Why Blockchain, AI Can Be a Fertile Farming Ground

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1:30Welcome, everyone, to the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing. My name is Santiago Velez. I'm here today with John Trask from CEO of agricultural tech company Dimitra. Welcome, John. Hey, thanks for having me here today. It's a pleasure. We had John a few years ago on Real Vision Crypto, one of our early guests. He gave a very insightful and deep dive into his project on agricultural technology, blockchain, machine learning. We're going to revisit that project and see the progress that's been made. We hope to really engage the audience today. We want questions and challenges. So we'll do that work today.

2:10But before, we'd like to just look at the markets and see how things are going. Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to trend up. a nice return from this long winter. We're having Bitcoin right now around 29 ,369. So things are recovering nicely. The altcoins likely to see a strong rally in altcoin season. So, you know, just around the corner. It's nice to see projects last this long. And so I'm glad to have John back on the show as one of the very small market cap coins that we visited way back in 2021. So with that, let's get to it. John, can you give us a little rundown of Dimitra, what the platform is, what your original goal was during our first interview and kind of how it's progressed since then?

3:00Yeah, so Dimitra is a platform that's completely focused on agriculture, working with farmers around the world and taking product rate from the soil all the way through the food producers, so your large distributors and restaurants and grocery stores. And we've made a ton of progress in the last year and a half, I guess we launched on KuCoin in September of 2021. And you guys had us on that month. So thank you for that. Since then, we've built five applications that work in different scenarios. We've built a lot of AI in order to help farmers make better decisions. And of course, there's a couple of different blockchain options within our platform.

3:52We are ERC20 token. We also work with Ethereum and Polygon, depending on what pieces of data we're writing and how we're going to use those and record those and create that immutable record for traceability or whatever the purpose is. Right. So let's break down each of these tech stack aspects and visit them individually. So let's start with the blockchain. Typically, blockchains can be used to record just transaction processing for a cryptocurrency, but they can also be used to record data sets and essentially immutable, persistent records that anyone can refer to as a source of truth. In that aspect, both the digital asset, the token versus the records, can you differentiate a little bit for our audience how you use blockchain technology?

4:46Yeah, so there's a lot of different ways that we use it, and I'll just cover a couple of those. So initially, we collect data from farmers, and we get to understand how they're planting, where they're planting, and we supplement that data with data that we collect from satellites and IoT sensors and other sources. and we pick components of that data to maintain traceability. And from a traceability perspective, farmers want to know what have they done in the past, what are they doing now, and how does that relate to regulations? There's a lot of regulations in the world around what chemicals farmers can use, how they treat their soil.

5:29There's a lot of interest from an environmental perspective about farming and farming practices and how that works together, works hand in hand with environmental regulations or environmental objectives. And so we have a number of applications and one of our applications is a deforestation application. There's a large regulatory set coming out in the world. The EU has come out and put out some new legislation. It's going live in early 2024. And they've given essentially corporations 18 months to 24 months, depending on the size of the corporation, to get ready. and get ready means how do you assess a farm or a timber lot for deforestation?

6:29How do you prove that it has not been deforested after December 2020? And then how do you maintain that record and integrate that into the supply chain So you have shipping records of every shipment of coffee and cocoa and wood and rubber and a number of other commodities when you're shipping your goods to the EU. So we take that data within our application, we write that to Polygon and create an immutable record, create a certificate for the farmer and for the food company in order for them to maintain records to show that they're complying with those regulations. Now, the really interesting thing is 141 nations signed up at COP, signed the PAC, and will be taking on or creating similar regulations between now and 2030 with the goal of eliminating deforestation by 2030.

7:32And blockchain is playing a critical role in that within the Dimitra platform. Wow, that's fantastic. You know, I think the thing that's truly special from my perspective is this idea that we're taking farming, which has traditionally been, you know, just passed down by word of mouth skill set of the parent to the child and essentially now digitizing it. We're capturing all the insights and the provenance of how we grow our food and manage livestock and trees. And we're digitizing it and we're making it accessible globally so that people can learn from one another's practices. The data, the insights can be gathered from the data.

8:15And then, of course, we can meet environmental sustainability goals, government goals and management. So I think in the big picture, this is a kind of secular technological change that's going to happen irrespective of how quickly, right? All we can do is provide the tools and get people onboarded quickly, but it's just a change that's kind of inevitable. So I think that what you guys are doing is absolutely on the right path. And I think a lot of the farmers are going to see the benefits that, you know, maybe from word of mouth they couldn't get from their parents. Can you talk a little bit about what some of those benefits are, how AI and machine learning can provide insights?

8:59You know, where is the value there? Yeah, so we start with a mobile app and the farmers enter their data. They tell us about their soil. And then we take satellite reports. We've generated 23 satellite reports that use AI in order to evaluate a piece of land using different spectral imagery and also using radar. And we can analyze that and compare year over year performance on a particular farm and help a farmer make decisions around what fertilizer should they be using? When should they be planting? climate change is impacting planting seasons and and farmers if they don't have additional data may plant too early when there's a big storm coming they may miss a particular rainy season that they need in order to help with their crops and and so we've set up about 40 crops now in the system we have a large team working on the ai for more crops we're adding three to five new crops every month now.

10:12And so a farmer, after they tell us about what they want to plant and what their goals are, we compare them to best practices. And then we look at actual performance. So we can look at performing other performing farms in the region, other performing farms with like conditions. And machine learning just creates so much opportunity for us to start analyzing that data and making recommendations so we have recommendation sets around soil nutrition we have plant health we have analysis around pests so a farmer if he doesn't know what's attacking his crop can take a picture of his corn and get a report back that says you know the the markings that are on his corn are us are a particular pest the same thing in brazil we're working on a disease set called citrus canker using artificial intelligence in order to help predict the risk of that disease working with abrafrutis who's one of the largest fruit organizations in the world to help farmers reduce the risk of their crops being affected by certain bacteria or certain diseases.

11:32Citrus canker is actually a bacteria, but it gets carried in the wind and can really damage oranges and lemons and other citrus crops. So it's just so exciting what we can do with it. We've developed a huge data set of photographs from farms around the world. We have data of every farmer telling us when they're planting, when they're harvesting their coffee, what chemicals they're using, if they're not using chemicals, if they're trying to grow completely organically, how are they managing that and how are they managing pests and we get great results about how do different practices work in the real world under real variables and real conditions and And so we take all of that data and we work with organizations.

12:29We're working with an organization, Colombia and Uganda now, around cattle and cattle management. And so that data can be made available to research organizations, to universities. We have a partnership with the Ocean Protocol, and we've run a couple data sharing initiatives with them. and we'll be making data available through the marketplace so that we can monetize that data for our farmers and for our customers. And then beyond that, anybody who comes on as a customer of Dimitra, if they're growing corn and we have corn data from around the world and through all of the other data that we've collected, we share that with them and that goes into the data set that feeds our artificial intelligence and helping them make better decisions for their particular circumstances?

13:27You know, I think, you know, for me personally, the biggest benefit I see here is really about the future. The amount of uncertainty that either, you know, an individual farmer, a commodities market, agricultural market, even consumers towards yields and ultimately prices. I mean, we're all very in tune now post-COVID with supply chain related inflation in food prices, et cetera. Better data, better analysis, increasing yields for as many individual farmers as possible. Essentially, it helps to eliminate a lot of that uncertainty and get better outcomes. So I think it's extremely prudent that technologies like these be implemented exactly like how you guys are doing it.

14:14So kudos to that. Can you talk a little bit about maybe that aspect of the data set in and of itself being a very valuable commodity? Because the majority of farmers are fairly low income, low scope. We're not talking huge industrial farmers here. The idea that they would have not only improved yields on site, but now an ability to take the methods and data practices and tokenize that or somehow commodify that for use. Can you speak a little bit about that and is that in the long-range plan? Yeah, so let me give you an example. We did an initial POC on a project in Bolivia. In that POC, Bolivia is known to grow quinoa.

15:00And we evaluated quinoa using all of these technologies, satellite and artificial intelligence, and came back in the POC and determined that we can increase a farmer's yield about 300%. And so now we're taking that to the next step. We're going live with 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 farms this year and see if we can replicate that across a much larger set of farms. We've signed some deals down there. We have a local university in a rural state or rural area of Bolivia, and they are doing a lot of our field work for us. So they'll go out and train the farmers on how to use the app, how to take the data coming out of the app and use that to improve their yield or reduce their costs or whatever each individual farmer's objective is.

15:55we teach Dimitra school so we go to the university and teach them how to do that and partner with the the ag students and some of the technology students because we need it we need that mix and and bring them in on how do they run a platform within the country in order to help the agricultural sector and we we're doing that all over the world we're doing that in 16 countries now and maybe we were more ambitious when we started thinking we'd be able to grow faster than that but you know we're pretty happy with getting it out and being used in in Brazil and Colombia and Bolivia and all over Africa and Southeast Asia so our growth has been phenomenal and And we're taking on each project crop at a time.

16:51So that's our strategy. We work with different subsets of farmers who work particularly with a crop. So perhaps a cooperative or a government that is trying to enhance the exports of a particular crop and move forward from there. Hey, everyone. We're going to take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back.

17:19That's excellent. You know, I think raising the yields of the farmers is awesome for them, of course, for them and their families. But I really am excited about this idea of the sustainability and being able to ensure consistent yields for longer periods of time, making sure they don't deplete the soil and have a situation where, you know, there's a checkmate scenario in the future. So I think the real value is that we'll have more clarity, more certainty and stability in the food supply as the planet grows. And these kinds of technologies can really assist them into not making the kinds of errors that have occurred in other places that lead to famines and et cetera.

18:02So it'll be particularly important with climate change related events and shocks to the global economy with things like a pandemic. having these tools in place now really provides us margin resiliency for the long term. I think we take it for granted here in the United States. We might get a little inconvenienced with higher prices at the supermarket, but for us, it's something we can tolerate. But in many places around the world, this is literally a life or death kind of situation and making sure that they manage their land properly and their cattle and their environment. So I think it's highly critical.

18:42Can you talk a little bit about maybe how some of Demetra's sales numbers or project numbers have increased, you know, year over year? Are you at liberty to talk about that? Yeah, so I mean, our sales two years ago were literally zero. And this year, we'll expect to be, you know, in that 20 to$30 million range. So we see that as quite positive. and you know from a growth perspective we signed up 16 major organizations actually 20 major organizations in 16 countries and and those organizations have about 20 million farmers within them so within each of those if you look at you know quinoa in bolivia for example stage one is just a handful of farms stage two is two thousand to three thousand farms and then we can scale it we've signed a contract recently with uh apro cafe in in honduras they have 115 000 coffee farms we're working through that scaling plan and it'll follow a similar scenario 60 or 100 farms several thousand farms and then tens of thousands of farms over uh over a five-year cycle and you have to remember that each one of these projects follows the crop seasons.

20:11So, you know, we may go sign up a deal with an Apro Cafe and you have a limited coffee season. So we're working with them throughout the season. And then your next stage of growth is six months away if your coffee season is about six months in that region before you can start onboarding the next group of farmers. And that's why we use the universities from a growth and knowledge perspective. They've been great. And the last university in the Philippines is working with our coffee farmers in the region there. You know, they've got, I think, 80 students now have been trained on our system and they go out a month at a time, 30 students at a time, and work day in, day out with thousands and thousands of coffee farmers.

20:59and spend a couple days teaching them how to use the app, come back a few weeks later, help answer questions. A lot with our app they can do offline. Some of the farmers don't have connectivity at their farm, so they have to go into a buying station where they drop their coffee every day or somewhere that offers them that connectivity. and that community and that expertise is really growing so you know and the last university we're working with three or four more groups in indonesia now and planning those and and it's quite interesting we literally go in and plant a seed with you know uh one group of farmers and And, you know, the original group of farmers for coffee was Solak Rajo, 3 ,500 farms.

21:55And that seed sprouts to other growing groups. And now we're talking tens of thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands of farmers over the next few years. So we see huge potential growth from that perspective. Yeah, it truly is an S-curve in terms of technological adoption. There's kind of a confluence of things all intersecting now. I mean, just to enable this process, you know, you had to have cell phones, for example, which are now ubiquitous in many countries where, you know, there just isn't fiber optic or cable type of Internet. Just a mobile phone in conjunction with blockchain technology, machine learning, satellite data, all of these technologies are converging now to the point where it's a useful product.

22:40And now that people are starting to see the benefits of it, that in and of itself compounds it through education. So I think that that's what makes me so optimistic about the future is this idea that this technological compounding is going to yield benefits for all of us, right? We can share the data together. We can learn from each other at scale. And this just wasn't really possible before. So, you know, I'm super excited about it. I'm very happy what you guys are doing with this. We've got a little bit of time left to maybe talk about the future. What do you guys see in the next six months to 12 months besides onboarding more farmers, more educations?

23:20But is there anything exciting that you're looking forward to? And maybe one more question is, how do you see this differentiation between the crypto markets as a small market cap ERC-20 token? I see incredible volatility, which is normal for that size. In the face of what I see as a secular growth in your company, how do you reconcile the two? Where do you see the future going there? And what do you see for the future of your company? Yeah, well, we love what's happening in the markets right now. You know, we've got some positive results with our token over the last three months or so. And that does create a lot of opportunities from us, from an investment perspective.

24:03We can do more with technology. We can onboard more farmers. So it creates a compounding effect for us. And then, you know, what we see in the next six months to a year is really the preparation for these regulations I talked about, the deforestation regulations. The EU has said, starting in 2024, there's seven at-risk commodities. And if you are selling those at-risk commodities to the EU and you have deforested since 2020, you will not be allowed to export or import them into the US after 2024. So it will change some of the world's largest commodities, wood, rubber, coffee, chocolate, beef, palm oil.

24:53So all of your makeups and things like that that use that and soy. And so what's happening now with the corporations is they're preparing for that. You can imagine any large food company that has hundreds of thousands or even millions of farms that they buy from, they now have to be able to assess their entire supply chain and determine in 2024 who are they allowed to buy from and who are now displaced because they have actively been deforesting the planet. So what we're seeing is a lot of the large corporations come on board now looking for ways to assess very large plots of land. I was on a call with a timber company a couple of days ago and they want to assess the entire southeast United States and the entire northwest United States.

25:50So we're talking millions and millions and millions of acres. and our deforestation app that you can see in the background here helps them do that. You know, we've built this so that somebody can create a geofence. We take the satellite report from 2020 and the most current satellite report. We do a comparison and we create, using artificial intelligence, a heat map that tells us what areas have been left status quo, what areas have been deforested, and what areas do they have new forest growing on. And we give a report that they can share with the EU and with their customers to show that they've increased the amount of forest on their property by 10 % or by a certain number of hectares.

26:43We bundle that all up in a compliance report. using AI, we evaluate that the crop was actually grown on that farm. So they can't fraudulently just say they've grown crop on that farm and show a report of an area that has not been deforested. In Brazil, for example, we evaluate the actual land registry. And we've got a couple contracts with two states in Brazil right now, where we can compare what a farmer claims is his or her property with what is actually registered. And then we take all of that, collect the critical data elements, and we write that the polygon. And we give the farmer a certificate that says that their farm has been evaluated on a certain date.

27:38it meets this criteria and then at that point they can share that with their customs broker or the importer of record in the EU and show that they comply. What we're finding now is a lot of the corporations who have a large number of farmers are looking to buy this service for their farmers. So as opposed to selling farmer to farmer, we're also selling to corporations. So we see that expanding around the world. And, you know, this is going to change the food supply chain every year consistently from now until maybe forever, but at least 2030, because that's what the pact says is going to happen.

28:23And the 141 top nations in the world have agreed to do this. So imagine, you know, Europe doesn't buy their chocolate from anywhere in Europe. They buy cocoa and it's coming from Africa and South America. and Southeast Asia, and now that's regulated. And your typical cocoa farmer has an acre or two acres or maybe 10 acres of land. So there's just huge, huge volumes of product. So beyond that, we see continued expansion in our platform. We built an animal genetics platform that is up and running in two nations now. We've got an agreement now that they're putting up to 5 million cows on the system over the next few years in South America.

29:14and using artificial intelligence and predictive data coming from the history of the parents and the history of the individual animal, we can predict with fair certainty how two animals mating will perform from a beef production perspective, a milk production perspective, and also identify a number of diseases that could be bred out of the food chain. So lots of exciting stuff happening there. And then we just launched a sponsorship program. And so investors who want to hold our token can hold the token for a year and pick one of our projects. And I think we have six projects now on the sponsorship program.

30:08And these are projects where we've gone in and either the government or the farming organization or an NGO doesn't have sufficient funds in order to fund the project. So we have a staking program where an individual can stake some tokens, stake$100 worth of tokens and provide access to the system for a farmer or for a large group of farmers. so loads of exciting things going on within our project right now and we're looking forward to more hey everyone we're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners we'll be right back to the real vision crypto daily briefing

30:55that's a that's amazing you know we hear a lot of lip service in the crypto community about banking the unbanked or bringing value to the rest of the world that is not highly financialized. But this to me is a project that is actually walking the talk, right? You guys are on the ground building a product that people can use to generate real value for themselves and others and helping develop sustainable economies, sustainable agriculture. So kudos to you. this is the way it should be done. And I'm hoping that we can have you back in another two years and do another check-in, hopefully even sooner to make sure that you're on track.

31:40I'd love to take a bunch of questions, if we can, from users. I'm sure there's people interested in hearing from you. All right, so first from Roger on our RV website, how does Dimitra prove that the data is correct at the time it's recorded on the blockchain? So we choose when we write the data to the blockchain based on a certain number of parameters. We know ranges of soil parameters that should exist. And the system will challenge if somebody enters data that's outside that range. We know if somebody tells us, and I'll give you a coffee example, if somebody gives us the soil pH and the soil pH is 4 and optimal is 6, And if we're going to do certain activities, if the farmer does those activities, we can see them via the satellite reports because we're going to get better NDVI, which is going to reflect the health of the plant.

32:45And so we know if the farmer is giving us information that's in the right ballpark, we also know that based on the activities that the farmer is doing and recording in the system, that we're producing a result, and the result is measurable through satellite reports, through IoT sensors, if the farmer's employing those IoT sensors. And then the AI will kick out anomalies. So if we have 10 ,000 farmers that are working on coffee, and 500 of them give us garbage information, it's not going to fit into the curve. They're going to be outliers. And those outliers may or may not be true, but we have enough other data that it offsets anybody that's potentially just trying to mess with the system.