Hello, test test. Manual D here.
Amazing, amazing, we're just getting settled here. Give us a minute and we'll be very happy to start. Yeah, we're having a lovely time here in Davos and at many amazing
meetings, discussions, also lovely panel and I'm very happy for this Twitter space. Just give us a second and we'll be happy to start.
Hello everyone. Happy to be here on behalf of Sensilize. And as a company that was working with the Sustainable Farming, we are happy to discuss it together with Manning.
We have recently became partners based on our common goals and those are helping farmers to achieve organic production, which is quite a
hurdle simply because there is an existing cultural practice of food production that is not good for the nature, not good for productivity. And we have to do something about it while they
existing industry is shaped for the non-very sustainable companies. We are fighting together for the space and for the opportunity to give farmers all over the world
world tools and knowledge in order to go sustainable and eventually go organic, then from non-sustainable to sustainable farming and from sustainable farming to regenerative agriculture.
I would like to say thank you to Amir for inviting me and I am happy to discuss today a lot of aspects of this industry and the ways we are going to tackle the problems existing.
Amazing, thanks a lot, Pasha. Very honored of having you over here. We had the lovely pleasure of meeting in token 49. It's like now I think five months back and there I got to know you as a hillman capital, a hillman venture and it's then that you're so deep in the crypto space. So it was a big surprise for me when I was mentioning that
we have been in sustainability since two years. This is actually the third generation of social and environmental businesses you have as a core, actually, next to the traditional financing business you're in. It was a pleasure and a ride.
Again, this background, we are super excited on tackling one of the biggest challenges we have in the environmental space, also in the agricultural space. And I'm very excited of discussing those topics with you. But Pasha, both of us in Davos, we are lovely week over here. We had a few events.
We know each other very well. Maybe you can start and give us a small intro on who you are, what you're interested in. And then we can talk about the vision and mission we have. A small spoiler alert. Our vision and mission is to create revenue models, allowing environmental
projects to actually be seen as an integral part of our economic system, benefiting them through liquidity, benefiting them to verifiable climate action. And yeah, I think we've got a few interesting topics to talk about just before handing over and yeah, wanting to
know more about you, about your family history in the business. I would love to have the understanding of what we're actually talking about, what the biggest challenges are. We've got the climate crisis. We know that we need a two-step approach to actually tackle it. First step is reducing the carbon footprint.
We know that. That's the responsibility of the organizations of the government and the individuals through purchasing power. The second step of fighting against the climate action is actually accounting for the non-avoidable carbon footprint, which we will always have in our economic system. And offsetting it by
For example, purchasing carbon credits, biodiversity credits, soil credits, water credits, we've got a complex issue, a complex problem, but the solution is fairly easy. We have to create revenue streams for those environmental projects. We have to bridge a liquidity gap, which is there, and all of this is only possible to verifiable.
and scalable solutions. So I know you'll be jumping into a few different topics, but your adventure which you acquired, centralized, which is basically, from my understanding, creating digital twins of environmental projects and allowing AI to come in and to optimize the farming practices.
in a regenerative way. This is something which we would struggle with in the regenerative finance space. So I think that's a small intro of topics we will discuss. Thanks for taking the time in Davos and actually giving us the chance to share this with our community. We'll have a Twitter space coming up in
piece with more talks with more discussions. Thanks for taking the time, Pasha, I'll hand over to you. Tell us what inspires you, who you are, where you come from, and why your family business is in the third generation already leading in this field. Thank you. Thanks, thanks a lot, I'm here. Yes, I am a sustainability
I can consider myself one, but this is because I'm coming from agricultural tech background as well as the digital and we are kind of making a hybrid of this digital technology.
technologies, biotech, digital in order to give those tools I just mentioned. And this came out of my business initially, it was a distribution of sustainable fertilizers, nutrients, biological products from all over the world in East
in Europe, we have over a thousand clients which are large farms and they are obviously interested to increase the yield of the crops they produce to increase the quality as well as the quantity of harvest and when we are coming to the farm they kind of using the
unsustainable products such as mineral fertilizers, which I mean our nitrogen, phosphorus and potash. And those are really important, but they are often overused and cause a lot of damage to nature. And at the same time, it doesn't really help plants.
It causes rather more stress. And this is a new science that is used in agriculture. It's not new because it existed before, but it was in academia in the lab. But last five to ten years, it's been
widely accepted in practical farming. And when we were selling, we came to Ukraine, for example, as a first company that offered biologicals and signaling molecules and various nutrients in combination.
in the productivity of farming, of crop production particularly. So we had to teach
As well as that, we had to explain them how do you use current economical principles and how to apply plant physiology.
So obviously it was very challenging because it's not easy to disrupt any industry and it takes a lot of investment into the education. So we have been doing that for a while. And obviously when you want to sell something to a farm, you want to try it out first.
field trials where you have to show it just less money and you get better results in contrast to the conventional old practices. And however, these trials were not always successful. Some of them would give a dramatic increase in the yield and the quality of the crop.
And on the other cases, we would have not the opposite effect, but no increase. And that is because farmers didn't take into account, whereas biophysical parameters of soil, they don't take into account the climate, the weather changes that have
on every day and it's very hard to track those information streams live and it takes a lot of machine power to aggregate the data, to analyze it and to
help the farmers because agricultural data is the most diverse one. It's the most saturated with various parameters that change constantly. So that's what brought me to precision agriculture,
called smart farming where you actually apply only a necessary amount of the nutrition in the specific locations of the field, which is sometimes done by the drones, sometimes by the variable
application spraying machinery, but this is the new way to tackle the nutrition in the course of season. So this is why I acquired Sensorize. It was manufacturing optical devices such as multispatrile sensors.
It's like a camera, sophisticated camera with spectral filters that is mounted on a drone. And then the drone is launched to fly across the field and scum it by taking pictures every second. And then those pictures are
stitched together on orthomosaic software that is basically putting them all into one map. And then you can put this map on the existing GPS location map and therefore tag locations where the problem is.
and what individual problem it is. Like for example, saturation of nitrogen and soil or potash or excess amount of water or the opposite, the lack of water, as well as the type of soil and many many other things.
So by taking this data we will learn how to also apply machine learning algorithms to be able to spot those things automatically because otherwise it takes just a lot of time for a human being to process this kind of volume of data in a very
short period of time so it would make us deliver the data too late when you can't apply it anymore. So in order to be on time and to tell farmer enough in advance what to do and where, what to apply in which amounts
then this becomes a solution otherwise it's not possible it's not very useful because farmer has pretty much bought three days to react to the recommendation we're giving them and we spent about half a day to generate those recommendations and there
Therefore, it is a great combination to use the digital tech, remote sensing tech, cloud computing, as well as biotech for farming to achieve those purposes. It's not an easy job for a farmer, so a farmer has to learn how to use the drones.
how to maintain them, how to use the sensors, how to maintain those types of equipment. And farmers are typically rather people from the past than people of the future. So we're trying to sell technology of the future to the people from the past.
That makes our job very challenging, but given the amount of incentive nowadays, for sustainable agriculture, given the amount of subsidies that are available, various grants and special loans with special conditions,
farmers have finally obtained this kind of opportunity and we need to bridge their current needs and their current requests to this digital tool and deliver those online. We also, yes, as you mentioned, we've also been
participating in those programs. We received a large grant from Israeli Innovation Authority in the past. And together with the five other companies and six universities, we have been working on phenotyping AI. So now, after four years of research and development, we also came up with an app.
helps a computer vision app that helps to scan your grape bush for example and see an important insight like how this has to be cut and how this has to be looked after so you know what's the percentage of ripenings
how much harvest you will have given the situation as of today. And obviously you can take action just with your mobile phone in your hand. You don't need drones satellites for this specific type of agriculture. And it's very
important because majority of farmers in the world are smaller enterprise. They would have an average size of their farm below five hectares and obviously they don't have enough knowledge, they don't have enough finance to buy all these expensive things such as drones, sensors and therefore
We have made a specially designated product for small and medium enterprises, orchards in particular and various where we can give the access to the farmer just from the app. So all they need is
is a mobile phone with a smartphone which is not older than four years and they can implement those practices and make more money so they can afford buying equipment like drones and satellites. So this is our latest kind of innovation.
that is doing really well now. We are launching it. We tested it in more than seven big corporations and small farmers, like dozens of small farmers. So now we're launching it. It's called C-Crop. It's going to be an app. You'll be able to find an App Store or Google
play and this is what we've been doing. Unfortunately Ukraine were operating as well as in Italy, Georgia and the United States. We had a problem because of the war. A lot of farmers stopped
producing their crops, they cut their costs to the minimum and this is a very dangerous situation. Ukraine is the biggest supplier of, for some flowers for example, it's one of the biggest suppliers of corn in the world and grain in the
So it's a bread basket of Europe and it's not only Europe, it concerns the whole world how this will continue. So we are taking the action together with mental protocol to provide more
tools to the corporations from big corporations to small farmers, these opportunities to switch sustainable and then organic and then regenerative. I think I did a little of a summary here, so if you want me to dive with
to our very specific aspects of what I said or maybe I may start something, please help me with it. Thank you. There is no thanks a lot for this lovely knowledge spell, so that's actually how I was just, yeah, I remember at the Marina Bay Infinity
tool, just like having my mouth open and listening to those very deep insights, me and myself coming from business and economy background as many innovators, where for example, tokenizing those carbon credit, solid credits, biodiversity credits, which create revenue streams to finance those innovations. So thanks a lot for sharing it. If I may
reflect on what you've just been saying is starting with the first point of you actually supplying in contrast to the chemical companies, different bio products in order to optimize farming land. So this is already like a very regenerative approach.
not even using Web2 technology right there. So, lovely that you took it to the next step, which is actually utilizing big data and AI to optimize the farming. So, I understood that basically one of the main issues of those farmers, right, is increasing their crops, increasing their product
I just heard in a panel we were together on an impact scope that farmers have a higher suicidal rate than prostitutes. So there's enormous pressure on this very, very dear and important industry. And I think it's admirable that in the third generation you're already pushing this.
having I think your if you if I don't understand I think your grandpa was one of a leading academics. Oh yes, I'm applying research for it. I told him not to mention yes that I'm I ended up in this agricultural sector simply because of my family everyone is a scientist apart from me.
with a PhD background in animal genetics biology, mythology and pathology of crops but I was rather an investment banker in the beginning I followed the trend I tried it for myself a few years I learned a lot but I realized that this is not for me
And back, longer than 10 years ago, I decided to focus on crop improvement, via the physiology, because I've seen a business opportunity. Simply because back then the sustainability wasn't so fashionable.
right now and we didn't do it because of this buzzword that we can put on our website. We did it simply because healthy crops give better yield, give better quality and quantity. And this is our unique way that we came with to penetrate through competition
And we succeeded. And if we succeeded, then anybody else can succeed because business is competitive until disrupted by the new technology. And this is the time, the time now. My grandfather, for example, has been working a lot, wrote 300 scientific works
published 32 books on animal genetics, invented two breeds of animals, as well as has like over 14 patents and inventions. And it took him a lifetime until the end of his life to produce so much. Now we have tools that like AI
that help us to aggregate enormous amount of data and produce this kind of research much faster. We have AI in biotech, we have AI in generating content, we have AI in marketing. We have AI everywhere, you just have to be able to
to use the right AI to the right purpose and just be knowledgeable and be disciplined about it and don't be afraid to learn, don't be lazy to learn because you have to learn through your lifetime if you want to be on top of any subject.
whatever you do. So I think this history of my family and my father also forgot to mention is a PhD and he built a large company in Eastern Europe supplying agritic solutions to farms but that was more on animal side. However animal
production is cannot be sustainable without sustainable crop production because today in order to manufacture one kilogram of meat you have to use at least 13,000 liters of water. If you can imagine how much it is, this is
needed to irrigate the crops. This is needed to give water to the cows, to drink. This is needed to wash the cows, barns and powders and maintain basically the whole process until the piece of meat goes on the shelf in the
the store and at the same time the logistic loses about, logistic loses about 40% of the crops wasting it because by the time they deliver it, by the time they go through all the bureaucracy to get paid and then it's a huge problem because
half of the product is off and then there is a next story, the argument, who will pay for the loss because nobody wants to take the responsibility. And when you said that the farmers have higher success, higher rate of suicide than prostitutes, I'm not surprised at all
because look how hard it is to be a farmer. If you want to produce a bag or a jacket or a piece of clothing or a glass or a piece of furniture, you need raw materials today. Tomorrow you have the product ready. And the day after tomorrow you can sell it and three days later you are paid.
That's it and the whole cycle is finished. Informants very is very different. They invest from day one into fertilizing their soil, into treating their seeds, into applying the seeds into the soil, and then if considerable temperature changes come or wind or hail,
or snow in the wrong time, then you can lose all the harvest, all the investment you've been doing. And the best case is that in six months down the road, you will be able to get your harvest, to collect it, and then you put it in storage because you're not the only one producing these crops. You have other low
farmers that will compete with you and therefore you will now have the second problem is to get rid of the harvest that you collected before it's off. And that means you have to pay for the storage, the electricity costs for so many things that it
It becomes an opportunity for commodity traders to drag the farmer through time and you go kind of negotiate for a very long time until farmer gives up and says, "Okay, I'll give you a discount of 20%. And then the commodity trader can make his money, satisfy his greed or
desire to be rich, etc. or simply reach his targets. The commodity trader's don't really care whether the farmer is going to commit suicide next year or he's not going to do that. And then this problem persists because the debancher
is paid only one year after the investment domain. And that's terrible because you have such a tremendous risk to lose the harvest at any point in time during the year. So many people just decide why I don't just invest in property. It will also give me
maybe about 30% margin over time, or maybe 20% margin, because I'm giving an example comparing now the producer of wheat, which is the cheapest commodity nowadays, they make not more than 30% margin. And that's not the net profit that's just operating profit.
for tax interest. So, that's very important to give freedom to farmers, that they can go directly and work with each other, directly work with the marketplaces and stores, deliver the products without the parties that are in between
and that are interested to kill your business and to, you know, so they can make more money now today and buy it themselves a new Gucci bag or leather bag from Louis Vuitton. So we have to be realistic because agriculture
employees 1.3 billion people. So we are talking about more than 15% of the global population that is involved in this industry and that is exposed to a threat of bankruptcies, suicide,
And when you're... I don't see a reason why we should compare them to prostitute because they're... Even though it's also the most ancient profession, we need them much more because we can live without paid tax.
but we cannot live without food and we have to feed the people around us. And the values that farmers bring us are more important than the values that the precision can give us. So let's rather dive into sustainable research rather than
fancy bodies on Instagram. And let's try to make that the fashion. And it is actually becoming a fashion now already. We just have to push together, accelerate, show them all how we can help them to be free, to get power.
that they didn't never had before. That's why our slogan of Sunslice says "empowering farmers with data" where we use the data to give an opportunity to farmer to act independently. And that data can be fetched directly to the retailer
and those retailers can make their decisions and communicate with our marketplaces that already have been built. I've seen several good examples of marketplaces that can help farmers trade their commodities. Look, there are derivatives of wheat, maybe corn as well, there's some kind of cow
index on topic change, but how about the rest of the commodities? How about the orchards, the fruits, the vegetables, the berries, the other type of perennial and technical crops? That's extremely important. So it's also very important to get rid of the chemicals.
chemicals, because chemicals could stress the plants, it's like a chemotherapy for a human being. When somebody gets cancer, in many cases, a doctor will prescribe chemotherapy. This is because there is no alternative and this is a very broad kind of toxin that affects the body,
holistically not only the two, the cancer itself and makes the organism really weak and susceptible to other diseases and other failures of certain organs. So in the same way it happens with the plants because principles of physiology are pretty much the same.
and animals, humans and crops, we react to stress in a certain way and it causes a knock on effect. So this is what my say on it. Many people will support me and I'm pretty sure you too. Amazing, amazing, amazing, thank you.
So I think this is like this Twitter space itself is a case study of looking at the evolutionary steps from starting with academic research, which you find in the library going over to maybe web 1 solutions where we have a website to share this information and supporting the product sale of bio products instead of chemical products.
products going into the Web 2 era where big data AI and platform business models, as you mentioned, empowering farmers with data come together in order to optimize this further. So we are not at the end of the road. We still have a lot to do and entering the Web 3 era.
We've got a very interesting set of tools to further enhance the revenue streams and we can create for those very important sectors on the one hand. On the other hand, we are allowing companies and individuals to actually, yeah, account for their impact
on the world and make better choices, verified choices of how they can actually have a positive impact on the world. So talking about Web 3 and also the big promise here for the agriculture but also for the environmental space, we've got like a huge movement regenerator finance coming
So this was a topic we talked a lot about just for everybody maybe a new tuning in like we've discussed this in a few Twitter space is already. Why is Web 3 seen as a very important cornerstone in this whole equation and also as a step to yeah not only let's
say a disintermediate certain third parties which are verifying over here. That's like through web2 solutions and AI and big data-driven verifications for example, but it actually goes one step further. Looking at the carbon credit market as one example, it's a 7 billion carbon credit market which we have there. We've got huge investors and many players
coming in who are tokenizing it, who are bringing it on chain. You know that one big innovation of Web 3 is tokenization. What issue does it solve in the carbon credit market as one example of a revenue stream? We've got many more types of credits which can also benefit the farmers and which the farmers can basically benefit from like soil credits by university credits.
etc. The big promise of Web 3 for carbon credit market in specific is that we've got liquidity in a market which is very illiquid, very old fashioned. We had the discussion that basically the car
credit market as a financial tool, as a financial revenue stream for those environmental and agriculture projects can leapfrog into a whole new digital sphere where liquidity, security, automation come into place and elevate the carbon credit market into a way where we, for the first time,
Yeah, are not are having a hope that as opposed to now we're 80 to 90 percent of the carbon credits, credits according to European studies are very low quality, very very different from what they promise. We've got the possibility to first verify them to through the
big data in AI and how to tokenize those verified carbon credits and bridge liquidity gap, create new verification systems which are decentralized data driven as opposed to current third parties out there which have done amazing work in the last 20 years creating this very new market, this new market allowing
and revenue streams for environmental and agricultural projects, but they limit themselves to big players who have money to afford to actually go through the verification process. Many of them end up not having any verification. So this is the reason why a lot of investors believe that the whole value chain of carbon credits, the seven
million carbon credit market will go on chain as a first industry to go on chain fully, which is why we're always coming back to a point and our speaking opportunities and explaining why the next bull run might be the most regenerative one. And maybe this is a good point to shortly summarize. We've got many new listeners. Please
free we are going to close the Twitter space but if you have any questions please stand up we'd love to take them. We'll also have a follow-up Twitter space where we're not standing between the doors in Davos and taking the Twitter space but we'll have a bit more time and a bit more flexibility in keeping a longer Twitter space
We had many points to discuss. So one very important point of the web three transformation as mentioned are bridging the liquidity gap, creating new verification systems, and that's what mental protocol does. Actually, making it very accessible, making it very accessible for individuals and companies.
to donate or to sponsor such endeavors as explained by Pasha, which is very much needed by the market. So at this point, I think we've covered a lot of topics and I think we're happy to look forward to the next Twitter space. If anybody has questions, we'll give a few
We'll give a bit of time. Please raise your hand. Come in. Thanks a lot, Pasha, for jumping in today. Thanks a lot for sharing the great knowledge base you have over here. And we are super interested in having mental protocols being a use
full tool for those farmers and for environmental projects leveraging Web 3. So I know that there are a few stealth projects which are coming into place, but I think that's that has time for for next-truth space. Thanks a lot for everybody tuning in and I would like open up the stage for any questions.
So actually this was more or less the same reaction I had after I had the first lecture of Pasha because it was a lot of information and understanding this in its holistic setting is something where we first have to
reflect on. But basically we see here an evolution of academic web 2 and now web 3 enabled solutions. Yeah, following and allowing our mission, maybe to support Mother Earth and also the farmers on the world in
to entering a new regenerative future. So thanks a lot to everybody tuning in. If you have any few last words, you can jump in. Thanks a lot from my side.
Pasha, you have to unmute yourself. I think... Oh, I'm really sorry. That was a case. So, yeah, thanks a lot for having me. It was a great pleasure to be here. I have so much more to say, but we are out of time. We have a panel to speak on. We have several meetings.
around tables to attend, to spot out this opportunity and collaborate together with other companies we started. However, I want to continue the next Twitter space to discuss the verification mechanisms, the methods that we can use, why verifications will
important, how does data analytics work in agriculture, how does the predictive analytics is built up and how this can be used more specifically. We will come maybe come up with some case studies we are preparing now for to show
show you guys for example and yeah it was absolutely exciting and very interesting conversation looking forward for the next opportunity thanks everyone how you all thank you
Amazing. Thanks a lot, Pasha again for tuning in. Friends, we're looking forward to have a Twitter space if not next week and the following week. Yeah, we're looking forward to like change the world together and thanks for all of your time. One regards from Davos. Bye bye.