Lisa Kiefer interviews Jason Aramburu, founder and CEO of EDYN, a social enterprise company at the intersection of technology and sustainable agriculture that is trying to tackle the problems of drought and the global food shortage
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next.
Speaker 1:You're listening to method to the madness. By week, we public affairs show on k l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm Lisa Kiefer and today I'm interviewing Jason [inaudible]. Jason is tackling the problem of drought and global food shortage through his new company. He's created a soil sensor and [00:00:30] water valve that will help farmers and urban gardeners grow food more efficiently and sustainably. Here, welcome to the program, Jason Aramburu. Thank you. You know you've been in the press recently and you've won a lot, a lot of awards for such a young person, a, you're a social entrepreneur, meaning you've come up with some innovative solutions to social problems, particularly at the intersection of technology and agriculture. [00:01:00] You were named a Forbes 30 under 30 last year and you've been named an Ashoka fellow, which is a big deal. You've won other awards. Can you tell us why you're getting all of this? I'm a claim right now. What have you done? Oh, well
Speaker 2:I've, I've dedicated my life to solving challenges that we face globally with agriculture and environmental conservation and resource scarcity. I believe that it's a huge opportunity to both change [00:01:30] the world, but also to build sustainable companies that create jobs and create value for people. That ideas is very powerful right now for this, this time in our generation to make money and do good. Exactly. Leaders at the political level and in the, uh, an entrepreneurial level have shown us that, you know, the two are not mutually exclusive. You can, you can make money, you can do well and do good at the same time.
Speaker 1:Well, how did you get these awards? Like you started out with the Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneur Award [00:02:00] way back in 2010. What was, what were you doing where you were rewarded for all this?
Speaker 2:My first company was a company called recharge and we developed a unique fertilizer, a soil amendment based on a technology called bio char. So it was actually a fertilizer made from charcoal. Really interesting stuff because it was very low cost to produce. And in addition to replacing or reducing the amount of chemical fertilizer that farmers need to use, uh, it also has great benefits for the climate. [00:02:30] So it actually helps to fight global climate change and sequester atmosphere at carbon mean it filters out well it actually, you know, by producing the biochar from waste, you're actually keeping carbon from getting back into the atmosphere. If it's done on a worldwide scale, scientific estimates say that we can offset about 12% of our annual CO2 emissions every year at just by putting it in the ground. And I firmly believe that agricultural sequestration is the best way and the only way that will actually [00:03:00] reduce co two levels in our lifetime.
Speaker 2:So you actually started this on the ground in Africa. Exactly. I was, I was working in western Kenya actually with small farmers and we applied and got funding from, from Yoshiyama as well as from some other organizations like the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation organizations that have a mandate to help alleviate poverty but also to do it and sustainable and entrepreneurial ways. We were working with thousands of small farmers who live on, you know, two to $3 [00:03:30] a day really make their livelihood off the land. They typically spend a third to half of their annual income just buying chemical fertilizer because they're so dependent on it. The soil is so poor there through a sad trick of of history, you know most of the local farmers in Kenya, when the British left, the British gave them the worst possible land to farm and kept the really good stuff for themselves.
Speaker 2:They really just tried to eke out a living on very little. The technology that we developed is very scalable and very affordable for [00:04:00] them and very effective. It's actually like putting a sponge into the soil because if you've ever, I don't know how to illness or stomach illness, one of the treatments is actually activated carbon or charcoal. You take charcoal pills and they will absorb whatever is irritating your stomach and it's kind of the same way in the soil except that the, the charcoal absorbs fertilizer and it absorbs water, so it keeps it at the root level where the plants need it. Adding carbon back to our soils is really one of our big agricultural challenges and reducing fertilizer and reducing [00:04:30] fertilizer use. And they really, they go hand in hand. So how is it reducing [inaudible]? Because when you have a very thin soil that's very, uh, poor and doesn't hold onto fertilizer, the fertilizer actually washes out of the soil.
Speaker 2:So when you irrigate and it ends up in rivers, streams, bodies of water, you know, there's, there's an area called the dead zone in the Gulf, which is totally a result of fertilizer getting washed into the Mississippi from the breadbasket of the u s and that's because the soil, it's so thin and it just, it just doesn't retain those nutrients. [00:05:00] So you end up applying two to three times more than you actually need because you know, so much is going to get lost. What do you think that companies like Monsanto, the big ag companies, are they ever going to embrace something like this that reduces the fertilizer content? Well, it's difficult to say because their business model is predicated on selling fertilizer and selling things like roundup and weed killer. So, you know, it would certainly be a big departure from their business model to embrace that.
Speaker 2:I will say though that [00:05:30] other Agri tech companies are interested in this type of technology and they have reached out to, they reached out to me for licensing agreements and so they are, there are other companies that I think see agriculture differently than our culture's changing in exactly. Bread baskets aren't breadbaskets anymore because the soil is bad. Right, exactly. Exactly. Somebody has got to wake up the crisis in agriculture. I agree. I agree. And I will say Monsanto, they are investing in some very [00:06:00] interesting and smart technologies. They bought a company called the climate corporation recently for north of $1 billion and climate corporation. They build very elaborate data models for how climate change impacts agriculture. Farmers who are experiencing change in climate can access this data and learn how to modify their practices to be more compliant with it. Their fundamental business model still is the sale of agricultural chemicals.
Speaker 2:It's a big ship you have. Exactly. You know, they, they started as a chemical company. Okay, well so [00:06:30] this recharge in east Africa. Well. So we reached thousands of farmers through a social enterprise model and we actually sold the, the bagged biochar product to farmers in the u s and to gardeners in the U S and we sold it at a profit to them because it's very effective in your garden as well. And we use the profits to reduce the cost of the product for farmers in Kenya. Because when I first went over there and tried to sell this, this technology to farmers, they were like, it's great, but [00:07:00] we don't have any money. We had to come up with a really unique way to, to reduce the cost. And it, uh, you know, we reached thousands of farmers, generated a profit and we didn't have any investors, which was great.
Speaker 2:So it was fully owned by the management team. How did you reach these farmers who was tough? We tried a lot of different things. I mean, I went, you know, farm to farm, talking to farmers. We employ very large sales team. Also have local people who are farmers, but also want to make some extra money. That proved to be the most effective technique [00:07:30] going door to door. Also text message advertising because a lot of farmers have really basic cell phones over there. At one time we rented out a flat bed truck and got a Kenyan dance crew to dance on the back and had music and stuff. That was actually pretty effective. So that was successful. And what did you do with the success? Right, what happened? Well I wanted to find a way that I could spread knowledge and agricultural knowledge to disparate communities using a network like the Internet.
Speaker 2:[00:08:00] And so it was kind of out of necessity because we were funded by the gates foundation and we needed to show what impact our product was having on the soil. They want a lot of data and so we were doing a lot of soil tests and you know, working with soil labs and it was a slow process. And my background, I'm a soil scientist and we started experimenting with sensors, soil-based sensors that could show what impact our product was having on nutrient levels over time. I wanted to leverage the Internet because the interesting thing [00:08:30] about Kenya is that because they have such a robust mobile cellular network, you can get internet anywhere in the country. Basically you can get high speed internet. So we started developing prototypes working with really simple prototyping tools. Like there's a platform called Ardwino, which is a, um, kind of programmable micro computer that you can use to build devices and built some of the initial prototypes that became Eden.
Speaker 2:And Eden is your new company. [inaudible] exactly. Eden is my new company. We [00:09:00] develop a smart mobile sensors for gardening and for agriculture that measure the soil's fertility, moisture, ph as well as ambient environmental conditions and use this data to make recommendations to growers to grow better crops, healthier crops and make it easier. And we also use this data to control a smart irrigation system that we called the Eden Water Valve. And what that does is it actually gives your plants the precise amount of water that [00:09:30] they need at any given time. So really helps combat wasted water and gardening and agriculture. And it's a big problem around the world. I mean in Kenya there their agriculture is mainly based on rain. It's rain fed because most people don't have irrigation systems. And I remember one year I was there, the rains were probably a month and a half late later than expected. And like when the rain doesn't come, people kind of starve.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately. There's just, people are so dependent on it and it's all a result of climate change. [00:10:00] It was really out of a, out of necessity that I started experimenting with these prototypes. How did you build this measurement device? Well, so I'm a scientist, but I've worked with instruments, scientific instruments my whole life. I've always tinkered with them and been interested in them. And I, you know, I, I solicited help from my friends where I needed it. You know, there's a community of hackers and Nairobi who want to make physical things and I have a lot of friends who like to make physical devices and so I just, you know, got help wherever I could. And that [00:10:30] bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, senior data and were they surprised or hey, they were happy. Yeah. They, they, they know the data was a, it was in a format that they liked and it was suitable.
Speaker 2:And it showed what we needed to show. I realized, well, maybe this, this tool, this instrument could, could be a company in and of itself. And so I used some of, um, the proceeds from my share of recharge and seed funded Eden. I'd never built a hardware electronics company before. I knew I needed a really phenomenal [00:11:00] partner who, who had the experience to take those really rough boxy prototypes and make it into something that could be on store shelves around the world. And so again, I, I reached out to my network and I, a mutual friend connected me with Eve Bahar, the lead designer from JobOne. He's the founder of fuse project and inventor and designer of the hundred dollar laptop project. So about, uh, seven years ago, I think they launched this project with [00:11:30] a partnership with MIT and they wanted to design a laptop for kids around the world that costs less than a hundred dollars, could connect them to the Internet and they sold millions of them. And it's, I mean it's amazing because they develop that before the iPad came out and before tablets really forward thinking product and it got kids on the Internet who had never heard or seen anything outside village. And so I set up a meeting with eve and I showed him the prototypes and he said, you know, this is a game changer. We need to [00:12:00] work together. You know, I can help you make this a success. And
Speaker 1:so is he going to design it? Is there more as he branding it or what are you going to call it? Yeah,
Speaker 2:what he did you know, he, he agreed to invest in the company and he also agreed to to give his design services and the services of his team at fuse project. And that's his, his own design studio in San Francisco in addition to being an industrial design studio. So actually designing the product, they're also a branding studio and they're a strategy consultancy. And so they designed [00:12:30] the look and feel of the product in collaboration with me. They created the branding and the name is the, so the device will be called Aiden, the diva, the two devices. It's the Eden Gardens sensor. The sensor goes in the garden and detects changes in the soil and it's fully solar powered. And then the Eden Water Valve is the device that actually controls your irrigation system. So it's two hardware components, but they work together in tandem. Exactly. It's e d y, N and we chose [inaudible] N for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 2:[00:13:00] Um, it's fresh and cool and it really reflects the design of the product. The, the garden sensor actually resembles the physical design, resembles the letter y and, and also, you know, more than that, we felt it was really important to have eden.com and e d e n.com. It would have cost us millions of dollars to buy it, but e d y n.com was available. So, and the idea of an Eden, a future Eden, if we embrace this [00:13:30] product, that's good. Exactly. It's, it connotes the Utopian Garden, you know, the future of people producing their own food and, and growing. You know, everybody growing a little bit in their backyard because I believe that gardening, it's, it's good for the environment, it's good for the pocketbook and it's also good for the soul.
Speaker 1:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness of biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today I'm interviewing Jason Adam brew. [00:14:00] Jason is the CEO and founder of Eden, a company finding innovative solutions to the problems of drought and global food shortage through smart sensor technology.
Speaker 2:I personally believe that small scale agriculture is the future. 90% of the world's farmers, there's over a billion farmers in the world, 90% of them farm, a small farm outside of the u s the bulk of agricultural production comes from small farms. And I believe it's the future. It's most sustainable and it's, you know, it's [00:14:30] most diverse as well. And so that's really the market that Eaton is serving. You know, everybody from a small gardener up to a small organic farm. That's an area where Fuze project has really been critically helpful. Their knowledge of the market and how to launch an electronics product has allowed us to just focus on making a really good product that people and want to talk about. How much more money do you need and how are you going about that? Well, so we needed to raise money to initiate our first manufacturing run.
Speaker 2:[00:15:00] You know, we have working prototypes of the two devices and we're testing them now that we've assembled here in Berkeley. Exactly. The design is very innovative. We needed a really top notch manufacturer and we also needed a manufacturer that had the same ethical framework that we do because a lot of electronics manufacturers, they don't have the best social or environmental record. So who did you end up? We ended up working with a company called Flextronics, and they produce a lot of components for jawbone and for Apple. And where are they located? [00:15:30] So they're located in San Jose and they have operations in Texas, Canada, Mexico. The first conversation I had with them was, you know, this has to be done in an ethically and sustainable way. And they, they were all about that. They loved that idea, you know, in addition to being open to that, they're also a top notch manufacturer.
Speaker 2:They know exactly how to, to design for mass production. We worked with them for a year to get the product ready for mass production and hardware, you have to do things in, in a run of so many units [00:16:00] because there really is an economy of scale. What I realized was producing a hundred units at a time, it could cost us a few hundred dollars per device to make them, because they're made by hand. The components have to be sourced individually. But to get 10,000 units, the costs could drop by 10 x. We set out a plan and we realized that we needed $100,000 to initiate the first run that first runs about a thousand units. And so we knew that was what we needed to do to get the ball rolling [00:16:30] and to get manufacturing rolling. And so I talked to Eve Bahar and, and we decided to turn to Kickstarter to turn to the crowd to fund it because we had over this year period collected a few thousand email addresses of people who learned about the product from, you know, I don't know how they learned about it in the paper.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And so people were really interested. And so we knew that we had the support of the community of the crowd and instead of going to venture capitalists, you know, we said, let's, let's put it out to Kickstarter and see [00:17:00] what we can do. And so our goal was to raise $100,000 and the duration of the Kickstarter was a 37 days. And we hit our goal in two days. Less than a week later we doubled our goal. And then we also have a really exciting tier partnership with a nonprofit called slow food USA. Great Organization. One of their really exciting new projects is that they build gardens in schools as well as in communities in Africa, food and nutrition [00:17:30] gardens. The idea is to teach young people about food and how to grow their own food. And, and I met with them about six months ago and they told me about this project and I said, this is fantastic.
Speaker 2:You know, we have to do something together and so backers can actually buy a sensor and give one to slow food USA. And that sensor will go to either a garden in the states, a school garden or a garden in Africa. We are also working with them to produce a curricula for the, the uh, gardeners to learn how to use [00:18:00] it and improve their yields, have a deal coming up to sell this retail. We have a deal with a big box retailer. And what will the pricing look like? Will it be close to the Kickstarter? It'll be close, but we will be more expensive than the Kickstarter donation price. Um, we haven't announced the retail price yet, but you know, mainly when you, when you go through retail you have to pay a margin to the retailer. And so it will be more expensive. We're, we're offering a discount to Kickstarter backers because they're getting it direct from us.
Speaker 2:How many people are in your company? Right now [00:18:30] it's two people and we are looking at bringing on a third software developer. You're going to need a lot of people predict. Oh yeah, it's going to take off. Absolutely. Well we want to grow the company quickly and you know, we've mainly just hired technical folks, technical staff to, to build and design the product. And I should say we, you know, although the core team is only two right now, we work with about 15 people through Flextronics and fuse project and you know, our different partnerships and they've, they work almost full time [00:19:00] on this. Okay. So the rollout of your product, so we're starting in the bay area, Berkeley, San Francisco, South Bay as well in Oakland. You know, a lot of our Beta testers are here, so they will be the first ones to get the units.
Speaker 2:And then we do have Beta testers who are around the world. So they will get their units as well. And that will start in December. From there. Our next milestone in February, we'll start shipping to the regular backers as well. And they are really around the world. I mean we got backers [00:19:30] in Australia. Yeah. Terrible drought. It's a big problem there. We got backers in Australia, India, Europe, a lot in China. I mean really all over the world. Well it's a worldwide problem. Exactly. Can you describe just to our listeners visually sure. What it would look like in the, like you have it in your yard and Berkeley. What does that look like? So my place in Berkeley, we've got uh, an Eden Garden sensor in the ground and it resembles almost the really, really resembles the letter y. It's, it's yellow, it's [00:20:00] 14 inches tall and you know, you, you put it about four to six inches in the soil.
Speaker 2:So it stands about eight to 10 inches above the soil. And it's got a solar panel mounted on top. It's a small solar panel. Yeah, it's about four inches by four inches. And we chose the color yellow for the device because it reflects the sun in the sun as the power source for the garden. And for our product. And that's why we chose solar power. You know, gardeners don't want to have to change the batteries on these devices or plug them in. It's a pain. And I, I personally feel that [00:20:30] all electronics should be solar powered at some point. I mean why, why plug them in? The device connects to your home wifi network. And so we had to build an algorithm that runs actually on the device. There's a computer built into the device and it determines how frequently the device connects to the Internet and sends data.
Speaker 2:You know, even if it's cloudy outside, Eden will still stay online, it will still work. And so it resembles the letter y and it sits in your soil right at the base of your plants. And it's constantly measuring and capturing data [00:21:00] for how many square feet. So one garden sensor will work for 250 square feet. And then the separate component, the Eden Water Valve, I have one set up from my front yard, so I have a soaker hose connected to it. Basically it's a, it has the same form factor as the garden sensor, a square with rounded corners, a diamond shape almost. And, and you connect a garden hose to one end and then you connect your either drip irrigation system, soaker hose or a traditional [00:21:30] sprinklers system to the other end. And the waterfowl also has a solar panel on it. Both devices. The solar panel produces about four times more power than you need on a sunny day.
Speaker 2:So you know, we have plenty of headroom there. It connects to your water source and when the time is right, it turns on the water and your gates, your plants. Give me an example of something it would tell you and where it appears. So all the data appears on your smart phone. So right now we are ios compatible so it'll appear on your iPhone and [00:22:00] by next year we'll have an android app as well for android phones, you go into the Eden app and the Eaton app, the main screen is a dashboard screen, which tells you right now the live moisture or nutrition levels in your garden, also temperature and light intensity. And on that dashboard screen you can click on any of those individual sensor parameters and actually see the readout of that sensor over time. So if you want to see how the moisture's changed over the past seven days in your garden, you can check that out.
Speaker 2:Will it alert you if [00:22:30] you are low on a nutrient or exactly. So one of the features it has is called, we call it smart recommendations. And so if any of the parameters goes outside of the optimal range for a particular plant, you'll actually get a push notification on your phone. You'll get a message saying, you know your back garden nutrient levels are low, we recommend adding organic fertilizer or a, your soil is dry. Or if you have the water valve installed, we'll actually notify you that we're turning [00:23:00] on the water valve to irrigate your garden. And so this can be as detailed as you want it to be. Exactly. We wanted it to appeal to novice gardeners and to master gardeners. And so what we do, we, we built a system on the backend. This actually runs on our servers. So when you set up Eden we identify where you are, your geographical location and that's all.
Speaker 2:It's all encrypted. We use bank level encryption and it's anonymized, so we commit that we will never share your location with anyone. We determine where you are and then we use [00:23:30] our database of plants and our soil science database as well as some publicly available databases from the USDA and other organizations to determine what crops are really well suited for your location. The user does select if they want to grow like a vegetable, a fruit or ornamental ornamental or or a medicinal plant. They select what category they want and then we'll recommend a particular variety or group of varieties that group well together. It just saves so much time and exactly, exactly. The water savings potential [00:24:00] is huge. It's estimated that an average American home uses about 40 gallons a day on landscaping. That's 40 milk jugs of water for many people who have, you know, a traditional sprinkler system, they might water at the same time every day and it's not necessarily the best time to water and so they could lose 50% of the water just as evaporation.
Speaker 2:With the Eaton system, you know, we deliver water at the right time every day. It has two, two modes actually. It's got the auto mode where it will determine the best [00:24:30] time and it it knows when sunset and sunrise are in your specific location. And then if you, if you're a master gardener and you want to set it yourself, you can also set it yourself. You can say, hey, water Sunday, Monday, Tuesday at this time, this time, this time. I want to talk a little bit about you and your parents were both in the medical profession. They are. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas and my father is a doctor and my mother is a nurse and they both work in the x specifically in the cardiology space and they work with [00:25:00] a lot of low income patients in San Antonio. There's a lot of people with heart disease and San Antonio who can't necessarily afford treatment.
Speaker 2:Both of my parents, you know, they work with primarily Spanish speaking, uh, low income patients and they, they really instilled in me as a child the importance of giving back and why it's important to help other people. How did you get on this path? You know, just this whole, as a student I went to a school in San Antonio, a small school that really emphasized math, science as well as the arts. [00:25:30] I was able as a middle school student in a high school student to participate in the science fair and I was a high school student. I ended up going to the Intel International Science Fair. My projects were always focused on plants. So the project I went twice to the Intel fair and the project was studying how tomato plants develop resistance to disease. Your plants do have an immune system. It's, it's not like our own, it's a much slower acting system and it's a very different, it's very different from the immune system in animals and humans, but [00:26:00] they are able to withstand diseases.
Speaker 2:And also what they can do. They actually can communicate with each other. So if one plant is under attack from a disease, I found in my experiments that it actually releases a volatile aromatic chemical into the air plants nearby, sense that chemical and then they will actually up-regulate their immune system to defend against the disease. And so I was studying, could we use that system to actually stimulate plants? Kind of like a preventative or a prophylactic [00:26:30] and a got to go to the Intel Science Fair won a grand prize there. And so you did figure out a way to, yes, yes. We did two chemicals, methyl salicylate, which is actually, it's the chemical that gives the smell winter green and a also a chemical called methyl jasmine eight and they're aromatic compounds that kind of drift in the air. They smell good, but they're also actually signaling chemicals.
Speaker 2:The plants actually, that's how plants talk to each other. I identified that by stimulating plants with these chemicals, you can make them more resistant [00:27:00] to disease in advance. It was a great experience. I won a grand prize. Is that monetary? It was, yeah, it was monetary. Gave me a small scholarship for college. So I, uh, I ended up going to Princeton University. Princeton had a unique program through the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian has a branch in Panama, tropical research institute. And so I got to spend about a year working there as a researcher studying soil. I ended up writing my thesis down there and I wrote my thesis on actually [00:27:30] how, um, leaf cutter ants, which are a very ubiquitous and dominant species in the rainforest, how they impact nutrient dynamics in the soil. They collect leaves from around the rainforest, bring them back to their nest, and that concentration of nutrients in their nest, it affects the distribution of nutrients in the soil.
Speaker 2:So I spent a lot of time studying ants and it was fun. It is amazing how interconnected everything. Absolutely. And everything that we do and put into the soil [00:28:00] affects everything else. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there's, the earth really is, it's an interconnected system. It's, you know, some scientists believe that the earth is actually one giant super organisms. The Guy Theory. Exactly. Yeah. And I believe in myself. I think the data largely supports that conclusion. We're seeing that certainly with climate change, it's, it's an interconnected system of of feedbacks and that was, you know, one of the most amazing things about being in the rainforest. Just seeing firsthand exactly what that [00:28:30] connection is. My, my last year at Princeton I took high tech entrepreneurship class and that was probably one of the most inspiring courses I took. It's taught by a guy named Ed Chow professor and he was an entrepreneur himself.
Speaker 2:He was also a US congressman from Silicon Valley and he's a venture capitalist, but just a really inspiring professor. Each week we would look at case studies of technology companies and then he would bring in the founder of the company to talk about his experience or her experience building [00:29:00] that company. He taught us that you, anybody can do it, anybody can start a company, and so he was able to get me a job with a startup in New York, a tech startup, because I'd never worked in a startup. I learned a ton about what works and what doesn't and made great contacts. I worked on that probably about six months and then I was actually out of that able to start recharge. That's great. Yeah. Well, Jason, do you have a website? Um, many of our listeners are going to be interested in this. We do, uh, it's e d y n.com eden.com [00:29:30] and you can go on the website and learn about the two devices. Watch our video, and also you can link to the Kickstarter. I'm so excited about this product and I want one, oh my card. So [inaudible] come over
Speaker 1:and see my yards and tell me what I do. Great. Thank you for being on the program. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. You've been listening to the method, to the madness. If you have questions or comments about this show, go to the k a l x website. Find method to the madness and drop us an email. [00:30:00] Tune in again in two weeks at the same time. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] okay.
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