Modern Agriculture & Ceres Imaging with CEO Ramsey Masri

Ramsey Masri, the CEO of Ceres Imaging, discussed the company's role in revolutionizing modern agriculture through the use of data and technology. Ceres Imaging was born out of Stanford University and aims to simplify and streamline the everyday job of farmers by synthesizing complex data into actionable insights. Masri emphasized the importance of data extraction and aggregation, as it allows farmers to make informed decisions by providing them with a comprehensive view of their crops. Ceres's technology focuses on capturing high-resolution images of crops, enabling farmers to gain a deeper understanding of their fields and make more precise decisions. Masri also discussed the potential of Ceres Imaging to impact the financial services sector by creating a dataset that helps banks assess the risk profile of farmers.

• 🌱 Data and Technology Revolution: Ramsey Masri discussed how Ceres Imaging is at the forefront of the data and technology revolution in agriculture, simplifying farmers' tasks and providing them with actionable insights.
• 📊 Importance of Data Synthesis: Masri emphasized the significance of synthesizing complex agricultural data into a single view. This enables farmers to extract meaningful insights from the data, leading to informed decision-making and improved crop management.
• 📸 High-resolution Imaging: Ceres Imaging's technology focuses on capturing high-resolution images of crops, allowing farmers to obtain a detailed understanding of their fields. This precise data empowers farmers to make better decisions regarding yield improvement and crop health.
• 💡 Potential Impact on Financial Services: Masri highlighted the potential of Ceres Imaging's dataset to impact the financial services sector. By providing banks with valuable risk assessment information, Ceres Imaging can contribute to better financial services for farmers, enabling them to access loans and insurance more efficiently.

Meet Ramsey

Ramsey Masri is the CEO of Ceres Imaging, a leading company in the agricultural technology sector. With over 30 years of experience in the tech industry, Masri has been instrumental in driving innovation and revolutionizing data-driven solutions for the agricultural sector. Under his leadership, Ceres Imaging has become a pioneer in high-resolution imaging, enabling farmers to monitor crop health, optimize irrigation, and enhance overall yield. Masri's commitment to synthesizing complex agricultural data into user-friendly platforms has empowered farmers to make informed decisions and maximize their productivity. With his extensive background in tech and his unwavering dedication to revolutionizing agriculture, Ramsey Masri continues to shape the future of farming by spearheading innovations that empower farmers and foster sustainable agricultural practices.

Transcript

00:00
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to Liquid Assets, where we talk about the business of water. My name is Ravi Kurani, and I'm your host. Today we have an amazing guest. We have the CEO of Ceres Imaging Ramsey.

00:11
Ramsey Masri
Hi there. I'm Ramsey. Masri. I'm the CEO of Ceres Imaging. We're based here in Oakland, California. And our mission statement is to help farmers and growers deliver healthier, more bountiful foods while you using less water, chemical and fertilizer to do so. And the goal there is an ever-growing and hungrier world.

00:33
Ravi Kurani
Tell us a little bit about you, a little bit about Siri and kind of your story.

00:38
Ramsey Masri
Ravi, thanks so much, and I really appreciate being with you today. So good afternoon. So thanks so much for having me on. And I want to talk to you a little bit about Ceres Imaging, what we're up to and what we've been up to for the better part of the last ten years. Ceres itself was born out of Stanford University and graduate student there. Ushwin. And Ushwin created really as a tool and a focus to make the world a more sustainable and healthy place. His first focus was on water, and living in California is very focused on the California farmer and how we can use less water while still delivering healthy, more bountiful food to market without using so much of that precious resource along the way. So over the last ten years, the company has enjoyed some great success, and we've expanded beyond just looking after water.

01:36
Ramsey Masri
We also help farmers and growers manage their chemical and fertilizer utilization as well. And where the original crops started, with a focus around almonds, we now support over 40 different crop types. We help farmers over four different continents. And we have 35 million acres of land surveyed and under management right now, which is super exciting. Where the world is going is no surprise, right? 10 billion people are due to be inhabiting the world by 2050. The amount of arable land is only shrinking, not growing, due to changes in climate. So we need to be more resourceful in how we go about farming and growing healthier foods while simultaneously not using more water, more chemicals, and more fertilizer to do so. So that's just from a human standpoint. And of course, the cost of goods, right, the cost of fertilizer and chemicals has quadrupled in the last couple of years, largely due to the conflict in the Ukraine and Russia that's really harming the global economy there.

02:50
Ramsey Masri
And then also there's a heavy pressure from the consumer segment to really get more nutritious foods on the storeshells. People don't want synthetic food. They do not want to feed their children synthetic things. So there's a lot of pressure there from all sides to do the right thing.

03:11
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. That's super inspiring. I mean, that 35 million acres number in itself is just awesome. To go from the California nut farms to four continents and 35 million acres. That's awesome. I remember actually meeting Ashwin, oh, my gosh, I think it was eight or nine years ago when were at Imagine H 20. And it was just I remember he was like, we're going to take pictures of crops and we'll tell you what happens. And I'm like, how does that make sense? So how does it make sense for the audience? Can you kind of walk us through what the technology of Ceres is?

03:45
Ramsey Masri
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And it does make sense. At the core of who Ceres is we are a data and analytics company with a specialty focus in agriculture. And the way we source that information is from a proprietary set of cameras that we affix to light aircraft and overfly crops. So over the last 10, 20, 30 years, you had satellites which can do a really good job on wide areas, and you can pull up a lot of information. But if you want deeply granular information sourced very quickly and very accurately, you need a different tool. There's also ground based sensors, but they have the inverse problem of satellites. They tend to be very focused on maybe a 1 meter diameter or up to like five meter diameter of understanding. And they're expensive and they require maintenance, things like that. So if you want a very efficient, very fast, very accurate, that's really our value proposition in the market.

04:49
Ramsey Masri
So because the system was designed to understand not only a farm or a field, but we can see all the way down to 10, we really understand the AI and the product, understands what plant it is, its health, its vigor. It can delineate between plant, weed and soil. We understand soil composition. So we have the full gamut of agronomic, understanding and capability in addition to our keen insight into water utilization or chemical or fertilizer utilization. And because we can see with computer vision, our ability to detect any anomalies weeks before the human eye or other sensors can helps our farmers and growers take proactive measures to ensure that they still get an optimal yield to market at the end of season. And as you're probably aware, making a light touch early in the growing season helps mitigate the need for a drastic move later on in your growing season when you realize you have a problem of foot.

05:59
Ramsey Masri
I grew grapes in California for 19 years, and a week or two without water, if there's a problem, can have a 20% to 30% negative impact on yield. It's pretty dire. And then you get into a situation where you have to flood the field or drown your vineyard to resuscitate it, which runs totally counter to the need to reduce water or be more sustainable in your farming practices. So that's really how we bring our science to bear in practical ways.

06:34
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. That's really interesting to hear. And it's funny that you say that yourself also used to grow greats. I've seen this story with CEOs and founders that if you get somebody that doesn't understand the product or has not seen the problem firsthand, it's just such a difficult place for that founder to actually figure out how to solve that issue.

06:55
Ramsey Masri
Yeah, for sure. And I had the pleasure of growing up around corn, cotton, potatoes as well. I grew up in South America and Peru, and I was able to see that firsthand. Those were old techniques. That was a flood irrigation. They divert water into the field and just drown it. Right. But we've come a long way. Look, my day job for the better part of 30 years was working in tech. So I've been in and around data and data analytics for the majority of my life. Even my last company was also very mission driven, focused on making roads safer by leveraging data and analytics. And we did so through the use of mobile phones. So we ended up tracking 65 million drivers and over 3 billion mile. And we use that information to make recommendations to people of, hey, drive slower, or take that, turn slower, things like that.

07:52
Ramsey Masri
Or help parents keep track of their kids and make sure they weren't getting themselves in trouble. So very analogous past where that data set drove the betterment of humanity or added value to the safety and well being of humanity. This is a much better story. Right. It's Ceres. We're really looking at helping people better fed, and it's happening all over the world. So it's a delightful place to be right now, actually.

08:23
Ravi Kurani
I want touch on something you said a second ago of in both Ceres and your previous company's and drive. Right. Is that what you're referring to?

08:31
Ramsey Masri
Exactly.

08:33
Ravi Kurani
There's this kind of idea of generating information or almost extracting information that otherwise wasn't available and then basically clumping that all together and then drawing insights from them to give the users of that data, be it a driver or be it a farmer, better ways to actually do the job that they're doing.

08:51
Ramsey Masri
Right. Just growing or driving. Yeah, so there's a couple of pieces to that. So if you don't mind, I'll riff on that a little bit.

08:57
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.

08:58
Ramsey Masri
Extracting data has never really been a challenge, necessarily. There's this great statement. It's not great, but there is a statement. They say farmers don't buy technology. That's not true. That's absolutely not true. If you look at the sophistication of things that actually are happening on a farm in any given day, they're very technical. Whether it's the complexity of driving a modern tractor or a combine or looking up weather or rain information, there's a lot of things the modern farmer needs to look after. What the farmer doesn't want to do, though, is become their own system integrator. There's some amazing pieces of technology out there right now. Right. But they're very much a point solution, and in many ways, they're a feature masquerading as a company. And for a farmer to really draw insight from them, they would have to lump six, seven, eight different pieces of technology together and then aggregate that into a single view.

10:02
Ramsey Masri
I don't do that on my own iPhone. Right. So why should we expect them to do it as well? They're people, too. So I think our value has been really to synthesize all that data. So it's not only our first party data that we source through our camera system, but we pull in field data, field IoT data, weather data, yield data, legacy satellite data, and we munge that all together in our back end. And then our algorithms, our AI plays over that data and does recommendations and insights and learnings from the data, and then it presents it in a very simple and joyful way. Right? They're colored reports. It's very specific. You can see it on your desktop. You can see it on your tablet. You can see it on your mobile phone. And it's very intuitive of what's happening there. So we're trying to simplify the farmers everyday job into actionable things by taking the complexity of all that data and just surfacing the elements that are germane to that farmer right then right there, by their specific crop or their specific ask.

11:13
Ramsey Masri
And that's part of the complexity that's the nature of technology is simplifying it to make it intuitive and usable. Like apple, right? Apple's done an amazing job. Things like that.

11:29
Ravi Kurani
Beautiful. I love that phrase of it's a feature masquerading as a company. I want to kind of double click on your background a little bit. I didn't know that you were born or raised down in South America. Kind of two questions. One, what was it like? What's the dichotomy of the work that you used to do on the crops that you had down in South America? And kind of, how is Ceres changing that? And then secondarily, I just love to kind of see is there any through lines? I know the history is always a very jagged curve. And I mean, people are like, the thing I studied in high school or college is never what I'm actually working on now. But hindsight 2020, if you were to kind of say these particular parts end up actually showing up in today, what would those be? Those are kind of two very simple questions.

12:23
Ramsey Masri
Yeah, I'm a history major, and you can see what that I'm really applying that in my everyday life, especially going to detect. But look, growing up in that region, the world gave me an appreciation for a wide variety of things. It wasn't just crop. It was sort of crop and community. Right. And living in Napa for the better part of 20 years and growing up there also gave me a good sense of community. And we spend a lot of time not only delivering amazing agronomic insights and Ceres and being great partners for the stewards of the earth who are looking to reduce their utilization of water, chemical and fertilizer. But we're really trying to better friends and partners with the communities as well. And we really love some of the partnerships that we've developed with some of the bigger growers in the world right now.

13:24
Ramsey Masri
And part of their sustainability issues aren't just lowering the costs or lowering the amounts of utilization of the inputs, but they really care a lot about how are we going to help our growers and farmers, especially the smaller ones. So we're working with a pretty large consumer packaged goods company out of Mexico as an example. They're a $22 billion business. They own everything from the farm field to the bakery. But their program is really centered around how do we help these farming communities participate in the modern world but not expose them to high risk of chemical or bankrupt them by having forcing them to pay lots of money to buy all these inputs so they can make a subsistence living. And I just love that change or that mindset which says, look, I'm a big grower, but I still care about the small farmer who's growing potatoes for us as an example.

14:26
Ramsey Masri
And so that's very analogous to how I grew up because when I grew up, our farm was very close knit, right? We had a school, we had the well, we had our own power generation. I mean, were totally independent and off the grid, but we made an effort to help the whole town that we worked in and I love that continuation of that community. Now all we're doing is we're bringing technology, more technology to bear to help everyone else. It's interesting someone shared a stat with me, and here in the US in particular, but I also think it's a worldwide statistic as well, which was 20 years ago, three out of four kids stayed on the farm. Ten years ago, two out of four kids stayed on the farm and now one out of four kids stays on the farm. Right. And she's got to manage the same farming operation that her father and grandfather did with their brothers and sisters.

15:32
Ramsey Masri
Now all of a sudden you have one person who's totally responsible for everything. So what can they do? They need to leverage technology. Now, the good thing is that generation, the current generation, are tech aware. They grew up as digital natives and they really understand the power of technology. So they're using that to grow better crops, get to market in more efficient way, really understanding having that one to many relationship with their farm equipment and capabilities.

16:09
Ravi Kurani
That's really interesting. That makes a complete amount of sense now, right? If your grandfather had three out of four, you had three out of four people that were on the farm doing the same work. Now you have one. I mean, it makes complete sense. You need technology to augment or supplement what you're doing.

16:26
Ramsey Masri
Absolutely.

16:27
Ravi Kurani
And I also really love that community aspect, too. I used to work india, and I remember a lot of the smaller farmers india with, like, Amal, for example, which is a large, really large milk brand. They have thousands, tens of thousands of local small farmers that will have one to three cows, that will have this whole bottom up approach of actually getting goods from the smaller farmers up to the kind of larger distribution houses. But that's super inspiring to hear that Ceres is not just this technology company. Like you said, farmers just don't want to buy technology. They have this one out of four problems that they're trying to solve. And you guys are helping them get that extra step to augment those other two people that they now don't have.

17:08
Ramsey Masri
Yeah, absolutely. And look, there's a lot of really big companies. We work a lot with the AG financial services communities. So think AG lending, AG insuring, and they're trying to help out too. And they have some amazing programs. We're working with a big bank insurer in Africa as an example. So obviously, if you're a small farmer, sort of analogous to your India dairy experience, which is if you're a small farmer, it's very difficult for you to afford seed chemical fertilizer to grow well, right. If you're only farming 3410 hectares, you have no leverage. So what this bank is doing, and they're an awesome group of people, is they're creating village loan programs. So basically, it's one super loan for all the farmers in the village to participate in. And then with that power of the bigger volume, they actually then have negotiating leverage for buying seed in bulk, buying fertilizer in bulk, and so forth.

18:19
Ramsey Masri
And we're starting to see a lot more of that. So we're spending a lot more time with those bigger businesses like those big AG finance or AG insurance companies to help them facilitate that type of behavior. So, again, it's a really delightful time in civilization where you have this heightened awareness of folks, we got to do something. Right. And it really started around water. Water was sort of the genesis of the idea of, like, this is a problem, but from there has spawned an awareness of, like, there's the different categories of problems that are all still related to it in and around farming. But of course, water is top of mind for everything because it's the most acute one.

19:04
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it's actually funny you say that. I just had an interview with someone from the USAID yesterday that was doing financing for actually taking off premise water from what they would have wells that might be 3 away and not necessarily bringing it in the home as kind of you and I would have where we turn our tap on, but something that's within a five minute walk. Right, because a big problem for a lot of women and girls are they have to end up walking multiple kilometers to bring this water back. But finance actually popped up a ton during that conversation because the USAID are using local banks instead of this sort of, hey, we're going to drill and leave to how do we take local banks to actually do this? Sort of bond system that we have in California, for example, and pool together capital so we can actually then put the infrastructure and then pay it back via taxes.

19:56
Ravi Kurani
But it sounds really similar from that standpoint with the actual bank doing that for the agricultural side.

20:01
Ramsey Masri
Yeah, absolutely. And look, at the end of the day, without the financial institution structure in place, farming doesn't happen, right, because the capital outlay not just for the original land acquisition, but the annual operating costs are steep. Right? So it's buying the seed, it's renting the equipment to plant with, again, fertilizers and chemicals, and then the harvesting costs as well. And most farming operations cannot afford to purchase all these equipment, so they have to rent it, but they need capital to do so. So having that capital structure in place is absolutely necessary. But where we're helping is where we can help. If you're a great steward of the Earth, right, and you're a farmer and you're doing everything right, shouldn't you get preferential rates for your loan? Shouldn't you get preferential rates on your insurance because you're less of a risk? Because you're demonstrating that you're doing everything right?

21:06
Ramsey Masri
And I think that's a really important thing. Rather than just having sort of a general policy, the people are doing things better using less water and so forth. They should be rewarded with better rates. And for the banks, they want to source that type of risk, preferred risk, as they call it, of, hey, there's less chance of these guys getting it wrong because they're paying such good attention to what they're doing in their farm fields.

21:37
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. So if I understand this correctly, Ceres imaging is helping basically build a data set such that then banks can see if this farmer has preferred risk or they're more or less risky from a.

21:50
Ramsey Masri
Financial one of the key ingredients in any banking or insurance operation is looking at risk profiles, right? And those risk profiles, as you're aware, they're sort of ten years retrospective of all these different attributes that are going on. Because we've been in business for ten years, and because we've sourced a very clean, high fidelity set of data of our own, and because we've taken third party data along the way, we have a really composite, 360 degree view of what's transpiring at the field level and all actuaries inside banks and insurance companies like Heterogeneous. Data that's been collected for a very long time. At least ten years. So rather than, in addition, just also helping the farmer with deep agronomic insights, we're sharing that data set. We're sharing that data set with insurance and banks so they can have a more granular understanding of what's happening with particular farms.

22:55
Ramsey Masri
And if everything is going right, it's a great way to get the farmer alone. And then throughout the growing season, because of that ability to see with computer vision, because we can detect things weeks before a problem emerges and take some sort of proactive measure and help the farmer realize the optimum yield. At the end of the season, that takes risk out of the insurance company. That takes risk out of the bank. But it also provides benefit to the farmer and the grower as well, so they can realize that, hey, something's happening over in this corner. I need to address it now. Fix it so they make their money at the end of the year so everybody benefits in that closed loop ecosystem.

23:41
Ravi Kurani
That's super cool. It reminds me of you guys are building a FICO system instead of as we would to get our mortgages, you're building it for farmers. We have this extra data set. You guys are the experian of farmers.

23:55
Ramsey Masri
The financial services sector in AG is sort of one of the last sort of analog worlds. And they know it. They know they need to evolve towards a digital presence and a digital future, right? And that's sort of the opportunity here for Ceres imaging is to take all that great understanding and help out the next layer, the adjacent area community, which is that the financial services sector. But oddly enough, or maybe not so odd in doing all of this it is actually also helping the sustainability aspects of farming and operations. Because by being more prescriptive in how inputs are utilized at the farm level we're able to help the farmer use less and as a consequence, have a gentler touch in and around the farms and the crops. Which is great as well, because that's also a big mandate from the consumer. But also, you know, farmers want to do it too.

25:01
Ramsey Masri
You know, good regenerative farming practices are great for fields, they're great for crops and helps promote soil health and creating environments that lend themselves to better crops over many years.

25:17
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, I think if you just mathematically look at it right, instead of making changes week over week or month over month, if you get more granular data that's on a daily basis or per minute or per half day, the control system, the Iterative loop becomes a lot quicker such that you can basically decrease your waste there. Totally. I wanted touch one thing, actually on something you said on the finance portion. What is the analog today? I mean, I totally get the Ceres imaging part, but how are farmers doing it? Sand Ceres, right?

25:47
Ramsey Masri
Ten years ago, ten years ago and probably earlier this morning in some beautiful field in the Midwest, somebody was driving around their field in a truck and taking a look at the crop. If there was a hailstorm last night, somebody was driving around the field in the truck. Maybe they flew a drone up in the corner of the field to see what happened. But that's imprecise science. It's slow and it takes a while to get to. We actually worked with a big grower in Florida after Hurricane Ian. They had 10,000 acres of citrus orange, and the fields were so flooded they couldn't get the sort of men and quads driving up and down rows with clickers, counting how many trees were damaged. So we overflowed that. Oh my gosh. 72 hours later, were able to produce a report that showed exactly how many trees they had lost.

26:43
Ramsey Masri
It's like 92,000 and change, but we can count damaged trees as well. So were able to very quickly understand what happened. We're able to generate an exact report which was good for the grower because then they knew exactly what their damage was. They knew where the damage was and what areas they had to go replant. But then also the insurance company understood exactly what the impact was to them, right? So when they did their payout, they knew exactly how much to pay. So not only did it shorten the period of time where everybody learned what was going on, but it quickened the time that the insurance company was able to get cash to the farmer. And it also improved the insurance company's understanding of how much to pay so they didn't end up overpaying or underpaying their insured. And that's really important because, again, in today's world, not a lot of that data, is there?

27:44
Ramsey Masri
Some financial services companies are ahead of others, but the vast majority, 85%, are not. They're still using person and truck or maybe satellite or something like that. Again, very imprecise slow. And that's where we come in to help.

28:03
Ravi Kurani
That's super cool. That's awesome. I still go back to this FICO model and then you remind me of a Progressive. That the car's new model, right? They put that ODB connector inside the car. So now you're not paying for insurance on a monthly or yearly basis. You're paying on it on a per mile sort of thing. And you can do that in real time, which is now you're paying per day, which is really interesting and changing paradigm.

28:29
Ramsey Masri
Progressive was a customer of ours, my last company, for exactly that reason. Yeah.

28:35
Ravi Kurani
So here's some through lines.

28:38
Ramsey Masri
Absolutely. Look again, I had the privilege of enjoying the digital evolution revolution of private commercial auto insurance. And again, that was taking this amazing data set that Zendrive had and pointing it at a really big problem, right? So not only making roads safer, but also helping, if you're a great driver, shouldn't you get a better rate? So helping people save money along the way as well. And the same principle applies here, helping a very big and very important industry, financial services and AG, move into that next level, right? It has to happen right? We cannot continue to go the way we've been going for so long and still meet our food goals, our sustainability goals for the next generation. I got kids. I care a lot about them, and I want to give them a good world or a better world from what I have.

29:38
Ravi Kurani
Entirely. And I love the way that you also started off this podcast. We're going to be up to 10 billion people in this world and the farmers of the world, right, the stewards of the land that are making this food, and they're growing it. If cereus can basically help leapfrog or at least level up the financial side as well as the input side, we now end up in a much more sustainable world tomorrow than we did yesterday entirely.

30:02
Ramsey Masri
And it's all interconnected, right? So good economic insight, good sustainability practices, good information to AG lending, to AG insurance, they're all interconnected. You cannot divorce one for the other. And we're trying to help out that whole ecosystem, move forward in a uniform way using that same data. So we'll overfly a crop or overfly a field, and we understand exactly what's happening, and then we share that data out to all parties. So there's a lot of uniformity and commonality in that data that benefits all parties. And because we have a historical measure of it over ten years and, look, we farm every day as well, so we're always adding to those insights. And then it's leveraging those insights to say, hey, here's some better techniques and methods to improve yield, or here's some better techniques to improve the vigor and uniformity of the crop. And again, that same ecosystem benefits from all these insights.

31:08
Ramsey Masri
It's a ton of fun. Ravi, I got to tell you. The feel good factor comes for free. It's hard work. But with our expansion now in Latin America, with our expansion in Africa, with our expansion through, you know, Europe and Portugal and Spain, and of course, Australia and up through South Asia, we're present everywhere. And so we're farming every day. We're gathering data every day. And it's busy, but it's delightful. It's a real delight.

31:41
Ravi Kurani
That's amazing to hear. Thanks tom Ramsey, we're coming up on close to time. So I actually have two more questions that I usually ask people. The first one is you're obviously deep in the AG industry, deep in AG finance. What is like, one or two facts? You said this kind of three fourths to one fourth number of people that are on a farm. Is there a fact that you know that the rest of the world doesn't know from all this data that you're seeing, from things that farmers are doing? Anything that comes to mind?

32:10
Ramsey Masri
Yeah. The one thing is the ability for a farmer to be more efficient and to get better crop and yield is unbelievable. Right. So we have seen almost a 70% increase in farm yield. Optimization over the last 20 years. So that same farm is putting out a much more uniform crop. So that's not that they're pumping the ground full of nitrogen to boost the crop, quite the opposite. The advances in science, plant level science, biologicals and so forth, is absolutely stunning. So there was this big concern about genetically modified crops and people had, including me, right when I first heard about that 2030 years, I'm like the Frankenstein tomato or whatever those things are. Well, as it turns out, they're adding maybe a sugar molecule or something like that to the overall. But there's no negative impact on the human. It's quite a positive impact.

33:14
Ramsey Masri
So these are disease resistant, these are more efficient in their consumption of nutrients and water. So the plants that are actually growing now, and the fruits and the veg and the wheats and the corns and the soy that are making it to market are better on a multitude of levels, but they're also a lot kinder and gentler to the soil as well. We're also seeing all sorts of clever techniques by leveraging science where you can taper off water utilization, up potatoes by 20% now in the last weeks of the growing season to actually let them dry out, but it won't actually impact the yield of the farm. So it was really through the science and insight that we realized that, hey, you can actually reduce water without having a negative impact on crop. And it's all these insights and these insights are now being shared around the industry at the speed of the internet.

34:14
Ramsey Masri
So the information sharing is amazing. The plant science going into the ground is amazing. The ability for the machinery to extract the things from the ground, equally amazing. So the technical evolution revolution that's happening in the farm field right now is giving many who are close to it a sense of huge accomplishment of like, wow, we have come so far, and a sense of confidence that, yeah, you know what? By 2050 we're going to make it right. We're implementing these techniques, we're implementing these new methodologies. We're silencing our way to a better humanity, better fed, more nutritious. The ability to ship healthier foods around the country and around the world in non perishable containers that oh, by the way, are not an eco disaster with wrapper plastic. So there's all sorts of things that may go underappreciated that the AG community has been working on for a long time because look, the farmers of the world have been looking after the fields for a really long time.

35:24
Ramsey Masri
Some of the regenerative practices, low till, no till, crop rotation, things like that, many of them have been doing for decades. It is now becoming more common practice. So I think that's a really encouraging thing. And again, where you're also seeing some innovation in the space is why I made a comment about the bank in Africa helping aggregate loans on behalf of villages. You're also getting these big investment funds, like teacher unions and pension funds, who are investing in AG land, and they're buying up millions of acres, or at least hundreds of thousands of acres of AG land, and they're bundling that together again to get economies of scale. What's really delightful in a lot of those companies, Ravi, is they've mandated that a good percentage of their crops or their farming practices are sustainable and regenerative. And they're really pushing that initiative that, hey, wow, I'm going to invest millions into this consortium.

36:26
Ramsey Masri
But you have to ensure that 30, 40, 50% of your farming practices are sustainable and regenerative, or you're doing something else really beneficial, like setting aside 200,000 acres of forest land. And we want to know that you're doing that. So it's a really nice social conscience going into these investments. It's a really nice social conscience that when they do make an investment, they do buy a family farm, that they keep that farm family on the farm to allow them to continue farming. But it's structured in a way that those farmers, because farmers can now participate in the global community, they're not disadvantaged by just being a small private farm. They now operate with the power of the collective.

37:14
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, super inspiring. That's awesome. What actually comes to mind is my buddy Zach Stein is actually creating a more sustainable 401K. He's looking very similar. Like you said, 30, 40, 50% of your portfolio has to be done through sustainable practices. I mean, it'd be awesome to get those assets put into his carbon collective 401K portfolio. I think that'd be I'm happy to.

37:39
Ramsey Masri
Be really interested folks who should look at who, in my humble opinion, are doing it, right?

37:47
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, awesome. I'll definitely connect you guys after the show. It'd be great to actually hear.

37:52
Ramsey Masri
Cool.

37:52
Ravi Kurani
So for the last question that I have, is there a book or a show or whatever it is that's kind of your one book that you keep on your bookshelf, that you recommend to everybody, that's kind of changed your outlook, given you a bit of the overview effect, anything that comes to mind, necessarily.

38:08
Ramsey Masri
A book, it's the community. I must say, while I grew up around farms and living in Napa, spent a lot of time around farmers, the fact that I'm interacting with them every day right now is probably the most amazing experience. Right. Because hardworking folks with truly a compassionate sense for not only their families and their communities, but the world as a whole, it's that community. So I would encourage people, if you have a curiosity, look at what's going on in modern agriculture and pay attention. These people are feeding you and look into what they're up to, and you'll be inspired by their motivations in life, not just their work ethic, but really their outlook and what they do seven days a week. And for me, I draw a lot of strength and inspiration from this group of people, and I just want to measure up to their level, right?

39:12
Ramsey Masri
I want to work and deliver to their expectations, because I see them doing that every day, and they harbor no malice. They have joy in their hearts, and it's a pleasure being in this world.

39:29
Ravi Kurani
That's beautiful. That's awesome. Ramsey, that's a perfect end to this podcast.

39:34
Ramsey Masri
Thank.

39:35
Ravi Kurani
Thanks a ton for yeah, definitely. So that's it for today's episode on Liquid Assets. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcast. Ramsey, thanks a ton. This was absolutely amazing. Thank you.

39:48
Ramsey Masri
So good for inviting me.