Doing the bees’ work with Thai Sade of BloomX

0:00What a What a It's I love to We The awesome trip this summer. And one of the things that made the trip so special were the Airbnb experiences we did. Immersive tours, cooking classes, a chance to get coffee with a world-class barista. I had so much fun on those experiences that I decided to host my own Airbnb original experience in San Francisco, designed to help you think about how to unlock your next big move in your career or even in your life. To learn more about my Airbnb original experience, head to airbnb.com slash guy. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. And no matter what you like, Audible's romance collection has something to make you swoon.

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1:50Audible makes it easy to drop into your fantasies during your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. There's more to imagine when you listen. Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial. Visit audible.com slash built. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So about a third of the food we eat, things like blueberries, citrus, almonds, and carrots, are pollinated by insects and mostly by bees. And by and large, they do an amazing job. The problem is that with rising global demand for food and dwindling bee populations, we'll have to find other solutions to make sure the world can produce enough food for everyone.

2:35So a company called Blumex has developed a technology that replicates the process of pollination using robots and artificial intelligence, not to replace insects, but to enhance what they're already doing. The technology developed by Blumex can help increase the crop yield by up to 30%, which means more crops using less land. The company was started by Tai Sade, who has a French and an Israeli background. He grew up thinking a lot about agriculture while living on a kibbutz in Israel and working in the orchards every week. So I grew up in a kibbutz, so growing everything from, you know, orchards of persimmon, citrus, avocados, bananas, to big open fields of wheat, cotton, corn, and big farming activity.

3:29I specifically was more in the orchards. That was where I was involved since I was 11 years old, understanding and loving the space of agriculture, of producing food and growing crops. So, I mean, as a child, as a teenager, you were working in the orchards. I'm assuming this was a commercial farm. It was producing fruits and vegetables to sell. Yeah, you're right. So I think it's a very unique way of how kibbutz is managed, which means that, you know, the youth, the education was very involved in the farming activity. And it means that while you are studying, you're also involved in the community.

4:09So it could be farming to be other things that you can do. And I specifically was involved in farming one day per week, you know, as a mandatory part of my life, of my routine, as part of going in a kibbutz. All right. So you grew up in this environment, but was your intention as you were growing up? Was it your did you think, you know, I'm going to stay in agriculture? Because I know, I mean, people I know who grew up around agriculture or farms, very few of them stay there. They they tend to move on to do something else. when you were I don't know going to you know when you were a teenager thinking about going to university did you imagine that this is what you wanted to continue to do or did you think you know I'm going to go do something completely different so I think you know back then it was something that was like that that was my dream or intention to do I'm also coming from a family from a French family who you know in our culture back home was very a lot about food And I think that's a very strong tool for us back home to share love.

5:17Absolutely. That's something that from a very young age, I was exposed for my mother, which is originally from France and was a big, big part of my culture and influenced me. So, you know, fast forward, I opened a restaurant with my mother and sister. It was a family business that we had for almost nine years. You were managing the restaurant? Yeah, we were the owners and managing together with my mother and my sister. After a few years that the business was established, basically, and I would say successful or self-sustained, a lot of the drivers for me to do what I'm doing today is this entrepreneurial mindset.

5:56And then back then, maybe seven years ago, eight years ago, I understood that I want to deal with a more impactful challenge or challenges. that we are facing globally, challenges of agriculture and food. So, I mean, some context here, because you live in a part of the world that has many challenges to producing crops. There's not a lot of water. There can be extreme heat and a limited amount of arable land. So there's been a lot of interesting technology that's come out of the Middle East, of Israel. Well, I believe your country is one of the biggest recyclers of water for agricultural use, right?

6:41So there is already an infrastructure around developing technology around agriculture, right? Like you probably saw that growing up already. You're right. So I think that this mindset is coming from a place that they needed to innovate because they didn't have the right infrastructure to produce what they need. If it's water, if it's to fertilize land, if it's finding new ways to protect the crops. And I think that a lot of the innovations that we have came from kibbutzes. So the irrigation pipes that were invented by Netafim, that's a kibbutz in Israel that basically, that sits in the desert.

7:25Basically invented that because it needed to control the water and irrigate. You're talking about drip irrigation. Yeah, drip irrigation. You're right. because they needed that, right? Right, because it obviously uses less water when it's just dripping from the hose, which is obviously widely used around the world. I want to ask you about what you started, though, because I guess you decided to move away from the restaurant business, of course, to focus your full attention on trying to solve some pretty big global problems connected to food and agriculture. And eventually you honed in on a single problem that is not just specific to your part of the world, but exists all around the world, which is honeybees as pollinators.

8:10Bees are essentially, right, like they are essentially, well, they're the workers of agriculture. Not everything requires bees for pollination, but I think a significant percentage of the food at least consumed in the United States, maybe a third or half of the food we eat requires bees as pollinators. So things like blueberries and avocados and almonds and strawberries, cucumbers, different kinds of fruits and vegetables that we eat require bees as pollinators to carry pollen from one plant to the next in order to produce yields. You're right. And I used to do stories on this when I was a reporter about bee colonies just collapsing, you know, and it was scary because without bees, we can't, there's a significant amount of food that can't be produced.

9:00presumably when you were growing up I mean you would have bee colonies or you would have you would release bees into the orchards or I mean because this is a there's a process to it right I mean bee colonies are brought on trucks colonies are deposited in orchards and fields and then the bees do their thing and then a couple months later they're picked up and taken away is that more or less how it worked on your kibbutz? Yeah, so that's how it worked in my kibbutz. And that's how it worked today. To produce food, we need pollination. Pollination means the transaction of pollen from a single flower to the other flower, which is usually transferred by insect.

9:44So around 80 % of the commercial growing crops that we use today are pollinated by insects. The other 20 % are pollinated by wind. And I think out of the insects, most of them are bees, right? There are moths and others and butterflies, but mostly bees. So you're right. We use those honeybees boxes, pushing them into the orchards or whatever we want to pollinate. And effectively, they pollinate. So here is the interesting part. The number of honeybee hives has increased from the 1960s to today by around 81%. But the number of land that needs pollination globally in the same time grew much more.

10:23and that's what created this big gap that you know today and effectively how we manage and use honeybees to pollinate make this process very problematic from the honeybee perspective which basically decreases their functionality and decreases the hive numbers and etc because of the commercial use which is very intense we talked about tracts transferring them from one place to another pesticides that affect them disorientation bad nutrition for example to pollinate only avocados if they don't like the avocado nectar or pollen it's not good for the bees so to eat only one thing is not good for for any living creature the reason we use them is because it's easy for us to manage them and put them in boxes and we can manage them because it's a very socialized organism that we can just commoditize but the other natural pollinators than insects is actually much more important to pollinate many type of crops but you cannot just spread many insects or different butterflies or whatever who want to pollinate a crop because they are not controlled like honeybees.

11:27And that's why we created Blumex, basically, because what we find out is that not only that we're harming the honeybees while we're using them like that, they are not pollinating effectively many type of crops. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Tai's big idea and his process that pollinates crops without using bees at all. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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15:00Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today is Tai Sade, who realized that honeybees alone, which have been commercialized by humans to pollinate crops for centuries, are actually not always great at pollinating, especially as global demand for food rises. All right, let's talk about Blumex. I know you started this, you started working on this idea in 2019 and you launched in 2022. let's talk about how this idea came about. Essentially, we've talked about what the problem is, which is bees as pollinators, obviously crucial and vital, but the commercialization of bees is a problem because some bees are non-native to parts of the world and they can't be brought in.

15:48And certainly it's not healthy for bees to just be sort of monocrop pollinators. I mean, my understanding is you can, I mean, humans can pollinate, pollinate, like you can physically pollinate plants, right? You don't necessarily need bees, but bees are obviously important and they do it well and they can do things much more quickly than humans. But you essentially said, is there a way that we can artificially pollinate plants, essentially, I don't know, to replace bees? Was that what you were thinking? So it wasn't to replace bees, but to enhance the pollination activity. And I think that what's very interesting to understand, you know, from what I've shared, you can understand that if honeybees are not the natural pollinators, I think that from our logic, it was meant, OK, so we shouldn't look on the honeybee and how to improve it.

16:41We should look on the plant. We should focus on the plant, not on the insect, in order to understand the mechanism and how we can enhance the activity on the plant. Essentially, from what I understand, the way pollination works, I mean, if it's a bee or a hummingbird, they land on a flower, they're vibrating, and that shakes the pollen loose, which kind of it's like a cloud of pollen that lands on the bee, then it goes to another flower and drops that pollen. And then you've got, it's doing its job. Not only does the bee get nutrition from the pollen, but it propagates that plant. And wind also does this.

17:22Wind also shakes plants and spreads pollen. So essentially, I guess you needed to figure out how do we vibrate plants, right? How do we like shake them a little bit and somehow get the pollen from one flower to another? Is that sort of how you were thinking about it? So actually, all flowers that have different mechanisms do transfer pollen from one flower to the other. what to differentiate those mechanism is the forces that you need to apply on the flower in order to release the pollen or transfer it so vibration for example the bumblebee vibration which you mentioned is is one of them it's one of them regarding to blueberries tomatoes peppers another mechanism that we are applying for example is basically electrostatic forces to collect the pollen out of the flowers and then apply them by friction and what we are mimicking there is that for example sticky pollen like avocados mangroves that have a very sticky pollen which means that the plant requires from the insect to really work out get the pollen out gonna dig that out right we got to dig that out yeah and that's why it's sticky and for those kind of flowers for example avocados in a co-evolution between the plant and the insect basically means that when the honeybee flying became electrically charged and that electrical charge when they approach a flower gets the pollen to jump on the body so we try to basically to mimic that process and to create electrostatic mechanism that collect the pollen out of the flowers and then apply it.

18:56Huh. Okay so essentially as bees as they approach a flower there's like an electric charge that's created by their buzzing and that shakes loose the sticky pollen from the flowers so it can pollinate other flowers. And basically your company has figured out a way to kind of replicate that process, but maybe do it even better than bees? Yeah, and we actually see that it's working now. And that's a very interesting mechanism that we are replicating, that we apply today for several crops, but could be others. but we also have the data on when to pollinate. We have an algorithm that allows us to understand how environmental conditions affect the flying behavior for every crop that we are working on that give us the right pollination window to pollinate and create a focus of the pollination season based on real-time environmental conditions that we have in the field.

19:53All right. This is a business show about entrepreneurship. If you're just joining us, you are listening to High Built. This is not a show about agriculture. but I'm going to do my best. You started to work on both hardware and software. So let's break it down a little bit because you've developed a, literally I've seen a video of it. It's like a machine with arms on top of an autonomous vehicle. And this vehicle just goes down the aisles of, you know, of let's say citrus trees or whatever crop it needs to pollinate. And the arms brush up against the plants and essentially they're pollinating those plants.

20:35Can you explain, especially because most people listening to this show do not understand, including me, don't work on farms, don't understand agriculture, but understand technology. So can you explain how that system works? Yeah. So what you described is correct. We are mimicking the bumblebee vibration system by those electric vehicles which have two mechanical arms that basically vibrate the bottom of the plant, blueberry flowers on the branches, with the same frequency that we are trying to get the vibration of the bumblebee. So just to clarify, I'm looking at a picture of this. It's like a small little, looks like it's an autonomous vehicle.

21:17It's very small. It's called a burrow. And your technology is on top of this autonomous vehicle. and it vibrates the, I've seen a video of it, it vibrates the blueberry bushes ever so slightly so the blueberries don't start coming down, right? They're not like dropping. It's a very almost imperceptible vibration, but that alone spreads pollen? Yeah. So what it creates basically, and that's something we don't see in the video, but it's the flower. When it gets a vibration for those mechanical arms, the pollen is basically released from the flower. It's like a pollen cloud that just is developed and it drops onto the other flowers.

21:57Yeah. Yeah. How, I mean, how much better are these operating than bees? So I think that it's like everything, there is this ROI and the cost effectiveness of everything we do, right? So this specific vehicle will replicate every week the same plant. It can do up to 20 hectares a week in six days. Wow. And just to clarify, one hectare is I think about two and a half acres. So this vehicle can pollinate about 50 acres worth of crops in a week, which is probably more than bees could do on their own, right? Yeah. But I think that the comparison is not on any bees. The comparison is more – that's what we emphasize.

22:41Eventually, it's on the results on the yield. It's not in the compared to the insect. And in compared to any bees, when we apply those machines, we see a range of between 10 to 40 percent of yield increase to cause get of using our services. If they're so much more efficient in pollinating and if the yields are clearly higher than using commercial bee colonies, it sounds like they could replace the commercial use of bees. Yeah, I think that they could replace, but trying to replace natural process that growers have been working for years, which are having a lot of reliability. The growers are used to having bees.

23:26And you want bees on your farm. And also on that, honeybees, they have value. But if you reduce them, that could also affect the yields of the crops. So essentially, the girls need to understand what they have with honeybees, what they have with us, and what they have together. Essentially. So what the technology does is you would say, keep using the honeybees, but you will see that your yields will go up because where the bees can't actually perform efficiently, this technology that we have, we can actually produce better results. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that we'll need to strategize together how to use honeybees and us.

24:12Maybe they will reduce the amount of honeybee eyes because it's becoming more and more expensive and using us as a supplementary tool for pollination. So I think that we are very agnostic in a sense of we want to show you the value of using our services. And you eventually, you the goal, will evaluate what is best for you. Again, agriculture is not natural. and if you want to have this essential process of pollination in the field like you irrigate, if it's tree or whatever, or fertilize differently, you need to have also a control on your pollination process. We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, how Blumex technology could actually help save rainforests across the world.

24:55More on that in a moment. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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27:37Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today is Tai Sade. His company Blumex has developed technology to help farmers pollinate their crops, including one of their newest products, the Crosby. So the one product you have is this sort of apparatus that has these kind of metallic arms that physically vibrate the bushes. You also have another product called a Crosby, and I'll describe it because we're on a podcast. So it's basically like a long pole and attached to it is like a panel. It's like a square panel. And a human holds this long pole and walks through, I guess, through the orchards and holds this panel up against the trees.

28:26And that also pollinates. So this is an electrostatic system. Can you explain how that works? Yeah. So you describe it correctly. That's the manual version that we have today. We're also developing a mechanical version, which is basically big mechanical arms that have big electrodes, big plates, flexible plates that they attach to a tractor or pickup. And that would just drive down the rows and it would electrostatically move the pollen from one flower to another. Yeah. What's happening there is that eventually we have two varieties that we use in the orchards to cross pollinate. So avocado is a great example.

29:05we have the pollinator variety. It could be Edinger, Fruity. Is the Edinger avocado the smooth-skinned one, by the way? Yeah, it's the smooth green. Yeah, I don't like those ones. I'm always, I'm a Haas guy. Yeah, usually. Give me those any day. Yeah, so, you know, the market loves Haas, but we plant the pollinator variety to enhance the Haas productivity. That's why we put them near each other in the orchards. So what we do is basically we collect from the pollinator variety, It could be Ettinger, Fruity, other smooth skin avocados. And we transfer the pollen that we collect in the plate, just rub it by friction on the flowers that we want to pollinate on the house.

29:46So you take basically the pollen from one variety of avocado with these electrostatic plates and you transfer it to another variety of avocado. Which is the house. Yeah, but why do you do that? so why we do that is because honeybees don't like to pollinate uh they have several flowers they don't like the pollen taste they don't like the nectar so if you don't have it's not that they're not pollinating at all it's not binary right but eventually statistically you will have less visits of honeybees you will have less fruits okay so statistically we increase the distribution of pollen because we predict what is the right time when pollen is receptive to collect it is that generally in the spring presumably yeah so it's in the spring but i mean not as a period i'm talking really every day we know what is the right the per day we know the hours how do you the right hours how do you how are you able to know that the the the algorithm basically that what we do there is to understand how environmental conditions affect flowering behavior and by that basically that's something that you know part of the secret sauce of how we built that but in every in every crop is different flowering mechanism different complexity but the operational essence is the same we're trying to understand what will be the right time in every day having those temperature humidity or sun of light what will be the right time to pollinate tomorrow the day after tomorrow and etc so we we can identify that but it's a per day practice because, for example, avocados have one million flowers in a season of one month and a half.