How I Built This with Guy Raz - Doing the bees’ work with Thai Sade of BloomX

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Thai Sade is the co-founder and CEO of BloomX, a company that has developed crop-pollinating technology to replicate natural pollinators like bees and other insects. So much of what we eat depends on bees, which have been used for centuries to pollinate crops. But today, the world’s growing appetite and other environmental stressors are pushing bee populations to the brink and threatening our food supply.This week on How I Built This Lab, how Thai’s company is helping farmers ease the burden on bees. Plus, how Thai’s upbringing on a kibbutz inspired him to tackle global challenges in agriculture, and how BloomX is contributing to rainforest conservation in Latin America. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carla Esteves. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So about a third of the food we eat, things like blueberries, citrus, almonds, and carrots are pollinated by insects and mostly, by bees, and by and large, they do an amazing job. The problem is that with rising global demand for food and dwindling bee populations, we'll have to find other solutions to make sure the world can produce enough food for everyone. So a company called Blumex has developed a technology

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

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

So it could be farming to be other things that you can do. And I specifically was involved in farming one day per week, you know, as a mandatory part of my life, of my routine. That's part of growing in a kibbutz. All right. So you grew up in this environment, but was your intention as you were growing up? Was it your, did you think, you know, I'm going to stay in agriculture? Because I know, I mean, people I know who grew up around agriculture or farms, very few of them stay there. They tend to move on to do something else.

When you were, I don't know, going to, you know, when you were a teenager or thinking about going to university, did you imagine that this is what you wanted to continue to do? or did you think, you know, I'm going to go do something completely different? So I think, you know, back then, it was something that was, like, that was my dream or intention to do. I'm also coming from a family, from a French family, who, you know, in our culture, back home was very a lot about food. And I think that's a very strong tool for us back home to share love. Absolutely. That's something that from very young age I was exposed from my mom.

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

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

agriculture, right? Like you probably saw that growing up already. You're right. So I think that, you know, this mindset is coming from a place that they needed to innovate because they didn't have the right infrastructure to produce what they need. If it's water, if it's to fertilize land, if it's finding new ways to protect the crops. And I think that a lot of the innovations that we have came from from kibbutz's. So the irrigation pipes that were invented by an taffin, that's a kibbutz in Israel that basically that sit on the desert, basically invented that because they needed to control the water and irrigate. You're talking about drip irrigation.

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

Like they are essentially, well, the workers of agriculture. Not everything requires bees for pollination, but I think a significant percentage of the food, at least consumed in the United States, maybe a third or half of the food we eat, requires bees as pollinators. So things like blueberries and avocados and almonds and strawberries, cucumbers, different kinds of fruits and vegetables that we eat,

require bees as pollinators to carry pollen from one plant to the next in order to produce yields. You're right. And I used to do stories on this when I was a reporter about bee colonies just collapsing, you know, and it was scary because without bees, we can't, there's a significant amount of food that can't be produced. Presumably, when you were growing up, I mean, you would have bee colonies or you would have you would release bees into the orchards or I mean because this is a there's a process to it right I mean bee colonies are brought onto on trucks colonies are deposited in orchards and fields and then the bees do their thing and then a couple months later they're picked up and taken away is that more or less how it worked on your kibbutz yeah so yeah that's how

it worked in my kibbutz and that's how it worked today to produce food, we need pollination. Pollination, I mean the transaction of pollen from a single flower to the other flower, which is usually transferred by insect. So around 80% of the commercial growing crops that we use today are pollinated by insects. The other 20% are pollinated by wind. And I think out of the insects, most of them are bees, right? There are moths and others and butterflies, but mostly bees.

So you're right. We use those honeybees boxes, pushing them into the orchards. or whatever we want to pollinate, and effectively they pollinate. So here is the interesting part. The number of honeybeehives has increased from the 1960s to today by around 81%. But the number of land that needs pollination globally, in the same time grew much more, and that's what created this big gap that you know today. And effectively, how we manage and use honeybees to pollinate, make this process.

very problematic from the honeybee perspective, which basically decreases their functionality and decreases the hive and numbers and et cetera. Because of the commercial use, which is very intense, we talked about trucks, transferring them from one place to another, pesticides that affect them disorientation,

bad nutrition, for example, to pollinate only avocados if they don't like the avocado nectar or pollen. It's not good for the bees, yeah. So to eat only one thing is not good for any living creature. The reason we use them is because, it's easy for us to manage them and put them in boxes, and we can manage them because there's a very socialized organism

that we can just commoditize. But the other natural pollinators, the insects, is actually much more important to pollinate many types of crops, but you cannot just spread many insects or different butterflies or whatever to pollinate a crop because they are not controlled like honeypeas. And that's why we created Blooming's basically because what we find out is that not only that we're harming the heart,

honeybees, why we're using them like that. They are not pollinating effectively many types of crops. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Ty's big idea and his process that pollinates crops without using bees at all. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today is Tai Sadei, who realized that honeybees alone, which have been commercialized by humans to pollinate crops. crops for centuries are actually not always great at pollinating, especially as global demand for food rises. All right.

Let's talk about, let's talk about Blumex. I know you started this, you started working on this idea in 2019, and you launched it in 2022. Let's talk about how this idea came about. Essentially, we've talked about what the problem is, which is bees as pollinators, obviously crucial and vital, but the commercialization of bees. is a problem because some bees are non-native to parts of the world and they can't be brought in. And certainly it's not healthy for bees to just be sort of monocrop pollinators.

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

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

And wind also does this. Wind also shakes plants and spreads pollen. So essentially, I guess you need to figure out how do we vibrate plants? plants, right? How do we like shake them a little bit and somehow get the pollen from one flower to another? Is that sort of how you were thinking about it? So actually, all flowers that have different mechanisms to transfer pollen from one flower to the other. What to differentiate those mechanism is the forces that you need to apply on the flower in order to release the pollen or transfer. So vibration, for example, the bumblebee vibration, which is one of them. It's one of them

regarding to blueberries, tomatoes, peppers. Another mechanism that we are applying, for example, is basically electrostatic forces to collect the pollen out of the flowers and then apply them by friction. And what we are mimicking there is that, for example, sticky pollen like avocados, mangroves that have a very sticky pollen, which means that the plant requires from the insect to really work hard, to get the pollen out.

You got to dig that out. Right. We got to dig that out. Yeah. And that's why it's sticky. And for those kind of flowers, For example, Apocados, in a co-evolution between the plant and the insect basically means that when the honeybee flying became electrically charged, and that electrical charge, when they approach the flower, gets the pollen to jump on the body. So we try to basically to mimic that process and to create electrostatic mechanism that collect the pollen out of the flowers and then apply it.

Huh. Okay. So essentially, you know, as bees, right, as they approach a flower, there's like an electric charge that's created by their buzzing. And that shakes loose the sticky pollen from the flowers so it can pollinate other flowers. And basically your company has figured out a way to kind of replicate that process, but maybe do it even better than bees? Yeah. And we actually see that it's working, you know, and that's a very interesting mechanism that we are really. replicating that we apply today for several crops, but could be others, but we also have like the data on when to pollinate. We have an algorithm that allows to understand how environmental conditions affect the flying behavior for every crop that we are working on that give us the right pollination window to pollinate and create a focus of the pollination season based on real-time environmental conditions that we have in the field. All right. This is a business show about entrepreneurship. If you're just joining us, you are listening to Highbilt. This is not a show about agriculture, but I'm going to do my best. You started to work on both hardware and software. So let's break it down a little bit because you've developed a literally. I've seen a video of it. It's like a machine with arms on top of an autonomous vehicle. And this vehicle just goes down the aisles.

of, you know, of, let's say, citrus trees or whatever, whatever crop it needs to pollinate. And the arms brush up against the plants and essentially they're pollinating those plants. Can you explain especially because most people listening to this show do not understand, including me, don't work on farms, don't understand agriculture, but understand technology. So can you explain how that system works? Yeah. So what you describe is correct. We are mimicking the bumblebee vibration system by those electric vehicle which have two mechanical arms that basically vibrate the bottom of the plant, the blueberry flowers on the branches, with the same frequency that we are trying to get the vibration of the bumblebee.

So just to clarify, I'm looking at a picture of this. It's like a small little, it looks like it's an autonomous vehicle. It's very small. It's called a burrow. And your technology is on top of this autonomous vehicle. And it vibrates the, I've seen a video of it, it vibrates the blueberry bushes ever so slightly. So the blueberries don't start coming down, right? They're not like dropping.

No, no. It's a very almost imperceptible vibration. But that alone spreads pollen. Yeah. So what it creates basically, and that's something we don't see in the video, but it's the flower. when it gets a vibration for those mechanical arms, the pollen is basically released from the flower. It's like a pollen cloud that just is developed

and it drops under the other flowers. Yeah, yeah. How, I mean, how much better are these operating than bees? So I think that it's like everything there is this ROI and the cost effectiveness of everything we do, right? So this specific vehicle will replicate every week, the same plant. it can do up to 20 hectares a week in six days. Wow.

And just to clarify, one hectares, I think about two and a half acres. So this vehicle can pollinate about 50 acres worth of crops in a week, which is probably more than bees could do on their own, right? Yeah. But I think that the comparison is not on, you know, on anem bees. The comparison is more that's what we emphasize. Eventually, it's on the results on the yield. Okay. Not in the compared to the insect.

And in compared to any bees, when we apply those machines, we see a range of between 10 to 40 percent of yield increase to cause get of using our services. If they're so much more efficient in pollinating and if the yields are clearly higher than using commercial bee colonies, it sounds like they could replace the commercial use of bees. Yeah, I think that they could replace, but, you know, trying to replace natural process that, you know, growers have been working for years, which are having a lot of, you know, kind of reliability.

The growers are used to having bees. And you want bees on your farm. And also on that, you know, honeybees, they have value, but if we will reduce them, that could also affect the yields of the crop. So essentially, the girls need to understand what they have. with honeybees, what you have with us, and what you have together. Essentially, so what the technology does is you would say keep using the honeybees, but you will see that your yields will go up because where the bees can't actually perform efficiently,

this technology that we have, we can actually produce better results. Yeah, yeah, and I think that we'll need to strategize together how to use honeybees and us. Maybe they will reduce the amount of honeybee eyes, because it's becoming more and more expensive and using us as a supplementary tool for pollination. So I think that we are very agnostic in a sense of we want to show you the value of using our services and you eventually, you, the goal,

will evaluate what is best for you. Again, agriculture is not natural and if you want to have this essential process of pollination in the field that you irrigate, if it drip or whatever or fertilize differently, you need to have also control on your pollination process. We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back,

how Blumex technology could actually help save rainforests across the world. More on that in a moment. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today is Tai Sadei. His company, Blumex, has developed technology to help farmers pollinate their crops,

including one of their newest products, the Crosby. So the one product you have is this sort of apparatus that has these kind of metallic arms that physically vibrate the bushes. You also have another product called Across Bee, and I'll describe it because we're on podcast. So it's basically like a long pole and attached to it is like a panel. It's like a square panel. And a human holds this long pole and walks through, I guess, through the orchards and holds this panel up against the trees, and that also pollinate.

So this is an electrostatic system. Can you explain how that works? Yeah, so you describe it correctly. That's the manual version that we have today. We're also developing a mechanical version, which is basically big mechanical arms that have big electrodes, big plates, flexible plates that they attach to a tractor or pickup. And that would just drive down the road,

and then it would electrostatically move the pollen from one flower to another. Yeah, what's happening there is that eventually we have two varieties that we use in the orchards to cross-pollinate. So avocado is a great example. We have the pollinator variety. It could be Ettinger or Fruelty. Is the Ettinger avocado the smooth-skinned one, by the way? Yeah, it's the smooth green. Yeah, I don't like those ones.

Yeah, I'm a hos guy. Yeah, usually. Give you those any day. Yeah, so, you know, the market loves. ass, but we plan the pollinator variety to enhance the has productivity. That's why we put them new, new chaler in the orchards. So what we do is basically we collect from the pollinator variety, it could be Ettinger, Friety, other smooth skin avocados,

and we transfer the pollen that we collect in the plate, just rub it by friction on the flowers that we want to pollinate on the house. So you take basically the pollen from one variety of avocado, with these electrostatic plates and you transfer to another variety of avocado. Why? Which is the has. Yeah, but why do you do that?

So why we do that is because honeybees don't like to pollinate the has avocado flowers. They don't like the pollen, taste, they don't like the nectar. So if you don't have, it's not that they're not pollinating at all. It's not binary, right? But eventually, statistically, you will have less visits of honeybees. You will have less fruits. Okay.

So statistically, we increase it. distribution of pollen because we predict what is the right time when pollen is receptive to collect it. Is that generally in the spring, presumably? Yeah. So it's in the spring, but I mean, not as a period. I'm talking really every day. We know what is the right.

The day. The pair of day, we know the hours. How do you, how are you able to know that? The algorithm, basically, that what we do there is to understand how environmental conditions affect flowering behavior. And by that, basically, that's something that, you know, part of the secret source of how we've built that, but in every crop is different flowering mechanism, different complexity, but the operational essence is the same.

We're trying to understand what will be the right time in every day, having those temperature, humidity, or sun of light, what will be the right time to pollinate tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and et cetera. So we can identify that, but it's a per day. because, for example, avocados have one million flowers in a season of one month and a half. One avocado tree? Yeah. Eventually out of it, if you love 200 fruits from an avocado tree, that would be amazing.

From one tree, even though there's a million flowers. Yeah, and that's why we're trying to improve the statistics of the pollen distribution on the right and the best conditions we can have. And then to affect the size, to affect the fruit sets. And that's what we are doing. You could, I mean, you could in theory, if you could get that tree to produce 250 or 300 avocados, that could be... Exactly. One weird question. I mean, is there, there must be a point where the tree should not be producing that much fruit because it wouldn't be, it would damage the tree.

Again, you're totally right. And maybe I can take it back again. In the natural process, you know, trees don't need to have 200 fruits, you know. We're trying to optimize that from a commercial. perspective. But for the trees to reproduce himself, he don't need that amount. So yeah, there is this balance of

what we're trying to take out of the tree, but also in our perspective, do that responsibly. Avocados and other crops that we are dealing with, pollination is a limiting factor for yield. Okay? Okay. So there is a very big gap that we can increase the yield

responsibly without taking too much resources from the trees that will be like a negative effect in the following years, okay, not demanding too much of the tree. That's kind of our philosophy and that's very important. We are focusing on crops that have pollination challenges. It's not that every crop have pollination challenges. Citrus don't have pollination challenges because honeybees where we use them.

They love citrus. Yeah, they just love that. But avocados are challenging. Oh, avocado challenging, mangoes, leachies, almonds, apples, chees. blueberries, blueberries, cocoa, coffee.

And so those are the crops that you're mainly focused on? Those are in the pipe and we are still not there yet for all of them.

But yeah, definitely. So where do you see the biggest potential for your technology to be used? So the main activity we started

with avocados and that was more in Latin America where the market is, Colombia, Peru, Mexico. So we started engaging with companies

there in our validation process. And from there we also understand that, you know, blueberries is a very big opportunity which suffers from pollination limitations and is growing rapidly in Peru, Mexico. And I would say generally, orchards in the outdoor that we want to leverage our crossbee. So it could be the subtropical like mangoes, leeches and macademia or nuts. So that's the focus.

All right. So you've got the hardware and you've got this soft. this algorithm that you've developed. I know you raised about $8 million to date from investors in mainly, I think, in Israel. And you have started to work with customers. Now you are in a situation where I imagine, you know, to state the obvious, there's been some disruption with with the war that's happening in the background. Is your business on hold? Are your employees not, you know, your team is its focus elsewhere? Are you still able to run the business? Yeah, so that's a good question in the current climate and situation we are in Israel, but we must go on as a company and provide our services and operation to where we have commitment.

You know, the majority of our activity is not in Israel. It's in Latin America today. So a lot of our employees and project managers are there together without distributors. And so essentially the war has not disrupted your business because you're mainly focused on Central and South America. You're right. It's interesting because you mentioned avocados and blueberries and those are two significant crops, particularly in the U.S. market. And I think some of that has to do with their beneficial health qualities around inflammation, reducing inflammation. And I know there's been a lot of a lot more interest in blueberries and raspberries.

I just read an article in New York Times about avocados and how Mexico in Mexico there are a lot of land is being cleared to produce avocados, which presents its own challenge and own problems because there's rainforests are going to be cleared and land that's going to be cleared to build. avocado farms, but if you could increase the yield per hectare, I guess in theory, you could prevent some of that environmental destruction by clearing land to make more and more farms. You're definitely right. And I think you really touched the point of, you know, I talked about what I'm doing here, which is trying to face with global challenge and find a solution. so that the incentive to better produce from your own farms, it's better environmentally and financially for you, okay? And that's something that retailers, you know,

having this conversation with their producers, and that's something that became more and more aware. And that's something that is also something that we can measure and add value for the goal. It's a conservative world agriculture, but I think that this problem of pollination and where we are is something that goes, really want to use and solve. If this technology becomes the standard, right?

You mentioned that the growers are conservative, that aggrimers are conservative, which makes sense. I mean, they know what they're doing, right? Many of them are coming from generation, have this generational wisdom that's been passed down to them. You know, so they are, they have a deep, sort of inherent understanding of land management and so on. But I mean, there are innovators, too. There's a lot of innovation that happens in big commercial agricultural facilities. So if this technology is widely applied, in theory, you wouldn't need to build, you wouldn't need to develop that much more land because you would just increase the yields on existing plots of land.

Yeah, I think that, you know, that's part of our mission statement from an environmental perspective. for sure and that's not only us but also for the farming industry. So I think that pollination is a tool to have better control, better performance and also better environmental outputs on how you produce your foods. People understand that we need to produce much more with much less. Not only as a buzzword, that's the reality that we need to face in order to feed the world and to make it. the same as we're having today.

Tai Sadeh, thank you so much. Thanks a lot, Guy. It was a pleasure. That's Tai Sadei, co-founder and CEO of Vlumex. Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Routinardt.

It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carla Estevez. Our audio engineer was Neil Rausch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, Malia Aguadillo, Neva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.