Episode 041 - Do We Really Have 40 Harvests Left? Andrej Porovic

Welcome back to Regreen. I am Francesco Delieto, joined by my co-host, Emma. Emma, what's coming up today? Morning Francesco. We're talking dirt today. We're taking it down to the ground level. I tell you what, we're going to have to do a pun count on this episode, because I guess absolutely fun of them. You and I like to get stuck into one of the real technical, high-tech, fancy, panty-kind of technology a lot at the time, and there's a bit of that in this episode, but we are bringing it back to basics with soil, particularly around the sort of agriculture and food production side of things, because this is so key. So yeah, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into some of the details on that. Yes, so today we're digging quite literally into the health of our soil. You probably heard the claim that we only have around 40 harbors left before our soil can no longer sustain current levels of production. It does sound dramatic, but how much truth is there behind it? To help us separate myth from reality, we're joined by André Parovic, co-founder and business development director at PES Technologies. PES has developed a rapid soil testing device that essentially smells the soil, giving farmer a clear window into the soil health in minutes, not weeks. André, welcome and great to have you with us. A pleasure to be with yourselves for Chesco and I'm thank you for having me this Friday morning. And it's great to see you again, André. You are one of our portfolio companies at Green Angel Ventures, so we have chatted before. And we've all heard this. I remember being involved with the National Trust eight years ago or so, that they were talking about having 40 harvests left in a lot of the agricultural production in the UK. That sounds pretty, you know, apocalyptic, doesn't it, really, if we can't produce our own food. So how close are we to that reality and what can you tell us about soil today? So it's interesting, Emma. When me and my co-founder, Dr. Jim Bailey, started a company back in 2017, that was definitely very good. People talk about there's only 50 harvests left. It was in fact something that we used a lot in our initial pitch documents and when we talked about the problem. Over the years, we started to move away from having that in there. Because, well, for a few reasons, it felt quite apocalyptic, but also it was one of those claims that could be quite easily not necessarily attacked, but argued against. And it was felt that it wasn't, it's not that it was debunked, but it would, it would almost get in the way of the message. It was felt that it was too, for our least an hour, and it was too dramatic. And it's something that we haven't used quite a lot in recent years. In fact, where we've moved away from it from is in our documents now, we show that a picture of the globe of the world, and we show where all the soil is degraded. Because about 60% of the world's soil is degraded or heavily degraded. And therefore, that is what they're kind of implying that actually soil that is degraded is not something that can really be used in the end. So if you look at it, only what's left if we delete that. But I think that it was always one of those things where there were only 40 years if we continue doing what we're doing, which is exactly where companies such as us in the whole regenerative farming movement and sustainable farming came in, which is, well, there were only 40 years if we kept farming it as exploitatively as we had in the past. But if we started to implement practices that were about sustainable and about regenerating the soil that is in the world, then that would no longer be the case. And I think that it might be why we don't really see that claim made quite often. And as I said, when I started, there was something that you heard quite off frequently. Nowadays, you don't really hear it so much anymore. Well, that's just good. That's good. Yeah, that sounds optimistic, then. And actually, I hear your point. I just want to acknowledge you're absolutely right. It is global soil health that matters because, of course, about 60% of our food is imported. So although we're focusing, I think, primarily on UK soil health, because we can see it, and we can see the farmers out there, and we're watching Jeremy Clarkson's farm, and we're feeling a little bit more connected to some of this stuff these days than we used to be. Then, yeah, but you're right, it is a global issue. Can you please explain what does it mean? What does a soil health really mean? I will argue that this is definitely my interpretation. The reason why is because if you were to ask 100 soil scientists what the definition of soil health is, you'd get 100 different definitions. But really, it boils down to a conflagration of three things. Soil health is the biological, the chemical, and the physical aspect of soil. Think of it as a triangle, and the overall, or even the one with the three circles which overlap I can't remember the name of top of my head. But the part where they all intersect is what soil health is. If you have only one of those, if you have one or two of those, you get an understanding of what the soil is like. But you don't have a fault. A Venn diagram, there you go. Thank you, it took me that long to think of it. Oh my god. I was getting anxious to see a constant trade. When the Venn diagram, in the middle of that Venn diagram, is what soil health is. And I think that goes back to why the soil became the great in the first place. With the advent of the industrialization of agriculture, which has had huge benefits on the world. There was an impetus on just using fertilizers and in making sure the chemical elements were improved and because we saw ever growing yield, you would be able to yield better or great every year for a long time. And we moved away from what was considered rotational farming. And now, when you used to do for-field rotations, you would kind of be leaving the land follow for a bit, allowing it to regenerate. Whereas when we started being able to put on materials every year, you would start unknowingly using up more and more the chemical of the biological life that was in there. Because you're just doing the same thing over and over. And so where we are now is that actually in the 90s, they realized that while the yield should continue to be increasing because you've got ever improving genetic variety, we're seeing to start seeing it start stagnate throughout the world. And in some place, even actually the tonnage per field was decreasing. And it was at that point when they started to theorize maybe there was something in the pattern to the biology. And that's where this idea of ecosystems and the fact that you need the microbial life in the soil was suffering start to come in and this idea of the biological part of soil is just as important as chemical physical, which just kind of makes sense when we talk about it now. And I think they'd always been aware of it. But you know, because we've been able to just essentially pump steroids into the soil for 50 years, that element of understanding or what exactly that meant and being lost. You know, we have people who have been mentioning they used to, you know, farmers of your, let's say, were able to taste, you know, take soil, taste it and be able to work out what it was missing or smell it. Whereas now actually a lot of that kind of information was lost because the farmers who are doing that didn't need to pass that information. And I'd, you know, I'd have absolute respect. Farmers, I think they're starting to bring that kind of knowledge back in. But it's the element of what is going on, the biology, what is that was missing. And that's where we came in as a company, by the way. So I heard if you're interested in hearing that at some point. Yeah. Before, before, what? No, what? No, what? No, what? Yeah, who, what about football? What are you talking about? Before you guys, farmers were bearing their underpants, were they not? I mean, it's, and it's still a good test. I mean, in the sense that when you put in cotton underpants, you come back a number of weeks or months later and you can tell how microbially active your soil is based on how degraded those pants are, you know, if you come back and your pants are still intact and you put them on, probably not much happening there and you should have a word of yourself. But if you come back and we're staying on a high-tech, you know, solutions to climate change right now, I think it's important. If you come back and your pants are pretty much degraded and now resemble less, more g-string and white fronts, then that means that you've got a really healthy soil. So it's good, but the main issue is that's one in cast iron. That's a whole different story. But the main issue of that is, you know, yes, it's great. It tells you it's healthy, but it doesn't, you know, takes weeks or months for that to happen. So it's not really useful for being able to make decisions in the here and now about what to do on farm as far as the biological life is concerned. Yeah. Well, also the diversity, I mean, of terrar, soil, cultures, the weather that is changing. Those are all the volume of metrics that it is involved in farming today. I mean, I've seen obviously Clarkson farm and I've seen the costs that are around farming today and also the risks that are absolutely mind-blowing. But my curiosity is regarding, you said we have started 50 years ago to understand better how to see the soil or analyze the soil. What is the current state of the soil health in the UK or if you have votes of metrics across other geographies? I mean, that's a good question and I don't have anything to hand specifically say. What I can say is that when it comes to these biological parameters about soil, the understanding that is relatively nascent. And I mean, you know, things such as, you know, what does respiration mean as far as soil is concerned? What does microbial biomass, what does fungal bacterial ratio mean? How does, how do you impact those in your soil? And when you get those results and you have one field that is low in, let's say, microbial, in fungal bacterial ratio, we have one that's skewed and one that's balanced. What does that mean as far as productivity on land is concerned? And I think we do need to understand this point that soil health is important, but at the end of the day, from farm, the key thing is productivity, because these farms aren't lifestyle, they're businesses. And you need to make sure there is productive as possible. And so there's an need to understand, okay, from the point of view of these biological elements, the ones that we looked at understand more in the last 50 years. And really, it's about, in this understanding, the same way, understanding chemical fizzle aspects. It's understanding, okay, what is the impact on the economic productivity on the farm? And that doesn't just mean necessarily yield improvement. Often actually improving soil health is better for yield consistency, because soil that is in better health is less prone to flooding, less prone to drought, less prone to climatic extremes of the kinds that we've seen increasingly here in the UK. And the healthier the soil is, the more water that is retained in the soil, so it's better able to grow in, you know, in more differiverse environmental conditions, which is what makes it so important. But that's one of the aspects. And there's still, you know, it feels like there's so still so much to learn about the biological part. And I think, and this is where we came in as a company, you know, no need, sorry for plugging ourselves. But the mission statement, but the mission statement we came to solve was there are no good quality affordable tests for the biological part of soil. Okay. You have a lot of good quality affordable tests from the chemical part. You have a number of well understood, really quite affordable tests for the physical part, but on the biological part, you know, going to the very extremes, you had the underpants test, which is obviously very affordable, but it takes a huge amount of time and not really sure what it means apart from, you know, you now have a different type of underwear. I mean, that's being incredibly flippant. There are things you can learn, but you then have tests such as the respiration test, the CSOB to CO2 burst test, you, which is decently affordable, but it's only one measure of the biological health of soil, an important one, but just one. And you also have genetic testing, so DNA testing, which can be very, very useful, but it's also typically very expensive and a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, if you don't know what you're looking for. So that's the mission statement we came to solve, making sure that we could provide good quality affordable test biology part. And why was it important? Because it's a bit of a chicken and egg, if the data to understand about how what soil biology means and how it interacts the soil and what it does is too unaffordable, then people aren't going to be able to test on it on mass and make the learnings they need. But because they haven't made the learnings they need, they don't necessarily understand what to do of that information. And so somebody needs to break that cycle, and that's why we came in to be, okay, we could produce a test that could be provided very cost affordably and provide a number of indicators used for the understanding of the biological health soil, as well as its physical chemical, so that people could start being able to test on mass and be able to make the learnings and then proliferate that through the rest of the community so that everybody else could learn. So how does it actually work? So our device is very straightforward. And if you don't mind, I have a prop with me. Oh, look, for those that can see on video, there's a blue box, what's that? That size of a camcorder or sort of a, yeah. I call it a lunch box actually. It's a lunch box, it's good lunch box. That would be an lunch box. Yeah. But the way it works is you put, you take a small soil sample, so that's as much as you need. That size of a coin? Yeah, from about the 5-15cm depth range, so it's not too deep. You pop it in the drawer, you hit go on your phone, and then 5 minutes later you get resolved some of a variety of indicators on your app. So when I say variety of my fibrolyphalical chemical physical, I mean, microbial biomass, respiration, organic matter, pH, pK magnesium, you get water, so water holding content, field water, field, sorry, water holding capacity, field water content, and you get soil texture, so sunset clay percentages. And you get all that with one test, and you get it in field in five minutes, so pretty much straights away. Now, the way we do it is pretty unique. We don't use in for rometry, which is often used, you know, when people ask us what how it doesn't, we're not doing some kind of chem-based thing. It is very much based on the smell. So actually, just at the bottom, if you can see this is metal, and actually you can see down here, maybe this is also made of metal. It's actually heating element. What it does is that when the test starts, it heats up the little puck, and that drives the gases off the soil, and we have a little conditioning system around there. And when, after a few minutes, when we allow it to breathe, those gases hit our sensor, and the changes in the properties of our sense in relation to those families of gases produce lots of different squiggly lines that you see if you saw the raw data. But think of it like a fingerprint. I've used this terminology also by other companies in space. Think of it as a smell fingerprint, and then our software interprets this fingerprint, and links it to a data bank of known indicators. So before we've did any work, before we released product, we collected hundreds of soil samples from across the UK. We sent them to labs for analysis for all of the indicators we provide. And then that means that, and we also analysed all of those same indicators, all of those same samples with our device. So that means that when actually, it starts to learn how to match the smell pattern, smell fingerprint patterns. It's draining the system. So the indicators pattern exactly. So that when it comes into the field, they can say, oh, okay, well, I see the similarities between how these squiggly lines change based on what I've seen previously. So I interpret that then microbial biomass will be x, that organic matter will be y, that p will be z, et cetera, et cetera. Andrei, how does a pest tech compare to conventional methodologies like laboratory tests or other way to measure the soil health? Is it more accurate? Obviously, it's quicker. This is clear. And I assume also less expensive than others. But what about accuracy? So the key watchword for us in accuracy has always been to be as accurate as a labs. I think it is for, you know, because we're sending it to labs and training it on the data from the labs. I think we'll, it will, it will, it'll be very different for us to be more accurate than the labs for those indicates because they're the training we get them on. But our aim is to be as accurate as they are, at least to meet the thresholds of accuracy required market adoption. So, and the reason why I said this is wait, we tend to think of labs when we send a sample of the lab, it gives you one result and that is absolutely right. But there's always a little bit of variance, big nan, that's not necessarily due to what the lab is doing, but because soil varies quite dramatically, even within a small GPS location area of, or free by three meters. And so as long as we have, or as small a variation in the accuracy as the labs do, then we're very happy of how accurate we are. And yes, then our biggest differentiators are the ability to give results in field straight away. We can talk about why we think that's really important because for me, that's really where we start to see the revolution in farm management decision making. Well, I was going to ask what do farmers or all those consultants in the field say about using this? What's benefit of to them? So a lot of the farmers and, and well, predominantly actually our customers and our key users are less so farmers and more agronomists or the people who are advising farmers on what to do of the land. The reason why is because we don't provide advice, we provide pure data points and set, and the ideas then to allow agronomists or decision makers to go, okay, based on this information, based on the yield data that I have historically based on what the weather is, I think we should be doing X, Y, Z. If we think of Clarkson's farm, it's a bit like if we gave this data to Clarkson, he'd be like, I have no idea what the fuck to do with this. And then he'd give it to Cheerful Charlie, who would then interpret it and then he's advising what to potentially Caleb. Yeah, that makes sense. And that's so those are the kinds of people we aim at. But they really enjoy the immediate data. They enjoy the fact that they get lots of different parameters straight away to understand it. Now, they're always going to ask us for more parameters. They're always going to ask for it to be even faster because everybody wants everything straight away. But being able to get results in field straight and in make decisions off, I think, as a huge thing. As an example, one of our partners who we'd worked in development, they said a couple of years ago, they sent samples off to the lab for analysis for nitrogen. Basically, that was a farmer that asked to come in and said, excuse me, Mr. Chronomist, why am I beans yellow? Now beans shouldn't be yellow. And he sat there for a long time and he thought, I think that I think these beans need more, I think they need more nitrogen. So I advise putting some nitrogen post fertilized down. And they said, okay, let's do that. But they sent samples off to the lab for analysis. Needs samples went off, came back four weeks later. And he called my co-founder Jim and he said, Jim, I've got the results back from the lab. I don't want to open the envelope because I don't want to find out whether I was right or wrong because if I was wrong, I've just cost his farmer a lot of money to do something he didn't need to do. So having that kind of those results in feels straight away means that you take the guesswork out of that. You go, aha, okay, my field is needing some nitrogen. My field is needing some phosphorus potassium. I need to improve the microbiome. I saw I need to be actually the water content is too high. I should avoid putting some water on it now. If you remember, if you watch Clarkson's farm at the very end of season, I believe it was season three when he's working with wild farm. Oh, yes. Where he looks at it and he goes, oh, you know, oh, I had the nitrogen, oh, you know, but they look at the beans and then Caleb's snorting at the fact that Evan then well is a bit livid and they're looking at and he mentions, oh, maybe the indicator mentioned, maybe we should have put on more nitrogen at the time in that that's exactly kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that actually would go into that for anyone that sounds familiar. Stirking out of it is that's immediate decision-making that makes a huge difference. And cost money, right? I can, you know, that's the price of a harvest, basically, if it's ruined or not. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, you know, we tend to think of farming as being, and I've heard this plenty of times, oh, well, why do I need to make decisions on the spot, you know, farming, changing soil is very slow. It's like, yeah, fine, I can get that point. But let's say you have a weather front coming in and you need to make a decision right now or the agronomist is here in the field, he's not going to be here in two weeks time. What do you do? You know, you want to be making decision here and now not kind of getting the date. And besides that, if you get results two weeks later, you're not making the, you're not learning, you're not making a decision based off of that and what to do now. You're trying to learn what happened next time. And in my opinion, and this is very much my opinion, I think that's why we haven't seen as rapid a take up and as a rigorous history of testing in the UK, because a lot of this is for box-taking rather than necessarily for actually providing meaningful advice and information to farmers when they come to do the farm. That was one of my questions actually, Andre, how receptive farmers are in adopting new tax in general in your case soil testing tools? There is still a lot of skepticism to overcome. Yeah, I mean, I tend to think of it as you have the distribution of users on in terms of adoption. You have the early adopters, you have the people who sort of like are willing to, you have the very early adopters, you have the early adopter, people on offense, people sitting in middle. And I think at the moment we're still at the stage, we're in the very early adopter part of the cycle where there's a lot of people who really are interested in this and want to see it, but they don't necessarily, they don't or can't afford to take the risk to take plunge and find out. And so they're waiting for others to do the work that early leaders to be able to do that work and be able to show, hey, this is viable, this does have meaning and then they'll come on board. I think UK farmers are typically very tech receptive. We tend to think them as backward, but if you go on to farm and look at exact hammy gizmos and gadgets there are on a tractor, you'll know that they're not shy of putting tech into business. I think however there is an element of when it comes to, when it comes to these kinds of things, I think that they've been burned a lot by, you know, by people who have sold them things that weren't quite what they said were going to be or weren't made specifically, they're big. And I think part of the reason is that a lot of the innovation sometimes doesn't come from within agriculture. And so it's not necessarily understanding. And look, I will quite happily say we're, you know, I'm not from agriculture. Neither is my co-founder, but we are very heavily leaned into people who we know are from agriculture. I want to people who work with a gender called Michael faint is from a foreign background. And he's worked with quite a lot because he is able to tell us how farmers think and forbid a farming voice when we make decisions about what to do. I think that's really important because it's difficult to understand the needs of farmers if you're not from a background. I do think it's, it's a very different type of mentality to city dwelling. Yeah. Yeah. What's that understandable? I want to ask you though something that can have even broader implications, soil carbon. So it is something that it is increasingly treated as a measurable asset and can potentially be a source of income for farmers. So we know how strategically important that can be. Can your device help quantify or verify the amount of carbon in the soil? So we have been, we already provide organic matter. And for the last years we've been developing a soil carbon data set specifically to provide more information on the carbon side. But actually, I think the biggest thing we can bring to the carbon space is actually measurement of microbial biomass. So when we think about the carbon cycle, you have huge amount of CO2 equivalent carbon being put into soil, but actually have almost the exactly the same amount being effluxed, being spat straight out in a, in an over a year, back out into the atmosphere. And that's because the microbial life in soil is using the CO2 carbon and then expelling that once it's done its activities. The long term stored carbon is what you're really looking for when it comes to, when it long comes to carbon sequestration. And studies have shown that 80% of the long term stored carbon is basically dead microbes. So if you're able to measure the microbial biomass at day zero and then measure it at the end of the season, you're able to get an understanding of how much your biomass has changed. And if you were to put some, multiple some algebraic factors, some clever maps in there to understand what that could mean, then you could try to understand, okay, well, you know, I would have normally had this amount of dead microbes. Now I have a slightly higher amount of dead microbes, which means that my carbon sequestration is infected as a result. It's worth saying all this is still relatively hypothetical from our end. We haven't implemented that, we haven't done it, but this is how I see us having the biggest impact in the soil carbon space. Well, the old measurement narrative, it is basically the bottle neck on on on everything regarding exactly management. I mean, and to explain why actually, you know, for listeners, why it's important to be able to, you know, well, so what? So you can measure microbial biomass who cares? When it comes to measuring of long term carbon, that's like carbon, that's really deep down. So you have to do a baseline measurement and then to get an accurate reading, you have to measure five years later. Yes. So actually, if, you know, you're doing a program, you kind of need to be hoping that you're on the way to, or you need to find a way to ensure within five years' time, they're going to, it's a firstly, have a really long investment period, because you've got to put a lot of money into the baseline in the first place. And then you've got to somehow be managing it in a way that you can see that these levels have increased in five years' time, but you can't measure it in the meantime. So how the hell do you, you know, know that you're on the right path? A lot of the ways that it's being done is through, um, through computational models, through clever algebraic functions, which definitely has, you know, are a good way to go, but often they require farmers to be doing work in a very fixed and rigid way. You need to be making sure that you're farming this field that you've got in for carbon credits in the same way, or years of the years. You wear it, but a lot of the time that isn't really how farming works, you need to kind of be flexible to be able to change things around as you need to, you might want to put into productivity. And that's why I think being able to do microbial biomass is helpful, because then you could look at the impact of microbial biomass. You could try to guesstimate how it's changing within a season, whether you've got it in the fixed program, or whether you're starting to use it for different productivity systems. And then you can go, okay, so it's, it's passionate. The way I like to think about it is imagine you went to school and or university or school, whatever you, you start in year seven, you've got your GCSEs at the end of year 11, and actually have no practice tests in the meantime. You're just kind of doing work, but you have no, you have no way of testing whether you're going to be actually passing the grade and you do your GCSEs. Whereas I like to think of the, what we do with microbial biomass is allowing people to be doing essentially tested in the year seven, year eight, year nine to see if you're on the right path to hitting that. Yeah, the computational method, computational methods are great, but it's a bit like predicted grades. And I can imagine that the other players in this sector are interested to see this. I mean, few producers, your, your, your necessities and unileafers of this world are putting a lot of work and effort into working with their farmers to improve for genital practices. They're putting money and they're going to want reports, right? They're going to want to see that data is moving in the right direction. I'm sure. They absolutely will. And I think that it's, it's one of those that can be quite tricky because you, you're, you want to make sure that you're moving in the right direction, but also you want to be making sure that you're making as pain free and as, and easy as possible. As easy for the market to swallow as possible. And so that's, I think, where a lot of this green washing has come in, where people have been doing things for the sake of making sure that it appears to be correct, rather than actually being the right thing to do. And I don't think I, that is a little bit harsh, potentially. I think a lot of the time when I speak to a lot of these organisations that are also well-intentioned, but they're going by the best what science has to offer. And again, I go back to this element of what I mentioned at the beginning when it comes to soil biology, which is really, in my opinion, the best way to understand if you're making regenerative sustainable practices, there hasn't been access to a mass testing of biology because of the fact that there has been no way of doing it affordably. And so that's why I think our device, our product of selling tests that provide information biology at an affordable price point is so important. I'm curious to pick your brain on something, Andre. Are you view the current measurement frameworks from organisations like IPCC or DEFRA? Are they detailed enough to capture what's really happening at a farm level? So, rather than talking IPCC and DEFRA, I want to talk about something that's very new, which is that the EU's soil health monitoring directive or soil monitoring directive, which was, it was announced a couple of days last week that the Council of Europe had adopted the framework for this and it needs to go to European parliament votes, after which member states will need to have will have three years of into within which to implement. Well, we're not a dog, but to actually implement ways of monitoring the soil. When we looked through what they had, when it came to the chemical physical aspects of the soil, it was actually very clear what they need to be doing. When it came to the biology, it was kind of going, you know, it's kind of like, well, we don't know, you know, use your best guess. And that's really what a lot of these sort of things are. You know, there's a lot of political will to do something because doing something is better than nothing always. But there's not because of, again, there's not a huge understanding of, okay, how do we actually get farmers to look at the biological part of soil? How do we monitor that in a way that is effective and tangible and measurable? So that's where, so to answer your question, you know, when look at IPCC and deaf, they're very good on the chemical physical aspects because those parts of soil science, we understand very, very well and can measure very well. But on the biological part, it's a little bit still, very, very. And I think, again, what's interesting about the directives, yeah, they leave it to each individual member states to implement it to their own accord. And I think that's going to be interesting because you potentially have, you know, what are the 27-odd member states who have 27 different monitoring regimes for soil, which so that's going to be, that's going to be interesting in seeing how they then are able to collaborate and compare notes across borders. So yeah, I was going to ask that, do they, do they communicate? Do people share some of that? I mean, there will be, I think, a need to communicate and compare it. But again, I'm, I'm at the moment curious about how that's going to happen simply because if member states are free to implement it as they see best, you're going to have, I think, a wide variety in how they have different implications. And my worry is that with these things that ends up being a bit of a race to the bottom, because the problem is, when you allow people to do everything, you end up going to the common denominators and the common denominators typically are the lowest hanging fruit, which isn't necessarily the things that are best to monitor a measure or use those yardsticks. So is, has technology is going to be going Europe wide soon? Is this an opportunity for you to start giving them a tool where they can all talk the same language to each other? Well, Emma, I mean, now, since you pushed me on the, on the surface, I mean, we are, we are increasingly in internationalization, you know, we have launched in the UK and we're always iterating a product here and looking to make it better. But the UK is, you know, is where we started it. So it's our home market, but it isn't, you know, soil is around world and the pro and the need to understand and quantify soil health is something that we have, it has global interest. You know, we, we get so many inquiries from all over the world about our product and doing. And so the need now is for us to work out, okay, how can we start also looking to bring it into countries beyond the UK? So yes, this EU directive is incredibly timely for us, I'm very excited to see what exactly is going to be announced and how we can fit into it. What about other applications besides agriculture, which already is absolutely humongous, but I'm curious to know if you can apply the principle of our tech works also across others, for example, like environmental monitoring, air quality, or even industrial processes. So, and I'm really glad you asked that because that is something that I'm incredibly excited about, you know, the technology we developed that provides you being able to provide cost affordable tests for, for a comprehensive assessment of soil health, I think is, is really important. But I'm always really excited about, okay, well, what's next? What else can we do? Because what we've developed essentially is a dog's nose. You know, then it's something that can smell the world in the same way that you can smell for truffles or narcotics. You don't need to know the exact gases that they are. You just say, "Hey, Fido, go and learn how to smell cocaine." I don't know how they do that, but I assume they just get them to smell it hundreds of times. It's the same thing with us. You just expose it to what you're looking to test hundreds of times. Are you lining up your excuses for when you get a SWAT team turn up at your door? I don't dabble in those kinds of things. Although, either, if you're having to take bags of soil, you can always look a bit dodgy. We'll act like we're taking your thoughts now. But the idea is that you have something, you know, we've got something that works with dogs, but we also got to, what separates us in my opinion from, because there are other companies out there who are looking to use volatile organic compounds, they're called. We tool gases, bulldog on compounds, senses. There are companies out there who are doing it, but what separates us from them, I think, is the fact that we have a way to really mass manufacture a sense. I'm talking millions of senses a year. We've got it online, and we can produce them really, really cost affordably. And so we can start bringing this idea of smelling the world and making it a reality. When I think of actually where I want a company to be one day in a real pie in the sky of vision, I would love us to be able to be the technology that is used to understand the world through smell. Because if you think about it, so much of life understands the world through smell, we understand it predominantly through hearing and through sight, but we don't really understand the world through smell or taste. And I would be dead excited if we became the benchmark for understanding how the world is understanding the world through smell, 'cause there's so much to understand. It costs us over to like health care and things, doesn't it? You hear about that? Training dogs to smell, I don't know Parkinson's disease. Exactly. In all these classic stories about cats being able to detect somebody or cancer. And you mentioned earlier environmental monitoring and their quality. I mean, there are huge things that we could do. We've already started looking at other applications in agriculture, things such as we did a project a number of years ago, we look for a particular pest or disease in soil, so called potato cisneumatoid. We worked at the UK AgriTech Centre. Unfortunately, that was during COVID and our technology was still very young, so we weren't able to complete that successfully because project wasn't Kenya, we couldn't get to Kenya. But we have reason to believe that if we're able to, if it has a biological signature, we're able to detect it. And you know, some of these other companies are producing, they've done tests for E.coli that are doing tests in human health. They're doing, we know one company has done that recently won an award at the British, at the fresh produce consortium, which was doing plant health by literally smelling the health plants. I think those are all exciting opportunities we go into, but again, I think the big differentiator between us and these companies in the space is the fact that we can produce these tests on mass and we can make single use sensors. Now, why the single use sensors matter? Okay, that sounds really good. But if we think about it, if you have to use the sensor continuously, so you put it in there and use it, it kind of sits there passively for a month or a year, the problem is that there are certain chemical that will bind irreversibly to these sensors. So kind of once you smell it, once you never smell it again, it's a bit like, you know, if you go into your local Indian and you smell the, you know, to warm, wafting aromas of curry, you know, smell a nice bolt, you know, a nice coma. So after you're in there for a few minutes, you stop noticing that smell. It's a big problem with perfume and the perfume in the industry. Exactly. You can't, you stop noticing it. Whereas, yeah, exactly become nose blind. Thank you. Whereas if you have a single use sensor, you essentially get over that nose blindness, you smell it as if you're coming into that room every single time. And that's where I think, you know, from a technical, we have a technical advantage of our company's pace, but that's precipitated by the fact that we have this mass manufacturing process that allows to produce millions of sensors at a time. Now, you mentioned that they're cost affordable. How much are they? So we currently retail each test at 25 pounds of test. It's worth mentioning, however, that that they don't come and are one as a one test, they come in a batch of a hundred because the way that we do it. But when the reason why 25 we settled on is the most commonly used test in UK agriculture is 25 pounds of test. Okay. In the labs, traditionally, business as usual. Yeah, from the labs. Yeah. And that's if you have no volume-based discounts or anything else, if you're just going, I want one test. If you're looking for a soil health test, which is something that is almost the same as what we have, but we have a few more indicators, that'll cost you at least 70 pounds, but potentially to do what we do, or cost at least 200 pounds per test. Okay. And so providing a 25 makes it very attractive if you're looking to compare soil health test tests. Especially when you know that you need to do multiple tests, both over one field, one area to manage out and then over time, of course, as well. Yeah. And, you know, we are looking at ways of how we can further reduce this cost. My personal driving ambition is to, I would love it to get to a point where actually you don't have to worry about the cost of testing. If we're able to implement something like a subscription model where you pay a certain fee a month or a quarter a year, but you can test as much as you like, I would love to be able to get to that point at some point. And for that, we need more sales data to be able to work out. We'll be the right price point. But that is something that I would love to work towards because we talked, price has been a barrier to mass testing, mass adoption. And I would love to get away from this idea of, oh, well, I've done a test and it cost me 25 pounds to just go, you know what? I'm really curious about why that looks a bit weird. Let me go test it. And actually, I just want to, I just want to carry a few tests. I don't even know if I'm going to get anything useful out of it. I just want to find out to just see. And I would love to be able to support that kind of work because I think being, when you can test, when you can learn stuff without fear of failure, is when you really make most learnings. That's very interesting. And you have what is in my opinion, besides the cost effectiveness, the timings, the meaniness of the answer that it is, that it is fantastic, just that plus or the integration. It is a, the way I see it, it is a wonderful way to start the journey of solid measurement for farmers that currently are not doing it. It is easy to use, it is life, it is cost effective, it is immediate, so that those are, we put all these things together, it can be a vehicle to bring more data across agriculture. Thank you, Andrei, this was extremely interesting. Your tech and the guy at the work that you guys are doing at a pass, very very interesting. Thank you for being on Rogreen and we'll catch up soon, thanks to you too Emma for bringing them on. Thank you Andrei. It's been an absolute pleasure, thank you both and hope you have a lovely weekend. We will. Thanks for listening to this episode of Rogreen. If you made it this far, you probably enjoyed it. 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