GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Farms, Food and Traceability, with Allison Kopf
In this episode we talk to Allison Kopf from TRACT, a revolutionary platform mapping and tracking global commodity supply chains to create greater transparency across the world's food systems.
From her physics studies at Santa Clara University to pioneering indoor farming in North America, to data-led innovation for sustainability, Alison's journey demonstrates how technology entrepreneurship can drive sustainable change when guided by clear environmental values.
Our conversation dives deep into EU sustainability regulations that are transforming how companies track deforestation and emissions, creating both challenges and opportunities. It also takes a fascinating turn toward AI applications in agriculture - from automating crop registration to detecting disease and mapping supply chains - revealing how technology can help sustainability teams focus on meaningful impact.
And - finally - we close talking about what all of this might mean for the future of value chains and, even capitalism itself, in an AI-led technosphere.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 3:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mirai Agency, istanbul, and.
Speaker 4:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 3:So in this episode we're going to talk to Alison Koff, the CEO of TRACT, a digital food and agricultural sustainability measurement platform. Alison is essentially a tech entrepreneur for the planet and started her career in solar technologies before moving into sustainable food systems. She's been named one of the Forbes 30 under 30.
Speaker 4:And I happen to know that Alison hates hearing herself talked about, so we better make this quick. Alison, you graduated in physics at Santa Clara University, innovated across a host of different areas, including indoor farming, which we'll get to, and with Tract and your previous venture, cmp, you're pioneering the application of advanced technology to support supply chain traceability in agriculture around things like deforestation and scope three carbon emissions. So, alison, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Dambler and myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited about the chat.
Speaker 4:Brilliant, okay, so the only other caveat is that you and I are both suffering from a classic Northern European cold, so if we sound a little bit snotty, that's why. So, before we dive headlong into the excitement of tech and data and AI and all that other fun stuff and how it could help save the planet, tell us about your journey to becoming a green tech entrepreneur, starting out as a graduate in physics. How did you get here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I think I got really lucky, honestly, and that's probably part of every entrepreneur's story, right, it's a little bit of the magic luck there, but when I was in university, I got to work on a project that the Department of Energy hosted a long time ago, and it was this really incredible platform for sustainability and teaching kids about sustainability, right, ultimately. And what we did was you spent two years during your undergraduate career designing and building fully functional, solar-powered homes that had all kinds of different green tech in them, from sustainable building materials to edible gardens to circularity around water, and so it really got you again as, like a 19-20 year old who had no real world experience, thinking about these topics and not just thinking about them from an educational and academic standpoint, but really being physically hands-on, and that sparked something in me. I was actually studying computer engineering at the time and I switched into physics because I had this you know little again 20-year-old epiphany of like I have to be doing more for the world, right, I have to be working on these bigger challenges, and I don't. I love computer engineering and I love building software, but I want to be doing it in a way that matters, that really is anchored into our lives and what we're doing, and to create a future that we all want to be a part of right. And so that was really the ideologue of my youth.
Speaker 2:And I got lucky in agriculture because my first job out of college. I had two kind of paths in front of me. One was working in the solar industry kind of the investment banking side, and the other was joining a very early stage company it was only a handful of people at the time building greenhouses in North America to grow produce closer to the point of consumption, so shrinking that supply chain, and I knew nothing about plants. I did not grow up in agriculture. It was just sort of this you know ideologue, coming from university, fresh out of the, out of the, the out of school, thinking about sustainability and trying to drive something forward.
Speaker 2:But I wanted to do that in a very pragmatic way and so I joined that startup as one of the first employees and and helped build this industry of indoor farming in North America. That was very fascinating to be a part of right this is boom and bust kind of cycle that we've seen now in that space has been kind of a wild experience to be a part of right. This boom and bust kind of cycle that we've seen now in that space has been kind of a wild experience to be a part of, but really taught me a lot about what I wanted to do, and that's where I've spent the rest of my career is working with farmers, working with people driving real change in the supply chain, working on things that impact our lives as consumers at the end of the day. But trying to understand those problems from a very practical standpoint and really trying to drive systemic change through pragmatic solutions has essentially been the crux of my entire career.
Speaker 3:Wow, that's a very nice story, and you are so clear-headed about what you want to do. I think that's very inspiring for all of us, and there's no room for chances other than the magical one in the beginning. You know what you want. That's great.
Speaker 2:But a little mix of luck, right? You have to have this like serendipitous thing. You know, I think a lot of founders and a lot of CEOs will tell you like you have to get really good at saying no to stuff, and I'm just in the opposite camp. My advice is almost always just say yes to everything, and I know that creates an awful time for your calendar certainly and probably eliminates whatever free time conceptually you had. Saying yes to things and opening doors. I for myself, at least personally, have created more opportunity in more interesting areas that I probably could have ever mapped out for myself. Right, it's not like I'm sitting down with a 20-year horizon of where I want to be. I'm sitting down with a 50-year horizon of where I want the world to be and opening doors to kind of find paths through there.
Speaker 3:I think I will have a new thing for that. I'll call it inclusive serendipity. I couldn't say that word, but inclusive serendipity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly, I love it.
Speaker 4:Hey, that would look great on a t-shirt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm in. This is my brand now. Yeah, I'm in. This is my brand now, okay great.
Speaker 3:So if you could boil it down for our listeners, how does Trax platform make traceability easier across so many different types of farms and crops, covering soy, beet, timber and even cotton for the layperson? What does your platform do actually?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for the lay person, what does your platform do actually? Yeah, so, for anyone listening, that's, that's maybe not in deep in supply chain mechanics, which most, most people are not, right. Uh, ultimately, what we're trying to do here is map the entire world's global commodity trading flows, and so what that looks like is you're taking some of the commodities that are most traded in the world and you talk about soy and palm and sugar. Right, these types of commodities that, uh, we as consumers probably take for granted, they're almost in everything, right, you talk about palm. It's not just a cooking oil, which it is, it's also in every makeup product you're putting on your skin, right, it's in toothpaste, it's in, it's in everything. Uh, you talk about, um, soy, and, aside from the soy that we think of as consumers, it's a major consumable in animal feed, right. So these products are in everything. So you've got coffee and cocoa and sugar that we all have in our cabinets, but we also have all these other products that are consumed in various ways, and so if you think about it as a consumer and try to conceptualize the kind of origin story of that product, it becomes very hard to think about. So, okay, yes, I've got toothpaste.
Speaker 2:Now I have to break down these hundred ingredients of where they may have all come from. Where did they come from? Okay, well, I bought. You know this ingredient came from this company Fine, where did they come from? Okay, well, I bought. You know this ingredient came from this company Fine, where did that company get it from? Well, they got it from somebody else.
Speaker 2:And actually that's a commodity that's traded, which means it could have sat on a boat and changed hands 17 times before it ever got to its port destination. Okay, that's interesting. Right. Then you go back to and eventually it came from a farm right, all of these crops eventually came from a farm, but had this opaque kind of messy middle. That happens, and what Tract is trying to do is make those least transparent supply chains transparent, and we do that from this point of resiliency. So we want all companies to be able to make choices in their supply chain that drive us towards more sustainable agricultural commodities, certainly, and have the information available to do that. Right now, there is no visibility into that, and so we're trying to drive towards a future where there is visibility into that.
Speaker 4:So it it sounds. You make it sound easy. Allison. That's weird, so simple. I know I'll just sort that out everyone should do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh, no very hard.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so it's like earlier when you said I just switched computer science for physics, like you do. You know, um, catch we, um, you and I met at a sustainability conference, uh, so a soy, uh, sustainable soy conference last year. And um, and the talk in the room obviously, as you know, is very much about eu regulations, uh, around deforestation, sustainability, reporting, driving, you know really big changes for these commodities and uh, it certainly seems to me that the deadlines around all of this are really shifting quite a bit, and does that create headaches for everyone trying to come up with solutions? Like you, what's your take on where we're at with sustainability in the EU?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. Of course it does right. I think so. For again, for anybody not deep in the regulatory landscape, the EU has a number of different pieces of legislation that are all oriented around sustainability and traceability. Right now, there's corporate responsibility that happens at the company level. That's things like CSRD, cbam, nagoya Protocol, you could name it. It's called acronym soup here, right, it's just name an acronym, and it's probably about sustainability regulation. But then there's also supply chain regulation, udr, which is deforestation related. We're getting more into carbon reporting, of course. So there's these handful of things that impact the industry and, frankly, does it impact solutions providers? Yeah, of course, I think it impacts the supply chain, though exponentially more.
Speaker 2:Imagine being a company in this space and you take the deforestation regulation, which has 4% fines on your global, on your EU turnover, if you violate the legislation. It is a law, it is impact right now, it takes effect later this year and there's still uncertainty about how it's going to be implemented. Well, what does that mean for a company? It means I'm facing this barrel of a 4% fine, potentially with questions still outstanding on how I can execute on this, and so that lack of clarity and the pushing of the omnibus, which is the kind of package of CSRD and CSDD and some of the other regulations that got delayed. Now it just kind of increases this uncertainty, and so that's really tough for a business to comply with. Now the big folks will comply. This isn't going to, you know, it's not going to hurt the big companies in this space, but there are a whole group of other companies that may not have entire sustainability departments, that may not have procurement departments, that have extra resources for regulatory compliance, who haven't necessarily had to think about traceability at the farm level before right. So there's this introduction of all new process that people have to deal with and the lack of clarity on when it's going to happen, what are the details of this and how to approach it. Now, again, some of these are already in place and coming to this year, and so a lot of the talk at that summit was around those specific regulations, right, the ones that are law, that are in Patlase, and companies have to comply.
Speaker 2:I think that's where technology, though, can be really helpful is that, in the wake of uncertainty, technology actually especially in the wake of AI and some of these new technologies that are out can actually provide guidance on that right Can be can help those companies that don't necessarily have that resource to do that to to get ready, and so that's what we are seeing in the industry. A lot is this move towards. I know I have to do it, it's. It's a new normal, it's part of my day-to-day life Now. It's part of business going forward. How do I ensure that my business is? Is that versus potentially at risk? And that shift in mentality is kind of what we're seeing as an industry right now.
Speaker 3:Well, I think we're going to see a lot of more shifts and changes in the coming days, more than the last decade, but I would like to stick to farming and food. Actually. So we never had a chance to really talk about indoor farming on the podcast, and you worked in that area previously, particularly on how digital systems could support indoor food production, so this is so interesting. Imagine we know nothing, because I don't. How does indoor farming work and what is its potential?
Speaker 2:Yeah, indoor ag is a cool space. So you take a look at some of the challenges in supply chain resiliency that farmers face, and one of the big ones, of course, is climate uncertainty. So we have a lot of known challenges in the world of climate. Right, we have rising temperatures, we have issues with soil quality, we have, of course, water issues depending on geographically where you are, this may be more felts than other areas, but we have this kind of chaotic system. That is the opposite of what farmers need to thrive. Right, we need predictability, we need to kind of understand what's in front of us. And you take commodities like corn or something like this. A farmer has only 40 seasons essentially in their career to get it right. Right, and so they're not taking a huge amount of risk on a day-by-day basis, but have to somehow deal with this chaotic system that's out of their control. And so where Indoor Ag fits really nicely is that what you're saying is as a tool in the toolkit for how we deal with this. What if you introduce protected systems, so you enclose the system in some way, shape or form, whether that's through a greenhouse or plastic shade houses or through a vertical farming mechanism, through any of these different types of enclosures. You control that climate in some way and there's a spectrum, of course there's like light control through protected houses that you might see's a spectrum, of course there's like light control through protected houses that you might see in the countryside, for example, in either hobbyist farms or, if you're in the South of Spain, just these kind of plastic shade houses that cover crops and help extend a season all the way through, to fully controlled, maybe more vertical or greenhouse environments, where you have a full control of your environment within and you're really creating almost an artificial environment to some degree outside of the system of chaos that kind of is happening outside and it's a really neat idea, right, and I don't know that anybody would say that this is the answer to all of our challenges in climate, kind of regulated agriculture.
Speaker 2:But it is a tool in the toolkit, it is a piece of it and it's in certain crops and certain geographies it works phenomenally well. You take the Netherlands net exporter of food at a scale that is unimaginable compared to its population density and its size, and that is a lot because they've invested heavily in this type of a system. So if you go to the countryside in the Netherlands, you will see greenhouses everywhere, glasshouses everywhere, like I mentioned, in Spain it's a core piece of their agricultural economy. Canada and Mexico, a lot of the produce is grown, especially tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers kind of vine crops grown in greenhouses. In other geographies it doesn't really work as well, right, and in other crops it doesn't really work as well. You're not going to see commercial greenhouses popping up with soy or wheat, right. It's just too much of a low margin crop right now that it would have to. Something in the technology would have to dramatically change for that to be accessible.
Speaker 2:But it's also an industry that's seen its rises and falls. It's certainly in North America really saw a big boom, kind of in the 2010 to 2015 or so range. A lot of capital came into the space Unit. Economics didn't prove out at scale for a lot of businesses and so, while investing in innovation and trying a new system, it just it didn't work the way that people had anticipated and so you saw this kind of collapse of the industry that we're in right now. But it'll settle out. It'll come out to be part of again a tool in the toolkit, the same way that other countries we're in right now. But it'll settle out. It'll come out to be part of again a tool in the toolkit, the same way that other countries have had for decades now, I think.
Speaker 4:So I think if we had more time, alison, I think we'd have to carry on with crazy farming stories, because I've got one. It was about 15 years ago that we here at Creative Concern we took part in a project where we were trying to create a vertical farm in a a disused office block. Um and uh, it was really cool and groovy. It was like completely empty and we figured out how to put the hydroponics in aquaponics or um lighting. And then we did this, we did the costings on it, and every cabbage was going to cost about seven pounds. Yeah, it was like, oh, we can't do this, it's not even moral anyway, um so um on tech.
Speaker 4:Uh, I'm really interested in your take on, you know, technology disruption, machine learning, generative ai, all that sort of really shifting space um and um. I think a lot of people have a general sort of take on it that it's sort of threat-based, it's a risk to us, but you're in a space where those sorts of tools could be part of what saves the planet at the end of the day. So for you, do you think that this technological shift, ai in particular, could be a force for good?
Speaker 2:100%, but I'm a techno-optimist so I take it for a grain of salt. I mean, there are very realistic threats with AI. I've seen some very dangerous applications and I think it should certainly be something that we're doing and balancing with ethics, of course. I think we that kind of represent humanity. Some of that's going to be phenomenally well used and some of it's going to have great applications and some of it's going to not right. Some of it's going to be used for malintent or whatever it may be. So I think if you look at a spectrum like that, uh, then you can kind of approach it in a slightly different way. But that's true for any technology, right. I mean, cell phones have a phenomenally positive impact on society, but do I need another spam call trying to get money from me for gift cards? No, probably not right and like. So there's. Every technology can be used for both good and bad. Ai just is one of those things that generationally only comes around once every, you know, once a generation, and so it definitely has the foundation to change a lot of the way that we do things, and we're already seeing applications of that. The company that acquired can afford right, which is a near impossible task, because that is just a challenge in and of itself. And they found this way to really identify the challenges within each individual kind of farm and farm application that meet that criteria and develop kind of scaled solutions for that. And so there's things like in the tomato industry, doing complete crop registration autonomously, which means things like counting the crops, color detection on readiness for tomatoes, pest and disease detection, leaf counts, right. All these things that people used to do but can be done autonomously far more accurately, far more frequent, which leads directly to profit margin for a farm. And on the flip side, it's not a replacement of labor. In that case, necessarily one-to-one Labor is just being redirected into high margin items. And so there's an interesting kind of conversation to be had about predictable metrics towards what might cause deforestation.
Speaker 2:Very interesting area, certainly in data validation. If you're going to build a data pipeline through the industry, you have to have good data in, good data out. And so how you analyze data at scale, certainly that's where machine learning is best. You can do things that are companies doing, things like pre-mapping supply chains based on public data sets. That's really interesting, right. So there's a lot of the work that is burdensome, right, this data management burden that companies have. If you can free that up so companies can truly focus on impact, it becomes really interesting. No sustainability team is sitting there going. I can't wait to fill out paperwork today. I really want to do that right. They want to work with farmers. You want to invest in ecosystems where you can focus on living income. You want to invest in areas of regenerative agriculture. So that, I think, is, to me at least, the most exciting kind of application that's near term, certainly not looking at even further.
Speaker 4:So Alison, I'm going to hand back over to Damla in a minute, but I just want to come back on that one little bit, because very regularly in this podcast we edge towards questioning whether capitalism will survive the 21st century.
Speaker 2:And one thing I find fascinating about oh, you got an american here, so we're watching it unravel as we speak.
Speaker 4:Um no, it's what I find really interesting about machine learning and that narrative around um sort of nudging up the value points in a, in a work, in a sort of labor chain, um, to the point at which I really always wonder I know this is a common trope at what point does it top out and you see the end of paid work as a meaningful exercise for humankind? And then you start to say, well, how do we, what does our value chain look like? And, conceptually, you know, what do we get paid for? And at what point does that actually start to really challenge market mechanisms across the world?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is where maybe I have a little bit of a darker view.
Speaker 3:We're going to go to the universe of pay for just being alive. And totally another discussion here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was funny, because it's funny that you asked that I was in a room with um, a number of founders and ceos a few months ago, having kind of a debate like this, and uh, a number of the ceos said, look, you know, it's not really the workers who are going to be displaced, it's us, right, it's this high value work that's going to be displaced. And I, I just sat back and I said I think that's a really naive view, right? I think, like, if we're looking at it from a capitalistic lens, capitalism survives in a system where there is a disparity right, like there is. There has to be kind of the spectrum of income that happens and there have to be workers in the economy in order for capitalism to thrive, right and so. But if you look at that and you look at the lowest kind of efficiency denominator in there and you can replace that with a higher efficiency denominator, capitalism still survives, but the work doesn't, and so, like I think it's again a little idealistic to think about.
Speaker 2:Okay, founders and CEOs are being replaced, are going to be replaced by AI, when founders and CEOs are the ones making decisions about the efficiency kind of coefficient right, and so I mean in agriculture alone, look at the applications of technology in the last decade. You see automation of harvesting, you see automation of planting, you see automation of weed detection and picking right. You see automation of weed detection and picking right. You see automation in counting things. You see, and none of that work is being done by a CEO right, that's work being done by workers. And then if you couple with it some of the socioeconomic and some of the geopolitical issues around immigration and again I'm specifically in agriculture it's a little bit maybe more black and white and interesting because you have an actual use case of a system at scale where these things directly are impacting our labor force and the technology, as a result of the last decade, has largely been focused on replacing that work, and partly because it's a risky, it's a risky, it's a risky source of labor, right? Especially if you have the conversation in America that's happening right now around immigration, you have to safeguard your business, that it exists, right.
Speaker 2:And so maybe my darker view is yeah, I actually think we're edging towards a future faster than we probably think, where a lot of routine type tasks, things that can be done repetitively, are probably going to be replaced by AI, because it fundamentally makes more sense to do that than most other applications, at least today, and if you do that, a huge swath of workforce does become eliminated.
Speaker 2:Now the optimist in me, though, is we have seen this before, right, we have seen it through industrialization, we have seen through the age of the internet. We have seen entire swaths of careers be kind of changed are by also an aging population. So you're essentially you're not actually switching, you're not saying we're retooling somebody's skills, which I think a lot of the conversation is around right now. You're actually saying we're forcing early retirement for a swath of people. And then to your question, damla, like then, how do you as a society thrive with that mechanic? And that becomes a question about, you know, universal basic income or any of these types of things, and that's a harder conversation, especially in a context geopolitically right now, to have.
Speaker 3:Okay, I'm going to feed your optimism, because I'm also apparently optimistic always when I'm not talking about capitalism. That's something else.
Speaker 3:But, I think I'm going to just touch base with Steve too. I do believe that nature, life, the universe and the physics everything loves glitches, so we will have glitches. It won't be as we project, as it is, so we will see very much different surprises in our lifetime because, as you say, we are seeing this so so, so fast. On the other hand, I think Steve's input about value was very important, not as the added value and the economic term, but also as society. We will need to find a new frame for our values and for being alive, for being a society, for being a kind that will survive, if it can, this climate crisis. But this is a very, very long discussion and I want to have it with you, maybe in another episode, but our time is discussion and I want to have it with you, maybe in another episode, but our time is up, so I have to.
Speaker 2:It's just this, but you have to have optimism in humans, right Like you have two options in front of us. We're either going to solve the problem and I think we do consistently solve, we create the problem, of course, but we also solve the problem or we leave to Mars and Elon Musk is right and we all abandon ship and abandon earth, right Like you have two views on the world.
Speaker 2:I happen to be in a camp that, like I think we can do it right. I want to believe that we're all, that there's enough of us out there that can and will solve the challenge and utilize tools at our disposal to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So our final question and this may be the answer to that too Our network is ironically called Do Not Smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. So what object, place or person or idea always makes you smile.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this one's just easy because I have a I have an almost two-year-old daughter. Yeah, this one's just easy because I have a I have an almost two-year-old daughter, so I'm gonna cop out and say it's, it's 100. Her, she's awesome. She is uh, in that phase of life where you can see exponential learning and growth happening right, and so everything is exciting and new and repeated and uh, and she's learning and adventurous and uh, and so I, just every single minute I have with her, I'm usually smiling- oh, allison, that's amazing.
Speaker 4:And well, she's what it's all about. That's why we do what we do. That's why we're here, right that's exactly, exactly, no pessimism is the of the intellect optimism of the will, and she's the reason you did it again. I know I got Gramsci in at the end. I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. Hey, listen. So I think, alison, we are all in Camp Alison, not Camp Elon. That's my takeaway, as well as the inclusive serendipity being our new secret movement that we launched today. Love it.
Speaker 3:So, damla, do you want to wrap us up? So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Geist podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 4:And make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So, alison Damla, see you soon.
Speaker 1:Bye, bye, good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor.
Speaker 2:Brought to you by the DNS Network.
