 How is everyone on Slush Day 2? So great to be here with you guys. We're going to talk about the future of growing our food today. There are going to be about 10 billion people to feed on this planet by 2050. And already, farming and growing our food supply is responsible for more than one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions. So growing food and the issue of climate change are inextricably linked. So from assisting small-scale farmers to the future of creating a hamburger that's never been alive, we're going to talk about what the future of food looks like today. So back in 2014, you originally thought of Verdun as a mobile app to help farmers. How has it evolved into the tech-based platform that it is today? Well, conceiving Verdun involved looking at the sort of situation of agriculture, especially from where I come from, West Africa. And the evolution happened from building a precision farming mobile application to actually scaling it down to smallholders who do not necessarily have access to smartphones or even broadband to start with, and making it in a small little chunk that they can understand and use in functional decisions on the farm. So farmers are able to text commands in, and they get resources like financial information. Yes, so rather than your normal GUI, now we have farmers using text and voice. And it's a huge thing now, looking at even Google's next $1 billion, customers probably coming from that segment of people who do not have access to either smart devices or computers or smartphones. And largely, the farmers use text and voice to get information. Yeah. And at Meetable, there are so many companies getting into this alternative meat space now, but what is unique about the process that you guys are working on? Yeah, so I'd like to get back on what you said earlier, saying making a hamburger that was never alive, but it actually is alive, right? We're using cells, and cells are alive. So what's really different about us is the cell type that we use. We're using a very young early stage in the development cell type that is very prone to grow at large scale, very easy to scale up. And what we have done is in collaboration with a spin-out from the University of Cambridge is finally being able to unlock the potential of this cell type. It's because they were very hard to control. They are very hard to grow from a real stem cell into an adult muscle and fat cell. But together with the University of Cambridge, they've developed a technology that would allow us to differentiate, which means turning from a stem cell into an adult cell within an unprecedented time, like five days, 100% efficiency. And to compare, the current status quo is doing this in 60 days and only 10% to 15% efficiency. So finally, we're coming now into an age where we can make the promise of stem cells a reality. And that's what we're working on. So what are some ways that Verdant is able to make these farmers more sustainable? Well, sustainability is at the heart of what we do. We want farmers to grow food with a full sense of economic, social, but also environmental value. So produce more with less effort, with also less ecological damage. A lot of the farmers that we have been working on prior to now had no access to any form of financial or otherwise management. And they basically grow what they can eat and can sell locally, which means they end up subsisting on it or probably not even having enough surplus to sell. So what we have been able to do is to get them to conserve resource and to get them to get more output from few input. And that for me is the basis of all sustainability if you look at what they're able to save and the profit that they're able to make and even the yield that they're able to maximize. Okay, and just out of curiosity, how many people here would choose to eat a burger that's been grown from a single cell? Raise your hand. Nice, nice, that's a lot of nice potential customers, huh? So, obviously for a regular burger, you have everything that goes into raising a full cow. It takes about three years. Right. So you have all of the water, the food, the land resources that go into that. But outside of those aspects, how does creating meat from a cell in a lab contribute to or mitigate the ecological impact? Well, if you're looking how many resources are going into raising a cow, really from the birth, feeding it, there's about 15,000 of liters of water necessary to get a kilogram of beef. And the conversion rate from grains to beef is 25 kilograms to one kilogram. And this also goes into the growth of the entire animal, right? You need to keep it alive. It has a body temperature. It roams around and this all costs energy. It has internal organs, which we're not using. And you can very well imagine that if you have a cell and you're putting nutrients in to create more cells, the conversion rate is much better. You can do this in a building. So you can actually make meat inside of a city instead of transporting it from their surrounding areas in. You only need the tank where the cells are growing in. So the amount of emissions, the amount of resources necessary is diminished by almost 90 to 95% on all fronts. So it is so much better to be doing this, just growing the cells in a suitable medium. And basically this is what Winston Churchill has speculated on in his paper called 50 Years Hands, where he said we'll be growing meat only the parts that is necessary in a suitable medium. We're a bit late because he thought we might be done in 50 years. And it was in 1932 when he said this, but we're working on it. So we're trying to make this statement still a reality. And what is the future of producing meat look like in your mind? Is meatable going to replace the cows that are being grown on farms now to be consumed? If you imagine that the current meat market is $7 trillion, so replacing this in the coming years is, I think, delusional. So I think you can just see it as a more diversification of proteins that people can look for and eventually hopefully diminishing the amount of cattle that are being grown right now. But I think it will take a long time before we really get rid of all the animals. And I don't think that's necessarily a desirable thing. I think complementation would be key here because from a grain perspective, you said it like, I read recently China eats more beef than the United States of America and the per capita meat intake in China is about 59 kg as opposed to 30 years ago when it was just 9 kg. So you are dealing with people who currently probably have no beef and you're giving them an alternative. So imagine a situation whereby, yes, there's cattle, but there's also beef, I mean also culture beef because to be honest, it's not gonna be enough. We need many more alternatives. Right, we need everything. We need plant-based, we need insects, we need culture meat, we need to reduce our meat intake because the problem currently is so big that there's not gonna be a silver bullet that helps everything. We need to really tackle this problem at multiple fronts and to make sure that it doesn't get out of hand, especially what you said about China, that now the middle class is getting more wealthier and you can really see a nice correlation between the amount of middle class or wealth growth in the land and the amount of animal proteins that they take up in their diet. So I was also curious, I'm wondering, so how would you think that the Nigerians would view cultured meat if we would bring this to the country, right? I'm not sure, get a lot of hands like we did at Slush, but definitely, I mean, you're dealing with people who have no much protein intake, so it's like saying, okay, do you have meat? No, how about take this? So it's a viable alternative. I definitely believe that you have a market, even though... Right, good to hear it. So you're working now with about 10,000 farmers and they're mostly growing crops rather than raising cattle. But how are you equipping farmers, especially in these developing nations, who will first feel the impacts of climate change to deal with the changes that are coming? So farmers are, I think, the most prone to the tangible parts of climate change that not necessarily everybody in this room experiences. They go through, you know, the floods and the droughts. You know, they are at the receiving end of climate change. And a lot of what we've been doing is to get them to see that this is part of a larger kind of chain reaction. And to do that, you can't necessarily just start dropping papers and academic research on people who have probably no education. So a lot of what we've been doing is to introduce products like index-based, weather-based index insurance that sort of tries to peg their farms to either adverse weather or drought or flood, you know. And there's a lot of interest in that they want to be safe because they do see the irregularities. This year the rain starts early, next year they start late. Sometimes there's a flood and sometimes there's a drought and they're suffering, you know, they are at the receiving end of it, so. And they also have a hard time securing finance as well, right? And insurance. So how does Verdant connect these stakeholders to the farmers themselves? Yeah, so the key part of what we do is to help small holders. And small holders here, I'm referring to farmers who have maybe two hectares below. So really small pieces of land and they depend on it. Their families depend on it. So what we're doing is trying to make them more visible. These people are mostly financially excluded, which means they have no form of bank accounts, no form of access to insurance or any other type of finance. So what we're doing is to put them in a database and go to a bank and say, okay, here's a bunch of customers. Here are customers who need agricultural credits, agricultural loans who need other types of financing. And that is basically what they need because for a small holder to leave their isolated, remote location and go to a brick and mortar bank is nearly impossible. And that's why they've been so financially excluded for so long. Yeah. And so obviously you are on board with the cell grown, the cell needs meat. But what do you say to the skeptics who might be opposed to that idea at first? Well, there is a nice thought experiment which I think a lot of people cannot get around. So if I would present somebody with two hamburgers and one was made from a real animal, right, with all the negative effects of the methane admission and the resource, the pollution, and the other one was made with cell culture and I would switch them around and I would feed them to you and you wouldn't be able to tell me the difference being one or the other. What would you choose? It seems to me like a very obvious choice, right? And if you have some sentiment of really thinking like, well, I really want an animal involved in the production of, I mean, like a live animal, yeah, that's unfortunately a market I cannot tailor to, but I do think that once you have something that is indistinguishable from the real thing, I think it's very easy for people to adopt it. And how long will it be before consumers can try a meatable burger? Well, we think we'll be at a demo stage, meaning we have a small scale production method validated in two and a half years and after that, of course, we have to scale and that's really important because meat is so cheap nowadays that if you cannot do this at the tons of kilograms, then the price will never be on par with real meat and we really think that's really important for adaptation. So then next, another two and a half to three years for a pilot plan where you can expect this product in exclusive retailers, in restaurants, high impact events. And I think also think that in this growth stage, you also can get more people accustomed to the idea. So once we finally have a flagship plan that is really on the scale that we want to, that you have a nice base of people that are adopting this new form of meat and that will be another three to four years. So about eight years, we think this could be in supermarkets for everybody to buy it. Eight years for a shelf, yeah. At a reasonable price. Yeah, and speaking of scaling, from a global perspective, how do some of the concepts that you're using in Verdant to help these farmers scale to other countries and how could these data insights be applied to help sustainable farming across the globe? So I think we started in Nigeria, all right, but the problem we're dealing with is almost global because you have farmers not only in Africa, but in Asia and even other continents that are isolated, that are not visible to markets and to finance and especially to good agricultural practices to core knowledge that makes them produce better. So I feel as soon as we're able to fully demonstrate the power of using agricultural data at such a small scale, then we would have demonstrated to the world that you could get small holders to produce almost at a par with mechanized agriculture, which we believe is the only way currently to produce 70% more food for the 10 billion people you spoke about. And if you look at it, dealing with small holder farmers, empowering them to produce better is actually healthier for the environment in that you do not have the greenhouse gas emissions at least not at the stage or the proportions that we're talking about when we speak of mechanized agriculture. And also if you look at the capacity or the potentials for using environmentally healthy alternatives like organic fertilizers and manures, it's easier to do that with a small holder, family type agriculture than a large scale farm that once profit at all costs. But you really believe that if you give these farmers the data, that's more important than increasing the infrastructure that they have access to. I believe the data has to come first. Infrastructure is key, but it's useless if it's on a bad decision. So I keep saying this, bad data leads to bad decisions. Now imagine what no data leads to. Imagine a situation where you build a railroad or an airport to transport a commodity that farmers grow. If the market doesn't want that commodity in the quantity or the quality that the farmer grows it, then your infrastructure in terms of the railroads and the airports you build are practically useless because no market will take the commodity in the quality and quantity that the farmers are growing it. So I believe infrastructure is key, but data come first. So sorry, I had a question. So how do you get the farmers to provide you with the data and make sure that the data is good? So yes, it's a two way thing, but first we provide the farmers with data, but in terms of small holders, say in Nigeria who use local languages, they have a simple way of getting in touch with us, as simple as texting a three letter word like W-E-A for weather information. And then we know your geographic location, we know exactly where your farm is, then we give you data tailored to that specific geographic location. And if you texted us about a pest or you phoned in, then we'll take the information and we know exactly where your farm is and all the heavy lifting could be sort of done for you. And in the near future, we probably have an artificially intelligent mechanism to do that, but currently we have people helping with that. Amazing. So you're equipping these farmers with data that helps them make better decisions, know about the demand so there's less waste, they have better sustainable practices. And they're able to produce more to feed this growing population. That's great. And as we've mentioned, the demand for meat is increasing as well. So in countries where there's these emerging middle classes that are asking for more meat, how do you see meatable fitting into filling that demand in the future? Well, I think it's much easier to get into a market where people are not very accustomed to having an overproduction of meat. And this way, if you substitute it with something else, it becomes like the standard, right? When you just have go to the supermarket, there's always has been a cultured meat section where you can pick your meat from. So it doesn't need to insert itself in between the shelves of the supermarket to start with. So I think it will be easier adopted when you're doing this from the start, educate people from the start. I do believe this is very necessary to tell people the difference between meat from an animal and cultured, why it's better to pick this choice and have people drawn to it from the start. And this way, yeah, just creating already a market where there was none before. And could you speak to how lowering the number of livestock being raised would affect farmers growing crops in Nigeria? So yeah, I mean, this is a very crucial matter because there's currently competition in grain production. Some people want to take farmland. By the way, the global crop land under cultivation is about currently 12% and we have a limit. We should not go beyond 15% of crop land globally. We are at 12%. And if we are going to ramp up agricultural production, especially in grain, we definitely need to cultivate more land. A lot of people subscribe to that school of thought. I don't. I think we should use the land that we have to produce more. But you said something, what does it take to produce a kilogram of beef? 25 kilograms of grains and soybeans. So exactly, so that means 25 kilograms of grain is in competition in terms of being either used to feed a starving family or to feed a cow that will give you one kilogram of beef. So you can imagine, there's quite a scenario here and I definitely believe innovation like yours in Agritech would definitely lower the demand for grain, going towards feeding animals rather than being consumed by them. I heartedly agree. And how do farmers fit into MediPulse mission? Well, actually we're trying to help farmers in a way that the bigger farms currently where they have thousands of herd to lower that amount and they can take better care of their animals. I think organic farming is wonderful and we definitely think that we should keep doing but we're really trying to combat the big, huge mega farms where their animals have poor lives, where they're standing in mud and in manure and have a terrible infection rate among the animals and need antibiotics to stay healthy for their short life that they have. That's the market we would try to mitigate. The organic farms is wonderful but you cannot feed the planet through organic farming. It's just not feasible. So this is how farmers fit in. They can reduce, hopefully reduce their herd but still have an increased amount of money per cow because I think through subsidies, the cost of meat is way too low. The real cost is paid in environmental burden. So we hopefully can raise the price of meat to make it more reflective of what it actually costs and have farmers take better care of their animals and their environment where they're in. So this way, helping them. So in addition to the environmental benefits, you've also mentioned that you can add nutrients to the meat as you grow it and you can prevent diseases and prevent those antibiotic effects. Could you speak to how that works? Right, right, so there's two things. So one is the antibiotic issue. It's not necessarily bad to give animals antibiotics. It's just that their natural occurring bacteria become resistant to these antibiotics and might cause infection in the population. Our method is completely antibiotic-free because you're using a sterile environment where you can grow these cells in. They need to be perfectly happy and clean, only providing the nutrients that they need to start growing. So no antibiotics needed. The other thing is that we can decide what to give these cells, what type of amino acid, what type of salt, and really control the process of what nutrient value the final product will have. So we can have meats in the future with higher protein content, lower fat content, different types of fat, different types of flavors, and really customize the final product how we want it to be as a form of personalized nutrition. Having elderly, having special diets, having athletes with special nutritional requirements, really customizing the meat and redefining what meat can actually be in the future. Yeah. So we're going to take a couple questions from the audience now. So how do you create a business out of a social cause like food waste or the environmental impact of food production? I think business is the greatest avenue for change, and I believe that if you're able to identify a genuine problem that affects people, then you're definitely solving a social problem. And what you have is a social solution. So it's incredibly powerful to identify a problem at the minute level to actually see what is wrong, to find the pain points, and to, no matter how simple or complex it is, as simple as giving data and as complex as growing meat in a lab, you need to be able to answer that question, you know, to provide a remedy for that pain point. And once you do that, I believe you have a social enterprise. Do you have anything, Dad? Sorry, can you repeat the question? How do you build a business around a social cause? But it's not really a social cause for us, right? It's more a food production system that you're inserting yourself into. It's not really a social cause. At least I don't view it as such. I really think this is just an environmental cause that we're looking into, and it's much easier to make a business around an environmental cause than it is about a social cause, I think so. I don't know if you agree with that, but... Well, I don't agree, I... Great, great, tell me why. I think you are solving a massive social problem. You know, there's a lot of people who, because of this problem, do not consume beef and feel, you know, animals have a right and feel animals should not be treated as such. And they're right, because when you see the conditions in which beef is provided on our tables, I mean, the journey it takes to get there, it's perilous for anyone to experience. Now, think also of the protein need of the world. There are a lot of people who do not have access to a balanced diet simply because all they have is grain. They actually have no access to meat. That is a social problem. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, I can see your point. That's great, actually. That's a new insight for me. I was really doing this for the environmental reasons. Mainly, I still like to enjoy some meat once in a while, but I really feel ambivalent about eating it, right? I know it's bad, but it's just... For some reason, it's very hard to kick the habit. You can see it is also in the population. I think the latest numbers in Western society has been five to eight percent of people are vegetarian and vegan, so combined. That's very few people, right? Yeah. That's very few people. Yeah, it's hard to cut it out of your head. People, if you ask them, say, oh, well, do you know about the problems that it's causing? They know about it, but they still decide that it adds so much value to their life that they consider eating it. So quickly to wrap up, when you're working on solving big, huge problems like how we're going to produce enough food, how we're going to mitigate the impact of climate change, how do you combat that kind of founder burnout or depression when you feel like you're not moving fast enough? What is it that inspires you to keep going? Well, for me, it's been the typical entrepreneurial journey with its typical ups and downs, and every time I go down, I remember that someone actually has to do something. And if, in 10 years, you're able to look back and see that, you know, you were at the hem of, you know, the scratch that started the brush fire that changed the world, then you would have been fulfilled. But if you allowed the downs to take you down and be nowhere in 10 years, then you wouldn't have had a mark on the wall. Yeah. And that gets me going. Oh, it's easy for me, because I'm super passionate about science, so I can finally do something where I can do extreme potential good for the world and practice science and be an entrepreneur. It's basically a dream come true for me, so every day I get to go to work. It never feels like I'm going to work. Being here is a privilege, and every day I feel privileged being able to do this work, and actually I can pay my rent by doing this. It's just amazing to me. That's the dream. Thank you so much to both of you for being here, and thanks for joining us today. Enjoy your second day of Slush. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great.