakness that I always wanted to learn right, so I'm eager, I'm just fanatic about that you know reading and goes back into asking the question of you know what happens if we do this? What happened? And then once you see that has a potential? The breakthrough was in understanding that this technology could be scaled, because many scientists will have a solution which is a breakthrough, until they then show that it may not scale, it may not solve the problem someplace else. And so, given the computers and the linkage with remote sensing images, I realized that that was applicable whether you are in California or you are in Michigan, and so it was a natural. No, I never thought, because, if I wanted, I had many opportunities to be attracted by you know companies and that decision was made by I want to be the owner of my own brain, you know, be able to think without having an agenda based on whatever the product of the company sells right right, whether it was a good idea or bad idea. So, um, I like to test new ideas and some of them becomes breakthrough. Some of them are still critical to learn. Uh, because you do better next time, right? So provando and riprovando.

David Washburn:

What's that mean?

Bruno Basso:

It means try and retry, try and retry. Yeah, that's a Latin statement from Galileo.

David Washburn:

So the company is roughly nine or ten years old now. How many people are there and what's your role? Chief Scientist? Uh, do they? Do they still drag you out to do fundraising or sales calls, or? Uh, indeed?

Bruno Basso:

all of the above. So now he started having an office just in in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because that's uh where the headquarters of uh Flagship Pioneering is, now has an office in Minneapolis, which is, I would say, it's where most of the programmers are. So we still have Cambridge, Minneapolis and then St. Louis, being close to a lot of the big ag companies.

David Washburn:

Big ag companies yeah.

Bruno Basso:

So these three big offices, I think the number I wouldn't say it changes quickly, but it has changed from being from over 100 people now stable over the last few years at about 80 people.

David Washburn:

Okay, oh wow.

Bruno Basso:

And, yes, I do so. First, I make sure the science stays highly robust. This is basically supported by what we find in the lab, but that there is always studies and literature to support the findings. Yeah, right, um, be true to what happens, you know. So it's truly a science-based company and that's what really differentiates. So the credibility of the science, with the incredible talent of the programmers, made CIBO a unique platform and so, yes, still the Chief Scientist. So make sure they stay out of trouble when it comes to the science, and I have really done the majority of the pitches. Went to pitch to Al Gore, both in London or San Francisco, and luckily, I mean, I can say, say this we've developed an incredible personal friendship with, with a lot of the investors and um, so it's um that that participation is very important because they really want to go back to the source yeah and say how did this got started?

Bruno Basso:

You know what are some of the limitation because they they invest in, you know, funding to solve a problem. There are companies Al Gore's company only invests in sustainability. That's right. And so they want to make sure that it delivers what the investment says and it doesn't go in different directions, that they're really very careful in not mixing with different type of investments, and so, yeah, that's basically my role and regularly, weekly, I have phone calls with programmers or the science team and still travels to the different sites.

David Washburn:

Do they let you write code anymore or no?

David Washburn:

No, not at all.

Bruno Basso:

I was never a talented code. I was always a good thinker.

David Washburn:

What about this? I mean the platform you've built, whether it's in the lab or at CIBO. These are intelligent systems. They're intelligent models. You know these things are, they've been around for a while and obviously we're now in the midst of AI mania. So how do you, how is AI coming into your thinking?

Bruno Basso:

The question that I was hoping to get a chance to, to, to, to really talk about this because, um, the system that we have, uh, they have their own intelligence, which means we learned by doing science how a system responds to climate, soil management, and so SALUS or CIRIS, these process-based models, have the embedded intelligence of how the science and the mechanism works. The mechanism is key, how the algorithm was developed, because it's not a black box, so you can always track on a single day when something happened.

Bruno Basso:

AI, on the other end, is just I can never stop to be impressed of, but what people are really incredibly attracted now is obviously with the advent of the learning language model. You know Chat GPT, I mean you type one sentence and you get three pages in the next seconds. You know explaining credible, it's significantly easier, in a sense. You know, with brackets around easier, to digitize and learn.

Bruno Basso:

You know how, the probability of two words being next to each other, the complexity of biology, that there are lots of things that were still do not fully understand, and so AI is critical in predicting from a large data set that still has boundaries. So whatever you developed as a former approach of AI was statistical modeling. You feed a regression line. Now they're just sophisticated regression lines that you basically predict within the ground of the data sets that you have fed, but you can't ask what-if scenarios, you can't ask all the questions that the data set does not have it embedded in. So that's a major differentiation between a process-based model that understands the mechanisms. Now those data, as a paradox, can be fed into an AI system because you have information every single day.

Bruno Basso:

Because in agriculture we have almost the opposite problem we have scarce and sparse data sets. They are not fully covered everywhere except remote sensing images. It's very different than genomics where you can do sequencing and you have, you know, these large data sets and then you can do predictive modeling, but it's still within whatever data you fed in. So I'm sticking with the process based model, with the intelligence based on the science, and trying to help AI become part of this cycle, where models feed into AI and AI would help the models to do, possibly design new algorithm based on what we couldn't see until now.

David Washburn:

I appreciate hearing that because I know having some experience in the software modeling world from you and I are about the same age.

David Washburn:

Talking about the late 80's, and so I was curious how the new sort of AI stuff plays in. So thanks for that answer.

David Washburn:

One area I wanted to explore with you that you mentioned CIBO, I know the sort of reference to Cambridge because of flagships headquarters out there, and then the reference to St. Louis and near Minneapolis. Obviously, you know one of the things we're trying to do here is try to keep companies in our neighborhood, and I know that you and I have talked about this in years past and, as CIBO continues to grow and develop, that this is something that we've talked about. What do you think about this sort of Greater Lansing innovation ecosystem and what? What can we do and how can we? How can we create a better, more rich environment for tech companies to um,

David Washburn:

not have to pack up their bags. And I mean this happens a lot to us and it happens a lot to other Big 10 universities where you know you're at the University of Iowa or Purdue and you just have to go to bigger markets. But I think we all try to create environments where we can try to at least get a shot at having some of these companies stick around.

Bruno Basso:

Yeah, that is indeed a good question, Dave. I would say this that, given my experience, when, in the beginning of you know, CIBO was founded, I was going every single week to Boston and what I've learned and witnessed with my own eyes is that you hire coders, and obviously Cambridge is well known to have advanced engineering, MIT. We were right on the MIT campus and you basically, if someone, for whatever reason, either not performing or themselves being attracted to the next steps of their career, you could look out the window and pick the person that was walking by. It was a programmer.

David Washburn:

They're at the coffee shop.

Bruno Basso:

They are at the coffee shop, so that basically starts the whole ecosystem. It was a programmer, yeah, then. So they're at the coffee shop. They are at the coffee shops, yeah, so that that gate basically starts the whole ecosystem. So the, so the university is doing fantastic job. We certainly specialize in many fields, and engineering being some of that. But with, with all the respect, we still don't have the numbers, not necessarily the quality, the numbers of student at MIT. That's right. You know graduates in the computer science programming, so that's one aspect. You know be able to continue to generate, but you you have to, so this is more a message to the government people in Lansing, in East Lansing, you also have to make the city attractive, and one way it is already already attractive because the cost of living is lower. So we really always say you should come to East Lansing instead of paying $4,000 a month for a shoebox in Boston. You know you're here, you'll get a house, and that's right.

Bruno Basso:

And at the same time there is the component of you know young kids wanting to do things outside. You know good restaurants. So those are things that are difficult to control. But compared to when I was a student here, things are changing rapidly. I mean, we have this top-notch now, both supermarkets that before we didn't have it. So the globalization has arrived is arriving quickly. New places are opening. So that's another part. The ecosystem is.

Bruno Basso:

I think the fact of the cost of living is bringing certainly more people. I see just by going in some places off campus and you could tell that there is a large group having a conversation. There are data scientists doing this. So the fact that university has really this advanced program in FRIB and other technologies and even my lab, is attracting these coders. But you have, it's not just the one single solution. You need to have the people, you need to attract them, you need to be able to pay them at a level that you know they see the benefits.

Bruno Basso:

And for people wanting to raise a family, I must say you know, it's my kids here. It's a great place to raise a family. So maybe popularizing it even more than we do. I think we're much a hidden gem, a hidden treasure in this context, think we're much a hidden gem and hidden treasure in this context. It's true we may not have the fancy restaurants that New York or uh, Boston may have, but we can always work on that it's, it's, it's we gotta turn the vicious cycle in a virtue cycle yeah, food entrepreneurs.

David Washburn:

Uh, we want to support them as well, so uh yeah, restauranteurs, yeah, we. I always felt when I got here, it was, um, it was two things. It was it was talent, certainly, that you talked about, and I think, um, I always felt like capital was a thing, and I think we've uh resolved the capital piece with some of the work we've done and the work we've done and partnered with the state, uh, on some of the venture funds we've done there, and that's it's.

David Washburn:

It's all you know about scaling things and and we're we're trying to think about how you are one of the changes how do we how? Do we scale this, this sort of ecosystem, exactly to?

Bruno Basso:

We are on a trajectory. I think you do that. I mean you can visually see more of young generation, more companies and, for what we said, both talent and the place being more attractive.

David Washburn:

Yeah Well, thanks for letting me take you on that tangent. I guess the thing I'd like to kind of wind up with was your perspectives on either the industry today or sustainability programs. Today there's a lot of we're in a moment with the current administration probably views this drastically different than previous administrations, but I think to your point, many consumers, and therefore large food companies, still are looking to sustain products or from sort of sustainable sort of agricultural practices. Yes, I just wondered if you had.

Bruno Basso:

It's not a very good question, but um, but I see, I see where where you're going and also because we all you know read it from the media and the turmoil in the government trying to improve uh efficiency, and one thing that I I really feel comfortable saying is that, uh, with with science, uh backing me is the challenges of climate, climate variability or climate change hasn't gone away. That's right, and so the conversation that I have had, I have the privilege to serve on board of several, you know companies, and it basically one of the statement is that hasn't gone away and we are a global company. So I have not heard a single time that the way the government direction was taking us, it would have minimized the importance of producing food more sustainably or be able to integrate, you know, getting people to be part of the system, of the equation and not just isolating, you know different groups and so on. So I see that to not necessarily change.

Bruno Basso:

The private sector is actually which is one of the greatest things in the US compared to my older continent, where the private sector steps up even more when there is a need, both from a philanthropic point of view. I'm privileged to have a gift from investors. You know well-known families that support some of the research and that's not changing because I was basically cut some of the fundings, really unjustified, because of this connection by a supportive under-representative group, which still puzzles me why a human being would not like to support an under representative group for the research that I was doing earlier and and so I think that doesn't happen in the private sector, that that is continuing to happen. So at least that piece, um, I see that um with a level of optimisms, and climate variability and climate change is still a major challenge and the data speaks very clearly.

Bruno Basso:

Agriculture is, it's both a victim and basically a cause of it. So that's the complexity and we need to work to make to identify solutions that farmers are the first one that witness climate variability, so they're incredibly supportive and thanks to the state of Michigan that has this new program on agriculture resilience, farmers, which are a component of the evaluation committee, is farmers understanding how these farms can become more resilient, which brings again the efficiency, the sustainability piece. So that part I think Dave will continue and certainly will do our parts to contribute to it.

David Washburn:

My guest today has been Professor Bruno Basso from Michigan State University, researcher, entrepreneur. I really, really appreciate your time and your collaboration and thank you for being here. Well, thank you.

Bruno Basso:

I am privileged for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you, to be a Michigan State professor, a Spartan, and thank you again.

David Washburn:

Thank you.

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