Jon Trask on Dimitra’s blockchain platform for farmers

0:02i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have john trask the founder and ceo of demetra john welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to come on today i appreciate you having me here ashton thank you for the opportunity you're very welcome i'm very excited to

0:22talk about blockchain in agriculture and ag tech some one of the use cases that you don't hear about as often but is actually super important and very transformative and i'm excited to dive into the solutions that your team has developed and is bringing into the industry and i would love for you to kick it off for us with just a high level on dimitra and some of the

0:42solutions that you're providing yeah we're really excited to be here have an opportunity to talk about it we're very excited about our mission and and all that we're working on um about a year and a half ago i started up demetra and we've been growing very quickly since we built an application which is used in agriculture and

1:10essentially what we're doing is we're providing our application to smallholder farmers around the world they can register their farm register their farming activities establish their goals and we use blockchain machine learning other forms of artificial intelligence satellite and sensors to help them improve their output so it is very transformative to farmers

1:38we are serving a niche of farmers that are called small holder farmers so in the world there's about 610 million farmers and about 570 million of those are underserved uh don't have access typically to technologies and it's and it's not normally within their budget to buy an application like it might be here in north america

2:04or in western europe so we're coming up with mechanisms working with governments ngos and not-for-profits to put this in the hands of smallholder farmers around the world and these are the farmers who need it most they produce 70 of the world's food and they get up work very long days and are typically some of the

2:30the poorest people in the world as well their income levels are are below poverty level in a very high percentage of smallholder farmers so it's an exciting mission to work with them definitely john and that's a great background you gave and it seems like the large majority of farmers are actually small farmers but they make up the majority of you know the production

2:54and i i understand you know i think a lot of investors that are in the tech space uh they have a hard time grasping you know somebody that's running a small farm how you know their operations and the kind of technologies that they use to help increase their efficiency uh and throughput at the farm you know and there's a big difference between small farmers and these large agricultural

3:18centers that that have top-of-the-line technology um that are that are in the mainstream you know which are the one percent uh you don't really hear about the kind of technology with the small farmers but there are a lot of technologies that that can help maybe you can talk about you know is it just effectiveness and efficiency in the kind of solutions that

3:40you're providing or how specifically if say a small farmer was watching this would they use dimitra to start increasing the effectiveness of their farm yeah so if you're in one of the countries we're working in already and you have the application you can log in and set up a geofence around your farm and once you've set up your geofence we can look at your farm with a satellite

4:04and we can take that satellite information and find out a lot of valuable information around your farm the health of your crops the health and quality of your soil and then we can compound the value that we can create by a farmer actually telling us more about their soil describing their soil describing their goals for what crops they want to grow

4:31describing how they prepare their fields before they plant and you look at smallholder farmers and typically smallholder farmers today don't have access to a lot of technology and their output is typically half to 60 percent of what you might see in a more mechanized uh more a farm that potentially is in north america or western europe

5:01that has access to other technologies and other information so when we take all of that information we couple it with weather information and topographical information and we let machine learning look and try to analyze what are the gaps do you not have enough of a certain nutrient in the soil are you is there a better way to prepare your soil should be you be using different

5:28fertilizers and taking that information we can increase the output by 20 or 30 percent now the interesting thing in that equation is typically a small holder farmer eats or consumes about seventy percent or eighty percent of what they produce and only twenty percent goes to market and that additional 20 increase in productivity can actually

5:55double the income of a small holder farmer so now you're taking a small holder farmer and you're changing the poverty equation you're you're creating new wealth for them that they can apply to further enhance their farm or provide for their family so lots of great benefits from a small holder farmer perspective and you know

6:23we look at the smallholder farmers in in other ways and a lot of smallholder farmers in the world have been adopting cell phones in the last three to five years and the prevalence of cell phones with farms is high but applications that people have to pay for is quite low so we are looking for ways to provide the application to the farmer

6:50for free and then the outcomes that occur of the increased product productivity can help from a government perspective so the governments are are quite welcoming uh from the perspective of helping the farmers in their nations and then the other people we work with is farm associations you know so if you're part of the the poultry association or the the corn association

7:17or a local farm association we like working with associations because they can help bridge some of the training gaps so it's uh it's all been great we've been growing by leaps and bounds we've got over a million users and about contracts signed for about 18 million users so loads of growth where we've got five project teams right now

7:45working on implementing in five different areas in the world and expanding the functionality to add new features we we started initially with about 13 modules we've got a roadmap of about 40 modules of technology that we want so over the next few years we'll continue to expand the the features uh for example right now we're doing one on

8:13cattle genetics to help breeders breed healthier animals and and reduce some of the challenges that they have just by managed reading programs incredible john and i can't believe uh that those numbers there you mentioned only 20 of the output is actually being sold and really they're just living off their own land so to be able to have a

8:4020 increase in efficiency you're actually doubling output um i saw that dimitra's also focused on the un sustainable development goals and you know they were recently talking about the poverty line how um you know there's they're trying to get people over uh to be able to earn one or two dollars a day to keep them over the global poverty line and those numbers really

9:04uh are sort of out of date and need to be doubled or even you know tripled um to sort of more sustainably live on you know five dollars a day maybe so to increase the uh output by double is obviously going to be hugely impactful for these areas and you mentioned there you have a bunch of contracts already we talked a little bit about you know how farmers in north america versus

9:28these other emerging economies and you said that you're also in a bunch of countries maybe you can talk about specifically uh where demetrius technology is growing the most and and where it's having the most impact yeah so we started in east africa and have been doing a lot of work in east africa we've expanded now and we're continuing to expand the countries

9:51that we work in and that we sell in so we have team members in 60 countries now um we're actively working in uganda nigeria india bangladesh brazil to name a few so you know loads and loads of activity and then we have a pipeline right now about 71 countries that we're in discussions with and so we just

10:19are in a point in our growth where we need to continue to grow so that we can continue to push into different countries there's a create there's a great deal of groundwork that needs to occur when we go into a country around setting up satellite analysis and and setting up you know weather access and various data feeds that have to occur in each individual country so it's not

10:47as simple the way the system's designed as a simple sas that might work for everybody in the world we have to strategically work on entering a country and preparing that country for success definitely a lot of uh work ahead with 71 countries in the pipeline so best of luck with that and you did mention there john uh earlier about how a lot of these farmers are starting to use mobile

11:14phones to help uh integrate more technology into the farms i want to throw back to just part of the blockchain and cryptocurrency aspect of dimitra maybe you can talk about you know the blockchain part of it and also the dimitra token uh involves how does that benefit uh the farmers and the users on the platform and and what are the main functionalities within the

11:35platform and how the dimetro token is used yeah absolutely so why don't i take it back to um the individual components of the system and so initially when a farmer comes on they need to register their identity they need to register um the location and they need to provide us with a lot of private data that could be risky for it to be out there so what

12:04are the relationships between their land how much land do they own where is their land where is their house things like that so we use a lot of the security aspects of blockchain initially to privatize that information to secure that information and keep it encrypted so then you know secondarily each one of those farmers has a farmer's points program if they use the app and

12:30they use the app well they earn points and we use a side chain roll up where we can roll up their points program into dimitra tokens so now they have a pot of dimitra tokens that gets them going in the crypto world and they can do one of two things one they can convert that and spend that they can invest that

12:58uh if they choose and i guess finally we provide opportunities for them to get discounted services through the demetra ecosystem so a farmer who's just starting out may need sensor services somebody to take a soil sample and do an evaluation of their soil so in each country we set up a number of ecosystem partners and we're always looking for ecosystem partners as we

13:23enter a country who can go out to a farm and provide sensor service or drone service or set up if they want to set up antennas to read sensors on their animals so they can take their points and additional dmtr and use that to pay those service providers who actually buy the components the sensors and such

13:51from us in dmtr so now we're creating an ecosystem of services that serves the individual farmers and then we layer on that each one of these projects typically is many many millions of dollars and even tens of millions of dollars so then we layer on it who are all the investors in that and how do they invest and transfer wealth between themselves and farmers and

14:19so we have input providers who provide seeds and fertilizer we have governments we have not-for-profits we have universities that come out and they all need funding so what we're trying to do is we're creating an ecosystem where if we invest a dimetra token in a project that we go and find two or three or four other partners who are also willing to invest a dimetro token in a

14:46project so that creates demand on the token and now creates a circular ecosystem that starts with preparing the farmer with planting going through harvest and moving their product through the supply chain either to export or to a local market whatever their their avenue of sale is and so we're developing that um as we go and

15:16you know i'll give you an example in one of our countries where we're looking at censoring millions of cattle um so there's some health sensors that can measure their temperature that can measure their their ph and help them reduce their health issues or identify if they're going to have a health issue earlier um helps reduce antibiotic use because now

15:42they don't have to blanket antibiotic every animal and so what we're what we're doing with that is we need in this country thousands of people to go around and put sensors on cattle so we sell the sensors to those local sensor specialists they go out to the farms they censor the cows they set up an antenna on the farm to read the sensors and connect that to the internet on the farm

16:10and all of that ecosystem is paid for by tokens wow okay so it yeah it's uh it's pretty exciting what's happening and and farmers moving into tech um is really making this happen they they get the benefit of the increased output or the improved animal health or reduction in antibiotics or reduction in pesticides and at the same time

16:39are creating a new economy within their country and new higher tech jobs you know in this one country we're probably looking at creating over a thousand jobs just to work on the demetra platform and within the ecosystem that's great to hear john and you know we don't have a lot of time left you did mention you have a lot of great things coming up with the amount of contracts

17:07and countries and also in the technology maybe you can briefly give a major roadmap of what are the biggest things that your team is looking to roll out into the platform as you continue to grow between now and in the next few months yeah so i would say in the next six months there's there's a couple big projects one of them is the rollout of the farmer

17:32points program on that side chain so we're hoping to have that out by year end we have a animal genetics contract that is rolling out the genetics platform is rolling out at christmas time um we're working on our sas model and have looking to have that out early in 2022 um and then we've got some major expansion going on um

18:00got a project in india right now which might be the largest soil remediation project in the world so we're actually working on satellite analysis of the soil of 1.3 million farms and then we're coupling that with a couple thousand people to go out and start censoring the soil in those areas and the goal is to build a process that we can take a snapshot of

18:26a farm and give the farmers advice on how to remediate their soil and bring back the bio diversity in the soil and increase the organic content in the soil which essentially creates a carbon capture so you know has an in you know an impact on global warming and an impact on their output at the same time and

18:53and we have lots of soil problems in the world so you know we see uh how we can help i think 30 percent of the world's soil has been degraded or or is gone over the last hundred years the way we farmed so in this project in in india we're working on setting up sustainable methods of farming so that each individual farmer actually improves their soil quality every year as opposed

19:22to degrading their soil quality and that'll help in a lot of areas like fresh water usage and and reduced carbon impact on global warming plus the benefits on the financial side for the farmer you know poverty reduction hunger reduction so it's it's just amazing what you can accomplish in farming and you know farming is becoming more and more necessary the world

19:49is growing we're you know we need to double our production by 2050 um in order to feed the world and the demand for healthier food is increasing so you know dependencies more on vegetables and fruits and and quality cuts of meats and alternatives to meats and alternative lifestyles and organic

20:16those are all prevalent in the world and becoming more and more important globally so the platform can help support that if a farmer is looking to run organic we can make organic based recommendations for them so that they're sustainable and that they're leaving the land better than they found it wow great john all good things uh regenerating the earth's soil and

20:42stopping global warming uh another you know a little tick in the box in helping little farmers uh get access to technology and you know growing their output so amazing work that your team is doing for the viewers and for the farmers investors anybody else that's interested in learning more about dimitra what's the best way for them to learn more and

21:05get involved in the project yeah absolutely you can find everything on demetra.io so there's information about the token there there's information about uh the application and there's you know dozens of uh news articles and and actually you can look at who all the team members are and the countries that we're in so lots of informa interesting information if you're looking for more

21:31than that there's contact info on the website and please feel free to reach out to myself or any of the regional directors all of their email addresses are on on the website sounds great sean i will leave those links in the description box below as well all the best growing dimitra in the coming months and i'm sure we'll talk again soon so let's follow up in the near future

21:55perfect thanks ashton good glad to be here take care