 Hello everyone and welcome to today's live AMA session. I'm Giovanni, the YouTube host at Cointelegraph. In today's exciting episode of our AMA show, we will be diving deep into the world of agriculture and technology. You may be surprised to learn how much of these two seemingly different fields have intertwined and how much they impact our daily lives. To help us connect these two fields, we will hear from Dimitra, the global ag tech company that is changing the game for smallholder farmers all over the world. Joining us today is none other than John Trask, the founder and CEO of Dimitra Incorporate. He is a well-respected expert in the blockchain industry since 2017 and has an impressive background in developing enterprise software solutions for the supply chain, finance, and agriculture sectors. He has held several high-ranking positions in major multinational corporations. Hi John and welcome to Cointelegraph Live. How are you doing today? I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me here, Giovanni. It's a pleasure. So today's discussion is particularly interesting as we will be exploring how the latest technological trends in agriculture are being utilized to grow and deliver food to our tables. From drones to big data and AI to blockchain, farmers are now leveraging these technologies to improve their productivity and create more sustainable food systems. So before we get started, I just want to remind our audience to please send us your questions in the chat and make sure to like the video and subscribe to our channel. So we are excited to dive into Dimitra's innovative platform and how they are changing the game for small holder farmers around the world. But first, here is a quick video introducing Dimitra and the incredible impact that it is making on the world of agriculture. So as shown by the video, Dimitra is at the forefront of using groundbreaking technologies to transform agriculture. By leveraging blockchain, mobile technology, machine learning, IoT devices, satellite and drone imagery, genomics and advanced farming research, Dimitra is collaborating with governments, NGOs and other organizations to create sustainable food systems for the future. So John, we don't talk much about agriculture on this show, so it would be great to start off with a general picture of what's going on in the industry. So can you discuss the main challenging facing the agricultural sector and the technologies being used to address them and how these technologies and solutions vary across different countries and how is Dimitra part of the old solution? Yeah, absolutely. It's an interesting sector, agricultural technology has been advancing for a number of years now and within the agricultural field, there's about 610 million farms in the world. 570 million of those farms are small farms, typically less than four hectares, but produce a very large percentage of the world's food. Some of the challenges are these large farms, the remaining 40 million farms in the world, have access to technology and the budgets to access technology. Small farms, ag tech solutions tend to be too expensive for them and that limits a lot of the access to the farmers who really need it most. The other challenges that are occurring in farming these days are the impacts of climate change. Changes in weather patterns affect how we grow our food and it also affects our input costs and the cost of food. So the ag industry is really focused on how do you address those three main challenges among with others and there's a lot of solutions, a lot of small apps that have been built. One of those challenges that farmers have is they may need three, four, five, ten apps in order to do everything and farming is very regional. So Dimitra plays a role in that in that we are building an enterprise style app for small farmers and launched last year with the live app and there are five different sections of our live apps and really trying to find ways to work with those small farmers to make better data-driven decisions. So that's really one of our core features within our app. Okay, that's exciting. And so I was curious to know what can you say about the rate of the adoption, the tech adoption by farmers? So what's their feedback on using technological tools, how they're getting trained to use them and also in which countries the local officials do the most for ag tech development? You know, I think that's a variable question. It's different around the world and in countries like the United States and India tech adoption is quite high. G20 countries tech adoption is at a much higher rate than other countries. And that is something we need to find different strategies on a country by country basis in order to train the farmers to use tech. So in some countries and quite often in developing nations we spend time working with universities and co-ops and combining our expertise with their expertise to go out in the field and train people. One example is a project that we did in Indonesia with a cooperative called Solicradio, 3,500 coffee farmers. And we partnered with Andalash University. Andalash University is doing a lot of research and wants to collect data and can use our software to do that. Those 3,500 farms want to take advantage of what technology can bring them. Many of their customers are demanding more information and more data. So it ended up being a great partnership. The university provided us 30 students every month to go full-time and work with the farmers. So every day they're out talking to these farmers and training them how to use the app, increasing their adoption rate. And at the same time the farmers are gaining benefits from the system and from the coaching from those individual university students. We have other examples in Bolivia with Kenawa and India. So it's a great method to have that partnership with the universities, the cooperatives, ourselves and the farmers in order to deal with some of the adoption challenges around the world. Yeah, and I guess that one of the focal points of these old technologies is about collecting data. So how does your company, Mitra, help farmers and other agricultural professionals to collect the necessary data? Yeah, so we have a number of applications. One of our applications is called Connected Farmer and that's a mobile application. So a farmer initially goes on and fills out some information regarding their farm. They provide a geofence of where their farm is located. They tell us about their soil conditions and their farming goals. And then throughout the season as they work they provide us additional data around the health of their plants and what pests they're encountering sort of how they're managing soil health with either fertilizers or organic treatments. And then we collect all of that data and we add additional data to it. Once we have that geofence, we run a satellite report and we built 23 artificial intelligence reports that evaluate different aspects of farming. So we start getting feedback around that. We get feedback around weather that the farmers being exposed to and how much moisture they have and how is the temperature and how does that relate to the productivity of the particular crops that farmers growing? You know, over time we're growing a huge repository of agricultural data, really helping us and feeding our machine learning with data in order to help make recommendations to those farmers. So there's loads of ways to access data. Now we're starting to add in, we've got a project going in Papua New Guinea around drone data collection, fighting a pest called fall armyworm with precision agriculture, but we're using drones that can give us two centimeter resolution over an entire cornfield and allow our AI to pick out challenge areas that can be addressed specifically by the farmer. Where, you know, and the satellite feeds into that and IOT, so there's just more and more sources for data that feed into our database and feed our recommendation engine. So it's pretty exciting how much data there is and what we can do with it. Hmm, okay, and actually we are already seeing that from the audience, there are some questions. So Sylvain Libouté is asking what are the metrics, what are the metrics used as datas? So initially we start prior to planting and some of the metrics are around soil health. So we're looking at soil nutrients and the nutrients that are necessary to grow a specific crop. We're looking at carbon and carbon emissions, what's the carbon footprint of a farm and the biggest contributor to carbon challenges on a farm really has been deforestation. So we look at measures of deforestation, we use AI to evaluate previous deforestation and the impacts of forest on the farm. And then we move into, you know, planting and we're measuring productivity dates relative to plant height and plant health. So loads of pieces of data and we do that all the way from preparing the soil until the goods are processed and shipped to, in coffee's case, which is one of our applications, to the roasters in Europe and North America or wherever they are around the world. Okay, and I was wondering, talking about blockchain technology specifically, what role does blockchain technology play in all this and in this product that you are mentioning and why you decided that blockchain technology was the technology that fit your goal and how do you educate farmers about the use of blockchain and the benefits it brings? Yeah, so blockchain plays a number of roles. Initially when we started designing the system, blockchain really fit from a track and trace perspective. So, you know, as most supply chain projects are looking to track the origin of a product and track the life cycle of a product from the farm to the grocery store or to the end user, we do the same thing. We track rate from the soil and the seed all the way to that roaster. And blockchain is a perfect tool from a transparency perspective and a fraud prevention perspective. And with all of the regulations that are out regarding food safety and food security and import regulations, blockchain really fits well for that. So nobody can tamper with the records. You get that immutable record. It's quite easy to use, almost transparent to the user because they're interacting through a mobile interface but provides an auditable record for, you know, the EU customs people who are tracking where the products are coming from and if those products are meeting certain safety and security regulations. You know, one example we have is our deforestation certificate and the EU announced late last year that there's a new EU DR regulation. And one of their goals is to reduce deforestation around the world. And there's been a PAC signed a couple of years ago by 141 nations that they'll eliminate deforestation by 2030, the EU jumped on board and appears to be going first with the regulations. So 28 nations have been given notice that they have about 18 months to get ready from last November. And what the deforestation regulation says for seven core commodities, like coffee and cocoa and timber and others, the EU has now banned buying those from a farm that is growing through a deforestation process. So they clear cut in order to plant more crops. So what we've done is we've taken AI and analyzed, we started with Brazil, Columbia and Indonesia as three large source nations for us and analyzed the forests across the country and can evaluate the change in forest from the EU's cut off date in 2020 to the date that the farm ships their product to evaluate whether they've deforested at all and meet the EU regulations. Blockchain fits in really well for that because we now take that certificate and the satellite data, the analytics, the mobile data to make sure that there's no fraud around location and we write that to the blockchain. So we take all of the data in the end, we write it to the polygon blockchain and that becomes a certificate that the farmer can share with the import organizations and the EU to show that they're complying and meeting the needs. There's many other examples around how we manage coffee and we also have a data marketplace that we're working on with the ocean and so sharing data and sharing data through blockchain becomes valuable so that universities can have access to farm data and other firms, input firms, fertilizer firms, seed companies can start accessing data to help improve the performance of their individual products and how they help firms. So loads and loads of methods to apply blockchain and we have probably six or seven core methods right now that we're working with. Sounds exciting and so you were mentioning universities and other counterparties you are dealing with so how do you work with officials, universities, tech startups and communities to get them involved in your projects? Yeah, so if we go back to that Indonesia example and do the same thing with Bolivia, we've partnered with the university in Aruru area in Bolivia and they are providing students for it to go out and help train the farmers when we're working on a project on quinoa and the objective and what we learned in our POC with quinoa is that from a productivity perspective if you apply technology and you apply the knowledge to make decisions that you can get from the technology you can greatly increase the output. So those university students are helping train farmers to put data into the system, helping them interpret the data that comes out of the system and then apply that in a real world farming situation. We do the same thing with tech startups. We know we can't build every technology and one of the challenges is farmers don't want to have three, four or five apps. They want to have one app that helps them make all of their decisions that helps them manage their farm and we look and if somebody has developed a great technology, we'll work with them to incorporate it within the Demitra system in order to provide the best services and the best tech to those farmers. So we're always looking for those universities, tech startups and other communities to get involved in our projects and help us move our mission. Community is core to farming and community is core to blockchain and crypto. So very similar from that perspective. Farmers learn and interact from other parties who are farming the same products. Crypto learn and interact from other people on the channels and so it's a nice fit, particularly when we get crypto interested people who are interested in farming and food security and the environment. And we see that there is a lot of engagement in the chat that's nice to see and I take the chance to ask another question from our audience. I see that Akki Srinivasulu is asking if there are any plans to support Indian farmers or engage with Indian farmers specifically? Yeah, so we already have people in India. We're working with a couple of cooperatives in India and we see a lot of growth potential in country. We have built a platform for onion farmers and really it's around soil health and soil management in India, how in an area where there's fairly highly degraded soil and soil is a huge problem around the world, how does a farmer build a strategy to support soil health while maintaining productivity and soil health has an impact on carbon. So there's organic carbon within soil. Soil health has an impact on water quality and so we've built some modules within our platform in order to support that project and we expect that project to grow to about 2 million farmers over the next few years. That's the deals of the contract. So we're onboarding now and community by community and village by village will continue to onboard more farmers. We have a number of employees working in India now securing other deals related to drones, related to pesticide use in some areas and maybe I guess looking at those 20 or 25 crops that they want to enhance. So lots of growth opportunity in India. Very exciting nation with such a huge population and such a huge population that is agricultural and food driven. Yeah, definitely India sounds like a huge market for these kind of things. So you have a project completely dedicated to a single product which is connected coffee. Why did you make it a separate platform and what sort of problems does it solve for farmers? Sellers and buyers. Yeah, so we started with our connected farmer product and very quickly we landed some coffee customers, coffee farming customers and they had unique challenges. So beyond just how do you plant a crop and successfully grow that there are requirements for traceability after the coffee cherries are picked and there's a transfer of goods that happens. We call that a buying station where farmers will go and pick 30 kilos or 50 kilos of coffee every day. They'll bring it down to a buying station and the buying station needs to maintain traceability through the consolidation process and then on to the quality and the drying and the processing. So those challenges and those activities are quite unique and aren't easily handled with a typical supply chain software. So building a separate platform helps solve those unique challenges where the coffee consumer wants to know the source of their coffee. The coffee roaster is obligated to know the source of their coffee. But in a single C container of coffee, you may have 500 farms contributing to filling that container. So maintaining traceability from a regulatory perspective and from a consumer needs perspective does produce those challenges. In order to overcome that, we built our connected coffee app and have had great success with that app. We've had a number of coffee growers and coffee cooperatives come on board. We just signed a deal I don't know a month ago now in Honduras for a coffee cooperative with 115,000 coffee farm members. So the coffee industry definitely has a need and the need is growing now with the deforestation regulations as coffee is a now a regulated product in the EU. And so each one of those 115,000 coffee farmers if they wanna sell their product to the EU need to prove that they're not involved in deforestation. So that adds more complexity and more process to that application in order to help them meet regulations. And of course every farmer in the world wants to sell into the EU. The margins are better, the pricing is better than selling domestically. So these are new challenges in a digital world that a farmer needs to overcome. And the connected coffee app is a great tool for helping them do that. Yeah, for sure. And I actually wanted to dive deeper into this topic of ecological issues such as deforestation as you were mentioning. So deforestation is a huge problem nowadays. So can you tell us what has been done? Tell us more about what has been done in the recent years to solve this problem and how Dimitra is contributing to solving this issue. Yeah, I think we've recognized for a number of years the impact of deforestation. And more recently we've learned around deforestation and deforestation is one of the largest causes of global warming and agricultural deforestation is one of the largest reasons that we deforest to make room for more farmland to have more crops or have more cattle or whatever the case may be. Each nation has struggled with this and countries like Brazil have done a lot internally to try to solve deforestation issues, but it's never seemed to be enough to end deforestation. We have the ability within the farmland that is developed around the world to continue improving productivity without deforesting or making smart forestry decisions as they apply to agriculture. Two years ago at the COP conference, 141 nations signed a pact saying that they would eliminate deforestation by 2030 and the EU has now banned the importation of seven core commodities if the production of those commodities is related to a farm or an area that deforestation has taken place. And those regulations are coming for every producer of makeup that uses palm oil, coffee, chocolate, rubber, timber, cattle related products and soy and soybean and all of the products that are produced from those. So it's a very large core that need to comply. And we're talking about tens of millions of farms around the world just fall into those seven core commodities and most large producers would sell some or all of their product into Europe. It's such a heavily populated big area that is a large consumer of chocolate and coffee and soy. So Dimitra has done a couple of things. One is we built the deforestation compliance module which really is driven by blockchain and powered by the Dimitra token. So an individual goes in and they buy a certificate and then that farmer or that cooperative creates a geofence and we use artificial intelligence to evaluate the amount of forest change over the farming area. And then we add some mobile technology in order to evaluate the source of the material and then again we use AI to evaluate was that crop actually grown on that farm or is there some amount of fraud in the certificate application? We pay some fees. Of course we've got to file these documents in order to comply with the EU regs and the import regs and everything is driven around DMTR. So all the fiat that goes in that's fed into that gets converted to DMTR and then there's a balance at the end after the expenses are paid associated with making those transactions and the gas costs and such and we burn a portion of that. So right now we're doing it with polygon. There's a number of other areas that we're working on contributing to climate change initiatives beyond deforestation but that is really a core one and as we're implementing that this year into 2014 these regulations take effect and the transaction volume will start going through the roof right now. Companies are evaluating their supply chains and I'll give you an example in Africa which is a very large producer of cocoa. We've evaluated some areas that produce cocoa and 50% of the area has been involved in deforestation. So think of a chocolate producer in Belgium if that's very famous chocolate buying their cocoa and in the next year they won't be able to buy from the farms that they've been buying from historically because of their environmental practices. So every supply chain involved with these seven core commodities really has a year less than a year now to figure out what does their supply chain look like in 2024 and how are they gonna manage in the coffee producing example assuring that those 500 farms and that sea container of coffee comply 100% because otherwise the product is banned and the EU has put teeth in its rules charging 4% of revenue if a company doesn't comply. So it's quite significant to their bottom line if they don't comply and the EU companies that we're talking to and the exporters from all over the world are trying to figure out how do they manage that? There will be a drastic shift next year in supply chain supply and how it feeds those companies versus companies, similar companies in other countries who haven't initially implemented these rules. So we're spending our year hoping companies understand their risk. Sure, and I see that you also have a sponsorship program which is helping basically farmers and agricultural initiatives to become more sustainable and profitable thanks to the participation of ordinary citizens and businesses. Can you briefly tell us what it is this sponsorship program that we're talking about? Yeah, and this goes back to our goal of helping small farmers who maybe can't afford technology and afford the technology that they need. And it takes a couple of years for a farmer once they start using the technology to get the financial benefit and have the cost be sustainable within their individual business plan. And when we look at these small farmers, they're probably only having thousands of dollars, maybe $10,000 in revenue. So we created the sponsorship program on specific projects. We've been out working in almost 70 nations. We've got contracts in 16 nations. And what we find is that we go and work with these farming communities. And the farming communities may not have sufficient revenue or sufficient profit in order to pay for a system. So this for us is a crypto initiative. An individual or a corporation can come in and buy Dimitra tokens. They can stake those, stake and lock those Dimitra tokens and pick a country of interest for them and support some of the projects. And what we do with the funds is we create free licenses, user licenses for the cooperatives or for the individual farmers. And then we also support some of their programs and initiatives. So for me, it's also a great way for that investor who may be interested in buying a Dimitra token to beyond the value of the investment, make a difference in the world and make a difference in a project that's trying to convert farmers into a more sustainable method of farming. So pretty exciting opportunity and we've had lots of good uptake within that so far. Lots of individual investors go into our portal and say that they wanna lock their tokens and support a project in India or Bolivia or wherever in the world. And then we'll send project updates as the projects get off the ground and start to progress. Yeah, and you mentioned the Dimitra token a few times. Now as wrapping up the discussion with the last question, I would like you to go a bit deeper into the tokenomics of Dimitra and its sustainability. Well, the basic tokenomics you can find on our website. So a billion tokens, how many we burned, how many have been issued and how many have been minted. You know, the interesting piece with the tokenomics is the Dimitra token drives the certificate. So our deforestation certificate, each certificate costs a certain amount of money. It works all over the world. And when a farmer or a farming cooperative or a coffee or a chocolate maker needs to certify a farm, they can input with Dimitra or buy a certificate with Dimitra or they can buy with Fiat and we do the conversion. And then some of the other areas that drive demand on the Dimitra token within it from a utility perspective are licensing and then the goods that we sell, we have a marketplace and the marketplace is expanding even further in Q3 of this year. So people will be able to buy and sell their products, their farming products in Fiat or in Dimitra and the transactions and transaction fees are driven by Dimitra. So lots of different ways that we do that. The other piece to this question is the sustainability and sustainability from a token perspective can be viewed two ways. One is how does it help us achieve the UN sustainable development goals? How do we help solve world hunger? And certainly the Dimitra token is right in there because creating food is such a important component of that goal, reducing food waste, meeting regulatory requirements, dealing with climate change, carbon practices and clean water and healthy soil. So the Dimitra token and Dimitra itself is so focused on these initiatives. So we align really well with UN sustainable development goals and we practice regenerative agriculture practices and make recommendations within the app to the farmers in those fashions. So such a great use case from my perspective of how you combine a token to meet global sustainability goals. Yeah, I'm personally very excited about everything that has to do with blockchain and basically preserving our planet. And I think it's one of the best, I guess, use case that we can do of this technology. So yeah, John, it was awesome to talk to you today. Today we learned so much about how farmers and other stakeholders are increasingly turning technology solutions such as precision agriculture, big data analytics, drones and blockchain and how Dimitra is actively working to develop and implement technology solutions that are tailored to the specific needs of small holder farmers in different parts of the world. So before we sign off, I am sure the audience would like to know how they can get in touch with you or how they can reach out to the team if they are any questions. Can you share what is the best way they can get in touch or connect with your communities? Probably the easiest way to get in touch with us is through our website, dimitra.io. And on there, there are links to all of our social media, Telegram and all of the associated pages on Reddit and Facebook and just about every social media platform. So go on there, explore some of our products, explore some of our projects, pick the social media channel that you use the most and join our community and start asking questions and how you can get involved. Yeah, and John, I just wanted to thank you again for being today on our AMA and I also would like to thank our audience for being so active and participating with the questions. They were very interesting. And so last thing I want to remind our audience to subscribe to the Cointelegraph YouTube channel. We do this sort of AMAs quite frequently. So thanks again, John and thanks again to our audience. We'll see you next time. Thank you for having me here today and thank everybody for joining. Appreciate your time.