This Week in Startups - How ocean farming can solve world hunger with Alora CEO Luke Young | E1698

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Alora CEO and Co-Founder Luke Young joins Molly to discuss ocean agriculture and the ability to grow crops offshore (1:17). They discuss the progression of engineering that has propelled Alora’s innovations (11:55) and the challenges of growing at sea (21:53). (0:00) Intro! (1:17) Alora’s mission and technological advancements (5:46) Mitigation and adaptation (7:58) The first taste test (10:25) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (11:55) Alora’s progression and timeline (16:26) Designing infrastructure and engineering fertilizer (20:25) LMNT - Get a free sample pack with any purchase at http://drinklmnt.com/TWIST (21:53) Challenges of growing on the ocean (26:14) Alora’s Business Model (28:56) Fennel - Join the fennel waitlist now and get your first month free at http://fennel.com/twist (30:10) Salt tolerance (35:17) Alora’s Customer and cost of development FOLLOW Luke: https://twitter.com/lukeheatonyoung FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt with no sugar. Get a free sample pack with any purchased at Drink L.M. nt.com slash twist and fennel make investments that make a difference fennel is an investing app that gives you over 200

esg metrics and information about past and upcoming shareholder votes so you can manage your portfolio and your impact join the fennel wait list now and get your first month free at fennel dot com slash twist On today's show, Molly interviews Allora CEO Luke Young. They discuss how ocean farming and the ability to grow crops offshore can lead to an abundance of food. They also talk about the progression of technological advancement in the ocean agriculture space and much more. Luke Young is a CEO and co-founder at Allura, a startup that is genetically fortifying crops so they can grow in the ocean. Luke, welcome to this weekend climate startups. Thank you very much, Molly.

I'm very excited to be here. This is amazing. Just tell us how it works. Tell us what you're doing. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it is very cutting edge. Everything we are doing right now couldn't have been done five years ago. So what we're doing is...

Well, hold on. Why not? Well, you know what? Hold on. No, first tell us what you're doing. See, this is what happens. I get too excited. First, tell us what you're doing.

And then I'll ask you about the technology breakthroughs. Absolutely, yeah. So what we are doing exactly as you described is we've created a way for crops to be highly salt tolerant. And that means that they can survive in salty soils, such as a Mecon Delta in Vietnam, or they can go as far to be in the oceans themselves. And so what we're doing there is we found a pattern of genes that exists in things like seagrasses, mangroves, really anything that already survives in the oceans themselves. And what we're able to do is we found that same pattern of genes, just relatives of those particular set, that particular pattern,

in things like rice, corn, cotton, wheat, really, you name it, anything you eat today that comes from the supermarket or a grocery store, you can do this with. We can activate those genes because they've already just laid dormant for hundreds of years. And once they're activated, they express this particular pattern that manages salt, just as it would do if it was in a marine environment. And in doing so, that salt is then pushed through and managed and doesn't displace any of the normal metabolism that goes on inside our plants.

And so we can place these crops in high salinsies and they'll grow just as they normally would. And so we've started to do this in rice. We've had huge success. We've got up to about half the level of oceanic saltwater. By the end of this year, we expect to hit that fully oceanic level. We'll just start it in cotton and corn. We're just going about to do coffee as well, aiming for that big Starbucks relationship. Nice.

I like thinking ahead to the full Tam scenario here. Okay, so let's take this piece by piece. First, talk about the technology that makes us possible. Why couldn't you do this even more than five years ago? Yeah, absolutely. The genetic design itself really comes to the era we're just coming into within biotech, which is we have the ability to map out genomes and decipher them and to really read the language that is DNA.

And we haven't been able to do that for well for really the previous decades of of scientific discovery. Over the past five years, we've been able to identify this. We have the genomes, we have the ability to read them. And now we're getting to the point where we can tweak little parts so that they express as we intend them to. Up until about 10 years ago, that was very random. A lot of the newer methods are still quite random. There's a few that are coming out, and in particular CRISPR, that are so precise that you can make a small edit or a small activation, and that activation will allow these plants to react just as if they would. if they had evolved over hundreds of years and pushed down a particular path.

So that's one of the really unique ways is that these methods have just caught up to what our minds are capable of imagining. And then you mentioned that some of these genetic expressions, that these genetic expressions exist but are dormant. Like this is a bit of a side note, but does that suggest that rice used to grow in the ocean? Yeah. If you look back far enough, all of our crops used to grow in the ocean. And this is talking hundreds of millions of years.

But they were all in the oceans at one point and they gradually came out of that environment. And in doing so, many of these genes that were used just stopped being used. We didn't need them to be grown just as all our crops today. We avoided growing in the coastlines. And so over that time period, as we domesticated as a civilization, as a human race, we just didn't use those crops. Now, there are some crops out there. Samphire is one of them. that is highly salt tolerant, but it's used in very small quantities and also accumulates a lot of salt.

So that was one of our challenges, is trying to reactivate these genes without that accumulation of salt, which has been a very interesting journey for us. And then talk to me about why this is necessary. Talk to me about this sort of climate aspect of what you're trying to do. Absolutely. I mean, there is really a limitless answer to that. If you're focusing on something just like rice, rice is a rice of a spring. responsible at the moment for about 100 million tons of methane.

I'm not sure if you're aware of it. Methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases out there for its warming effect. So it's 28 times worse at the minimal level than CO2. It can exist for at least 50 years within the atmosphere. And so what we're trying to do here really is being able to reduce that expulsion of methane by growing these crops in an environment that is more beneficial for humans and in nature around them. But at the same time, transfer agriculture as we've known it into an environment that doesn't require things like fresh water, land, even the nutrients that we have forced to apply now to get

the yield we demand. In an environmental setting like the oceans, you have the space you need provided. In particular locations, you have the nutrients you need provided, and then everything else is the same. So as long as you can overcome that salt side things, you can really have a farm anywhere in the world. And your two requirements that have been so persistent in agriculture for so long, this freshwater availability and this land availability, breaking those down into the first principles

of what actually are these, what do we actually need? You can find all of that in the oceans. And so with this, we are trying to shift how we grow our crops, how we grow our food, into the most sustainable practice we can. And it's pretty fascinating because it's sort of a, from a climate perspective, it's both mitigation and adaptation. You expand dramatically the area in which you can grow crops, assuming that we will get to a point where huge parts of the earth

where you used to be able to grow will not be usable. That's exactly it. Yeah. And so really we accepted early on that there will be a change in the world, as we all know now, and just as we were talking about snow in L.A., like this is crazy. And being able to actually find a way, to make sure that we can live as a society going forward.

And that's exactly what this does. It's an adaptation, but it's also a mitigation for any further damage that could be occurring. The question I think that a lot of people are going to ask right off the bat is like, is the rice saltier? We've had that. We've also had requests. Can you say like a brined chicken? I mean, honestly, that seems about it. I put a lot of salt in my rice.

Exactly. A bit of taste in there. You know, if we can fine tune it. Luckily, at the moment, that's still up to choice. So they're not coming pretty salted. The way the design works is super cool. I can geek out about this all day long. So the way like salt travels through the cells is there's like multiple roots.

But it's always jumping from cell to cell within these root structures. But there are really two main avenues for that salt to go from the roots themselves up into the leaves. and we've just prevented that avenue from occurring. So really that salt is locked off within the roots themselves. So if you were to take a cutting of the roots and grind them and taste them, they'll be pretty salty. Maybe we can use that as a sprinkling later. But what we're doing there is essentially everything above that root section is entirely normal. You could taste it, you could take that rice.

And in April, the end of April, beginning of May, we will be to actually tasting our rice for the first time. So that's a huge moment for us. And it's very, very exciting. That's amazing. Okay, so that gets to sort of my next question, which is where you are in the process. You have designed these seeds. You've successfully grown them. And they are getting pretty close to, as we're talking, being harvested.

Exactly. Yeah. Inside, I assume this is like indoor. This will be in our greenhouse. So we've had everything a lab based off the past three and a half years since we've kind of been a really physical base company. Okay. But we just started a pilot in an equipment.

greenhouse set down the road. So we have a mini paddy set up there. We were going to have our rice grown in exactly as they would normally, but a salty conditions of that. And then we're going to harvest that in late April, early May. And yeah, we'll be eaten for the first time. So everyone's kind of on tender hooks right now, just waiting for that moment, make sure everything goes perfectly. That's a high stakes dinner party that you're about to have. Yeah. Hopefully we can invite some guests along. How long? Yeah, I mean, how big is the greenhouse? I think you just said, but how much do you anticipate getting? How many bowls of rice do you think?

So we're looking around 30 to 40 kilos of rice. So plenty of rice to share around. You'll need friends. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. So we're going to have to eat all, I'm afraid. Amazing.

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How long has this all taken? Yeah. So we really started the idea, at least in 2018, but it took us a good year of really just honing in on that genetic design before we could even touch it to be in business itself. So we came into investment in 2019 as we applied to the Indy Bio program in San Francisco, which was completely life-changing for the company. We went there, we did six months, and during those six months, we essentially honed the actual business model itself to be something that could be scalable as a company and found a way to be able to release this across the world and make those global

connections that really mattered. And so for us, we've been around, I'd say since 2018, but 2019 since the just with company. And where did you come from? Like, how did you arrive at this problem? Yeah. It's quite funny because both my co-founder and I, we met at university. But when we left, we actually found out we lived about half an hour from each other. And then the very, very rural section of England. So you can probably tell, I've got a British accent, try to maintain it as much as possible. And, yeah, we're in the US now? Yeah, exactly. You're like, I'm holding on. Methane. It is called methane. It is called methane.

An aluminium. Exactly. It's always good fun. But yeah. So you realize that you were half an hour apart in the States. Like you had gone to school together. Half an hour in the UK. So we grew up both in the UK in rural North Yorkshire.

My town was literally at crossroads with a few houses. And the next closest village was 10 minutes away. So we both grew up in that type of environment. And then coming over to the US and seeing the expansion of the potential here was was quite eye-opening. Amazing. So then tell me, once you have figured out, once you've gotten, it sounds as though like where the seeds are now, which is that they can tolerate about half the level of salinity of the actual ocean, that there's still use for seeds like that, right? There are places where people will.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So talk to me about the progression of starting to sell seeds and what the business looks like over time. Definitely. So really for us, there's two stages to the business. And as you've just said, like, that's perfect. there is that first stage where we can have access to seeds that are partially salt tolerant but not oceanic level tolerant and about one fifth of the world's irrigated land today

is salinated in some way and as each day goes by that is increasing and so we've had a huge amount of inbound interest from people experiencing this salinization to try and find a seed that would work in these environments and currently there is no other seed on the planet that can actually survive these environments and still produce the yield that they would if salt wasn't there. And so for us, it's working with these distributors, working with these farmers, to get that seed, the one that is partially salt tolerance, into the hands of them. And so for us, we prefer to work through local seed distributors.

They know the network. They know the people because farming is such an ingrained industry. It's so hard to break into. And so instead of just going in there and saying, hey, we're a new company, this is what we're doing. Like, trust us. We work with those people instead and that create that relationship and that community. So we're working with a group in Vietnam, we're working with a group in Kenya and the US as well to try and get situated in these regions. And by doing so, we license the use of that crop to them to be used with their community within that region there.

As the company develops, in about hopefully two years, what we're looking at, as we tie up a few ocean-based pilots, we're looking then to commercialize our ocean agriculture. And again, there are two ways we can go about it. There's the partnership route in areas where we don't have a good understanding of the culture or the interests of that region. Then we work with partners to be able to establish presence there with them and are splitting the supply chain to ensure that we can actually scale this in that region while not stepping on any toes and kind of making sure that we can scale this across the world as easily as possible. In areas where we do understand the culture, where we do understand the business and how it's done in that region, and we prefer to have our own farms because this is a very new technology. And in any case, any new technology, if used erroneously, can cause complications and problems. And so we like to keep as much control as possible just in these early days until that is scaled up and understood.

So what does having your own farm look like? You're also designing the floating farming component, right? Yeah. So we have three core technology in the company. We have the actual plants themselves, salt tolerant crops, which can be any crop that you imagine. We have the engineering, these floating ocean farms, and they are what we would call really a platform. Because there is a ring structure that provides buoyancy to everything within that ring. And then within that ring, there's a small sheet and there's holes there that exist throughout it.

We can get our pods and screw those parts into that sheet. And as they do so, these parts are essentially replacing soil. So these parts can be reused with the original design for the match. We cut down about 96% of the cost just by shrinking the size a little bit, playing with the ratios, changing the material suppliers, things like that. To a point, we're increasing our margins in every case, the more we develop this engineering. But it replaces the soil. So the crop can be planted on the top.

It can grow through perfectly into the water to obtain all its nutrients. And when it comes to harvesting time, we can just harvest as we normally would, just as it if you're on land and then just replace that crop in that pod the next cycle, the next harvest. And then our third basis of the technology is a bacterial fertilizer that essentially replaces what you would normally have in soil, that community of bacteria that supports crop's growth. It's amazing when you remove it, crop really struggles to produce the yield we know and expect today. But introducing it, you can take things like now we have 50% of all the nitrogen requirements, by a plant is supplied by this bacteria alone.

And we can even then take mutiny it in from the air, break it down, and supply that to the crop as well. So these are some of the things we're trying to establish by kind of bring all of these technologies together. Did you also invent or create the fertilizer? As a consortium, as like an application. So most of these fertilizers exist in the wild, and we found them, identified them, identified their traits.

and then we're kind of honing them down, pushing them down on an evolutionary path to better improve that trait. In the wild, as in nature produces bacterial fertilizers already. Yeah. Yeah. All different types. I feel like I need to, I feel like we need to geek out on this a little bit too. Absolutely. Yeah, no problem at all.

Where do the sort of fertilizer part come in? So you were trying to grow and you're realizing, oh, they're not doing great. Yeah. We need. Within the oceans, there are areas anywhere with 200 meters in depth. depth. You have plenty of nutrients available. You can grow these crops, no problem. As soon as you start to move into, let's say, the middle of the Pacific, it starts to get too deep for that. And so you need an availability of nutrients at the surface. You can do that mechanically with pumps and things

like that. We want to find a biological solution as well because it's self-renewing. There's not that added application, lowers our cost, increases the margins over time. And so with these bacteria, they're existing in all our soils today. You step outside, even the plant that you'd see in your garden would still have some level of bacteria working within that soil. Normally these bacteria can fix nutrients from the air around them, the soil around them and make that available to the plant. So what we've done is fine-tuned which bacteria is present in our crops because as soon as you put these crops in the ocean, it's not the same bacteria and any of the normal bacteria can't exist in that salty environment, but they can exist within the roots. So we have a very

selective process of essentially providing the best bacteria to the crops when they're in these locations. So they have built-in fertilizer? Yeah. So, okay. So there's not a sprayer out there. No, no sprayer. They're engineered to survive the salt and bring their own.

They pack their own. They're like at the Winnebago of rice lights. Exactly. They'll just take everything in and sort it out and there no problem. All right, everybody, I have to tell you. about the most delicious electrolyte drink I've ever had. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt with no sugar.

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in terms of having a farm that sits on the surface of the ocean, which is a pretty dynamic environment, are many. Yeah, you'd be right. It's definitely a frontier. Well, how do we tackle that? Absolutely. By doing it is part of the solution. So putting these crops in that environment and then saying,

okay, what are we experiencing here? Because being able to grow crops in freshwater bodies, isn't really new. There have been ancient civilizations that have done it in floating gardens, but growing it in a salty environment introduces a whole set of challenges. There's mechanical ones, so things like biofowling. So just the build up of algae, muscles, barnacles on your mechanical components. And then trying to get those to move again is just out of the question.

Really, nature has its own power in that realm. And so coming up with ideas to protect our farm. in that way or removing all of those movable parts at the same time. And then trying to estimate this as much as possible. One thing we've found is that experience here is the most valuable asset to come work with people who have already spent time, let's say, varying telecommunication cables underneath the Atlantic. What material did they use?

What was their process, like working with them to understand that? Because this is such a new technology, we have to pull from different industries and learn in a generalist way, how we can apply those specialist knowledge to being able to fix the solution. So biofowling material usage, everything from nutrients, or how do you deal with fish? And trying to approach these problems, not so much problems, but opportunities to actually benefit our system. In many cases, what we've tried to do here is create a business that can save and protect

regions of environments through productivity. And so instead of just saying, okay, this is now a protected zone, let's provide a productivity to do this so it's protected for decades and doesn't have to be reaffirmed over the decades. And so by doing things like that and identifying these problems through what's already understood has helped us really overcome a lot of issues there. And so in terms of location, is that what you would be looking for, is areas that are already protected so that there's not shipping traffic or fishing or, because I'm not thinking just of the growing, but even the wind and waves and boats. Definitely, yeah. With the wind and wave and boats, that's a perfect way of summing it up.

Wind and waves, relatively okay to deal with. That comes down to the engineering. If we make actually a smaller farm, then the whole farm works with the waves themselves. So it'll bend with the waves, it won't topple over, it won't get to a point where it's too top heavy. And so with a lattice structure across there, essentially it's a wave itself. That's how we overcame that situation with boats. It becomes a policy issue. This is where we're working with governments now to try and catch up with what we're doing. Because we do need those designated zones, but not so much the protected ones, more so the areas we want to protect.

And so with something like a fish farm that can produce a lot of nitrogen into the outer environment, we can work with those to produce a farm around that or soak up all of that nitrogen before it gets to a point where it's causing algal blooms. So working with these unprotected zones to produce productivity. Got it. Are you, is there any concern about unintended consequences? on the sort of biology of the ocean from your firms? Definitely.

Yeah, absolutely. In any case, with any new technology, there should be that concern. Yeah. And again, we're working with different trade associations. We actually have a pilot running in Singapore right now, where that's the entire premise of that pilot, is to assess how we're going to impact the environment, the ecosystem around it. And what happens if this random, very low likelihood scenario does happen, how do we approach that, and how do we deal with it and how do we prevent it?

And so that's been running for the past year. It's got another year to go and probably will extend beyond that as well. But it's introducing different members of the ecosystem like crustaceans or sea grasses and just seeing how we react to that and also our nutrient load on those systems at the same time. Tell me a little bit more about the business model. Like what is the market size? You talked about sort of licensing and outsourcing and operating your own farms. How does it all come together?

Definitely. Yeah. So in terms of the actual rice market size, it's about 300 billion across the entire world, but it's looking to increase up to 50% by 2050. And this is a crop that is really feeding half the world right now, and it's most pressured by salinization. And so we're working within rice because it does feed over half the world's population, but also is most pressured, perfect candidate for us. We're branching out to other crops to combat issues like food versus fuel in corn, for example, also developing biofuels, you don't have to then choose between the two. You can grow all the fuel you need in the oceans. So with things like that, really we're scaling up to the option of just working with

the entire agricultural industry, which is hitting the $4.2 trillion dollar mark, which is really limitless for us and how much we want to be able to scale. With this technology though, scaling it back down, it's really then coming to the areas of one-fifth this irrigated land. In Wright, for example, that's 300 billion and one fifth of that is the area that we can then apply to. And so by each of the crops, it's really assessing your location because not all areas are equally irrigated, not all areas that are equally salinated.

But in terms of capacity in terms of actually market appetite, there is unfalable market appetite for this. And it really is just a location specific focus. And that's what's limited to us right now, is that we just have. so much interest and so much inbound interest that we're trying to meet that and all our resources are being used to meet that. And so what we're focusing on is just trying to increase that capacity and to meet those demands.

And we keep getting it because of how we've edited these crops. We actually got a really interesting request the other day to develop salt torrent soybean so that it can be planted closer to the coast in Brazil to pull away from the Amazon and to protect the Amazon there as well. And so it starts to come through that there are all these options all around the world. And it's more of a process of for us, it takes around $6,000 to develop a single salt tolerant variety. And then the licensing capability there is really dependent on the regional locations. For Vietnam, there's 1.3 million hectares that are currently salinated to a point they can't grow anything else.

And we can have about 5 to 10% fees on all the licenses of all the seeds, there, which reaches about 130 million per year. So pretty big then. Pretty big market. Yeah, it gets pretty big, pretty fast. Listen, if you follow this podcast, you know that retail investors have taken the financial world by storm over the past few years with tools like commission-free trading apps and robo advisors.

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them a greenhouse. What could you run into as you scale? Because on the one hand, it sort of sounds like you're describing like a miracle, which. And it's definitely been called that a point. When we first started, I was on a picture run and I was called just crazy for believing that this was capable of happening. And then a year later, like the normal response to miracle actually is, to back away slowly.

So. And that's definitely been the case here. And so we've just tried to very much focus on showing that it is capable and it is possible. And so getting that salt-tolerant crop that is half the level of very shalamic salinity last year was just life-changing for us and really showing that this is a design that works. And it's just a phase now for optimization and iteration. So what really holds us back right now is being able to, one, have the capability to scale

this to different pilots, to different locations around the world. world, working with different crops, working with different partners, but also the regulatory and policy to actually keep up with where we're putting these plants. In many locations, there is no policy that sets out, okay, you can have this farm in this location, and the closest thing is really aquaculture, whereas the actual inputs and outputs of our system are very, very different to agriculture. And so that's what's holding us back. That's where we're trying to work again with different partners, different policies, to then bring that up out so that that when we do get to the point of commercializing ocean agriculture, there isn't anything

holding us back. In terms of the science side, there's not really too much now that's going to hold us back. It's really just how fast can we move. Rice takes about four months to grow, so we have to wait four months to really get a decent answer on how these plants are performing. So it's just time. And so we've started working a crop that's a little bit lower in its generation time. So looking at about a month to two months, and hopefully we'll get some quicker answer.

is there. How about the process of getting, you know, your 50% to the way to the, 50% of the way to ocean tolerant. How hard is that other 50%? Yeah, definitely. As yet, because no one's gone up to that level, it's a prediction of what we expect. And what we do expect is a diminishing return. So as we increase that ability for our aircraft to be salt tolerant, the next, the first

50% relatively easy. compared to the next, the next 30% a little bit harder, the next 10% after that, a little bit harder, and the last 10% will be very difficult. But what we're seeing here is that if you're mapping what's already been seen in nature, so things like seagrasses and mangroves, everything they're doing can be replicated, and everything we've done so far isn't the perfect match. It's not the perfect mimic of these systems. So what we do when we're creating these crops is we find these genes, activate them as I mentioned.

We're activating just the ability of them to be expressed. We're not changing the gene at all. And so what we've seen is that our edits have been good, but they're not perfect. And so it's just that optimization of making sure that dial of how much this gene can be found, where it's found, what triggers it to be found and being expressed and produced is just turned up a little bit. And at the moment, those dials are just turned down just less than I would like them to be. and so our focus right now is just turning those dials up all insynchronous so that we can have this expression across the field

could you imagine a universe in which you have to do a little more editing like a little beyond expressing and into that's a technical term I know science absolutely I don't see it with the salt tolerance that don't be wrong there are multiple ways you could go about doing salt tolerance, different methods, different ways to be able to remove and introduce salt into a plan. That this way, because it's already been shown by nature, is like a direct path being able to reach that. What we do expect is that what we can introduce is the bacteria to come in and try and manage

a little bit of salt. They're essentially creating like an atmosphere around the roots of the cells, around the roots of the plants, so that they reduce that salt by a little bit, just to then the internal systems, the internal machinery, and then take the rest of that salt and manage it as well. So let's say instead of going for 100% oceanic salinity, we only have to hit 80 and the bacteria will do the rest. So we have some backups and to be able to ensure that those are capable. The beautiful thing about this business is that where we're currently at, this could be a business

all by itself and do very well. But what we're really aiming for is that oceanic level because that's where we see the largest change and the most sustainable change within agriculture. And then who, let's get a little more specific about who the buyers are. Is it commercial growers? Is it farmers? Is it landowner? You know, who would want to license or buy these seeds or the farms themselves?

It can be the farms themselves, of course. It can be the actual seed developers. So we're working with a couple of seed developers in the U.S. You have their own rice lines that they sell already to farm. And we're working with those to introduce salt tolerance to them. And then in other situations, it's people more downstream. So when we're managing our own farms, it's working with the larger multinationals who have food and snack lines and beverage lines and we'll use these within that pipeline and that supply chain.

And so as long as we can be competitive in that environment and competitive as a supplier, we can provide very local production systems. And then you mentioned that this seems like sort of more capital efficient than I would have expected. You've only raised what a little over

$2 million? $3 million, a little over $3. Just less than two million at 1.7, but hopefully we're just bringing in another $2 million, hopefully the next week. Great. Congratulations. Always good.

Glad to hear it. And then you said it takes $6,000 to develop a new variety, what does that, once you have a new variety, is that an infinite number of seeds? Like, what does that translate into? Really?

Yeah, as soon as you get, like, that one variety is just a normal plant. You can plant to obtain the seeds and they're going to be salt-tolerant for generations after this. And this is how we've designed it, because if you take a subsistence farmer, for example,

and you grow these crops in those farms, if you're using like a system where where the salt torrents stops after that first generation, they have to come back and buy it from you. These farmers will suffer very, very quickly. What we're trying to at the moment is reduce that salinity over time. So these subsistent farmers can still use them, get a subsistence yield,

but commercial farmers just will not be competitive. And so even if the yield, the seeds are taken and being able to use elsewhere, they still have to be able to be reactivated and re-initiated to be salt-horrent again. wait can you explain that one more time so yeah of course somebody can't just buy one set of your seeds so it depends and use that forever necessarily with someone we're working with seeds as a service subscription yeah can be the new sass I think I think I love that actually actually quite good it's pretty good right the new sass let's yeah definitely you're welcome go ahead scampered take that just going to pop that on the marketing um with uh

So it depends who we're working with. If we're working with established sea companies, they have their own pipeline to manage their seeds and enforce that they are being used. And so what we can introduce there is assault torrents into their pipeline. And then the ability for that to be kept out of like a persistent use and is on them and through their license. When we're working in locations where that protection and that pattern enforcement doesn't come as often and isn't really great. we try and find a way to be able to reduce that salinity over time. We're still working on this to make sure that if we do provide seeds to that location,

then we have no protection capacity for whether seeds are going to be used, who's going to be using them, and how. I see. Okay. And then finally, will the price of the seeds be in parity with the ones you might plant in a non-salty in front? non-salty environment? Like, is that the goal to basically have price parity? Absolutely. Yeah. On margins in the terms of the ocean sector, and even on the land licensing side as well, so anything where you're growing crops in salty soil, the rent is so much lower, the upkeep is so much lower.

In the ocean side, you have no, if you remove your three major inputs, so if you fertilizers, your pesticides, and your irrigation, the margins just increase dramatically. So for us, selling them a price parity is no problem at all. And it's really just being able to scale so that we can flex the new ability for agriculture to be a very profitable business and move away from the system that we've grown used to. Great Eak 1 to be truly sustainable, but also very sustainable as a business as well. Amazing. Luke Young is a CEO and co-founder at Allura, turning seawater into food. not to overdo the miracle thing here, but congratulations.

It's crazy. We accept it. Just run away. Thank you so much. Thank you.