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SPEAKER_00: 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 BloomX 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. The technology developed by BloomX can help increase the crop yield by up to 30%, which means more crops using less land. The company was started by Ty Sadeh, 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.
SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, as a child, as a teenager, you were working in the orchards.
SPEAKER_00: I'm assuming this was a commercial farm. It was producing fruits and vegetables to sell.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're right. So I think it's a very unique way of how kibbutz are managed, which means that, you know, the
youth, the education was very involved in the farming activity.
And it means that while you are studying, you're also involved in the community.
So it could be farming, there could be other things that you can do.
And I specifically was involved in farming one day per week, you know, as a mandatory
part of my life, of my routine, as part of growing in a kibbutz.
SPEAKER_00:
All right. So you grew up in this environment, but was it your intention as you were growing up, was it your, did you think, you know, I'm going to stay in agriculture? Because I know, I mean, people I know who grew up around agriculture or farms, very few of them stay there. They tend to move on to do something else. When you were, I don't know, going to, you know, when you were a teenager or 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 going to go do something completely different?
SPEAKER_03: So I think, you know, back then, it was something that was like 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
SPEAKER_03:
home was very, a lot about food.
And I think that's a very strong tool for us back home to share love.
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. That's something that from very young age, I was exposed for my mother, which is originally
SPEAKER_03: from France and was a big, big part of my culture and influenced me. So fast forward, I opened a restaurant with my mother and sister. It was a family business that we had for almost nine years.
SPEAKER_00:
You were managing the restaurant?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. We were the owners and managing together with my mother and my sister. 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, eight years ago, I understood that I want
to deal with a more impactful challenge or challenges that we are facing globally, challenges
of agriculture and food.
SPEAKER_00: So I mean, some context here, because you live in a part of the world that has many
challenges to producing crops. There's not a lot of water.
There could 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 your country is one of the biggest recyclers of water for agricultural use, right?
So there is already an infrastructure around developing technology around agriculture, right? Like you probably saw that growing up already. You're right.
SPEAKER_03: So I think that, you know, this mindset is coming from a place that 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 I think that a lot of the innovations that we have came from kibbutzes.
So the irrigation pipes that were invented by Netafim, that's the kibbutz in Israel that
basically sit on the desert, basically invented that because they needed to control the water
and irrigate. You're talking about drip irrigation.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, drip irrigation.
SPEAKER_03: You're right. Because they needed that, right? Right, because it obviously uses less water when it's just dripping from the hose, which
SPEAKER_00: 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 the workers of agriculture.
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.
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 have,
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 months later, they're picked up and taken away. Is that more or less how it worked on your kibbutz?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so yeah, that's how it worked in my kibbutz.
That's how it worked today.
To produce food, we need pollination. Pollination means the transaction of pollen from a single flower to the other flower,
which is usually transferred by insect.
So around 80% of the commercially grown crops that we use today are pollinated by insects.
The other 20% are pollinated by wind.
SPEAKER_00: And I think out of the insects, most of them are bees, right? There are moths and others and butterflies, but mostly bees.
SPEAKER_03:
So you're right. We use 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 etc. Because of the commercial use, which is very intense, 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 clack the avocado nectar or pollen.
SPEAKER_00: It's not good for the bees. So to eat only one thing is not good for any living creature.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_03: But other natural pollinators than insects is actually much more important to pollinate
many types of crops.
But we cannot just spread many insects or different butterflies or whatever we want to pollinate a crop because they are not controlled like honeybees.
And that's why we created Bluemax, basically because what we find out is not only that
SPEAKER_03: we're harming the honeybees while we're using them like that, they are not pollinating effectively
many types of crops.
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Ty's big idea and his process
SPEAKER_00: 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.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today is Ty Sadeh, 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 let's talk about Bluemix. I know you started this, you started working on this idea in 2019 and you launched in 2022.
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. 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 mono crop 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 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?
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_00: 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 the bee get nutrition from the pollen, but it propagates that plant.
And wind also does this.
Wind also shakes plants and spreads pollen. So essentially, you need, I guess you need to figure out how do we vibrate plants, right? How do we like shake them a little bit and somehow get the pollen from one flower to another?
Is that sort of how you were thinking about it?
SPEAKER_03: So actually, all flowers that have different mechanisms to transfer pollen from one flower
to the other, what differentiate those mechanism 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 we mentioned is one of them. It's one of them regarding to blueberries, tomatoes, peppers.
SPEAKER_03: Another mechanism that we're applying, for example, is basically electrostatic forces
to collect the 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, mangroves, that have a very sticky pollen, which means that the plant requires from the insect to really work hard to get the pollen out.
You got to dig that out, right?
SPEAKER_03: You got to dig that out.
SPEAKER_03: And that's why it's sticky. And for those kind of flowers, for example, avocados, in a coevolution 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 mimic that process and to create electrostatic mechanism that collect the pollen out of the flowers and then apply it.
SPEAKER_00:
Huh. Okay. So essentially, 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?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And we actually see that it's working. 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 flying
behavior for every crop that we are working on that give us the right pollination window
to pollinate and create a focus of the pollination system based on real-time environmental conditions
that we have in the field.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: You started to work on both hardware and software.
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, 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. 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?
SPEAKER_03: 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, the blueberry flowers
on the branches with the same frequency that we are trying to get the vibration of the
bumblebee.
SPEAKER_00: So just to clarify, I'm looking at a picture of this. It's like a small little... Looks like 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 dropping. No.
SPEAKER_00: So it's almost imperceptible vibration, but that alone spreads pollen?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So what it creates 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.
SPEAKER_00: It's like a pollen cloud that just is developed and it drops onto the other flowers.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Yeah.
How much better are these operating than bees?
SPEAKER_03: 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 the same plant.
SPEAKER_03:
It can do up to 20 hectares a week in six days.
SPEAKER_00: Wow. And just to clarify, one hectare is 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?
SPEAKER_03: 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 compared to the insect.
SPEAKER_03: In compare to honeybees, when we apply those machines, we see a range of between 10 to
40% of yield increase to get off using our services.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I think that they could replace, but trying to replace natural process that growers have
been working for years, which are having a lot of reliability.
SPEAKER_00:
The growers are used to having bees. Yeah. And you want bees on your farm.
SPEAKER_03:
And also on that, honeybees, they have value, but if we reduce them, that could also affect
the yields of the crops. So essentially, the growers need to understand what they have with honeybees, what they have
with us, and what they have together.
SPEAKER_00: 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, we can actually produce better results.
SPEAKER_03: 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 grower 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's drip or fertilizer or fertilize differently, you need to have also a control on the pollination
process.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, how Bluemix 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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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So, my guest today is Ty Sadeh. His company, Bloomex, 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 sort of apparatus that has these kind of 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 like a panel.
It's like a square panel. And a human holds this long pole and walks through, I guess, through the orchards and holds this panel up against the trees. And that also pollinates. So this is an electrostatic system. Can you explain how that works?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so you describe 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.
SPEAKER_00: And that would just drive down the rows. Yeah. And it would electrostatically move the pollen from one flower to another.
SPEAKER_03:
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 the pollinator variety.
It could be Ettinger or Fruity.
SPEAKER_00: Is the Ettinger avocado the smooth-skinned one, by the way? Yeah, it's the smooth green.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't like those ones. I'm always, I'm a Haas guy. Yeah, usually. Can you do those any day?
SPEAKER_03:
Yeah. So, you know, the market loves Haas, but we plan the pollinator variety to enhance the Haas productivity. That's why we put them new, new chowder in the orchards. So what we do is basically we collect from the pollinator variety, it could be Ettinger, Fruity, others, smooth-skinned avocados, and we transfer the pollen that we collect in
the plate, just rub it by friction on the flowers that we want to pollinate on the Haas.
So you take basically the pollen from one variety of avocado with these electrostatic
SPEAKER_00: plates, and you transfer it to another variety of avocado. Why?
SPEAKER_03: Which is the Haas.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but why do you do that?
SPEAKER_03:
So why we do that is because honeybees don't like to pollinate the Haas avocado flowers.
They don't like the pollen taste.
I see. I got it. 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
SPEAKER_03: fruits. Okay? So statistically, we increase the distribution of pollen because we predict what is the right
time when pollen is receptive to collect it. Is that generally in the spring, presumably?
SPEAKER_03: 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... The day.
SPEAKER_03: The day, we know the hours. How do you know that? The right hours. How are you able to know that?
SPEAKER_03: The algorithm, basically, that what we do there is to understand how environmental conditions
affect flowering behavior.
SPEAKER_03: And by that, basically, that's something that's part of the secret sauce of how we built that.
But in every crop, it's different flowering mechanism, different complexity, but the operational
essence is the same. We are trying to understand what will be the right time in every day, having those temperature,
humidity, or sun of light, what will be the right time to pollinate.
Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and et cetera.
So 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.
One avocado tree?
Yeah, eventually out of it, if you love 200 fruits from an avocado tree, that would be
amazing.
SPEAKER_00: From one tree, even though there's a million flowers. Yeah, and that's why we're trying to improve the statistics of the pollen distribution
SPEAKER_03:
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.
SPEAKER_00: So you could, I mean, you could in theory, if you could get that tree to produce 250 or 300 avocados, that could be... Exactly. One weird question, could, I mean, is there, there must be a point where the tree should not be producing that much fruit because it wouldn't be, it would damage the tree.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
But for the trees to reproduce themselves, you don't need that amount.
SPEAKER_03:
So yeah, there is this balance of what we're trying to take out of the tree, but also in
our perspective, do it responsibly.
SPEAKER_03: Avocados and other crops that we are dealing with, pollination is a limiting factor for
yield, okay?
Okay.
SPEAKER_03: 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 kind of our 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...
They love citrus. Yeah, they just love that. But avocados are challenging.
SPEAKER_00:
Avocado challenging.
SPEAKER_03: Mangoes, leeches, almonds, apples, cherries, blueberries, cocoa, coffee.
SPEAKER_00: And so those are the crops that you're mainly focused on?
SPEAKER_03: Those are in the pipeline. We are still not there yet with all of them. But yeah, definitely. Definitely.
SPEAKER_00: So where do you see the biggest potential for your technology to be used?
SPEAKER_03: So the main activity we started with avocados, and that was more in Latin America where the
market is, Colombia, Peru, Mexico.
SPEAKER_03: So we started engaging with companies there in our validation process.
And from there, we also understand that blueberries is a very big opportunity which suffers from
pollination limitations and is growing rapidly in Peru, Mexico.
And I would say generally orchards in the outdoor that we want to leverage our cross
bee.
So it could be the subtropical like mangoes, leeches, and macadamia or nuts.
SPEAKER_03:
So that's the focus.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
So you've got the hardware and you've got this software, this algorithm that you've developed. I know you raised about $8 million 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, to state the obvious, there's been some disruption with the war that's happening in the background. Is your business on hold? Are your employees not, you know, your team, is its focus elsewhere? Are you still able to run the business?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So that's a good question in the current climate and situation we are in Israel.
But we must go on as a company and provide our services and operation to where we have
commitment. You know, 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 it's our distributors.
SPEAKER_00:
And so essentially the war has not disrupted your business because you're mainly focused on Central and South America.
SPEAKER_03: You're right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting because you mentioned, you know, avocados and blueberries, and those
are two significant crops, particularly in the U.S. market. I think some of that has to do with their beneficial health, you know, qualities around
inflammation, reducing inflammation. And I know there's been 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, a lot of land is being cleared to produce avocados, which presents its own challenge
and own problems because there's rainforests that 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, you know, I guess in theory you could prevent
some of that environmental destruction by clearing land to make more and more farms.
SPEAKER_03: You're definitely right. I think you really touched the point of, you know, I talked about what I'm doing here,
which is trying to face this global challenge and find a solution so that the incentive
to better produce from your own farms is better.
It's better environmentally and financially for you.
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 grower.
It's a conservative world, agriculture, but I think that this problem of pollination and
where we are is something that the growers really want to use and solve.
SPEAKER_00: If this technology becomes the standard, right? You mentioned that the growers are conservative, that farmers are conservative, which makes sense. I mean, they know what they're doing, right? Many of them are coming from generation, have this generational wisdom that's been passed down to them, you know, so they have a deep sort of inherent understanding of land management
and so on. But I mean, there are innovators too. There's a lot of innovation that happens in big commercial agricultural facilities. So if this technology is widely applied, 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 plots of land.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that, you know, 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, not only 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.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks a lot, Guy. It was a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00:
Thank you.
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SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Dan Harris, host of the 10% Happier podcast, where every week I talk to meditation
gurus, top scientists, even the odd celebrity about how to do life better.
These are wide-ranging conversations. We explore topics such as productivity, anxiety, enlightenment, psychedelics, relationships, and every episode is loaded with practical tools you can put into your life right now. To start this year off right, we've asked some of the smartest people we know about their non-negotiables, the practices and principles they cannot live without. We're talking about big names like Bill Hader, Esther Perel, Glennon Doyle, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and the legendary Buddhist nun Pema Chodron.
These conversations were fascinating and like I say, extremely practical. Kick off your new year with Non-Negotiables, a special six-episode series from the 10% Happier podcast, the smartest people we know, the advice you cannot live without. Listen to 10% Happier on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
