foreign good morning everyone and thank you all for being here and thank you to John Ireland from ntp Technologies who's going to present to us today and has the courage and grit to put up with the suggestions and questions that people will pose during the meeting luckily it's a benevolent group and a bright group so the beauty is it's recorded John you get a copy of it and therefore you barely have to listen when people make suggestions because it's all recorded and you'll be able to digest it later but everyone thank you for being here I'm sure some will continue to join one million cups is all about caffeinating entrepreneurs and promoting entrepreneurship education opportunity so that people can come and exchange ideas there's no risk because it's your content and it stays here even though we do make it public in all of our presenters are comfortable with that hey check in on the mobile app and if the mobile app isn't working please check in on the website to register uh the 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in their business to improve their profits to extend and grow their profits and to subsequently create sustainability in their business if you don't have the profits you won't have a business for one and portnoid the profit planner thank you so much to both guys our virtual meetings yes that you use hand icons and mute yourself and we'll eventually get you a q a after uh John's presentation and uh I think you all understand this page so we can move on next page please great ah you know it's really important and most of us don't really think that it could ever be us but in fact some of us could easily insult a presenter by the way we phrase something so first certainly introduce yourself in the chat if you haven't already but to the main point don't tell the presenter you disagree with them or try to um one-up them okay think about starting with the what word in your question as opposed to why makes people less defensive but also just read the bullets and get the point that we want to be supportive of the presenter and not in any way offend the presenter next day uh slide please I think it's this and John will begin sharing right uh John Ireland ntp Technologies thank you so much please welcome and the floor is yours thank you very much I appreciate it um thanks for everybody being here um not to worry uh I'm originally from New York specifically Long Island so I have pretty thick skin when it comes to people making comments about stuff so uh just uh be prepared to for me to fight back though I think that's from from my youth anyway um thanks for again for everybody for for having me um we're going to talk about something kind of kind of different um it's a it's a pretty big scale issue that's happening all over the world and uh it's about fertilizer so there's eight billion people in the world soon to be nine billion people somewhere around 2035. more people more food more fertilizing unfortunately synthetic fertilizer negatively impacts our air Soil and Water and Farmers today are looking for alternatives it's a 200 billion dollar World by market 60 of that market is nitrogen-based fertilizers currently we're targeting forward-thinking farmers and we're running some running some Pilots ntp provides affordable on-site salt-free organic fertilizer using only air and electricity so in terms of a global challenge you know it's kind of like how do we feed the growing population in a sustainable fashion that's something that a lot of people are working on all over the world in terms of the one Million Cups challenge how does ntp increase its Pilots through strategic Partnerships and get the message out about a new alternative fertilizer so kind of think about that a little bit as we're going through all these slides and then we can talk about a little bit more towards the end without synthetic fertilizers half the population would starve I could see on the left hand side as population increases fertilizer use increases pretty much one for one total fertilizer production around the world you can see kind of the numbers in terms of millions of tons and this is a little old but it still holds true today and 60 of that is nitrogen fertilizers again it's a 200 billion worldwide Market one of the things just to kind of go back to some some basic organic chemistry plant science plants need nitrogen they need it for chlorophyll which promotes photosynthesis it's kind of what makes the plant green amino acids for building blocks which kind of gives that plant kind of its structure it's also part of the energy storage and ATP of plants as well as nucleic acid which is kind of their DNA and plants need nitrogen preferably in terms of nitrates and that's kind of what the plant really absorbs through when it actually drinks water it actually drinks its nitrates that's necessary for it to actually survive and flourish um other types of nitrogen that's out there needs nitrogen fixing or some sort of microbial content in order to change the nitrogen into usable nitrates unfortunately this leads to a waste especially applied in the early stages so if you're throwing granular fertilizer down that has to actually convert it to nitrates to the plant to use um to give you an idea um of this types of technology early in the 1900s there was a company called a group called birkeland eyed um and these two gentlemen invented uh ionizing air and they turned it into nitrate so they were actually pretty successful unfortunately somewhere in 1920 the Hebrew Bosch process came along and a lot of people are a little more familiar with Haber Bosch process they actually take natural gas and air and turn it into ammonia which is a precursor to a synthetic fertilizer unfortunately it produces a lot of CO2 but the reason it really took off was because it was cheaper natural gas was a byproduct of the oil Industries so they found a way to actually convert natural gas which really wasn't being used uh into fertilizer a very usable product unfortunately there are a lot of unintended consequences think about like Plastics fertilizer is the same way we end up using fertilizer and contaminates our soil our air based upon a production of nitrous oxide as well as the production of the fertilizer itself in terms of CO2 emissions uh it also in contaminates our water all these algae blooms you're hearing about a lot of it has to do with too much nitrogen that's actually in the water which comes from right off from Farms golf courses Etc so what we're looking to do we're looking to take this sparkling eye process bring it into the 21st century and actually use this process today as an alternative synthetic fertilizers um and we think the time is right mainly because a lot of Technology developments have happened in the last hundred years plus uh haber-wash process is uh really contingent upon natural gas prices availability is tough It's really controlled by a lot of large organizations uh in terms of international conglomerates and we're looking to kind of give fertilizer sort of back to the farmer uh we have a plan for growth we're targeting our forward-thinking Farmers vertical Hydroponics indoor farming Organic Farms small farms sort of our first target market and then we're looking into eco-conscious groundskeepers we start looking at golf courses municipalities colleges everybody's got turf fields ultimately getting into large farms and row crops which is sort of the corn wheat soybean Etc um this is a little bit of Education in terms of the four r's of farming a lot of people are moving into this type of concept which is applying the right product at the right time at the right rate in the right place I talked to a corn farmer the other day what he does is he puts down 50 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer before he even plants a a seed half of that gets run off if rain happens and then uh three weeks lady puts another 100 pounds down well the plants don't actually need all that fertilizer at that particular time so he's not really putting it at the right time it's just that's the way I've been doing it for years so education is going to be a key to changing practices and actually starting not only to use our product but also for people changing the way they farm and people have heard of regenerative farming they've heard of biostimulants they heard of better soil conditions and we could talk about all these things a little later if people are interested in terms of uh and this is kind of what I was talking about that corn farmer so he put down all this 150 pounds and the soil produces a little bit through microbes and nitrogen fixing however the application is tremendous but the plant only uses a certain amount and there's a lot of runoff what we're looking to do for two using the 4r we're looking at micro dosing which is actually applying at the right time which means the plant gets a lot of usage of the materials being applied and but there's very little runoff so ntp delivers quality nitrogen the far away Farmers want it it's organic salt free it's on site no Transportation or storage consistent quality it's a single eye on production so therefore there's no contaminants uh customized solution in other words we're modular and scalable we can actually uh build a machine to actually fit your size bar so that kind of talks about the big stuff talking about local farmer problems they got price volatility right now uh nitrogen fertilizer increased 300 over the last couple of years they got poor availability if you could get it even at that price product quality obviously with high demand you end up quality tends to suffer with people producing more and more product again in the typical application challenge is crop yield and waste and of course it negative easily impacts our air Soil and Water again our solution is Affordable it's available on site controllable reliable easy to apply there are no salts and contaminant free and we could be zero greenhouse gas emissions if you're using renewable electricity in order to power the system to give you an idea of our machine we basically take electricity and air again preferably renewable energy we ionize that air and we generate nitrates the nitrates are then bubbled through uh water we use the water as a delivery mechanism we call our product nitrogen enriched water or the product actually coming from the machine our real product is actually the machine this particular machine is what we call our nlab it's about the size of a microwave it can handle about two acres it only produces 25 to 30 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer a year which is not very much at all our next size machine which are actually designed is about the size of a refrigerator it can handle about it's targeted to handle about 100 acres it's in the design phase and it's designed to be scalable and module of course with low capex and on-site delivery here's a vertical Farm you can see the benefit of the nitrogen enhancement in the leaf color compared to our Baseline plants in the system so you can see how greener it is and it looks a little crisper and that's because it's getting the nitrates that it actually needs in order to grow a healthy plant our go to market strategy we've got kind of direct Farmers right now our nlab is offered mostly for testing right now we've again we've done a couple of Pilots um you know you use past testing uh use past testing the pure testimony use past the testing period is a fixed monthly fee regardless of production our n plus is kind of free installation for the first hundred Farmers no production fee for the first six months uh ultimately we'd like to become a an appliance on the farm just like you got a dishwasher refrigerator we'd like a nitrate generator on the farm the farmer can use at any particular point in time so there's a lot of influences and partners out there that can help us out there's land grants extension institutions um and I don't know if people are familiar with those there's a lot of Industry Consultants out there as thought leaders and AG technology of course commission papers on applications so we know the technology work it's worked 100 years ago it works today the idea is can we get it economical and can we actually show farmers that it works because a lot of the farmers that were around 100 years ago to see it working uh not really around today in terms of Partners we're talking to sensor companies analytic companies sprayer companies some irrigation companies these are different people that can actually help us get our product into the market so just to give you a little background uh we've had some awards uh deic we won the pitch competition last year we went through an icap program for svdc um clean tech open we were in the top we were in a regional winner top four in the Northeast and then the top six uh nationally we won the big loss or it came in second place the big launch challenge which is down in North Carolina and right now we're part of the X under uh grow International or impact accelerator out of 600 applicants we were in the top 10 I was actually in Singapore about two weeks ago so back kind of to those Challenge questions how does ntp increase its research and engagement receive Partners to increase awareness of alternative synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in its application and of course I'd like to hear and what everybody thinks about kind of their take on feeding the world is it important to you and how do you plan on making a difference thank you very much thank you so much John if you want to leave The Challenge questions up that would be great or we can drop it in chat as well let's give John a round of applause thank you again I was a big dose of science to go with our big dose of coffee so hopefully we're all awake now or scratching our head and wishing we'd lead science a little bit more in middle school and high school but that was really helpful and very clear for folks attending please drop your questions in chat or your suggestions so you can raise your hand uh using the recognition icons in the zoom bar as well and again just going back to the challenge question based on what John shared who are strategic partners that he could think about uh collaborating with in order to accelerate and launch the pilot um or expand the pilot I should say as well as things like gaining research insights and papers for credibility as they grow to expand yay John Foster three stars I just can't even resist John I gotta tell you what a what a way to start a Wednesday morning um yeah and this is certainly near and dear to my heart um I work with a uh a local restaurant called Green fair if you couldn't guess by my Hollywood Square up there green Fair health and wellness and we are a uh a 100 organic restaurant in and certainly you know all this stuff is really important to us as well I'm curious um just from a cough standpoint the farmer and then also um how did this fit into the organic you know the organic world sure so um I'll start with the organic part first so we're working on you know you got to be some certified to become organic a lot of you know people say What's the difference between an organic farmer and a regular farmer you know organic farmers spray at night um so so the idea of having um to get that Organic certification is going to be something we have to work on however we are mimicking nature so I don't know if you're familiar um you know the way plants actually get nitrates right now are one of the ways is through uh lightning storms so lightning ionizes the air and then the rain actually brings the nitrates down to the ground so all we're doing is mimicking that where it's kind of creating lightning in a box and actually ionizing the air the same way lightning does we just pass the air through it and we use the water again as a delivery mechanism so I think that's uh I don't think we're going to have too hard a time getting organic but it's it's going to be something that we're definitely going to apply for you know at the right time it does cost a lot of money in order to do that yeah so we don't say we're 100 organic we just say we're organic or natural or mimicking nature I guess right a better uh way of saying it yeah um in terms of cost to the farmer um so what our Target numbers are we kind of compare ourselves since we're since we're targeting smaller Farmers We compare ourselves to bagged bagged fertilizer so if you went out to Home Depot right now and bought a bag of fertilizer cost you about 16 dollars per pound of nitrogen okay and a lot of small farmers do that they go to Home Depot or they go to Tractor Supply or somebody to buy something fertilizer now you get to the next guys that says well look we're a big farm so we're going to buy it by the pallet so if you start buying it by the pallet you know you could probably cut that price in half somewhere around eight bucks we're actually targeting for our next size machine because our first machine is really a proof of concept machine our next machine we're targeting about three to five dollars per uh pound of nitrogen okay um We're not gonna be able to compete with the guys that you know buy directly from the manufacturer in truckloads and rail cars you know that are that are actually you know pushing 10 000 acres of corn to create ethanol and feedstock for cows you know that's that's not our Market we're targeting the the smaller farmer the more local farmer food security kind of types people that are interested in organic that are actually want to do a better job and again we're big proponents of regenerative farming and things like that there was an article a couple of months ago a guy's been doing regenerative farming for the last five years you reduced his nitrogen uh fertilizer use by 25 percent well that's great what about the other 75 you know you know where does that come from right so again we're just looking to be a tool that's out there we think uh um I try and compare it a little bit to solar as well in the sense that you know renewable energy uh competes against fossil fuels but there's no one type of renewable energy you've got solar you've got wind you've got geothermal Etc right there's going to be a lot of different ways depending upon your situation in terms of actually what tool you actually use or what model you use for renewable energy same way here depending upon where you are your weather your soil the kind of crops you grow Etc there's all kinds of newer Technologies coming out there to help you grow more sustainably uh more naturally and keep your yields at the kind of the same levels we just see us as being a tool to help you obtain that by providing you nitrates on-site and On Demand so I'm gonna jump in real quick thank you John for sneaking in two questions for the price oh sorry uh we appreciate that that's all right people the name John are troublemakers I think Reggie Holmes has a question and just a quick reminder let's keep our questions and answers concise or possible uh just so we can get as many ideas insights in as we can Reggie go ahead good to see you hello uh hey John thank you for the the presentation um I uh so I work with a with a organization that's like a organic uh advocacy Watchdog organization uh with the national s uh reach and um would love to make a connection there they are the types of Farmers that you talk about their very committed to sort of restoring the um the title and significance of what it really means to be organic um and taking it away from like the the big corporations that have sort of infiltrated the process um so if that would be helpful would love to make a make an introduction there um and uh also I was wondering about the um sort of how this impacts those Farmers uh like their workload their work process like is it does it make it more efficient does it save them time save them money I imagine that it does um beyond the environmental benefits which are which are tremendous um but if I'm a hard-working American Farmer I mean I I'm interested in products that allow me to make a produce better crops um with maybe less time and and less money and less effort involved so I was wondering how how the product actually impacts that for the farmer sure so it highly depends upon the type of farming you actually do okay so let's take vertical farming or hydroponic farming for example they have a closed loop system that system um you know circulates water and they add nutrients as needed uh so some of the issues that they have are things like if I and this is a little bit of a simplification but say I use calcium nitrate in my closed loop system what will happen is that the plants will use nitrates preferentially and you have to keep adding calcium nitrate well what happens is over time calcium builds up in the system and then you have to actually dump the entire system and start all over again so the idea of being able to not have to do that and using our technology just to Bubble Up the nitrates directly into the system the same way you might be right now bubbling up oxygen so a lot of people use dissolved oxygen or try to add dissolved oxygen to their systems when they do that they use a bubbler we can actually just tap right into that bubbler so here's an easy way to add nitrogens directly to your system and if you're a vertical farmer now when you start getting Outdoors or let's actually move to another indoor farmer say a somebody does drip irrigation here's another way they actually mix up all their nutrients and then they use drip irrigation to actually water their their plants whether that's a Horticultural or food but any kind of usually indoor Growers use some sort of drip irrigation that's another method we can actually attach directly into that fertilization Loop and add nitrates directly to their drip irrigation system so that's another way and then finally just as a third there's a thing called pivot sprayers pivot sprayers are out there uh basically irrigating crops they do about a hundred acres at a time like a 100 Acre pivot sprayer is about kind of the size of those pivot sprayers we can actually put one of our machines right next to a pivot sprayer as that pivot sprayer starts watering we can actually add nitrates directly to it okay which again gets to that micro dosing I don't know if everybody picked that up so the idea is not to dump a whole bunch of fertilizer on your crops and see what happens and see how much they need and overload them the idea which also kills your microbes and your soil but actually just give them what they need again four hours at the right time the right concentration and the right amount hopefully that was helpful and next question Anita welcome uh thank you um okay so I love everything about this I organ I volunteer for safe soil my husband's in climate Tech uh we're raising our sun with all of these values I really really really appreciate you having an actual technology for this um I have two questions I'll be very quick I see the mission also is you know curtailing unnecessary chemicals in the environment I'm all riled up um first question is have you seen the business model of Pella to Lomi um and how they introduce their compostable cases and then a tabletop composter and I think they're a larger scale is going to be a farmer's compost model so that's how they're going and then the second question is if you've heard of my climate Journey or mcj Collective and happy to chat one-on-one about either of those and you know I know a lot of entrepreneurs get questions that they've already cut through so if this is any one of those two I apologize no no problem um we're all for composting and organic type fertilizers okay whether it's manure whether it's um you know uh cover crops which you actually then right you know push back into the soil there's all kinds of different methodologies the challenge is is that they're a little inconsistent when you use organic Nick you have a question yeah I don't think I I put that question out correctly I I was talking more about the business model so your model is you know you have a two acre model and now you're scaling to a big um bigger much bigger 200 acre model what Pella and Lomi did was they went from a very small product to a home size model and now they're scaling to a bigger model and I'm just wondering if you know their business um strategy and if that's something you would consider like a Kickstarter type thing for the two acre model for smaller farmers and homes right um so uh We've thought about Kickstarter and things like that and we do have a plan what's nice about the machine itself is that there's two ways to scale one way to scale is to just make things bigger right you just make it all bigger right well unfortunately there are limits to that because we have a certain amount of power supplies and and our power supplies get too big when you make it bigger so the idea is to instead of make it bigger make it kind of in parallel so instead of having a machine with one you know plasma field we have a machine with five plasma Fields so we've now increased production by five there's basically only three components to our system which is a plasma generator um or a plasma core a power supply and a compressor and the compressor is pretty much off the shelf the other two systems are actually proprietary to us in terms of Technology we then have the ability then to mix and match as as we see fit so we're we're designing our next size again I mentioned the size of refrigerator I reserved the right to say whether it was a dorm refrigerator or a Subzero refrigerator only because they are going to have different sizes when it comes to how much is actually needed out there and again since we looked to be an appliance it's really not about how many acres you can do when we're trying to get away from this it's more about how much nitrogen you need at any particular point in time because if say you need you know a thousand pounds of nitrogen okay for your farm but you're doing regenerative farming you're doing soil Health well that might drop down to 600 pounds of nitrogen on that same acreage well that's great so we want to size you for the nitrogen you're actually going to need and that's why we're looking at uh making this very scalable and module modular and give people the ability to say this is how much nitrogen I need not necessarily how many acres I have can I ask a clarifying question but maybe this will tease out some of Bonita's question as you think about scaling how many farmers are you trying to scale an onboard this year versus next year okay let's save small farmers let's just pick that one example yeah so and our business model looks at somewhere doing you know this year we're trying to get more testing done more than anything else as we decide our next model next year is probably going to be and we'd love to get about 50 Farmers on board sometimes in 2024. that's kind of our Target perfect thank you all different sizes by the way just so you know no that's perfect very helpful John ridenberg sure um what have you found in current Pilots what has your experience been so um to me any good Pilots um if it worked perfectly you probably didn't design the pilot properly uh you always need a little bit of feedback in order to help you move forward um the two pilots we did one was in a vertical Farm in Texas one of the challenges they had which was the pictures you saw they actually had some very good success their challenge was more about uh measuring and monitoring there's no great sensor out there for nitrate that's small and compact for what we're looking and we're working again with about 10 to 12 different sensor companies in order to come up with the best sensor for the system itself there are sensors out there using wastewater treatment plants that cost twenty thousand dollars the challenge these guys had was we need to know how much nitrogen we're actually pushing in and how much nitrogen we're pulling out or the plants are actually using in order to push the nitrogen back into the system which is which is great however the way they do it today is with electrical connectivity when the electrical connectivity drops they add more fertilizer well electrical conductivity has to do with salt in the water well we don't create salts that becomes a problem when you're trying to measure nitrate okay so that's one of the things we learned is that we definitely need better sensing technology and we're working in kind of in in parallel with with sensing companies the other one we noticed was that we had a 20 reduction in uh fertilizer use or nitrogen use in one of the systems another vertical farm and a 20 reduction in what they call PH down which is a way they actually used to keep the pH in the system down they dump all this uh basically acid in it uh these are great results uh towards the end we saw a little bit of an issue and we're trying to figure out what it is um the brown we started seeing at the very end Browning on the edges now our machine generates both nitrates and nitrites since you're a closed loose vertical farm and this might get a little technical sorry about all this but the idea is that you have nitrate you can have a nitrate a toxicity at the night sorry nitrite toxicity if the nitrates accumulate too much we only produce a small amount of them but over time say six eight weeks we might reduce it be producing more than we need so we're working on ways to actually pull the nitrites out of the system in order to make sure that the system doesn't uh or the plants don't experience that as a potential issue so that's sort of what we've experienced so far I've done a lot of stuff at home and seen great results with it in terms of take two plants feed nitrate to one and none to the other it works everybody knows it works the issue has always been the farmer needs something from a University study or something from an Institute that says this is going to work on my crops before I actually use it okay so let's keep going um Ken you're next and again let's try to keep our answers concise so they've been doing great John explaining it in layman's terms I think for everybody um Ken portray you're up hi John uh very very impressive very motivating um I'm not a gardener or a farmer so um but I wish I were because it sounds like a great thing to get involved with um also your preparation for this presentation is just remarkable thorough and marvelous um but enough of that I'm curious if you might be interested in an organization that is building uh Advanced substrate for vertical Farms they were participants in uh Loudoun County Business competition for startups last year I wish I were as good as Reggie and could remember their name but I'm sure there's publicity about that Loudoun County startup award that you could identify I'll try and do some research to find them and get back to you on it but if if you would be interested in talking with them about a potential partnership they provide their unique substrate plus essentially full vertical build out lighting for internal vertical Farms if you're interested it doesn't have to be Kappa agriculture that sound familiar they're based out of Loudoun County um okay I'd love to talk to them I mean basically a lot of those people have you know they're they're talking to the same customers we have right actually why it wouldn't be worthwhile to be talking yep no I'd appreciate that thank you Kim Bernard um just a couple of thoughts on John Rey's book about these yesterday but I'll share them for the group yeah George Mason has a program around sustainability um which also includes doing firing and testing so if you're looking for a research partner that might be a group to look at and I can help make interactions there I also think looking at organizations like 4p Foods who work with a lot of local farmers in this area from a strategic partnership standpoint it sounds like you need multiple and one of the things we discussed yesterday which I think is worth bringing up is inviting some of these different stakeholders to be on an Advisory Board I think Azure organization is looking to Pilot on scale you may want to consider what that looks like that's not something you have to pay people right it's a different structure than a board of directors there's not the same fiscal responsibility or fiduciary responsibility I mean hopefully they are responsible with their advice but it's a it's a lighter structure and easier to manage um and there's something called a flash board where you can invite people just to be on the board for six months so you can keep it time-bound which might be of interest but I think as you look at monitoring companies or universities or local businesses or Regional National businesses starting that Advisory Board might make sense I'm happy to identify some books for that one great thank you very much I agree I agree with you we are looking at expanding our Advisory board at this point in time Dan Linder thank you thank you Jen and John thank you for your presentation today very interesting um I'm looking at the uh uh your second question is is is compelling what is your take on feeding the world is it important to you and of course the answer is is probably everyone is yes but I'm looking and I'm looking at the numbers uh for your you you said your device was would produce enough nitrogen for like a two acres or something like that and keeping in mind the explanation that you gave to Venita about um it's not it's not necessarily the amount of nitrogen it's it's the micro dosing it's the right amount of nitrogen and I'm thinking about uh you said a device for 100 acres would be about the size of a refrigerator that's underway and I'm thinking about that second question in farms that really produce a lot of food I mean they don't have 100 acres and they certainly don't have two they have several hundred if not several thousand acres so I'm thinking is your is your solution really geared towards um I mean your your sounds like you're scaling up but it sounds like your Solution that's available today is geared towards a really small micro or Mac micro farmer so can you talk a little bit about that about the the the size of your devices and if we're really going to impact the food supply does that make sense yeah no no it does and um I I don't want to you know offend people here but uh one of the issues is that on a global basis 80 to 90 percent of the farms in the world are two to five acres okay so in this country we're most most used to seeing people and seeing farms and articles and news about these massive farms and this massive acreage unfortunately that massive acreage a lot of it goes like is corn and goes to ethanol or goes to you know not food well I don't consider you know high fructose corn syrup really food but that's where it actually goes to right whereas all around the rest of the world there are you know two to five Acre Farms that are trying to feed their communities okay so there's a big disconnect right now and a challenge for us when it comes to us-based versus International kind of markets us-based markets are more about you know if I tell you you know we're having a fertilizer shortage the only impact you're going to see is you know an extra dollar in terms of the cost of your head of lettuce in other parts of the world you're actually going to see people starving people not being able to feed their communities government's extremely worried there's a bunch of stuff that's been going on India stopped exports of wheat a little while ago and the reason they did that because they were worried about feeding their own populations so our technology has the ability and that hundred acres the way we see it on an international market is tying our 100 Acre kind of machine with a solar system or some sort of a local renewable energy that allows us to drop a machine anywhere in the world and actually feed a community of farmers say anywhere between 20 to 50 farmers in a community so they can actually then feed their community and actually produce product that they might actually take to Market somewhere so yes um I agree with you that uh it appears to be that we're targeting these local markets or very small markets um just to also let you know vertical farming is growing somewhere 25 a year uh all around the world uh especially in Asia I was just in Singapore Singapore has a 30 for 30. they want 30 of their food to be grown by 2030 in their country the only way they're going to do it is vertical farms uh the Middle East uh you know Dubai and Oman and all these places are looking in front of the Farms to solve their problems so uh that small Market I think is growing which is great for us um also to take a look at it is a 200 billion dollar market so uh it is pretty big so so you don't need that much of it obviously which is a typical intrapreneurial answer to you know something which isn't isn't very valid sometimes but this is a big market so we do have the ability to Target smaller farms and just look at more of them you could say thank you I mean I I definitely in Northern Virginia it's it's we're getting rid of our Farms to build data centers and so I think small farms are probably uh the the the have to they're a reality right well I actually just uh to add on to that our climate Czar John Kerry wants to say hey Farms you have to stop Daniel stop shaking your head our Farms have to uh actually go away the small farmers because they don't have the capacity they produce too much nitrous oxide so they're looking to buy out small farms well the whole concept of food security sort of goes away and I get why they're having these these these you know talks is because where people are and where food is you know they say let the Midwest handle our food and we'll just import everything but a lot of people are much more concerned about where they're going to get good local fresh food uh nutrient value of food is terrible 96 of lettuce comes from Southern California by the time it gets to your mouth it's it's about how long it's been decaying not about how fresh it is so you know and we're trying to solve some of those problems only some small farmers aren't we're trying to help them out okay thank you John thank you Dan that's a great question we have a couple of minutes for a few more questions or thoughts Ken fortnite so I'm I'm not familiar enough with the technology to understand whether it is feasible but it seems to me that um um beehives beehives are needed in certain parts of the cycle for growth and so beehive owners show up grab a beehive bees do their thing they pick up the Beehive and move on is that a model that might be appropriate down the road quite a ways or the delivery of nitrates through your technology put a bunch of refrigerators on a truck show up at a farm do the thing at the point in time and growth cycle that they need it pick them up move on up and down the geography to where the seasons are okay I will I will say yes and no again there's with such a big Market there's all kinds of different Farmers um our ideal customer is someone that grows 365 days a year somebody that has what they call High Velocity crops that are turning over your lettuces your strawberries things that turn over pretty rapidly and you just need continuous supply of nutrients to these these types of farms the guys and again since they're trying to do that micro dosing showing up and applying a whole bunch doesn't really do any good you'd have to show it multiple times with that being said though um talk about the international market and you're serving say 20 to 50 Farmers there's no reason why you wouldn't have a central location with a very large machine that then goes out and you know part of the local business is the person who owns this say Co-op has the ability to go out and actually irrigate but goes and irrigates three Farmers over here and then three over here and always comes back to the main place but you got to remember that's really a community-based thing so you're not going more than a couple of miles away you know you're not looking to to go 100 miles to go deliver something because a lot of it is dependent upon water um without also being said though there's a lot of big trucks out there that are actually doing irrigation they actually drive right through the system so can we put a refrigerator basically on the back of a truck so as it's actually using its 2 000 gallons of water and watering it we're actually micro dosing it at the same time those are all viable options but again it depends upon where you are the type of farm you have the kind of farm you are and how you actually want to apply your fertilizers hey Jen I see that you have your hand up do you still have a question well I had a thought that I was well actually I did have a question you mentioned International markets but I wasn't sure are you trying to Pilot and scale in international markets or just domestic right now so we're focusing domestically and we actually like to focus in Virginia so we're looking for a lot of people here because it's easier to deal with them right and go back and forth on the other hand we also joined uh the grow impact accelerator which is an accelerator that's actually based in Singapore so I was actually out in Singapore about two weeks ago uh for the start of their boot camp we met a whole bunch of people that are very interested in piloting our our technology so we're going to be taking machines and probably sending them internationally to either institutions or vertical Farmers that are looking to do some additional testing so we're it's kind of parallel but they are definitely sort of different markets we struggle with the you know diluting our mind share to going into two different markets but um you know my I'm an empty nester my kids just all graduated like last week so I'm good to go and so as a follow-up question or thought I mentioned a company in India in chat their name is orja Solutions o-o-r-j-a they're installing solar um in the small farms in India and so there might be some very specific organizations social entrepreneur minded organizations to collaborate with so happy to make that introduction um globalgoodfund.org is an organization
that does a lot of the social entrepreneurship work that companies actually a fellow in that organization they're accepting applications now so if you are interested in trying to potentially get in front of a different audience different funding that might be in organizations to look at um Ken I'm going to give you 30 seconds to last to ask a question and then I will get back to sharing our slides in a wrapping it great it's quick do you have the funding to buy academic research you said you wanted to get papers on the street yeah well that's one of the part of the problems is that we've talked to a couple of Institutions they want thirty thousand dollars to do an actual study um however we are teaming up with the New Mexico State University who actually has grant money for their actual professors so we can actually go the grant money goes to the professors not to us but what we get is the testing uh responses actually from them um and uh and there are other universities that are interested in doing that it depends where their funding comes from and how we can actually work with that and there's a lot of things that are going on just a and Jen you can yell at me at some point in time um there's a lot of stuff going on in the governments as well uh last year there was the climate smart Commodities they just pushed out 3.2 billion dollars to find ways to get organic foods and better better climates strategies for Farmers there was also another group another fund for U.S based alternative fertilizers 500 million dollars from the government to do that Unfortunately they wanted a 40 match which means this smallest fund of a million dollars a smallest Grant we'd have to come up with six hundred thousand dollars even to apply uh in terms of matching funds um but there's good things going on we believe that since like solar has a 30 tax rebate when it comes to actually you know adding solar to uh Farms you know you talked about Jen there's the reprogram uh which the government actually funds uh which you get a 30 tax rebate for adding solar to your system into your farm so that's great that's for reducing greenhouse gas emissions why wouldn't they give us a 30 rebate on our machine because again remember one of the big things we're doing is we're moving a operating cost of buying fertilizer every single year to actually purchasing a machine that's going to produce your material with fundamentally free inputs of air and solar energy so I'm gonna jump in as MC Jen I'll turn it back to you for the and I see Vanita you have a question you're okay okay because it'll be 10 a.m yes ma'am sorry just real quick um John I'm gonna send my climate journey to you again um those people can help but get on policy and get funding they're very very very um impactful people in the chat will be great Jen please feel free to ask the very last question what else can R1 linkups Community do to help you obviously folks should save the chat we'll make sure you get that but what else can we do to help um it's really about the connections um any kind of land grant universities any institutions any Farmers that you think are kind of forward-thinking farmers the ones that are interested in doing um better and and are interested in looking at new technology I'm happy to talk to any of them especially if they're local because I can actually get to them and show them the system and show that it works so I'm still the emcee to the end so next slide please by the way I have another question what part of Long Island Garden City okay I grew up in Roslyn Heights um next week so uh next week Dark Horse nutrition we're thrilled and just look how we go from John's presentation by the way fabulous thank you so much really fabulous um each week we're fortunate to have great local entrepreneurs not always local I'll take that back but entrepreneurs willing to stand up and present and next week uh we'll learn a little bit about health as we did today next slide so if you look closely we have open meetings where we don't have presenters to think about presenting think about someone you know who might present that would be great the organizer organizers um are uh assembling different panels and presenters I call your attention to Mr Ken portno are you two weeks ago gave us a briefing on AI which was factors okay so look forward to more of those and step forward and be a presenter uh six weeks ago Reggie did it so uh please know so the first meeting of the month is next Wednesday right and it's in person at the uh Mech Center Mason entrepreneurial center gen any additional comments relating to that no just say it's in person and virtual so please continue to join us virtually and our presenter will be there in person um and if you're interested in being a coffee sponsor for Jim I don't think we have one um if I'm wrong please I know someone will let me know but if you're interested let us know excellent next slide uh upcoming events um Karen is there anything you want to add to upcoming events thanks John for asking I just sent something over to Jen and I think she's going to post it but it is for a ribbon cutting um one of the companies here locally in Fairfax County is hosting a ribbon cutting and open house and um Jen is going to put the information in the chat for everyone but all are invited thank you Karen other folks want to mention an event okay next slide please the only pitch you can hear at one of our one Million Cups meeting is a pitch for talent for leadership to come join a great group some of whom are in the room today who actually planned each of the week's meetings so even though Portnoy did a heck of a great job a couple of weeks as did Reggie Holmes as has others in the room it's the behind the scenes people who make the whole thing happen so we'd love it if some of you would step forward and become organizers thank you join our team in building 1mc yeah man is that Ken waving at me yeah [Music] um there you go that's awesome man thank you very very much appreciate it there's a meeting today at four if you can join see how easy that was for me guys yeah foreign oh yes please also when you jump on social media or as simple as in your LinkedIn profile add 1 Million Cups it's so easy and that QR code is to um to register am I correct isn't that what it is right there I think there are a couple different links on it let's scan it and find out yeah yes because I've sent it to people and it's very easy so finally thank you first to uh John Ireland really appreciating your presentation and really look forward to hearing uh about your successes by the way I have all the answers to the challenge question but I figured I'd wait till we have an opportunity to talk about it um but also to the Kaufman Foundation you know their strength in numbers both locally and nationally there are over 160 chapters we stand out because we meet every Wednesday that's kind of special not every group meets every Wednesday so you can be proud of that and again by being here every Wednesday when you call or someone calls you you'll pick up when you're available or return that call quickly because that's what the community is all about so everyone thank you we're four minutes early it must be dmc's responsibility to be four minutes early and so I open it up to additional questions and uh to fun and again John thank you man that was great thank you all I appreciate it I I just gotta say thank you to referred to Vanita for being here vineet and I met at the farmers market absolutely bad Saturday though that was fun and also I want to just point out Jen Grayton is here as well been listening in Jen uh has been very interested in one Million Cups and they showed up this morning and hoping she'll show up again Jen is the uh well she does a number of things but the one thing that I really like is she's the Baker at Green fair and does a phenomenal job she's also a massage therapist and does a bunch of other stuff so really
2023-06-06