Notes for TWiST ep.621 — Science rules! Rowbots transforms agriculture w/robotic farming & Experiment.com funds research
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6 min readFeb 15, 2016
On today’s ThisWeekInStartups (links: video, audio) Jason is joined by two interesting guests:
- Kent Cavender-Bares, co-founder and CEO of Rowbot revolutionizing how crops get fertilized with small self-driven robots and how what that means for the enviroment and people’s health;
- Cindy Wu, co-founder of Experiment.com, a kickstarter for scientific research allowing anybody to get their research projects crowd-funded
Here comes the notes for this episode.
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Kent Cavender-Bares, Rowbot
His background
- He grew up in agriculture, his brother is a large scale farmer (and one the most profitable dairy farmer in the north east)
- He was designing farm equipment at Cornell as an undergrad, got interested in the environment so he pursed a master and phd in environmental engineering
- He was a science advisor for non-profits for years
- After the collapse of 2008, non-profit sector got hit cause rich people were hit by the crisis as well stopped giving donations
The problem Rowbot is solving
- In 2009 he started a non-profit to tackle the big problem agriculture is facing today: nutrient pollution caused by nitrogen fertilizers, ending up in the gulf of Mexico and causing “dead zones” (technically, a low oxygen zone)
- Fishes can’t live in these zones, so they leave and move away
- There’s also an upstream problem: it pollutes drinking water
- Farmers put nitrogen fertilizers on the earth to have more robust crops and putting too much to have a good harvest, they end screwing up the environment
- They put $100 worth of nitrogen per acre and they are losing half of it, 50 bucks per acre
- It’s hard to put the nitrogen on the right time
- When the crop needs the fertilizer it’s hard to put it on there cause it’s 5–6 feet tall
Rowbot 1
- The Rowbot 1 is a small tractor that runs through plants, many times per second it’s adjusting its course avoiding to hit the crop plants
- It’s easier than building self-driving cars, probably 50 ways to plant crops not 5 millions and you don’t risk of hitting people
- It sprays liquid fertilizer at the basis of the plant, the enough amount and right where the plant needs it at that stage
- The holy grail is to have the Rowbot going through the field and occasionally stopping and sampling the soil and the plant
- They run on diesel, it’s easier for farmers used to diesel and they can have them run 24.7
The business model
- They go to the market as a Robot-As-A-Service
- Farmers are accustomed to pay for services
- They have tons of technology today and when it breaks it’s frustrating (they don’t want to own these things)
- It will be like an Uber for nitrogen they can order from their ipads
- Nitrogen is expensive: if it’s $150 per acre for seeds, it’s $100 per acre for nitrogen
- Based on their data and their models, they will be able to predict how much nitrogen it’s really required, save money or putting more to increase the yeald, thus making more money
Farming in 10 years
- Food is cheap right now, it probably won’t get cheaper
- There will be billions of more people wanting to eat better: we need to figure out how to produce more and better in a sustainable way
- It will be through a mix of all the best practices from organic and industrial productions, with possibly GMO as well
- We’ll see smaller machines instead of big ones: if they are autonomous they can be small, no need for them to be big
- Big machines also damage the soil by compacting it
Cannabis
- It will take the place of pain medication, it’s less addicting than traditional pain medications
- Some say it will be the crop of the future but it will be highly controlled
The future of food
- He’s optimistic, new ways of making agriculture more profitable and sustainable are emerging (Rowbot is an example)
- He believes in eating less meat, less dairy (for health reasons) and to have a more sustainable agricolture (6 billions people can’t all eat meat like people from the Western countries do)
- With smaller machines, it will be easier to have smaller plantations and have more diversity
- Today you can’ mix corn and soy beans and something else good fo the soil on the same field easily, you will in the future
Raising funds
- It’s a seed funded company
- It’s been challenging
- It’s a hardware company, they don’t have a team (in Silicon Valley investors ask for it) and that’s what they need the money for, to hire a team
- It’s an agriculture company and investors may be familiar with California agriculture instead of north-west agriculture
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Cindy Wu, Experiment.com
Kickstarter for Scientists
- Experiment.com is a kickstarters for scientists: scientists put up their proposal and anybody with a credit card can give them money to fund their project, with no tangible returns
- The funders don’t care about getting a t-shirts or something out of their donation, but they want to know where the money went and if a new discovery was made or not
- The project organizer will share periodic updates with the funders and once the paper is written and published, he’ll share the results with them
- Scientists are encouraged to publish their papers on publicly accessible — journals
- They even put together a journal themselves for them to share their findings with everybody without the paywalls that many traditional scientific journals have
- In the future publishing scientific results will happen in real time as the research progresses and people will be able to follow it as the results unfold
What scientists want
- Scientists are concerned people may steal their ideas and publish them before they do
- They are not concerned with people using early results and incomplete data to promote their agendas (they could be pro or cons something)
- What scientists care about is the prestige in the scientific community (beside unveiling interesting facts)
Why she built it
- She built it to fund high-risk ideas that traditional funding institutions don’t fund (she was 20 years old, she asked for 5k from the professor to fund her own research and she got a big “No, you are not a PhD”)
- It’s public since April 2012, they graduated from Ycombinator in 2013
- So far they have raised over 5 million dollars in projects funds to fund over 400 projects, 40% of the projects lauched meet their funding goals
How projects get funded
- Most funded project: Finding a cure for Batten disease, a rare disease affecting less than 100,000 kids and it affects the brain
- They approve 80% of the projects they receive: they make sure the projects follow the scientific method and that they are raising enough money to complete the project
- Anyone can be a scientist, no college degree required — high schools kids have used the platoform to send stuff to the International Space Station
- If your project involves testing on people or animals, you go through their ethical board and need to be a part of an institution
- Average funding size is 5k — science is not expensive
- The funding goes mostly to materials and access to equipment or anything they need to get the project done
- There have been people funding 2 or 3 projects
- People will be hopefully able to make a living by doing project after project for their research
- There have been projects funded on the best way to cook cookies
- They have funded the genome sequencing of an internet famous cat, Lilbub
Grants
- They receive money from anonymous donors asking for it to go funding projects in a specific field (e.g. ocean preservation, Zika virus) and the manage the money
- They could have sponsors like Microsoft, Google, Beats as marketing tools, it would be great for branding if Beats funded project researching the effects of music
Business model
- They take 5% fees (+CC fees) like Kickstarter.com
- It’s hard to make money with these margins (Jason)
- When they’ll succeed everyone will be able to become a scientist
- They plan to get into publishing to make open access to research the standard, not the exception
- They’ll have their (printed) journal and people will be able to subscribe and pay for it
