ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice and I’m always in a state of wonder.
Something that has me pondering is the fact that we are living in a world of extremes—extreme weather change, increasing carbon dioxide, water scarcity… And that there will be an estimated 9 billion more people to feed in the world before 2050.
But I am happy to see a new generation of Solarpunks using biology and technology for planet, climate and social justice.
Agam Khare: My first job was working with the 11th president of India who was also a world renowned scientist, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. But I worked for two years, my job was to bring exponential technologies to India and then commercialize them in India.
ALICE: That’s Agam Kahare, CEO and founder of Absolute, a bioscience company in India leveraging biology and A.I. to reimagine food, agriculture and global trade. And yes, we think he is a solarpunk. Agam aims to solve the world’s food challenges.
Agam Khare: In 2015, I was sitting with Dr. Kalam the president who got me started on my journey of entrepreneurship. And we chatted about the state of the world. And fast forward today, when I look back we see that even till date in the 21st century, you have a couple of billion people who are still suffering from nutritional deficiencies or do not have enough food to eat. And then you have another five to 700 million people who absolutely go to bed hungry.
In 2016, early we started solving for a very basic core problem. Was it at all possible to grow safe food which is highly nutritious in multiple countries making them self-sufficient in their production and eventually ensure that the farmers are more profitable? The consumer health is improving? And eventually the earth sustainability factor is going up? So how do you tackle all of these three together? And if we were able to achieve that and do that, eventually we would [00:03:30] have solved for a grand problem that humanity will face eventually going forward.
ALICE: Absolute leverages billions of years of nature’s intelligence to solve for humanity’s grandest challenges, starting with regenerative agriculture.
Agam Khare: Between 2016 and 2020 we have largely been an R&D company trying to work on plant science, symbiotic relationship of plants with soil organisms, understanding what really gives the plant a kick to grow better. How does the yield really go up in a field? Or in a greenhouse? Or in a vertical farm? How do you really choose a certain variety? What are the mechanics involved about it? How do you improve the genetic varieties of those crops growing very naturally without doing a GM, genetic modification. [00:04:30] And how do you then build proper cultivation philosophy, which by the way you can control through a very real time IOT system through satellite imagery and IOT.
Fast forward to today, we operate close to about 50,000 acres of farm land, land farms across developing countries in the world. Where we deploy our technology solutions to improve yield quality for growers, eventually making them more successful. Growing food which is absolutely zero residue. There is no inorganic or organic poison in it. There is only microbial inputs that are going in the field and nutrition going in the field which is helping them grow crops which are of a certain quality, which meet all global standards and eventually food that itself is so tasty, so nutritious, that it can heal a lot of problems of our planet and of humanity.
ALICE: Agam is not alone. According to Eric Schmidt and Dror Berman, we are entering a significant era they call The Super Evolution, where technology, engineering, AI and biology will cause radical, multi-generational change.
Agam Khare: Today fast-forward we run these 50, 60,000 acres across the world. Land farms, then we operate greenhouses, we operate vertical farms. We're the first vertical farming company in India and we have progressed. And now we are expanding our footprint to Middle East and to some of the parts in Europe. So that is some background on what we do as Absolute. With Absolute, we are trying to build Absolute into not just a category defining company, but a generation defining business which stands for, what did humanity really need at a point in time and what was this company really able to create? This is way beyond what business can do. This is about people; this is about you and me and everybody on earth. And we are trying to change their lives.
Using artificial intelligence and a lot of data feeded into it related to plant biology and plant science, can figure out in real time what needs to be optimized to the best to grow the crop to the best of its ability. That is a good capability that we've built.
Everything around the products to what inputs need to go, at what point of time across the life cycle of a crop. What irrigation measures need to be taken, everything around it. From starting, from seed to harvest is being taken care of by this almost near to autonomous growing platform that we call a universal farm OS.
That is what Absolute is enabling, an absolute mechanism of cultivation for farmers.
ALICE: Using the biosciences with precision data is the goal of ag-tech to help deliver resilient and sustainable food systems.
Agam Khare: For many, many years agriculture has been making somehow not so good impact on environment, on people's health. There are a lot of places which are growing now naturally everything. But there are a lot of places again and most of them are using chemicals, pesticides, killing microbes in the soil which eventually have a relationship with plants. And spraying things which are not very useful for the soil culture or for your water table because it eventually also goes into water, whatever you put there.
ALICE: Absolute’s aim is towards regenerative agriculture, helping humanity to create more abundance using less natural resources.
Agam Khare: 60% Of everything that we produce today is regenerative by the way. 60% of all that we produce. And going forward in the next two years, everything that we will produce in the next two to three years will be regenerative. Will be grown using a way that is absolutely natural. There is no element of any synthetic outside chemical coming in the field, harmful chemical. Nothing of that sort. Everything that is good for planet, good for people, good for farmer, only that exists.
So eventually I've always believed in building a world which is safer for our people. We are all people at the end of the day and we are here to spend a lifetime and then our kids will, and their kids will. What kind of a world are we really going to leave behind for our kids?
It's not just about a business opportunity, it's a moral obligation that each of us have. We have got enough from our planet, from community that we have lived in, and it's imperative for all of us to give back.
I think that with Absolute what we're trying to do here is to create everything which is good for people, good for planet, which is the right thing to do. And I'd be very happy seeing more companies taking that bold step. Even if that means to some extent sacrificing with profitability for some short term. Because eventually if you're doing the right work, in the long-term profitability is going to be there, and we have seen that. The primary data suggests that.
So, my opinion to everybody is, go build a better world. This is one lifetime we all have, and this is it. This is the time of our lives; we've got to do it.
ALICE: We couldn’t agree more. Thank you Agam Kahare, and the many solarpunks and bio-engineers out there dedicated to creating a more beautiful and regenerative future for all.
That’s it for this mad tea party…. Thanks for listening.
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EP021 Solarpunk AgTech