Doing the bees’ work with Thai Sade of BloomX

Thai Sade is the co-founder and CEO of BloomX, a company that has developed crop-pollinating technology to replicate natural pollinators like bees and other insects. So much of what we eat depends on bees, which have been used for centuries to pollinate crops. But today, the world’s growing appetite and other environmental stressors are pushing bee populations to the brink and threatening our food supply. This week on How I Built This Lab, how Thai’s company is helping farmers ease the burden on bees. Plus, how Thai’s upbringing on a kibbutz inspired him to tackle global challenges in agriculture, and how BloomX is contributing to rainforest conservation in Latin America. This episode was produced by J. C. Howard with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carla Esteves. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:11Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So about a third of the food we eat, things like blueberries, citrus, almonds, and carrots, are pollinated by insects and mostly by bees. And by and large, they do an amazing job. The problem is that with rising global demand for food and dwindling bee populations, we'll have to find other solutions to make sure the world can produce enough food for everyone. So a company called Blumex has developed a technology that replicates the process of pollination, using robots and artificial intelligence, not to replace insects, but to enhance what they're already doing.

• 5:52Guy Raz?

  The technology developed by Blumex can help increase the crop yield by up to 30%, which means more crops using less land. The company was started by Thais Sade, who has a French and an Israeli background. He grew up thinking a lot about agriculture while living on a kibbutz in Israel and working in the orchards every week.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  So I grew up in a kibbutz, uh, so growing everything farm, you know, orchards of persimmons, citrus, avocados, uh, bananas, to big open fields of wheat, uh, cotton, corn, and, you know, big farming activity.

• 6:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I specifically was small in the orchards. That was where I was involved since I was eleven years old, understanding and loving the space of agriculture, of producing food and, and growing crops.

• 6:46Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, as a, as a child, as a teenager, you were working in the orchards. I'm assuming this was a commercial farm. It was producing fruits and, and vegetables to sell.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. So it's, I think it's a very unique way of how kibbutzes are managed, which means that, you know, the youth, the education was very involved in the farming activity. Uh, and it means that while you're studying, you're also involved in the community. So it could be farming to be other things that you can do. And I specifically was involved in farming one day per week, you know, as a mandatory, uh, part of my, of my life, of my routine, as part of growing in a kibbutz.

• 7:26Guy Raz?

  All right. So you grew up in this environment, but was your intention as you were growing up, was it your, did you think, you know, I'm gonna stay in agriculture? Cause I know, I, I mean, people I know who grew up around agriculture or farms, very few of them stay there. They, they tend to move on to do something else. Um, when you were, I don't know, going to, you know, when you were a teenager, thinking about going to university, did you imagine that this is what you wanted to continue to do? Or did you think, you know, I'm gonna go do something completely different?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, back then, it was something that was, like, that, that was my dream or intention to do. I'm also coming from a family, from a French family, who, you know, in our culture, back home was very allowed about food. And I think that's, that's a very strong tool for us back home to, to share love.

• 8:19Guy Raz?

  Absolutely.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  That's something that from very young age, I was exposed from my mother, which is originally from France and was a big, big part of my culture and influenced me. So, you know, fast forward, I opened a restaurant with my mother and sister. It was a family business that we had for almost nine years.

• 8:38Guy Raz?

  You were managing the restaurant?

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were the owners and managing together with my mother and my sister. Um, after a few years that the business was established, basically, I would say, successful or self-sustained. You know, a lot of the drivers for me to do what I'm doing today is this entrepreneurial mindset. And then back then, maybe seven years ago or eight years ago, I understood that I want to deal with a more impactful um challenge or challenges that we are facing globally, challenges of agriculture and food.

• 9:15Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, some context here because um you live in a part of the world that has many challenges to producing crops. There's not a lot of water. There can be extreme heat and a limited amount of arable land. So there's been a lot of interesting technology that's come out of the Middle East, of Israel. I believe uh your country is one of the biggest recyclers of water for agricultural use, right? So, so there is already an infrastructure around developing technology around agriculture, right? Like, you you probably saw that growing up already.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  You're right. So I think that, you know, this uh mindset is coming from a place that they they needed to innovate because they didn't have the right infrastructure to produce what they need. If it's water, if it's to fertilize land, if it's finding new ways to protect the crops. And and I think that a lot of the innovations that we have came from from the from kibbutzes. So the irrigation uh pipes that were invented by Netaphim, that's a kibbutz in Israel that basically. That sit on the desert, basically invented that because they needed to control the water and irrigate.

• 10:32Guy Raz?

  This is, you're talking about drip irrigation.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, drip irrigation.

• 10:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  You're right, because they needed that, right?

• 10:37Guy Raz?

  Right, because it uses, obviously uses the less water when it's just dripping from the hose. Yeah, which is obviously widely used around the world. I want to ask you about what you started, though, because I guess you decided to move away from the restaurant business, of course, to focus your full attention on trying to solve some pretty big global problems connected to food and agriculture. And eventually you honed in on a single problem that is not just specific to your part of the world, but exists all around the world, which is honeybees as pollinators. Bees are essentially, right, like, they are essentially, well, they're the workers of agriculture.

• 11:20Guy Raz?

  Not everything requires bees for pollination, but I think a significant percentage of the food, at least consumed in the United States, maybe a third or half of the food we eat requires bees as pollinators. So things like blueberries and avocados and almonds and strawberries, cucumbers, different kinds of fruits and vegetables that we eat, require bees as pollinators to carry pollen from one plant to the next in order to produce yields.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 11:48Guy Raz?

  And I used to do stories on this when I was a reporter about bee colonies just collapsing, you know, and it was scary because without bees, we can't, there's a significant amount of food that can't be produced. Presumably, when you were growing up, I mean, you would have bee colonies or you would release bees into the orchards or, I mean, because this is a, there's a process to it, right? I mean, bee colonies are brought on trucks, colonies are deposited in orchards and fields, and then the bees do their thing, and then a couple of months later, they're picked up and taken away. Is that more or less how it worked on your kibbutz?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, that's how it worked in my kibbutz. That's how it works today. To produce food, we need pollination. Pollination, I mean, the transaction of pollen.

• 12:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  From a single flower to the other flower, which is usually transferred by insect. So around 80% of the commercial growing crops that we use today are pollinated by insects. The other 20% are pollinated by wind.

• 12:55Guy Raz?

  And I think out of the insects, most of them are bees, right? There are moths and others and butterflies, but mostly bees.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  So you're right. We use those honeybees boxes, pushing them into the orchards or whatever we want to pollinate. And effectively, they pollinate. So here is the interesting part. The number of honeybee hives has increased from the 1960s to today by around 81%. But the number of land that needs pollination globally, in the same time, grew much more. And that's what created this big gap that you know today. And effectively, how we manage and use honeybees to pollinate, make this process very problematic from the honeybee perspective, which basically decreases their functionality and decreases the hive numbers and et cetera. Because of the commercial use, which is very intense.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  We talked about trucks, transferring them from one place to another, pesticides that affect them, disorientation, bad nutrition, for example, to pollinate only avocados if they don't like the avocado nectar of pollen.

• 13:59Guy Raz?

  It's not good for the bees, yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  To eat only one thing is not good for any living creature. The reason we use them is because it's easy for us to manage them and put them in boxes. And we can manage them because it's a very socialized organism that we can just commoditize. But the other natural pollinators, the insects, is actually much more important to pollinate many types of crops. But we cannot just spread many insects or different butterflies or whatever what to pollinate the crop because they are not controlled like honeybees. And that's why we created BloomX. Basically, because what we find out is that not only that we're harming the honeybees while we're using them like that, they are not pollinating effectively many types of crops.

• 14:44Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, Ty's big idea and his process that pollinates crops without using bees at all. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 15:08Guy Raz?

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• 18:45Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today is Thais Sade, who realized that honeybees alone, which have been commercialized by humans to pollinate crops for centuries, are actually not always great at pollinating, especially as global demand for food rises. All right, let's talk about Blue Mex. I know you started this, you started working on this idea in 2019 and you launched it in 2022. Let's, let's talk about how this idea came about. Essentially, we've talked about what the problem is, which is bees as pollinators, obviously crucial and vital,

• 19:24Guy Raz?

  but the commercialization of bees is a problem because some bees are non-native to parts of the world and they can't be brought in. And certainly, it's not healthy for bees to just be sort of monocrop pollinators. I mean, my understanding is you can, I mean, humans can pollinate, like you can physically pollinate plants, right? You don't necessarily need bees, but bees are obviously important and they do it well and they can do things much more quickly than humans. But, but you were, you essentially said, is there a way that we can artificially pollinate plants? Essentially, I don't know, to replace bees? Was that what you were thinking?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  So it wasn't to replace bees, but to enhance the pollination activity. And I think that what's very interesting to understand, you know, from what I've shared, you can understand that if honeybees are not the natural pollinators, I think that from our logic, it was meant, okay, so we shouldn't look on the honeybee and how to improve it. We should look on the plant. We should focus on the plant, not on the insect, in order to understand the mechanism and how we can enhance the activity on the plant.

• 20:36Guy Raz?

  Essentially, from what I understand, the way pollination works, I mean, if it's a bee or a hummingbird, they land on a flower, they're vibrating and that shakes the pollen loose, which kind of it's like a cloud of pollen that lands on the bee. Then it goes to another flower and drops that pollen and then you've got, it's doing its job. Not only does bee get nutrition from the pollen, but it propagates that, that plant. And Wind also does this. Wind also shakes plants and spreads pollen. So essentially, you need, I guess you needed to figure out, how do we vibrate plants, right? How do we like shake them a little bit?

• 21:18Guy Raz?

  And somehow get the pollen from one flower to another? Is that sort of how you were thinking about it?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  So actually, all flowers that have different mechanisms to transfer pollen from one flower to the other. What differentiate those mechanisms? Is the forces that you need to apply on the flower in order to release the pollen or transfer it. So vibration, for example, the bumblebee vibration, which you mentioned, is one of them. It's one of them regarding to blueberries, tomatoes, peppers. Another mechanism that we are applying, for example, is basically electrostatic forces to collect pollen out of the flowers and then apply them by friction. And what we are mimicking there is that, for example, sticky pollen like avocados, mangoes, that have a very sticky pollen, which means that the plant recycles from the insect to really work hard to get the pollen out.

• 22:09Guy Raz?

  Go to dig that out, right?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  We got to dig that out.

• 22:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  And that's why it's sticky. And for those kind of flowers, for example, avocados, in a co-evolution between the plant and the insect basically means that when the honeybee flying, they became electrically charged. And that electrical charge, when they approach the flower, gets the pollen to jump on the body. So we try to, basically to mimic that process and to create electrostatic mechanisms that collect the pollen out of the flowers and then apply it.

• 22:41Guy Raz?

  Huh. Okay, so essentially, you know, as bees, right, as they approach a flower, there's like an electric charge that's created by their buzzing. And that shakes loose the sticky pollen from the flowers so it can pollinate other flowers. And basically, your company has figured out a way to kind of replicate that process, but maybe do it even better than bees?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we actually see that it's working, you know? And that's a very interesting mechanism that we are replicating, that we apply today for several crops, but could be others. But we also have Like the data on when to pollinate. We have an algorithm that allows us to understand how environmental conditions affect the flowering behavior for every crop that we are working on that give us the right pollination window to pollinate and create a forecast of the pollination season based on real-time environmental conditions that we have in the field.

• 23:38Guy Raz?

  All right. This is a business show about entrepreneurship. If you're just joining us, you are listening to How I Built. This is not a show about agriculture, but I am going to do my best. You started to work on both hardware and software. So let's break it down a little bit because you've developed a, literally, I've seen a video of it. It's like a machine with arms on top of an autonomous vehicle. And this vehicle just goes down the aisles of, you know, of, let's say, citrus trees or whatever crop it needs to pollinate. And the arms brush up against the plants and essentially they're pollinating those plants.

• 24:20Guy Raz?

  Can you explain, especially because most people listening to this show do not understand, including me, don't work on farms, don't understand agriculture, but understand technology. So can you explain how that system works?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what you describe is correct. We are mimicking the bumblebee vibration system by those electric vehicles which have two mechanical arms that basically vibrate the bottom of the plant, blueberry flowers on the branches with the same frequency that we are trying to get the vibration of the bumblebee.

• 24:56Guy Raz?

  So just to clarify, I'm looking at a picture of this. It's like a small little, it looks like a, it's an autonomous vehicle. It's very small. It's called a burrow. And your technology is on top of this autonomous vehicle. And it vibrates the, I've seen a video of it. It vibrates the blueberry bushes ever so slightly so the blueberries don't start coming down, right? They're not like dropping.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:17Guy Raz?

  It's a very, almost imperceptible vibration. But that alone? Spreads pollen?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so while it create basically, and that's something we don't see in the video, but it's the flower. When it gets a vibration for those mechanical arms, the pollen is basically released from the flower.

• 25:37Guy Raz?

  It's like a pollen cloud that just is developed and it drops onto the other flowers.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:43Guy Raz?

  How, I mean, how much better are these operating than bees?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  So I think that it's like everything, there is this ROI and the cost effectiveness of everything we do, right? So this specific vehicle will replicate every week, same plant. It can do up to 20 hectares a week in six days.

• 26:03Guy Raz?

  Wow. And just to clarify, one hectares, I think about two and a half acres. So this vehicle can pollinate about 50 acres worth of crops in a week, which is probably more than bees could do on their own, right?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think that the comparison is not on honeybees. The comparison is more, that's what we emphasize eventually. It's on the results on the yield. It's not in the compare to the insect. And in compare, in compared to honeybees, when we apply those machines, we see a range of between 10 to 40% of yield increase because of using our services.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  If they're so much more efficient in pollinating, and if the yields are clearly higher than using commercial bee colonies, it sounds like they could replace the commercial use of bees.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that they could replace, but you know, trying to replace natural process that growers have been working for years, which are having a lot of reliability.

• 27:08Guy Raz?

  The growers are used to having bees. And then you want bees on your farm.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And also on that, honeybees.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  They have value, but if we reduce them, that could also affect the yields of the crop. So essentially, the goal is to understand what they have with honeybees, what they have with us, and what they have together.

• 27:33Guy Raz?

  Essentially, so what the technology does is you would say, keep using the honeybees, but you will see that your yields will go up because where the bees can't actually perform efficiently, this technology that we have, that we can actually produce better results.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and I think that we'll need to strategize together how to use honeybees and us. Maybe they will reduce the amount of honeybees because it's becoming more and more expensive and using us as a supplementary tool for pollination. So I think that we are very agnostic in a sense of we want to show you the value of using our services and you eventually, you the goal, will evaluate what is best for you. Again, agriculture is not natural, and if you want to have this essential process of pollination in the field, like you irrigate, if it drip or whatever, or fertilize differently, you need to have also a control on the pollination process.

• 28:33Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, how Blumeck's technology could actually help save rainforests across the world. More on that in a moment. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 29:59Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today is Thais Sade. His company, Blumex, has developed technology to help farmers pollinate their crops, including one of their newest products, the Crosby. So the one product you have is this apparatus that has these metallic arms that physically vibrate the bushes. You also have another product called a Crosby, and I'll describe it because we're on a podcast. So it's basically like a long pole, and attached to it is a panel. It's like a square panel. And a human holds this long pole and walks through, I guess, through the orchards and

• 30:44Guy Raz?

  holds this panel up against the trees, and that also pollinates. So this is an electrostatic system. Can you explain how that works?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you described it correctly. That's the manual version that we have today. We're also developing a mechanical version, which is basically big mechanical arms that have big electrodes, big plates, flexible plates that they attach to a tractor or pickup.

• 31:10Guy Raz?

  And that would just drive down the rows and it would electrostatically move the pollen from one flower to another?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's happening there is that eventually we have two varieties that we use in the orchards to cross-pollinate. So avocado is a great example. We have a pollinator variety, it could be Ettinger, Fruerte.

• 31:30Guy Raz?

  Is the Ettinger avocado the smooth-skinned one, by the way?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the smooth green.

• 31:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I don't like those ones.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:36Guy Raz?

  I'm always, I'm a hass guy.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, usually.

• 31:38Guy Raz?

  Give me those any day.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, the, the market loves hass. But we plan the pollinator variety to enhance the hass productivity. That's why we put them new, new chowder in the orchards. Uh, so what we do is basically we collect from the pollinator variety, could be Ettinger, Fruity, others, smooth skin, um, avocados, and we transfer the pollen that we collect in the plate, just rub it by friction on the, on the flowers that we want to pollinate on the hass.

• 32:07Guy Raz?

  So you take basically the pollen from one variety of avocado with these electrostatic plates and you transfer it to an, another variety of avocado. Why, why?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Which is the hass.

• 32:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah, but why do you do that?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  So why we do that is because honeybees don't like to pollinate, uh, the hass avocado flowers. They don't like the pollen taste. They don't like the nectar. So if you don't have, it's not that they're not pollinating at all, it's not binary, right? But eventually statistically you will have less visits of honeybees, you will have less fruits. Okay? So statistically, we increases the distribution of pollen because we predict what is the right time when pollen is receptive to collect it.

• 32:47Guy Raz?

  Is that generally in the spring, presumably?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's in the spring, but I mean, not as a period, I'm talking really every day. We know what is the right.

• 32:56Guy Raz?

  The day?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Per day, we know the hours.

• 32:57Guy Raz?

  How do you, how do you know that? The right hours. How do you, how are you able to know that?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  The, the, the, the algorithm, basically that what we do there, uh, is to understand how environmental conditions affect flowering behavior.

• 33:11Guy Raz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And by that, basically, that's something that, you know, part of the secret sauce of how we built that, but in every, in every crop is different flowering mechanism, different complexity, but the operational essence is the same. We're trying to understand, uh, what will be the right time in every day, having those temperature, humidity, or sun of light, uh, what will be the right time to pollinate? Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and et cetera. So we, we can identify that, but it's a per day practice because, for example, avocados have one million flowers in a season of one month and a half.

• 33:47Guy Raz?

  One, one avocado tree?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, eventually out of it, if you love 200 fruits from an avocado tree, that would be amazing.

• 33:55Guy Raz?

  From one tree, even though there's a million flowers.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's why we we're trying to improve the statistics of the pollen distribution on the right and the best conditions we can have. And then to affect the size, to affect the fruit sets, and that's what we are doing.

• 34:10Guy Raz?

  So you could, I mean, you could, in theory, if you could get that tree to produce 250 or 300 avocados, that could be.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:20Guy Raz?

  But one weird question, could, I mean, is there, there must be a point where the the tree should not be producing that much fruit? Because it wouldn't be, it would damage the tree.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Again, you're totally right, and maybe I can take it back again. In the natural process, you know, trees don't need to have 200 fruits, you know? We're trying to optimize that from a commercial perspective.

• 34:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  But but for the trees to to reproduce himself, he don't need that amount. So, yeah, there is this balance of what we're trying to take out of the tree, but also, in our perspective, do it that responsibly.

• 34:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Avocados and other crops that we are dealing with, pollination is a limiting factor for yield, okay?

• 35:01Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  So there is a very big gap that we can increase the yield responsibly without taking too much resources from the trees. That will be like a negative effect in the following years, okay? Not demanding too much of the tree. That's that's kind of our, you know, philosophy, and that's very important. We are focusing on crops that have pollination challenges. It's not that every crop have pollination challenges. Citrus don't have pollination challenges because honeybees, where we use them.

• 35:30Guy Raz?

  They love citrus.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, they just love that.

• 35:33Guy Raz?

  But avocados are challenging.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Avocado challenging, mangoes, lychees, almonds, apples, cherries, blueberries.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  You know, cocoa, coffee.

• 35:45Guy Raz?

  And so those are the crops that you're mainly focused on?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Those are in the pipeline. We are still not there yet with all of them.

• 35:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  But yeah, definitely.

• 35:52Guy Raz?

  So where do you see the biggest potential for your technology to be used?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  So the main activity, we started with avocados. And that was more in Latin America where the market is. Colombia.

• 36:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Peru, Mexico. So we started engaging with companies there in our validation process. And from there, we also understand that, you know, blueberries is a very big opportunity, which suffers from pollination limitations. And it's very, it's growing rapidly in Peru, Mexico. And I would say generally orchards in the outdoor that we want to leverage our crossbee. So it could be the subtropical, like mangoes, lychees and macadamia.

• 36:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Or nuts. So that's, that's the focus.

• 36:36Guy Raz?

  All right. So you've got the, you got the hardware and you've got this software, this algorithm that you've developed. I know you raised about eight million dollars to date from investors in mainly, I think in Israel. And you have started to work with customers. Now you are in a situation where I imagine would, you know, to state the obvious, there's been some disruption with, with the war that's happening in the background. Is your business on hold? Are your employees not, you know, your team, is it, is it, is its focus elsewhere? Are you still able to run the business?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's a good question in our, in the current climate and situation we are in Israel. But we, we must go on as a company and provide our services and operation to where we have commitment, you know, the main, the majority of our activity is not in Israel. It's in Latin America today. So a lot of our employees and product managers are there, whether with our distributors.

• 37:47Guy Raz?

  And, and so essentially the war has not disrupted your business because you're mainly focused on Central and South America.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 37:56Guy Raz?

  Okay. It's interesting because you you you mentioned, you know, avocados and blueberries and those are two significant crops, particularly in the US market. I think some of that has to do with their their beneficial health qualities around inflammation, reducing inflammation. And I know there's been a lot of a lot more interest in blueberries and raspberries. I just read an article in the New York Times about avocados and how Mexico in Mexico, there are a lot of land is being cleared to produce avocados, which presents its own challenge and own problems because there's there's rainforests are going to be cleared and land that's going to be cleared to build avocado farms. But if you could increase the yield per hectare,

• 38:42Guy Raz?

  I you know, I guess in theory, you could prevent some of that environmental destruction by by clearing land to make more and more farms.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  You're definitely right. And I think you really touched the point of, you know, I talked about what what I'm doing here, which is trying to to face with global challenge and find a solution. So that the incentive to better produce from your own farms is better. It's better for mentally and financially for you. Okay. And that's something that retailers, you know, having this conversation with their producers and that's something that became more and more aware. And that's something that is also something that we can measure and add value for the goal. It's a conservative world agriculture, but I think that this problem

• 39:30Speaker 01

  of pollination where we are is something that growers really want to to use and solve.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  If this technology becomes the standard, right, and you mentioned that the growers are conservative, that farmers are conservative, which makes sense. I mean, they know what they're doing, right? They're many of them are coming from generation have this generational wisdom that's been passed down to them, you know, so they they are they have a deep sort of inherent understanding of of land management and so on. But I mean, there are they are innovators, too. There's a lot of innovation that happens in in big commercial agricultural facilities. So if this technology is widely applied.

• 40:15Guy Raz?

  In theory, you wouldn't need to build, you wouldn't need to develop that much more land because you would just increase the yields in existing, on existing plots of land.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, you know, our mission, that's part of our mission statement from an environmental perspective for sure. And that's not only us, but also for the farming industry. So I think that pollination is a tool to have better control, better performance, and also better environmental outputs on how you produce your foods. People understand that we need to produce much more with much less. And not only as a, you know, as a buzzword, that's the reality that we need to face in order to feed the world and to make it the same as we have it today.

• 41:03Guy Raz?

  Ty Sade, thank you so much.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot, Guy. It was a pleasure.

• 41:10Guy Raz?

  That's Ty Sade, co-founder and CEO of Blumex. Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carla Esteves. Our audio engineer was Neil Roush. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, Kerry Thompson, Malia Agudelo, Niva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.