 Welcome to the private property farming podcast. My name is Mbali Nwogor, your host, right here on the private property channel. Thank you so much for joining us on all our social media platforms, whether it's Facebook, Instagram Live, YouTube Live, it's always great to be speaking to you and introducing yet another guest onto the show to discuss all things Agri. Today we're speaking to someone based in America and currently doing work with a South African company and it would be quite interesting to see the importance of global partnerships within the agriculture industry and the various programs and initiatives that are available, not only for professionals, but for farmers as well. Obviously always contributing towards food security, trying to combat climate change and just grow the industry as a whole. And so if you have any questions for tonight, our topic is food security and business opportunities within the agricultural sector. So if you're an entrepreneur wanting to take part in this industry, please feel free to ask questions alongside our topic. If you're a farmer that is also quite interested in understanding how do we partner with other farmers abroad, organizations abroad, how do we enter and be part of programs and initiatives that are also facilitated abroad. Then I think also, please feel free to comment. And if you've missed this episode, please watch it on our YouTube channel at the end of the show. However, I just would like to introduce to you Emily Church, Senior Director of the Milken Institute. Emily, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you. So happy to be here today. Fantastic. So you're a Senior Director of the Milken Institute. For those that have never heard of the Milken Institute, what does the organization do? The Milken Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank based in the US. And our mission is to connect people to the financial, educational and human resources that they need in order to have more meaningful lives. And that's in terms of really being able to have scalable solutions to global challenges. Awesome. And how long have you been with the organization and what does your role specifically entail within the Milken Institute? I have been at the Milken Institute just over a year and a half. And my role is I run our prize competition program. Right, so tell us more about it. So prize competitions at the Milken Institute, the idea here is to find solvers from around the world who are creating new solutions, particularly about harnessing the power of technology to solve our global challenges. Our first program is the Milken-Mudsepe Innovation Prize program we just launched in April. And this is a series of prizes and programs that are all aligned to the sustainable development goals. So the idea here is to have one prize or program at a time that is focused on a specific topic and we incentivize people by giving money, cash prizes, free resources, really to build a community to help support innovators for accelerating these sustainable development goals through technology. All right, so what is it that you're anticipating? I mean, there's many prize programs. There's many entrepreneurs coming with so many solutions to help farmers to contribute towards food security where they're data monitoring, sensor monitoring, coming up with apps to help farmers record their data, find data, track their logistics, inventory. You know, just more work experience and around technology. What type of entrepreneurs and businesses have you seen since you've been working with the Milken Institute? You just laid out a part of the amazing part of my job is getting to see the things that entrepreneurs are building and doing. There are so many challenges we all know around the globe right now, but there's also immense opportunity because we have these technological tools that allow people to create, to solve wherever they are. So particularly here for our agri-tech prize, we are very happy and lucky to have partnered with the WhatsApp Bay Foundation based in South Africa. They're also a nonprofit foundation and we really partnered together to say, how is it that we can look specifically on solvers on the continent and say, can we make sure that we are running programs as much as we can to highlight African entrepreneurship, people working across global borders. What we can offer is connection, networking, introducing people to investors. This is really that part of allowing for those resources. Again, as a nonprofit providing educational training, events, all of these things, we think what part can we play when there is such amazing innovation out there to help people, particularly in terms of adaptability and scaling. All right, are your programs once off? So for example, if there's a prize program entrepreneurs enter, they win a cash prize, you connect them to a few individuals and that's it. Or do you kind of walk the journey with them trip and maybe from concept idea to concept to maybe connecting them with stakeholders and maybe do you support them for maybe three to five years in their business? Absolutely. This was actually one of the main reasons I was excited to join the Milk and Institute. I have worked in prizes for many years now. What's exciting about what we're doing is being able to build this community from the beginning based on lots of research. We are not the experts in every topic by any stretch. What we can do is reach the experts in various topics to shape each program to understand where there's need for more capital, where there's need for more innovation and what people need, both innovators and those from the communities being solved. As we walk entrepreneurs through the journey from the beginning when they join in this case, the Milk and Institute prize program it's free to join. We had over 3,300 people from 105 countries sign up. We provided a library of free resources, courses, webinars as people were still coming up with their ideas. We also had a forum where people could form competing teams. So they were meeting each other on this forum. We closed our first deadline for the AgriTech prize in December and these 25 finalists who were just announced last month now have even more specialized and curated resources. So they have access to a Stanford online course and entrepreneurship, personalized mentoring, pitch training, we're having an investor showcase where they're meeting all different types of investors as they're going through this field test that we're also sponsoring across the continent. So all of these 25 teams are choosing their locations on small to medium sized farms across the continent. They have a year to test their solutions. We've partnered with the World Food Program who is also going in and working with these teams going on site visits as they are testing their solutions. And then for the next really important part of your question, once the prize is awarded and that's gonna be in 2023, the idea is it doesn't stop there. Once we have these vetted products that have been tested in the field, we have the data back, we know these entrepreneurs at this point we'll have been working with them for two years, that's when we really have them join this community in order to scale, get them even more investors to be able to grow their business, open doors to meet if it's regulation in some cases, regulation needs to change, sometimes it's building their business, whatever a company needs, their successes are a success really. Absolutely. And having engaged with the various entrepreneurs in all these different countries, what are some of the top challenges that you've encountered that entrepreneurs within the African continent are trying to solve? Well, the call we first put out was for increased farm productivity and or decreasing post-harvest loss. So before we even launched the Agrotech Prize, we spent a number of months interviewing experts primarily on the continent to find out where the biggest challenges were. And it's for farmers, for entrepreneurs, for people across the food system. And so through that, we determined there are a number of challenges, but particularly it's how do we get more food? How do we make sure it's not lost after it's harvested? How do we make sure it gets to people's tables? And most importantly, a critical part that these teams are gonna be judged on for winning the prize at the end is does the economic value ultimately go back to the farmers? So we are not looking for solutions that are going for large industrial farming solutions. We're looking for solutions that are going to be scalable and that are gonna help the farmers themselves on small to medium-sized farms. Are there any top-of-mind commodities that stand out above the rest, especially where entrepreneurs are trying to solve solutions for the farmers? Any specific commodities that come to mind? Well, we've allowed the teams to really choose for themselves. They know better than we do what commodities they should use in their particular area. We did limit it to crops at this point. So we know there's lots of innovation happening in terms of livestock and fisheries and other things in farming. We did focus this one particularly on crops. We asked competing teams to explain why they were choosing the crop or commodity that they chose. And ideally they'd be able to demonstrate that it would work for more than one crop because the idea here would be it's something that could be used by people in different regions. And obviously with such a diverse continent and with the change in climate, being able to adapt and have a solution that's gonna be able to adapt to different climates and commodities would be really important. Yeah, I see that you have a long-standing history for advocacy around women, women rights, et cetera. And with your work within the Milken Institute, have you seen some woman entrepreneurs coming to the fore and trying to solve their own challenges within their immediate communities? Maybe some woman trying to solve challenges around women farmers. Have you come across any? Absolutely, so this was something from the beginning. Well, first let me say this issue is across the tech industry and across the globe. So we are talking a global issue of women-founded companies, also women getting investment, and certainly in the agri-tech space that is true. So we were looking at the data from the beginning and we're really trying to be intentional working with nonprofits who focus on and support women-founded companies, female entrepreneurs, making sure we were doing media and trying to reach women entrepreneurs. I will say there still is a need to find and support more women-founded tech companies. So we're actually looking at, as we move forward with the Milken Motsete Prize, saying in our next programming, and as we move forward, how can we really center this idea and make sure that we are finding, supporting female-founded companies, particularly in the tech industry? It is a continued imbalance. Yeah, there's so much emphasis and focus on tech. Is it the only mechanism of the only way that really can solve farming challenges? No, no. Like most things in life, there are, I think we need many different actors and many different solutions. However, what I believe about technology and particularly fourth industrial revolution technology, so that's the artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, is that this is gonna allow, especially emerging economies to leapfrog, it's gonna be jobs of the future. It democratizes a lot of access. So I think the amount of opportunity there to have quick scalable change, to have businesses that are gonna be successful, the more that people can really figure out how we use these new technologies, it's gonna help the solutions for the planet and for the entrepreneurs themselves. And tell me, you mentioned that Milken Institute is a think tank. How important is it for organizations like the Milken Institute to collaborate with other NPOs, maybe private companies as well across the globe? It is critical. I mean, the bread and butter of what we do is bringing people together and that is across borders, across sectors. So Milken Institute, for those who know about the Institute, probably know about our big global conferences. We have regional conferences like our Middle Eastern Africa Summit, Asia Summit, Future of Health Summit. So this idea of bringing people together to say, we know more, we can solve better when we have more people at the table. And that's in terms of, again, sectors. So if you only know or are talking to people from one industry, if everybody's an economist sitting at the table, or everyone is a tech entrepreneur sitting at the table, we're not gonna have that diversity of thought, opinion that you have when you have people communicating with each other. Now, for across borders, that's even more important. Running prize programs, we can do things ranging from clean water to climate change solutions to ed tech, future of work, agri-tech in this place, in this case. So we have to rely on people who are experts in the field. The whole premise is we don't have the solution. We believe that there are solutions out there, brilliant minds across the earth. Our role in all this is to say, how can we find and support people who have these great ideas and connect them to resources? It's not to have the answers ourselves. Yeah. Do you ever run out of people to connect with? No. No. The world is full of amazing people. I mean, this is when I think about what's the thing that gets me up in the morning? It's because I get to hear from builders, dreamers across the world who believe in a better future, who are trying, they're connecting across borders and are embracing the changes that we need to see as a global community. If anything, there are resources, there are brilliant minds, it is just there aren't enough hours in the day to connect all of the people and all the great ideas. So all we can do is focus on our one part, one prize at a time, one day at a time to try to do our best to support people on a journey. Yeah. I know, Emily, you mentioned that with the prize program that you have with the Medzippa Foundation was basically centered around two things, reducing loss of post-harvest and increasing production and farms. Over and above just those two, from your experience, what other gaps do you think entrepreneurs really need to focus on in solving food security and across the continent? So what other gaps do you think we could be more creative and innovative in trying to solve certain challenges? Well, I think climate change is at the forefront of many people's minds. And it's so key to find resilient and sustainable solutions. And that can range from how crops are gonna change over time to the amount of water someone has or access to electricity. So really having that top of mind is key. We are measuring in our agri-tech prize, we are measuring how much water is used, what the impact is on the community. I think also these questions of equity. Frankly, is it something that people, as people are solving and starting companies, does everyone have equal access to it? How we thought through our solutions affordable and scalable? I think transportation is another big one to think about. And then of course getting healthy sustainable foods and that are nutrient rich and dense because that has all sorts of repercussions whether it's from pregnant mothers to children learning in school, of course having access to food and nutritious food is key for thriving society. All right, sounds like you're doing a hell of a lot there within your portfolio in the Milken Institute and all these prizes, I think they're definitely beneficial for entrepreneurs. And I just wanna find out, do you see that you are actually building sustainable businesses? Do you have you met the entrepreneurs that are really there for the long-term and that are solving actual problems? Or are they just there for the prize money? So it was a delight to meet our 25 finalists. That was really fun because having, it's sort of abstract for the first year or so where you're out, you're building something and doing research and there's sort of names on a platform. So it was really exciting to meet people and hear their passion and experience in their particular fields. So they range. So some people have had businesses that have been thriving already and they're looking to kind of take it to the next level. And we are also very specifically open to people who are new to entrepreneurship that don't have a track record of successful business. We have some youth led teams. We have, I believe five of the teams are youth. So many of them are starting off for the first time and part of the way we design this, it's why we had the long field test, it's why we have training throughout, why we have support for mentoring and other things is even if someone is starting out and they just have an idea, like I think this thing might work, we want to help provide that so somebody can start their business. And then once somebody has a successful model, then we say, how do we help somebody grow their business from here? And then as a final note, outside of AgriTech just working on prizes in general for these years, it is incredible to find what sort of solutions people come up with. What we found time and again is it's not necessarily the people you think who are gonna solve the challenge. If you go to the same people over and over who are the experts in the field and expect them to solve the problem, they would have solved it already if they had all the answers. So making sure that we're hearing from these new voices where people who have an idea that is maybe untested or some people like, I don't know if that's really gonna work, we wanna leave room for that because that's how you get breakthrough and new markets. So yes, we have companies that are successful and proven and we also have some that we just can't wait to see what they can do. Yeah, to give you my final question, Emily. You know, we've somewhat come off of a post-COVID world. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs now in 2022, whether they're thinking of an idea or just about to start a business? My first advice would be start. So one of the things just start something. You asked earlier about gender. So for lots of entrepreneurs, but women in particular, what we have found is people think, well, maybe my idea is not good enough or maybe somebody else knows better than I do. So just if you have an idea to start and to try, the other thing would be to connect with other people. It can't be reiterated enough how important it is to find other people, whether they are peers working on something, whether they are mentors who can help you along the way, people who can open doors for you and keep trying. What you'll hear from entrepreneur after entrepreneur, I don't think I know one who is a successful entrepreneur who hasn't had failure. And they take, when you get the word no, or when you have any sort of something doesn't work or it fails to not let that stop you and really pick up and try again. That is part of the journey. And to have that confidence to keep going and keep trying and connect with others. Yeah, I agree with you, Emily. We have to be resilient as entrepreneurs because if we know as a door close, then we wouldn't have businesses today. And there's a lot more value and lessons learned that come with failure. However, thank you so much for your time this evening. I can really, really feel the passion inside of you just helping entrepreneurs, believing in entrepreneurs. And I think we need more professionals like yourself to support us because it's true. We doubt ourselves sometimes. And as women, I think we're the worst critics towards ourselves when it comes to thinking of business ideas, executing certain things like that. And just approaching people to partner with all collaborative people. Thank you so much for the words of wisdom and I hope you don't become a straighter to the farming podcast. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be on. And thank you to all the listeners. We do have a People's Choice Award. So our, please stay tuned with the Milk and Licepe Prize and AgriTech. Everybody can vote. One of these teams can win an extra $100,000 by your votes. And that's how you'll also hear what these entrepreneurs are doing. So we certainly look forward to staying in touch, hearing from you and your community. Thank you so much for having us on today. It's a pleasure. That was Emily Church, everybody senior director of the Milken Institute. You just heard it. There's a lot of prizes up for grabs for entrepreneurs who are willing to solve solutions. Solve certain challenges and find solutions towards the challenges that we have in the agri industry. They're really, I think there was 25 entrepreneurs that have been selected with this program. They're going to work the journey with them this year and the following year. And next year, I think that's when they announce the winner. So please go on to the Milken Institute's website, vote for them. The Milken and Licepe Prize program, have a look at what they do and the entrepreneurs that are on there. And please support their initiative. If you want to connect and feel that you could add value, please I think reach out to Emily Church and she will connect you with the right individuals. Thank you so much for joining the private property farming podcast. I will see you yet again in another episode. Take care.