The Buzz @ SWARM - Episode 3

About this episode

Aaron Magenheim co-founder of Grower’s Insight and Anthony Howcroft CEO at SWARM Engineering both talk about the work they do to help organizations optimize, modernize, and digitize business processes.

Transcript

Holly: Thanks for joining us today for episode three. Of The Buzz @SWARM podcast. Wait. What was that? Did we get an official name for our podcast? Yes, we did. Uh, first off huge thanks to everyone who helped by voting for their favorite name. you are now listening to The Buzz @SWARM.

New name. But same great content. So, you'll still hear us talking about how to solve big problems in the Agri-food value chain using AI data science and machine learning. I'm Holly self VP of marketing at SWARM Engineering. And today I'll be your co-host. If you're curious about optimizing modernizing or even digitizing the operational processes in your organization, then you are in for a double dose today.

We have Aaron Magenheim co-founder of Grower’s Insight and Anthony Howcroft CEO at SWARM Engineering, both talking about how they work to help you do just that. Optimize modernize and digitize your business processes. Hello gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Anthony: Hey, thanks, Holly. And thanks Aaron for joining us. I know we've been working together for a while now so, uh, I have a pretty good idea on some of the things you do, but I thought it'd be great to just explain what Grower’s Insight do.

Aaron: Thanks for having me. you know, Grower’s Insight. We do business process mapping, build workflows for food companies, ag companies’ different people in the agriculture value chain. We Go in with subject matter experts to understand how things are being done today.

Things as simple as how do you make an irrigation decision or how do you make a sales decision or harvest decision? Seem like simple things, but when you dig into there's a couple hundred different decisions that are made decision points through those processes. And there's lots of different people involved.

And so, as you're bringing. Digitalization into an organization and modernizing and growing those organizations, technology only works as good as the people that are involved. And we help agri-food businesses really move towards their goals.

Anthony: Excellent. And how did Grower’s Insight get founded? What made you start the company?

Aaron: So, it's been a long line. You can say since I was born of learning and uh, following opportunities my family owned an irrigation business in Salinas, California. That led me to. Start selling and working with different technologies.

In 2009, I went to the first Silicon Valley ag tech conference in 2014, met all these crazy VCs and Google people. And startups said, hey, I need to learn about what's going on here and, help push technologies forward. And so, I start a company called AgTech Insight and we do lots of consulting work on a broader basis focused on technology, but across the value chain, public, private, et cetera and have that bigger picture of technology and how it works in the ag and food industry, as we built that business over the last few years is about three, four years ago. Some of us started saying, how do we really get farmers, food companies? How do we get organizations to actually adopt this stuff and find business value in it? Instead of it just being a science experiment, let's try it.

Let's play with it. It gets siloed. Doesn't really get used or gets used by one or two people. How do we actually get better leverage of these technologies and usage across organizations. And so had a bunch of fun conversations with early adopters and leaders in the industry and, uh, boiled down to us, starting Grower’s Insight and even, three years ago, we thought we'd lead with let's help you build technology plans.

What we do today is 75, 80% of. Process development, improvement, optimization, and that type of stuff. Everybody's bombarded by technologies and work and just too many things to do. And so, we help organize things and help people understand, how things can run smoother.

How you can get more value from what you're doing today and the information and people that you have today, and then start looking at where you can leverage better technologies, newer technologies, and improve there. It's really just been, years of being in the industry and learning what works, what doesn't with different types of organizations around the globe.

And so, it's been it's just been a lifetime of learning opportunity and helping really make a difference. And I think that's one of the big things that's important for us is I grew up in an irrigation business if it didn't work right, or it didn't get done on time things died. it's really important to be able to have some impact. And that's really, what we're focused on is the business impact that technologies and just modernization can make.

Anthony: That's great. And I take it. I'm going to come back on the irrigation.

I've got a couple of questions for you on that, but I was going to say, given the name Grower’s Insight, I'm assuming that your customers typically the growers, but obviously with your background in Salinas Valley as well. Some of the almonds and fruits and nuts and so on, but.

I'm guessing that if you look at the farm to fork process, you must also be working with some of the distribution firms. I just wonder how far through that whole process you actually go and where your customers are concentrated.

Aaron: So, we started at calling Grower’s Insight because. That's where we thought we'd focus.

And I go, I know hundreds of growers and start talking with them. And as I talked with them, I started realizing, most of them they're maybe running a 50-million-dollar business, but they're saying, hey, you know, I'm still just a little farmer. I, generational farmer. I'm just a little guy.

I don't need strategy. You know, Things just go. And when I die, then someone will have to figure it out. I don't really care about operational succession planning and all that stuff. Today, our core clients are institutional investors.

They're vertically integrated. So, they own, handful of. Apple farms or cherry farms or corn. And they've bought the processing facility. They’ve bought a sales and marketing team. And so, they're vertically integrated growing through packing and shipping and sales.

And so that's our core clients. We have clients further down the supply chain that are processors that process, hundreds of different products and make things from salsas to pickles, to chopped salad. So, we do stuff on that side. We have clients on the trucking logistics side of things.

We're starting to work with. The different organizations, even outside of, that growing side into the input side we have some clients in the grocery side of things as well. So, we've built a process that works across the ecosystem.

A data driven process to help us understand quickly and efficiently where an organization's at where there's, some quick wins that we can get and where they want to move. We're working with tree nurseries; we're working with covered agriculture in different parts of the world.

It is somewhat grower focus, but most organizations are vertically integrated. We have farm management companies. You know that have insurance and real estate and things like that. I think a lot of it just comes from, we've figured out a secret sauce, to help organizations move forward.

Quickly find some quick wins, get people on the team and being able to move stuff forward and show the business value of what we do and how they can leverage the tools that they have.

Anthony: Interesting. And so, I am going to come back on the irrigation, there was a guy I met at a conference last week who had a really interesting quote, where he said that technology is just stuff.

We haven't figured out how to make it work yet. And he was saying that agriculture is just an earlier technology. And I was thinking about that in the context of irrigation. A few years ago, I was in Morocco, and we were at an Oasis in literally in the Sahara Desert. And I saw the technology that they used to create the Oasis.

So, the Oasis wasn't natural, it was manmade, and they had a whole series of Just bricks and things with a slight slope to basically do the irrigation. And it was quite astonishing looking at how a low-tech solution had produced this astonishing, bloom of plants in the middle of the desert.

 And I know one of our other advisors is an irrigation expert as well. He grew up working for a big irrigation firm and there's a whole bunch of technology these days involved in the sprayers and the pattern of spray and having that work remotely or at certain weather conditions, just interested as to your thought, as you said, irrigation, if it doesn't work things die, do you think irrigation is going to become more critical as water supplies dwindle based on climate change.

Aaron: I finally started reading a Cadillac desert, because people have been, telling me that for years and I've never read it. And so, I started listening to it because I, I don't seem to find time to read, but I do find time when I'm driving

so, you know, it's interesting to see how different cultures and how different people throughout the years have, changed landscapes and what was done in that Salt Lake City area a hundred, 150 years ago is amazing. And, understanding kind of the progress that we've been through to get to where we're at today.

 Is pretty amazing, we've been developing land and developing property that maybe didn't have the water or shouldn't have been developed. And with better irrigation technologies, you only need, a hundred gallons a minute from a well, you can drill a well dump it into.

Reservoir, put it on with micro sprinklers or, we used to flood irrigate trees and vines. And then we went to sprinklers. Then we went to micro sprinklers and now people are transitioning into drip. And if you go to Israel, they're actually burying that drip. 18 inches to two feet, which makes it even more efficient.

 We think that we've, hit some of the best that we can get in irrigation, but we can continuously improve. some people have soy moisture, sensors, different things like that out there, but they don't integrate them into their organization as well.

One person looks at it, they make a recommendation based off of that, or even the software makes a recommendation and they'll give that to their irrigator and their irrigator will carry it out, they think, but the reality is their irrigator keeps doing what they've been doing for the last 20 years, because they're the one who's on the spot for does the crop come out good or not?

And so, they're going to over water. Because that's what they've done. And there's interesting technologies that are able to give prescriptions that are able to push into, an, a remote-control software platform and actually carry out those prescriptions on their own. But there's a lot of opportunity.

Most growers that we work with that we've actually. Spent time and they've integrated processes, they're able to save 50 to 75% of their water and water is interesting, but it's still relatively cheap. When you look at fertilizer, because most, if you're running, especially in drip all your fertilizer is going through that for the most part.

So, you're saving money on fertilizer as well. So. There's a lot of opportunity. There's still a lot of growth to happen. And I guess the last thing I'll add is most companies want sensors and they wane know what's happening in the root zone of the plant.

That makes sense to manage the plant, but it doesn't make sense to manage your water fertilizer usage. And so, 12 years ago, when I started selling soil sensors, I said, we need to have a sensor, a foot below your root zone. So, we know, are we watering more than we should? And I had growers we're growing wine grapes that they'd watered 24 hours once every two weeks.

That's what they'd done for 30 years. And we looked at after four hours, they were already down. Five feet past their root zone. And so, they've just been wasting, millions of gallons of water and same thing with strawberries, so you really have to look at not just throwing the technology out there, but then using it to make better decisions, not just on the plant, but.

On, sustainability and on water usage. So, there's still a whole lot to learn. And a lot of opportunity to improve moving forward.

Anthony: That was really interesting insight, Aaron, I love it. I didn't know all of that about the water.

Aaron: So how do you see SWARM helping customers, in the industry as a whole? where do you see some of your best opportunities and where you're able to help clients.

Anthony: Well, it’s interesting what you were just describing because I think where we've come into the market is with a big data background.

So, there's large volumes of data out there that people are using to make decisions. And typically, that's been the classic analytic insights. say there's a problem in this field. Or we need to put more pallets on a truck or whatever it is. There's an insight that says this is something you need to do.

But what you were just describing there in the irrigation is as you start adding sensors, and as you start to get more information about what's actually happening, it really influences your decisions. And SWARM is there to help people make better decisions by applying some AI intelligence underneath that.

So, we are very much a cognitive platform. As opposed to pure AI and just to make the distinction very clear AI often just goes away and does something and says, here's the answer. What cognitive does is it works with people to support them and help them make their decisions. So, when you were describing, all of the various aspects about, how much water was going down to the roots and the fact you've got the fertilizer in the water as well.

Those are complex decisions and it's also based on the weather clearly and how much rain is coming and when you need to harvest and when someone can pick up the crop and all of these various different things or in the wine industry, obviously, there are critical times where the fruits are exactly the right point to harvest.

 SWARM is helping people make the best decisions with what is becoming an overwhelming wave of data. And as you increase the volume of data, in theory, it lets people make better decisions. But in practice, what often happens is they just get overwhelmed with too much information.

We had a customer who was, previously blending grains to make breakfast cereal. And they used to have five or six different measures. And the person doing the job would look at the five different measures for, 40 different silos of grain and make a choice. But suddenly if you.

Add in 20 additional factors about the grain and its origins and the beta glucan content and all of these various different things. That decision actually becomes much harder to make without some sort of assistance.

Using that additional wave of data that we're starting to see come in from sensors and satellite images and, GPS and on trucks and on workers, phones and so on. So that's really a high level. Our goal is to help people make better decisions. And the other thing I would say is we started off building an engine that could do that, and we thought we'd hand it across to customers and let them model out their problems.

What we discovered is that most customers are not data scientists or developers or data management gurus. So, we extended the product with a piece called the challenge modeler. And what that does is it lets a businessperson in straightforward language, just describe their problem.

And we then use that to map to an appropriate algorithm to solve the solution and just deliver it as a cloud-based portal. So, I think in some ways we think that's almost more important than the solution. There's a great quote by Einstein about if he had an hour to save the world, he'd spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem.

And I think what we are seeing is a standardized way of defining problems and comparing problem definitions as well is incredibly powerful. It actually helps you get better at solving problems. So, we are just rolling this piece of the product out and we're going to be giving it. For individual users completely free because we think there's something we can do there to help people just get better at defining and solving problems.

Aaron: I like that example. And that's one of the reasons, that I really like the approach that you guys have, years ago when I was selling all these sensors, I'd get to a point that we'd have 50, 60, 80 soil moisture sensors. In a field, each one of them would have, sensors at five or six different depths.

And you're really looking at a couple hundred sensors to make decisions. And what we found is even someone that was dedicated to looking at data and helping make decisions off of it, they could only manage maybe. 40 to 50 sensors and be able to get any heads or tails and make decisions out of them and make them useful.

And if you're looking at someone that's an irrigation manager at a ranch or an irrigator that you want to get involved, they don't have the time to spend hours looking at all these different depths and all these different sensors. And having ways that, that you can quickly understand where there's problems, where you need to do something and, what's okay as well as, making recommendations based off of, hey, I've watered this way for the last year.

We've gotten better at not pushing down, past our root zone and we're keeping, water and fertilizer in our root zone where we need it. Being able to use. The type of tool that you guys have to help make those suggestions, then it becomes a, hey, this makes sense.

I'm going to take that suggestion, pass it onto the guy or the system that executes. And then over time it becomes completely autonomous. And it's funny to me because so many people say that they have automatic irrigation systems. Just in the last year, there's been a couple of company partnerships that have been formed that allow some autonomous things to happen.

But their remote-control systems for the most part where someone's still looking at information, someone's still putting information into a controller and that controller is doing what a person tells them to. And so, I see you guys as being able to bridge that gap. How do you leverage the information that we have?

How do you get people to utilize? And believe in the prescriptions and the technology. And then the other thing I like is that there's plenty of companies that are just focused on irrigation. And so great. You can help me optimize my irrigation and gimme some prescriptions.

There's a number of companies that are focused on that. But as a business, my irrigation decisions are just one of hundreds that I have to make. And then we come to the point that. We have hundreds of different technologies that are trying to help us make different decisions. And that's the mess that the industry's in.

And so, you guys are able to work across many problems across the entire supply chain. So, when you look at, okay, let's bring these data sets together. And then, let's optimize, you're not having to work with a hundred different C. To get people on board and to get the relationships built and to get things working, you're able to work with one organization, start at one place, fix one problem, and then move to the next one. And the next one, and a couple years later, you're going to look. Back and you solve 30 different problems.

Anthony: Exactly. And that's a really interesting point because ultimately, we also don't see that all of the solutions will even be ours.

We're quite happy to help people just solve problems. And some solutions might be our solution engine, but some of them might be something we don't do at all. We saw a company doing field trials for. Crops the other day for row crops. And they got some great software to help with that. So, someone could define this is my problem.

And we could just pass that through as an opportunity for another company. So ultimately, we see ourselves as a way of helping people solve their problems in the agri-food supply chain, wherever that. Solution or wherever that problem is. And I think you, one of the things that's really critical that you triggered there, you sparked with what you were saying is I think agriculture is different from some other industries in that there are industries where you can, ex explore some stuff.

I can play around with some financial models, see if my stocks are selling or being bought more effectively with this different algorithm. But with growing, if I try a new fertilizer or new, microbial approach and all the crops die, then I'm out of business. So, I think it, it is really critical to have that trust in agriculture and to understand how the system is working and what's being done.

I think you can't just experiment and play with these things. You actually have to have the trust of the particularly of the growers, because as you said, these are often generational farmers and they only get, a couple of shots a year at a crop, and if it goes wrong, then they've just destroyed several generations of work.

So, it's really important to get the trust and to do that by opening up what you are doing and making sure that these decisions can be validated and proven as well.

Aaron: And that kind of leads into a, another piece. This whole supply chain has been built in a way that it's been built to maximize farming has been built to maximize.

We put as many inputs as we can to get the most yield that we can. We've centralized our supply chain and our distribution to make it the most direct route for trucks to make it centrally located to make it as big machine as we can. . . And you know what we've been seeing and COVID definitely pulled this out, I think for the general population to start understanding as well.

But there's a lot of disconnects in the chain to begin with. And we need to start moving from maximizing to optimizing because you may have a field that is just never going to get X bushels of corn because. Doesn't matter how much you put into it. It's just not going to do that because of the climate or because of the soil.

So instead of just dumping as much on as we can to try to maximize our yields, why don't we look at, hey, this piece of land is going to produce. X with limited inputs. And so, we need to start optimizing and I think that goes throughout the whole supply chain. Because now we're not looking at the most, we can get we're looking at dollars and cents sustainability logistics, people like all of the different things that are going into.

What make the most sense to optimize that piece. And I think as we look down the supply chain, it goes, just as well for processing is it's not necessarily about the most. It's about optimizing your processes and being able to. See where there's opportunity to improve and where the bottlenecks are in the chain.

And so maybe you can talk a little bit about how you see SWARM being able to navigate the continuously volatile food system and how do you guys look at optimizing things and looking at a complete system because you can, maximize one piece of the system, but it might slow down another piece.

And so how do you guys. Have that larger approach to, to look across an ecosystem rather than, a very specific problem that might cause five more.

Anthony: I think what you are talking about is clearly very common, not just in food, but in supply chains and a lot of other processes too.

And it’s essentially people optimize within their functional area. So, if I'm a grower, I'm obviously trying to maximize the yield on me. If I'm a transport guy I'm trying to put as much as I can on a truck and, minimize the miles I drive and so on. So, each person is optimizing for their individual functional area.

And of course, the problem is. What we want is we being, consumers and generally organizations as well. We want the end-to-end process to be optimized. So, we often use the term MOOP which is multi objective optimization problems. And really what that's, it is just a fancy way of saying the problem is everyone's got their individual targets in different areas.

And what you really want to do is get value across the whole chain. So, there's two approaches mathematically you can take to that. One is you can model the entire chain and build an algorithm to resolve the entire chain. That's very challenging from intellectual perspective from a political perspective, often even a cultural one in particularly when you're crossing multiple organizations.

And it's also often horrendously processor intensive when you're trying to actually resolve those problems. So, the alternative approach and the one we take is to break it down into pieces. What we do is we'll optimize each functional silo and then we'll put a layer above those individual optimizations, which will take the results from the others and optimize across them.

And from a math perspective, they call that a pareto frontier which is the best set of results you can get that don't damage the other functional areas. But nobody needs to worry about, pareto frontiers and the deep math and things. We've done that for people. What we're really doing is just layering on top so that we're getting a holistic end to end process for you.

And the nice thing as well about taking this approach of let's optimize each piece and then joining them together. Is the image. You can do it a piece at a time, so you don't have to do the classic thing we used to see with SAP in manufacturing, where you spend five years trying to roll out an SAP system across your entire organization and link everybody and your suppliers who don't want to share their data and all of those.

Challenges instead, we can do something in literally a month or two in one area and improve it. Then we can do the same in another area. And then what we do is join them. And sometimes to be very Frank about this, if you have area a and area B, if you are, supply chain and. You optimize each independently.

That's great. But the overall solution isn't going to be optimized when you optimize across a and B what you're really doing is you're getting a slightly suboptimal result in one of those areas, probably. So, there's some interesting aspects as to how you decide to do that, because let's say area a is the grower and area B is the retailer to take it in a very simple example.

So, if I'm maximizing value for the retailer, but not for the grower clearly the grower's not going to be very happy. So, what you need to do is actually agree what the measure is for the holistic process. And you can either agree that in advance and have the system SWARM will actually automatically work on a business role you've defined and agreed in advance.

So maybe the retailer and the grower agree what the goal is, or you can actually do it afterwards. So, you can say, here are five options and you can have someone maybe a team of the retailer and the grower choose which of those options is the best one. So, to put that in real terms, let's say I've got a crop of, I don't know, avocados and I could say, okay, they’re going to be perfectly ripe in five days’ time.

So, I could pick them now with the transportation. They'll be in your stores Mr. Retailer in the five days when they'll be perfectly ripe Or I could pick them in two days and put them in cold storage, or I could do these other things, but what price will you give me for those two different options?

And it may be that the retailer has got multiple avocado suppliers coming in. He's got a glut of ripe avocados. He must delay it. So, there's an interesting thing there about what price and timing to do. And it comes back to it's an optimization. If you can optimize across that instead of the farmer picking it and discovering it gets to lower price because there's a glut of ripe avocados and, the retailer just says, I don't need these right now.

And he going to give you. Whatever it is, X number of cents per fruit. What you want to do is actually have those coordinated so that you are maximizing the value for that particular grower and it's the right price for the retailer. So, it's a balance between these things and it's very tricky to do.

Particularly with large volumes of data and especially in an environment where things are being disrupted, where transportation is hard to get where, drivers are harder to come by or whether is impacting this. So having some software that can help automate this and say, Here's the best option for both sides, I think is a really good way of maximizing value for all the participants and also minimizing waste.

You don't want those avocados too many over ripe avocados in the store. I'm thinking of this because I was down in my local store the other day and every avocado I touch is just a mush. So, I think there's a lot we can do to reduce waste and increase value for both the retailer and the grower.

Aaron: To add onto that. I think the other interesting thing here is that you have these not only data silos, people, business silos within these businesses. And being able to, as we map out business, Processes and help people understand where they can improve.

And then you guys come in and start actually giving them tools to make their lives easier and optimize. It also helps facilitate conversations between different people in the farming organization. Harvest and growing talk only when they need to, because. Being on a schedule a grower and their packer or warehouse or processor, very rarely talk because they have a contract, and they have an agreement.

So, unless there's a problem, nobody's really talking. And there's a lot of information. Growers have that can be very valuable to a packer. I understand data privacy and data rights and that type of stuff. A lot of our clients are institutional investors, so they're all owned by the same organization, but they're still doing business like they're separate because they have their own P&Ls and people are, incentivized by profits. So being able to get people at the table and trading information then, we'll be able to build on it and optimize not only in ours, but across the chain.

My avocado. Super hard. I won't be able to eat them for a few days, so, maybe we could split them up and share.

But these are challenges that consumers are getting stronger, and retailers are starting to drive a bit more. And sending trucks across the country with product that's not any good or that's not optimized, or trucks are half full.

Those are all challenges that, that don't help the environment pricing or, anybody involved.

Anthony: That's true. I was thinking about the avocados again and sending things across the country, but clearly, it's also going international.

I think in super bowl this year, if I remember correctly, they had the Mexican growers advertising their avocados as opposed to the Californian growers. And I know, there's a lot of a lot. Fruit in particular that comes across the border from uh, LATAM. And I know you've been doing some work down there recently and done some trips.

It'd be fascinated to get your insights on what you think is happening in that market. And some of the trends that you think might influence north America, too.

Aaron: Absolutely. I've had the opportunity to travel around the globe. I've been to Asia 65 times. I've been to Israel and Europe and Latin America, 15 or so times.

And, out of everywhere that I've traveled and all the. Hundreds of people in organizations that I've worked with. I see the quickest uptake of technology and the quickest progress happening in Latin America right now. I think there's a couple things that are driving that for us, it's.

It's a focus area on business. I got slowed down with COVID the last couple of years, but we really see a lot of opportunity for LA not only to supply, the us and a bit of Europe as they have, but also Asia India other growing markets. And the things that are interesting to me is Brazil, I think has like for every person there's 1.7 smartphones.

They have more smartphones per capita than we do in the us. If you go to Latin America, nobody text messages. Everybody uses WhatsApp, they used Facebook. So, people are more involved in technology in their day to day lives. If I speak at an event to 500 people in Latin America, I'll have.

180 to a hundred people connect with me on LinkedIn, connect with me on Facebook, even more WhatsApp, et cetera. If I speak in an event in the us, maybe I have half a dozen people that will connect with me, maybe a dozen, but it's just built into their daily lives. My dad doesn't have Facebook, never has.

I think every person that I've ever met in LATAM has, these common tools. And it's built into their day to day lives. The average farmer through most of those LATAM countries are in their middle forties. Or even younger, whereas in the us, we're in our, late fifties as an average owner operator and you go to Japan, they're like 67, 68. I've hosted over a hundred groups from Latin America throughout the years. And most people from the us. Don't travel a whole bunch. We've been doing things well, and we've been ahead of the curve, but there's a lot of opportunity down there.

So, people think more business minded people with college education turning on and off valves and doing irrigation, which I don't know if I've ever met a college educated irrigator in the us, but maybe. I'd have to think about that, but it's just they look at things a bit different.

Another thing is they have. Some challenging political environments. In Argentina you have to be a businessperson first and a farmer second. If you don't, you harvest something, you sell it. You put that money in the bank in a month, it's gone down 10, 20% in inflation sometimes.

And so, you have to be a businessperson first in those countries and in the us, we still have the luxury of being a farmer first and business. Second. Anyways, lots of opportunities, lots of local technologies erupting and disrupting as well as. Companies from around the globe starting to see that LATAM is a really good opportunity.

Anthony: Yeah, that's really interesting. I do wonder if we are going to become more like LATAM in north America with the inflation and the various disruptive factors starting to hit the market here too, but maybe that's a conversation for another day. I think one thing I was going to ask you about is I often hear.

How different the farms are. And in terms of, simply the scale, in that they seem to be so much larger on average and therefore they seem to have adopted, for example, sensor technology in the fields faster than in America, because the scale is much larger. What's your thought on that?

Aaron: So, it's definitely interesting. And it depends on your crops. I have a good friend who is, who founded an ag tech company in Brazil and, broad acre crops. And I said, when are you going to come to the us? He goes, how are you kidding? I, my average farm is 25 to 30,000 hectares.

50,000 acres and, there's only a. Full of those up in the us and they're scattered a lot of minor contiguous. As we maximize our opportunities and Brazil and Argentina, Paraguay, et cetera, we're going to go to, bread, basket, Ukraine Russia and expand there.

And then probably Africa after that. I think scale is one piece of it. There also becomes challenges with scale as well. But I think, it's really the business acumen and I've had lots of people tell me at different times through the years that, as us businesses in general, we count hundred-dollar bills and we're losing a hundred dollars bills falling through the floorboard of our tractor. When you go to these other countries, they say, we have to count pennies. We know where every penny goes. We know exactly where our costs are.

In order to stay in business, they have to do that. I think it's a mix between the size piece and They travel, and they learn.

Anthony: Are there any specific use cases you're seeing down there that were interesting or new to the ones you've seen in north America?

Aaron: So, I was in Querétaro. Mexico couple of months ago speaking at the green tech Americas event, which is a covered agriculture event.

And I was really impressed, and I thought it was interesting talking to people about why they make decisions to grow crops in certain areas. Traditionally, Salinas is where you grow berries and lettuce. The Pacific Northwest is where you grow cherries and apples.

Midwest is corn and beans. But because they are growing a lot of their higher value vegetables in somewhat controlled environment. They are able to grow them in a wider variety of locations. With logistics costs being as expensive as they are a lot of people are starting to build more greenhouses where land is a little bit more expensive. And it might be a little hotter up towards the us border. But it makes sense for them to build greenhouses, put millions of dollars of investment in those locations to reduce their longer-term logistics costs.

Anthony: I would say SWARM have the ability to model network optimization problems as well.

Which is exactly what you're describing, where should I site the new facility? And obviously there's a balance, because it's, an optimization about the costs of the labor force. The power the water and so on, and the transportation costs, and you've got that both from raw materials coming in and finished good going out.

So, we do, have that as a classic optimization problem. We've got that in the tool. We also do some network optimization on which products to do it in which facilities. So, you may have, four different facilities, which one should you grow? Which crop in, for example or if it's a manufacturing, which facilities should produce which product lines and that actually can vary throughout the year or with disruption too.

So that's an ongoing optimization. So, we've done a couple of those projects and we've got the templates for those set up. And we also have an advisor who used to do that. For, Anheuser-Busch and Monsanto on our team too. So, if anyone has specific problems around that, that's something we're very familiar with.

So, look, I know we're nearly out on time. I was going to ask you about what you are currently reading, and I know you mentioned the Cadillac desert earlier, so I don’t know if you've finished that and your journeys around or whether there was anything else you'd recommend that you read in the last year or so.

Aaron: So, I'm also listening to tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. It's hard to digest. But it's, an aggregation. Hundreds of different podcasts and conversations that he's had.

So, it's really interesting because he has, just a wide variety of people on there. Talking about anything from health to business to family, et cetera. So, I'm in the middle of both of those kinds of switching from one to the other, but both of them are really interesting and in line with a lot of the things that that I like to think.

Anthony: That sounds great. I have to say I do have a book called food five zero that I was given the other day that I keep intending to get in and start reading, but I haven't had a chance to look at that yet. But it looks like I have some interesting insights from the grower’s perspective, so that's something I'd love to read more about.

If you've got any of the recommendations on books you think will be good from that angle?

Aaron: So, I don't typically read much about the grower side of things, but I've read a team of teams. Is something that we recommend to every single one of our clients, because it helps people understand how organizations are working differently and just a great book about how your business is today. The untethered soul is super interesting to dive into how and why your mind and other people's minds make decisions.

And so that's another one by Michael singer, he's got a few great books. If you want to dive into understanding why and how people do things again, very business focused. Just helping with the change management and the changes that are happening in our industry and the last short one that my kids enjoyed as well was who moved my cheese.

Another one that we recommend to all of our clients, because these are the types of things that happen today. And which mouse are you going to be? And how you build your business moving forward.

Anthony: It's funny. You should mention that my wife reread that one. Only the last couple of weeks.

So, we were discussing that book. I haven't talked about that book for a while, but it's very interesting book. And it sounds to me like with the experience, the knowledge you've got from growing, maybe you should be writing one Aaron rather than just reading them. We should look forward to Aaron's Grower’s Insight book to come out in the next year or.

Aaron: I've thought about it. One of these days right now, I just do short articles. I enjoy those here and there, but there's a lot to learn. There's a lot of opportunity. Really appreciate the conversation today and the work that you guys are doing to move the industry forward.

Anthony: Thanks, Aaron. It's been great having you on the show and look forward to talking again soon.

Aaron: Thanks a lot, Anthony.

Holly: Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Aaron. And that concludes episode three of The Buzz @SWARM podcast. Thanks for listening. And if you'd like to get in touch or send us a message, you can always find us on LinkedIn, or if you're feeling a little more formal. Uh, you can fill out the contact us form on our website www.swarm.engineering. And upcoming we have some great guests lined up for future shows that you do not want to miss so make sure you subscribe to the podcast to get all updates for our future shows thanks again and see you next time