Revolutionizing Grain Storage: New Tech for Sustainable Agriculture

Approximately 20% of grains worldwide are lost to spoilage, representing a substantial quantity that could otherwise nourish millions. This not only impacts global food security but also translates into direct profit loss for farmers.

Crover, an emerging player in the agriculture sector recently joined the Altium Startup Program. They are developing a cutting-edge robot designed to oversee and regulate grain storage conditions. In this episode, we're delighted to welcome Lorenzo Conti, the founder and CEO of Crover.

Lorenzo details how the innovative robot has the ability to navigate within grain storage, conducting real-time monitoring of temperature, and moisture levels, and detecting potential issues like infestations and spoilage. This is a conversation you don't want to miss! Watch this episode now, or listen on the go!

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Show Highlights:

• Intro
• What Crover Does
• Background in Farming?
• Why Pursue Robotics in This Area?
• Bad Storage and Losses
• Other Markets and Food Products
• Huge Potential
• Larger Items? 
• How Do Farmers Receive Data?
• What the Data Attempts to Predict
• How Farmers Use the Data
• How Technical Do the Users Want the Data?
• Smaller Farmers?
• Farmers in Developing Countries?
• Working with Government or Nonprofits?
• Overall User and Investor Response?
• Scaling Challenges
• Investor Relations
• Cost of Deploying in Developing Countries
• Where Does Crover Go Next? 
• Outro

Links and Resources:

• Take Your Startup to the Next Level with Altium Launchpad

• Connect with Lorenzo Conti on LinkedIn

• Learn more about Crover

• More episodes on this topic:

  • Metyos & the Future of Wearable Medical Devices

  • AI Inference in Robotic Vision with Luxonis

  • The Exciting Path to Mechatronics Engineering

Transcript:

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, and that's a lot of people that could be fed with food that would otherwise just get thrown away essentially or thrown into a landfill.

Lorenzo Conti:

And I mean, that's the social and environmental impact of helping feed a growing population. Reducing the impact of that supply chain on carbon emissions as well is a big reason why we decided to start with the grain storage market rather than other less sustainable markets, let's say, where our technology could be very well applied to.

Zach Peterson:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Altium OnTrack podcast. I'm your host, Zach Peterson. Today we're speaking with Lorenzo Conti, founder and CEO of Crover. Crover was just recently admitted to the Altium Startup Program and we're very happy to have Lorenzo here with us today to talk about his company. Lorenzo, thank you so much for joining us.

Lorenzo Conti:

Thank you, Zach. Delighted to be here.

Zach Peterson:

So as a startup, you're working in an interesting area, which is agriculture. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what your company does and what problems you're trying to solve in the area of agriculture.

Lorenzo Conti:

So at Crover we are pioneering locomotion in gran materials, so anything from sand dunes to grains stored in silos and sheds, and the latter has really been our focus so far. So we've been developing around our rover robot that is able to swim through assemblies of bull soils and powders. We have developed a grain storage management system that checks the condition of grain as the robot is moving through it. Things like temperature, moisture to identify hotspot and wet spots early, helping prevent infestations like molds and insects also steering the grain, which helps maintain the quality of the grain and collecting physical samples adapt from wheat in the bulk, which sold jobs that at the moment farmers have to do primarily manually. Wheat also the risk involved of working on those bulks, which can lead to grain entrapment or engulfment, which can be fatal.

Zach Peterson:

Grain entrapment sounds like a very academic way to describe being crushed under grain.

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, there's a few movies from back in the years where you have deaths that way, but yeah, it's definitely not a nice way to go. And

Zach Peterson:

So for anyone that builds a company focusing on technology solutions for farming and agriculture, I always wonder, or I just have to ask, do you have a background in farming and is this how you became aware of some of these issues that could be solved with technology?

Lorenzo Conti:

So myself directly, my main background is in the field of grammar materials or grammar physics, which is what I, generically speaking, my PhD, the University of Edinburgh was on, if you want to go way back, my grandfather used to sell German tractors in the north of Italy and had a meal in Emelia, Romania. We got other people on the team with kind of much deeper farming background than myself. For instance, our non-executive director, John, who is the leading author of the AGCA Grain Storage Guide and the Safe Storage Calculator, which is the main tools that farmers in the UK follow when storing their grain.

Zach Peterson:

So not directly working on a farm, but still exposed to it enough to have an understanding of some of the challenges that are present in the field.

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, definitely.

Zach Peterson:

And this is interesting because you brought up robotics and among some of the agriculture startups I've seen, especially here in the US, robotics tends to be a big focus, but it's usually around the area of harvest and not necessarily around monitoring of the conditions of the things that they harvest, so they kind of focus more on picking apples, that kind of thing, and building robotics for that. Why, just from a business standpoint, why did you prefer to go into this other area where it's like storage and management and monitoring?

Lorenzo Conti:

Well, in our case, it's mostly because we saw a niche where we add a technology that only we add and we could provide significant improvements over a very old style way of managing grains, which is using end spears or static sensors, and which hasn't really changed significantly for the last 20 or 30 years. And so it was mostly kind of hinging on our competitive advantage of our unique technology and where it could be applied. But I think that there's also the fact that, like you said, a lot of farming and robotics startup, they're focused in the field because that's where farmers are typically used to spending large amounts of money. But as we move towards improving efficiency across the entirety of the grain supply chain, there are significant other steps of the supply chain where inefficiency become more evident as other steps like cropping and WAN start having more solutions. And also there's a lot of competition in there, but at the moment we look at the midstream of the supply chain, so after harvest before consumption, grain storage is really where it's still the single step with the largest losses generally.

Zach Peterson:

So given that there are those losses, I think it's natural for anyone to ask, and especially for an investor to ask how much loss does adverse storage conditions create each year? Or I guess what's the potential cost savings?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, it varies a lot. I mean, the average globally is about 20%, but that's significantly skewed by the situation in developing countries where there's often not proper storage present. If we look at places like the us, it usually tends to vary between 2% and 15%, but even the lowest end of that range, if we think about the large storage infrastructure where you have multiple millions of grain in storage per shed or per silo, even a one or 2% of a mean tens or hundreds of thousands of losses,

Zach Peterson:

And that's a lot of people that could be fed with food that would otherwise just get thrown away essentially or thrown into a landfill.

Lorenzo Conti:

And I mean that's the social and environmental impact of helping feed a growing population. Reducing the impact of that supply chain on carbon emissions as well is a big reason why we decided to start with the grain storage market rather than other less sustainable markets, let's say, where our technology could be very well applied to.

Zach Peterson:

Well, what are some of those other markets, or I guess what are other food products where the same approach towards monitoring and management could be taken?

Lorenzo Conti:

Well, food products, I mean anything that is granular nature, usually we tend to focus on non-processed grain and pulses, but it could be used also on feed, PTs, cocoa beans, you name it, but technique we could apply to most types of bulk solids and powders. So whether it is mineral books, chemical powder, say for the chemical pharmaceutical industry as well. I mean, that's probably one thing that people don't realize a lot because it's not a type of material that is often taught about, but bull solids and powders represent the most traded family of commodities, let's say worldwide. So it is a very big field, just one that a lot of people that are not in the sector really often hear about.

Zach Peterson:

Well, if on average you're addressing about 10% of the largest class of traded commodities worldwide, and that's got to be a huge total addressable market value,

Lorenzo Conti:

We think. So, I mean, we are still early stage startups, so we are aware of the potential. We're just going through that journey of raising awareness and establishing our product into the market.

Zach Peterson:

So how does the monitoring approach change? If you start talking about larger solids, I understand with grain it's smaller granules that makes sense, but what if you go to let's say nuts or maybe you even go to fruit like apples. Could you use the same system on those types of foods?

Lorenzo Conti:

So we soft fruits and vegetables, we don't deal with those because they tend to be more susceptible to damage. So even small forces can damage those kinds of things. And also they tend to be stored in boxes rather than loose bulks. With our type of system, it's usually makes sense if you've got a loose bulk, let's say. So whether it's a loose bulk in a warehouse or a shed in a silo or even outdoors, I mean, for instance in Australia, they tend to use a lot bankers as they call them and just kind of tarp them on the top, but it's kind of smaller containers. Then our robot cannot jump from one box to the other. Really, it is mostly made to move through grammar materials, which is where also other technologies don't really work. So I think there's other solutions more suitable if you've got boxes or bags, but if you've got a loose bulk, other things wouldn't really be able to move in there and we can,

Zach Peterson:

Well, I mean you bring up jumping between boxes for fruits. What if you attach some rotors to it made it a quadcopter could fly between different boxes?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, I mean an hybrid in the future we'd be an interesting idea. It's definitely something that we've thought of before, but I think right now the focus is on continuing to improve our core type of robot.

Zach Peterson:

So I'm going to assume this robot is going around, it's gathering data, it's sending that data out to farmers somehow. How does the data get back to the farmer so that they can make some sort of meaningful decision about whether to modify storage conditions, dispose of some of the material, maybe move it, I don't know what they would do, but how do they then take that data and make some decision based on it? Are they getting it through a phone app? Are they getting it off of a website?

Lorenzo Conti:

So we usually provide a little data transfer sim card with the robot that is kind of in the robo control, which then sends that data to our secure cloud hosted on AWS as most people, and then all of that data can be visualized through our web app, so through which can be accessed through an internet connected device can be viewed on mobile, tablet or desktop, and there they can see the maps or conditions for each time step or day where the data was taken. Now it's varied over time and also get notifications for the various storage units and sites that they have in case any measurement that is taken exceeds a safe threshold, meaning that it's usually an indication of either a problem being present or an early onset of potential infestation. So a big thing of what we're doing is trying to enable accurate integrated pest management, which means accurately controlling the temperature and the moisture of that grain and keeping those parameters wheat in safe thresholds, wheat in which pests cannot grow. So if you identify those problems early, you can manage things in a way that means that infestations will not grow, will not develop, and so the quality of your grain will be maintained.

Zach Peterson:

So really you're looking at I guess a few different things. One of them is pests, which you just mentioned. It sounds like the consequence of moisture would be mold, and then I would imagine there's also possibly a third route, which is just spoilage over time. Is there anything else specifically that you're looking at or trying to predict through all this data that you're capturing?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, that's one of the things. I mean, we're still in the early stages of building more prediction algorithms and so on, which is one of the big plans that we've got at the moment. In that sense, the system is quite basically we collect the data and then if tempera percent moisture values are too high or too low, then we give a warning, but there's more analytics and recommendations that could be provided. We've been focusing on the core functionality so far, but yes, both temperature and moisture, usually if you've got the wrong combination of those two, then things can go wrong is about making sure that you don't create the kind of environment where, because pest are biological entities, in the end they'll come from the field with some amount of eggs or SPO spores, and if it's both too hot and too wet and these things will grow at a certain temperature, you might, if the temperature is high, you'll need a lower moisture before these things can grow. If the temperature is lower, the moisture will need to be added before they can grow. It is usually a correlation between those two. It's not just one parameter.

Zach Peterson:

I see. I see. Okay. So you're actually doing all of this prediction on the backend in your AWS instance, serving that to farmers, I am going to imagine that what they're looking at on screen is something that's simple enough to where they can say, yeah, I'm going to ignore this, or I agree this makes sense. I need to adjust my humidity in the storage container, or I need to adjust temperature by X amount, and then they can continue on their day as normal.

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, we've experienced that. Different people tend to different levels of complexity and detail assay, so they can go as top level or as in detail into our platform as they like. In the end, the most basic level is just getting the notification and focusing on those early only. And the other one is kind of going into the more detail maps, starting with the two D maps that we provide, and then the cooler feature on the app is more the three D maps that we can show. So you can navigate through the ball and say, okay, I've got a hotspot here, a we spot there, but we realize that three D maps, they tend to be a little bit, some people find them a little bit complicated even though they're not for us as engineers, but we totally understand the user side, which is why we're providing these various levels of complexity.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, see that's what I was wondering is really how technically deep the users like to get for that reason you just mentioned. Right. For us, as people who deal with technical things all the time, I think it's easy to understand what's going on when you look at a three D map, but maybe a farmer who doesn't have the kind of technical background dealing with data like that, they may look at that and say, what the heck is this? What am I supposed to do with this?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, I mean that's actually something that I realized recently while we were going around some sites in the US with some people that didn't fully come from agriculture background, that I think a lot of people don't realize that grain storage sites, at least the larger ones, they tend to be the kind of industrial site where they've got dashboards. Some of them might be quite outdated, but they've got dashboards with a lot of data around and they tend to be used with dealing with data and processes. I mean, they often tend to have SCADA systems controlling different parts of the process, especially if they're doing processing on site as well. So it's not always the farmer not used to data type of situation. More often than not the type of size that would adopt our type of solution are the kind of places that, if anything, they've got too many platforms, then they want to converge them all into one, which is also why we've got a beta version of our API whereby people can feed the data from our system into their existing system.

Zach Peterson:

Okay. So I mean, is there a solution here also for the smaller farmer, maybe the family farmer that has to handle storage for a short amount of time before they ship off to a larger processor?

Lorenzo Conti:

It depends how much screen they have. In the end, it's a kind of cost versus benefit and rise analysis. I think in the end, if they've got a significant amount of grain in storage, say usually we recommend, I mean we really start getting big arrow rise is if they've got like 20,000 tons metric tons of grain in storage or more, then it's almost a definite yes if they got less, usually between 3000 to 20,000 tons. It depends on the specific situation. So in the US and North America, typically a lot of farms will be at that kind of levels where we're based in Edenburgh and Scotland in the UK and Europe, it tends to be more centralized storage operators like green merchants, co-operatives and port operators. So

Zach Peterson:

You mentioned earlier that the losses that are experienced during storage tend to be skewed towards developing countries. Did I have that right?

Lorenzo Conti:

Well, they're higher in developing countries yes. Than,

Zach Peterson:

So what are some of the challenges that farmers in developing countries face when they're trying to adopt a system like this? Or do they even see a system like this as something that is number one valuable for them, or number two that they can really access and use and understand?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, probably a big challenge there is the access to capital to make the large upfront capital investment that it takes to set up a proper storage infrastructure, whether it is a proper silo of facility or something else. Yeah, so the prevalence of proper storage in those areas is just much lower. Also, there's a lot of geographies like India where they're not a developing country, but there's significant losses because they are historically more used to storing grain or rice in bags. So you put them in bags, you leave them in storage, you'll still be in a warehouse, but you pack the bags on top of each other and next to each other. You leave them in there for several months and you have not really any way of accessing what's going on in there. So it's also about sometimes making systemic changes towards better and more modern practices. Sometimes people are just used to doing things in a certain way and getting them to change. It takes time.

Zach Peterson:

Usually when there's a problem with technology adoption in a developing country and that adoption is related to an issue with access to capital, usually the government steps up or a nonprofit steps up and tries to do something to encourage investment or apply or provide the investment directly. Have you considered working with governments or nonprofits to try and solve that problem?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yes, we have. I mean, because of our stage at the moment, we don't want to stretch ourselves too thin, so we are focusing on the local markets and more profitable markets, but because of the potential for even greater social benefit in those areas, we love to be able to start something there. So if the right opportunity comes along, whether it's the right NGO or government, we love to partner to do some work there.

Zach Peterson:

So what has been the overall response, positive or negative from users? And then what has been the overall response positive or negative from potential investors?

Lorenzo Conti:

From users? Very positive. We often find we've got a bit manage expectations had over time a lot of people that want to have the system with them, and we don't have the capacity to make too many robots yet. So we've just been working with few selected partners, but we are getting ready to fill in some months, be able to offer robots to some of the people that have been asking us for 'em. In terms of investors, we focus mostly on the product and the market. We've sort of half bootstrapped in a wave and until we raised via equity crowd funding and an angel money, but we haven't gone down the VC route so far from what we've seen. I mean, the investment in the agriculture sector is a little bit kind of older style. It'd be great if there was more funds kind of ready to take big leaps at an early stage like there is for software or biotech. So I think, yeah, that's probably one of the kind of slowing down forces in agriculture innovation, just the absence of strong forward thinking funds.

Zach Peterson:

My understanding of agriculture and at least on the farming side, is that the margins are pretty thin. And so I think that perception that it's maybe not a big money, high margin type of business or industry might dissuade the typical software or tech VC from being willing to invest in this space. The prior startups that I've been seeing, at least with harvesting robotics, they have all gone through the equity crowdfunding route to try and go through series A after some, and they get started through an angel or they bootstrap it. And I think it's hard for them to overcome those perceptions and get money from VCs, especially when VCs are so focused on stuff like social media, Facebook, it's just a web platform. It's easy to scale, there's no hardware. Eventually you get it big enough to where the margin is so huge that they can make 10 XA hundred x. I mean, for them, a 10 x day is not a good day and they still made out bandits. So I think that underscores the challenge that a company like yours has trying to convince investors to come into this space. Would you agree?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think it's just that the leading VC model is, like you said, more crafted around things that move really fast in the early stages and then either continue scaling or fail or anything in between. I think in terms of scaling, there's definitely a big opportunity, but at the intersection of hardware, robotics and agritech, which is where we're in, but it requires a bit more patience just to get to the scale and the potential is there is just obviously VCs, they want to see big numbers soon, and you need probably funds that understand more the space and know how it moves and know what the cycle looks like that don't expect a cycle that resembles a kind of softer one. So obviously the fund needs to be crafted a bit differently around that. And I think hopefully we can start a bit more the cycle of money being made in the space, which hopefully will then create more and more funds in the space. And I think just historically, we haven't enough of that happening as much as there has been in other sectors, and I think that that's really what is needed for that to happen.

Zach Peterson:

Well, related to funding, one thing I've also been seeing recently is not just equity crowdfunding focusing on things like ESG, but also there are some funds popping up that are focused on ESG doing right by the planet, those kinds of themes. I just don't think that they're Sequoia Capital or any of these huge names that have funded Facebook and those kinds of companies. Have you tried talking to them and is the ESG environmental angle working for you guys to get both user interest as well as investor interest?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, I mean, we haven't kind of actively been to focus on the investment play, let's say. I mean, we've mostly just spoken to people that reached out to us, and I think that kind of continuous flow of inbound requests has really been our main driving factor, mostly from a market perspective, but also from an investment perspective. So even the equity crowdfunding route came up because we had a initial group of let's say, corner store investors that wanted to invest. We knew we needed a little bit more money and we realized okay, or other people made us realize that, okay, the crowdfunding investment route was a way to expand up on that investment days. But yeah, I think it's just one of those things that we've got a team of 13 people, which seems like a lot now it's taking quite a bit of time to get to the point, but leading all the operations and commercial side is really just myself and another team member.

Lorenzo Conti:

And we also help out on the technical side. So if we had to go and focus on the investment seeking investment, it probably set us back on a lot of other things. We probably lose other opportunities and we just want to kind of ensure we've got a good balance. So if the right investors come along, we're always happy to speak with people. So far, we haven't felt like it was just really focusing on that, and also we've been in a way trying to make it happen in kind of more the bootstrapping way we feel that leaves us with a bit more freedom and flexibility.

Zach Peterson:

Well, I think that's understandable, and I like that you're focusing on the product first instead of the money first. Going back to my

Lorenzo Conti:

Money's useful to get to other things.

Zach Peterson:

Well, that's fair. That's fair. One thing I want to go back to briefly is just about deployment in developing countries, the cost point for your system, the cost point for technology, it can vary, but it's seen as an investment. The whole point of investing in a system like this is to see positive ROI through reduction in losses, right? Pretty simple model. Does the cost point for your system make the technology attractive for use in developing countries? I mean, I asked that because if they have trouble getting capital, building a facility that where just the facility itself could reduce loss, how can they justify getting technology that's also going to reduce loss?

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, I mean, the way we've set our pricing model at the moment, it's almost too cheap for a lot of geographies, but for a lot of developing areas like you said, where the badges are not the same, it would be a significant investment for them, potentially one that most people there can make, which is also one of the reasons why we've been focusing on more profitable markets, let's say. So that's a bit of a barrier for us as well in terms of doing more work there because we, as early stage company, we've been putting a lot of our own resources into what we're doing as well.

Lorenzo Conti:

We unfortunately don't have enough funds to go and give robots at a loss, but we've got some plans to make that happen. I mean, one plan that we've got is more aligned with the circular economy is to, because we are focusing also on a subscription model where we lease the hardware. One plan that we've got is to after X number of years with the robots being in the field, once they come back and clients get upgraded to a new one, to refurbish those and offer them for a much lower price to customers like those in developing countries where their ability to pay is lower. And we think that's probably the primary way in which we think we could make it much more affordable for them and bring a more social benefit.

Zach Peterson:

I'm going to ask you one last question, just kind of looking to the future for the company. Where do you guys go next? Because you're doing robotics, you're doing data capture, delivering that to farmers. Where do you go next with the technology and what are some of the other areas that you're targeting with this approach?

Lorenzo Conti:

I mean, there's a lot that could

Zach Peterson:

Be said. You tell me that's okay because we don't want to

Lorenzo Conti:

Reveal

Zach Peterson:

Secret sauce before it's ready.

Lorenzo Conti:

Yeah, I wouldn't even know where to start a lot that could be said there. I mean, the focus right now is really making the old system more robust and ready to scale, including getting more and more certifications completed so that we can sell in more markets to more types of customers. But from the technology side, we have quite a significant amount of staff in the pipeline adding more sensing capabilities. I mean, we were talking about temperature, moisture. There's some other obvious ones that we're planning to add in the short term, like CO two measurements, and we've got a bit of longer term projects that we've been working on. For instance, try to detect mycotoxin and well, different types of mycotoxins, kind of low pars per billion and protein content, but those are a lower TRL, and so they're going to need a bit more time. Yeah, we talked about data analytics and providing recommendations and so on. I mean, obviously we're talking about Altium and there's a lot on the electronic side that we're trying to improve as well. We've got five custom design boards on the system that we kind of developed from scratch using the software, and we've got a lot of ideas for the next iterations of those and a new ones. So we're lucky enough to have a really smart team that is always thinking ahead, but we got to make sure we prioritize on the most important features.

Zach Peterson:

Sure, sure. Well, I do wish you the best of luck, and as all of this stuff rolls out, we'd love to have you come back on to discuss the progress you're making.

Lorenzo Conti:

Thank you, Zach.

Zach Peterson:

Thank you very much To everyone out there listening. We've been talking with Lorenzo Conti, founder and CEO of Crover. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the button and hit the subscribe button. You'll be able to keep up with all of our tutorials and episodes as they come out. And last but not least, don't stop learning. Stay on track, and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody.