What’s next for agritech? How lawyers are getting food from farm to table

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What’s next for agritech? How lawyers are getting food from farm to table
Agriculture is changing, and with it, so is agritech. Incredible new tech solutions are needed as the human population continues to grow and climate change necessitates updates to our traditional farming methods. This week, we have a special podcast from White & Case, an international law firm that is increasingly working with cleantech and greentech clients. These technologies need funding—which usually involves investors, deal-making, contracts, and legal expertise. We’re discussing some of the exciting innovations promising to get food from the farm to your table with Emmie Jones, partner at White & Case, and Professor Benz Kotzen of the University of Greenwich, a researcher in aquaponics.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ghislaine Boddington.

More on this week's stories:
White and Case
Emmie Jones
Professor Benz Kotzen

Editor: Ania Lichtarowicz
Production Manager: Liz Tuohy
Recording and audio editing : Lansons | Team Farner

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Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

I'm Gareth Mitchell and this is the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:00:13 Gareth Mitchell 

And our expert commentator this week is Ghislaine Boddington and the keener listeners amongst us Ghislaine, may have noticed that things sound a little different this week, maybe a bit less studio-y. 

00:00:24 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, we've definitely, yeah, a different ambient because we're in a room, a fairly big room  actually.  

00:00:31 Gareth Mitchell  

Quite a swish room as well. It has to be said, yes. 

00:00:33 Ghislaine Boddington 

Very swish room. Yeah, very nice indeed. 

00:00:36 Gareth Mitchell 

Indeed. So we took, and in fact the the geeky point for the audiophiles among our audience. We are using the same mics that we have in the studio. We've just put them on stands, or Stevie has anyway, our sound engineer, and brought them to a different place for a conversation that is going to be, shall we say, wide-ranging, and something that is relevant to all of us. If you eat food, which I think counts for most humanoid life forms, this will matter to you. 

00:01:02 Ghislaine Boddington 

It does matter and not just humans actually. Animals and birds and everyone. But food  food, we we won't exist without it much longer than a few days. So yes, this is a very important show. 

00:01:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Exactly and well done for not making this humancentric. This is indeed a planetary issue. It's about the biosphere, biodiversity as well. Good one. Thanks Ghislaine. Should we jump in? 

00:01:22 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, let's go for it. 

00:01:29 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:01:32 Gareth Mitchell 

Agriculture is changing because it has to. Populations are growing and the climate is changing. There are massive challenges, but there are some incredible new solutions emerging too. And that brings us to the White and Case international law firm here in the centre of London. 

00:01:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Cleantech and green tech need funding. That usually involves investors, and that involves deal making, and that involves contract and legal expertise. Now, fear not, we're not gonna spend half an hour delving into the small print. The lawyers do that so most of the rest of us don't have to. But we are here to discuss some of the exciting innovations promising to get food from the farm to your tummy? Yes, that's right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:02:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. So first, let's well, second, because we've met Ghislaine, let's meet Emmie Jones, who's a partner here at White and Case. Now, I'll be honest Emmie, when producer Ania said, oh, we're going to do a programme from a law firm. I thought we're a tech programme. What are we doing in a legal firm? So for people who may be still wondering. What are we doing? Tech programme sitting here talking to a lawyer. Why would we do that? 

00:02:47  Emmie Jones 

Well I I'm not surprised that it might seem as though the tech ecosystem is a million miles away from a law firm in the centre of London. 

00:02:54  Emmie Jones 

But actually, tech and more particularly cleantech and infotech, is massively important to all of our clients. The net zero transition is impacting everybody, whether that's our corporate clients and particularly the energy companies who are having to decarbonize and they're making massive investments into new technologies to help them reduce their emissions, or whether that's the capital providers, so that's private equity, venture capital, the private credit solutions, sovereign wealth funds. All of them are being asked to invest into these new technologies. 

00:03:30  Emmie Jones 

And they're doing so partly because they've got their own ESG targets that they need to meet, but also because this is going to be an absolutely critical industry and development for the world. I mean, you mentioned that everyone needs to eat, that everyone needs to be part of the net zero transition. 

00:03:49 Gareth Mitchell 

You mentioned your clients there though, that which is interesting.  I guess you can't for legal reasons name your clients unless you want to. But can you give me an idea of the kinds of people that you do work with, like is it the venture capital firms specifically or would it be, you know, if I'm some startup working on green tech? Do I come to you as my legal representative to make sure that everything goes through OK with the deal or is it all of these things? What kind of people do you deal with? 

00:04:12  Emmie Jones 

It's all of these things, really. I personally am in a really fortunate position with my backgrounds in private equities, so I do a lot of work on the investments side, but I also act for founders and the companies in these incredibly new and exciting startups. So I get to hear about such interesting technologies and deals. And then I get to be part of the solution of putting together investment to fund them. 

00:04:37 Gareth Mitchell 

And I suppose if you think about any of the tech in our lives, none of it really came into the into our sphere, it never ended up on the market or something that we interacted with without lawyers at some point going through the small print, as you say. So many of the other people don't have to in order for the deals to happen, for the tech to be there so. 

00:04:56 Emmie Jones 

I mean, that's such a good point and I'm glad that you're validating my existence here. It's always, always nice to hear. 

00:04:59 Gareth Mitchell 

Totally. Yeah. 

00:05:02  Emmie Jones 

But yeah, that's exactly right. No technology, however innovative or amazing it is, will be able to impact people's lives unless it's scalable, which means having investment behind it, which as you say, means doing deals and means lawyers. 

00:05:16 Gareth Mitchell 

Alright, Ok. Now also here is Benz Kotsen. He's at the University of Greenwich, where he's a professor of landscape and nature based solutions. 

00:05:27 Gareth Mitchell 

And when we talk about landscape and nature based solutions, then what are you researching over there at the University of Greenwich? And spoiler alert for everybody, this is more than looking things up in a textbook, isn't it? You do some pretty amazing stuff over there. 

00:05:39 Benz Kotzen 

Yes, we have a a base at the University of Greenwich and the building has been designed, for example to have a number of green roofs or gardens and this is kind of, gives us an impetus actually to to work on these real solutions to solve real world problems. So, for example, we're talking about green roofs as, and this is one of the research areas that we look at, green roofs in terms of what we call adding to the ecosystem services that nature provides. 

00:06:08 Benz Kotzen 

We believe that technology is advancing so very, very quickly. But we mustn't forget actually that nature which has existed for hundreds of millions of years, has provided our ancestors and even us until recently with many of the solutions that we need. 

00:06:28 Benz Kotzen 

So for example, when we're talking about ecosystem services of roofs one of the things that a roof will obviously do is going to insulate a building. But a roof can also enhance biodiversity values. It can hold water so we don't want water going to the drains all at the same time and therefore we have problems in the Thames, for example, we know what that is and we can provide food we can provide amenity on our roofs. 

00:06:52 Benz Kotzen 

So that's just one little aspect of the research that we're doing and actually a very big part of that actually is in London and many of our big cities are getting warmer and we have something called the urban heat island effect. I'm sure you've all heard about that. 

00:07:08 Benz Kotzen 

People die because of the rising temperatures that we're getting, mainly old people or babies, and there's a huge cost to obviously families and cost to the NHS. And if you have these green solutions, for example, we can mitigate some of those. 

00:07:23 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, because the the green roof does it absorb heat or some of the, or does it help to? We’ll not obviously not dissipate, but it's dealing with that whole issue of not of moving away from a concrete landscape that just adds acts like a great big storage heater and moving away from that with green roofs aren’t you. 

00:07:38 Benz Kotzen 

Exactly. Exactly. So I mean, the remarkable thing is, and I think it's so clever, nature is so clever. So for example, what nature is doing, if you take the leaf of a plant, if you compare it to concrete or tarmac or something like that, which is actually going to be absorbing the heat and then releasing it and then kind of creating this added heat into the, into the atmosphere. What is happening with the plant it's absorbing the light. It's basically visible light and ultra red light. And it's absorbing that to grow. So it's it's the energy that's taking. It's marvelous, isn't it? 

00:08:11 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh, it's so good. Yeah. 

00:08:13 Gareth Mitchell 

It's amazing because it's it's photosynthesizing and it's soaking up carbon, giving off oxygen. 

00:08:17 Benz Kotzen 

Exactly.  

00:08:17 Gareth Mitchell 

They're pretty good, aren't they? Someone should invent them. 

00:08:22 Benz Kotzen  

And so. And so, you know. And so this is the kind of thing that we're advocating and we're doing research. We have these 10 green roofs. We have lots and lots of vendors and visitors. So if anybody's interested, you know, get in touch with me. And we have groups to come and visit because it's an exemplar of actually what can what can can happen. 

00:08:38 Gareth Mitchell 

What's there? It's a way of demonstrating it to people, capturing the public imagination. It's captured your imagination, hasn’t it? Ghislaine Boddington? Because you know the University of Greenwich very well. And you know about these green roofs, don't you? 

00:08:49 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, I'm also in the School of Design with with Benz. I'm in a design side, Benz is in the architecture and landscape architecture side, but we crossover a lot and I love these green roofs. It actually makes going there an absolute pleasure and I have to say Benz and his team have got the most incredible sets of things growing and several of them we can go out on, we can actually, there's, one which comes off our office area which is just beautiful to be on.  

00:09:16 Gareth Mitchell 

So it improves the working environment, so yeah. 

00:09:17 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah, we've got picnic tables. We can sit and eat our lunch. We can have meetings there. So the working environment’s improved too. Definitely. 

00:09:23 Gareth Mitchell 

You have that aspect. OK, Emmie, you work with clients in this kind of area. And is it like green roofs and other areas related maybe to thinking again about urban or indeed rural landscapes and doing so around agriculture, farming, aquaponics, what an area that is. Tell me about some of the the clients that are working in this space. 

00:09:45 Emmie Jones 

Well, we as a firm have traditionally done a lot of work in the oil and gas space and obviously with their energy transition and the move to net zero by 2050, all of these firms are now really investing very heavily in infotech or cleantech technologies. And so we're just seeing some what what seems to me, as someone who's in no way an expert in the science, but it just seems so fascinating. We're seeing the biggest green hydrogen initiative, the biggest blue hydrogen initiative, these unbelievable things. And at the same time also in the UK, things that are very tangible for ordinary people, like a battery storage units so that new build housing estates don't need to be powered solely by the grid, they can have their own batteries in their own way, not only of generating renewable electricity, but also making lives easier and less expensive for the people who are living in those houses. So it's a real world impact. 

00:10:42 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And like you say it doesn't get much more real world than needing the lawyers to come in to sort the contracts out to to get that happening. You know, so Ghislaine. 

00:10:49 Ghislaine Boddington 

I wanted to ask you to maybe explain to our listeners and to me as well, actually a little bit more about this ESG. Yeah, which I've been, obviously it's been scattered all over the place and coming up for many years, but you mentioned it earlier and I wanted to ask you what what exactly that means and how you apply it in your work, but also how it's applied to the companies cause obviously things are moving. Is it because of the ESG side? Maybe you could explain it to us? 

00:11:18 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and what it stands for, yeah. 

00:11:19  Emmie Jones 

ESG, you're absolutely right, is an acronym that people have been using for a long time. So it's environmental and social and governance Issues and it covers a wide range of topics. It's, it covers your supply chain, checking that there's no human trafficking or slavery within supply chains. It's making sure that companies are well governed and are going to be sustainable businesses for the future. And then it's also the environmental side of that. 

00:11:48  Emmie Jones 

The environmental impact and it used to be something that was a bit of a tick box exercise. So if we were doing diligence, people would just want to know that, they'd ask a very bland question about whether the target company had complied with its ESG obligations and and that would be the end of it. 

00:12:04  Emmie Jones 

But there is now real teeth behind some of these, and there's proper interest in it and it is impacting deals. Bidders won't progress through an auction for example, because they're not satisfied with the ESG position of a of a company. So it's something that everyone is having to take seriously and I think they're having to take it seriously because people are more interested. They genuinely care more about this. 

00:12:27 Ghislaine Boddington 

It's not a legal scenario. It's not like companies have to do it? 

00:12:31  Jones 

ESG is a is a kind of umbrella term. It's very, very wide. So some parts of it, yes, absolutely,  companies have to comply with. So there are laws in place that require absolute compliance and then part of it is more, a little bit woolier and and that's probably areas where people are less clear about what they're asking and also the answers can be fudged a little bit more, but it's a it's a very wide umbrella term that covers all sorts of legal obligations. 

00:13:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Which creates a business case for much of the kind of cleantech and greentech that we're talking about today. For instance, vertical farms. And I wonder if I can bring that back to you, Benz. So tell me, I’ve heard a little bit, what do we mean by vertical farming? 

00:13:12 Benz Kotzen 

Hmm. Now I think you'll probably realize that farming, most farming that we recognize is horizontal. It's not vertical, and it's basically geometric in form and shape, and you can imagine rows and rows of corn or rows and rows of spuds and stuff like that, and it takes a lot of space. 

00:13:33 Benz Kotzen 

Of course we realize, especially during COVID and when we have food shortages and we have problems when we need to be looking at the kind of footprint or the ecological footprint or the fuel that's required or the carbon footprint of of produce, you know, bringing this food from far away has has all these consequences, bad consequences for our planet. 

00:13:56 Benz Kotzen 

And so one of the things that we need to do is to try become much more efficient in the way that we grow food. And this is where vertical farming comes in. They're various types of vertical farming, of course, most of it is going to be done indoors in some kind of whether  it's going to be in a greenhouse, whether it's going to be in a a shipping container or whatever it is depends on the kind of the scale of the of the the the business that there is. 

00:14:20 Gareth Mitchell 

But the point being that that all their produce or the crops, whatever they're they’re  stacked. 

00:14:24 Benz Kotzen 

Yes, and they're stacked. And of course, you know if you've got one square metre of how much can you grow in one square metre? Let's say you can grow, you know 5 corn or or 10 corn plants. And corn's not a very good example because corn grows tall, but let's just say if you've got lettuce for example, you can get 20 lettuce in one square meter. If we start stacking them like shelves, then we can, you know, depends on how you want to go. We can we can double it, triple it, go as high as as high as we want. So it becomes much more efficient. 

00:14:55 Gareth Mitchell 

And and and in terms of the harvesting as well, sorry to interrupt but and and servicing it, getting the water to it all the things you need to grow crops, it's all happening in the same space. 

00:15:05 Benz Kotzen 

Yes, And then of course, it's climate controlled. So you know, you don't have issues, for example, of of weather, for example, bad weather because absolutely everything is is controlled. And so the the temperatures are controlled, the amount of nutrients that is is coming into it is controlled. And so you know the the the product is healthy and good. Basically it's it's hydroponic. So it's actually using water with nutrients and those nutrients in the water are being recycled.  

00:15:36 Benz Kotzen 

It's also extremely water efficient. Which I think is something if we go back to the the right at the beginning of this, the conversation or actually the theme of this, we're talking about green, we're talking about food, but actually water is is just as much of a problem, if not a bigger problem for us. 

00:15:51 Gareth Mitchell 

OK, so right, so so many benefits there and I don't know if it's just me, Emmie, but I feel as if I was hearing all about this like all the time like vertical farming is on the front covers of magazines and so on three or four years ago, not hearing so much about it now. Is it still the kind of active space for VC's to be investing in, for instance? 

00:16:10  Emmie Jones 

It's really interesting actually, though a number of investors did get into vertical farming a few years ago. But there have been real problems trying to scale those farms and make them economically viable, and there have been a number of cases of farms going into insolvency or Chapter 11 in the US, which is the the US insolvency equivalent. And people have struggled so far to make it work. 

00:16:36  Emmie Jones 

I think there's a number of reasons for that. I think that obviously as as Benz was describing them, they're massively energy intensive because you need to keep them at controlled and quite hot temperatures and there's a lot of light involved. And I think with all of the geopolitical issues and challenges that people have been facing, the energy costs obviously went up. So I think that was an issue. 

00:16:57  Emmie Jones 

I also think that investors have become quite nervous about this as a sector, maybe because there haven't been runaway successes that they've been able to point to. And also because funding it is actually quite difficult from an investment perspective. They're so CapEx intensive you know. 

00:17:16 Gareth Mitchell 

So you mean capital expenditure, you basically you have to spend a ton of cash just to build one of these things is what you need, right? OK. 

00:17:21  Emmie Jones 

Exactly. To be able to have proof of concept you've got to build a farm which costs, I don't know, $50 million or something. And so you're asking investors to put a lot of money at risk  in circumstances where there's no proof that this will be able to work or be viable or scalable, and that has been a real challenge for people. 

00:17:41  Emmie Jones 

And I think this is something that is true of the wider cleantech and infotech environment. A lot of these great ideas are really capital intensive, and so they do require huge amounts of funding upfront. 

00:17:56  Emmie Jones 

And that's not really the way that the venture capital model has traditionally worked. If you think about what we think of as tech and huge VC successes, they've all been things that are immediately scalable because it's just code on a computer and you can, an open banking license, you know, all of the new open banking world. You can have one person using your tech or 10,000 and it makes no difference to you.  

00:18:22  Emmie Jones 

And so VCs were able to come in with a certain amount of funding obviously, as the companies grew more funding was required, but everyone was coming into the equity and everyone's interests were aligned. Investors were putting money in, management teams were being given options or sweet equity to encourage them so that everyone was aligned towards an exit.  

00:18:43  Emmie Jones 

But where you've got huge capital requirements and huge amounts of money need to come in that can only be financed by an investor, it's very difficult for everyone else's equity to not to be hugely diluted, which means when you come to an exit people don't really feel incentivized in the same way. 

00:18:59 Gareth Mitchell 

OK, so that that's cause for concern, obviously Benz. Is this how you see it because you research this stuff, you actually have some vertical farming trials effectively you know part of your green roofs at the University of Greenwich. 

00:19:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Are you saying the way you see it is that the case is made in terms of the agriculture and the way it all works, but it's just the funding aspect and maybe the legal aspects around it are are holding it back or are there more fundamental reasons why we're not seeing this huge growth in vertical farms around the world? 

00:19:33 Benz Kotzen 

One of the things is that all vertical farms are not the the same. I think we need to say for example. I had a bad example right at the beginning of growing corn in a vertical farm. You're not going to grow anything that is really quite large in a vertical farm. Most of the product is going to be something like herbs or green leaved vegetables or cut and come again things, 

00:19:56 Benz Kotzen 

like, you know, chards and things like that, you know, which are rather kind of low. Again  also vertical farms can be these stacked shelves kinds of things, but they can also be more like living walls, which I'm sure you probably all know about. And so the kind of plants stuck into kind of, maybe troughs or something like that? And then you could you could be growing kind of bigger, bigger plants. So I think the kinds of plants that are in a a vertical farm are kind of limited. You know, another one we can think of is mushrooms. 

00:20:32 Benz Kotzen 

You know, we can grow mushrooms vertically and and I think this has been done for a very long time already. So growing them kind of in the shelf kind of unit. I think things that do work, I think there's a problem at the moment with them, I think economically is you know, we're talking about hydroponics and you know most of the, for example tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers we get are grown hydroponically. 

00:20:54 Benz Kotzen 

They're not in vertical forms. They're still in row, kind of, but very, very automated and very high tech kind of systems. And they've been sorted out over, let's say, the last 20-30, maybe even 40 years in Holland. And now we have them in Kent. And they I think they are profitable. 

00:21:14 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And only just a really quick one. It just occurs to me, given that you said, oh, the great thing about this is it's all indoors as well. You've got a lot of control over the, the climate and the humidity and everything that the crops need. 

00:21:16 Benz Kotzen 

Yes. Yes 

00:21:24 Gareth Mitchell 

But the downside is that no biodiversity from outside gets to take advantage of that. Presumably, you don't get pollinators going in there and other things, so there's a cost there isn’t there?  Just briefly. 

00:21:32 Benz Kotzen 

 Yes, the the the poll you have to bring the pollinators in. So yes, yes. So so if if you've got anything that needs pollinating, for example obviously with green leaf vegetables you don't need pollinators. So. So, but with things like peppers and tomatoes, you need pollinators, so they bring bees in. 

00:21:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. OK. Yeah, some people might say. Ohh shipping bees in or just it's, it's such a shame to have to do that. But anyway, you've mentioned many of the upsides as well, Ghislaine, just a little comment from you as we go along. We're gonna change topic shortly. But just on this. 

00:22:04 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes. Yeah, I think the vertical farming area is fascinating because it's always been in our kind of future view, hasn't it? It's like this will shift things. This will enable far more people to eat fast like you say, ready to cut or grow again ones, etcetera. And there's two things about it that I think are really special in terms of future and tech stuff. 

00:22:24 Ghislaine Boddington 

One is the fact that the data gathered from them is so brilliant, this big data gathering which actually can be reused and actually reused year on year 

00:22:32 Ghislaine Boddington 

in that vertical farming scenario, but also shared with others. So that actually the knowledge that we're getting, how to get the best produce out of it, the biggest productivity, the most efficient use is like actually in some farming cover we've done for agritech, et cetera, is very much becoming a kind of collective shared environment where people can improve and improve. 

00:22:54 Ghislaine Boddington 

And the second thing is for a while it's been talked about and I know there are quite a few examples now worldwide where, you know, here we are in the middle of you know the finance district in the city and this area is actually pretty well filled up because there's a lot of banks, a lot of places. But we know in other areas, in cities, there are quite a lot of tower blocks that are not being used. Yeah. 

00:23:14 Ghislaine Boddington 

And some of them are older, et cetera. And I know that in certain places they've started to layer these vertical farms into tower blocks where there's  30, 40 floors. And this is, one it's saving land, you know, two, it's actually creating farms directly within the city environments, which then actually can feed directly into the restaurants, into the cafes, into our sandwiches at lunchtime. 

00:23:36 Ghislaine Boddington 

Again, saving transportation, etc. So it's a very circular thing, isn't it? The whole circular economy within vertical farming is really fascinating. 

00:23:46 Benz Kotzen 

I mean, it's also interesting that we we know that plants require carbon dioxide to grow properly and if you got a building full of people or maybe say half the building is empty, if we can direct that carbon dioxide that people are creating into those spaces, 

00:24:01 Benz Kotzen 

you know, basically we're getting kind of free kind of carbon dioxide to make the plants grow. Also many of our buildings are you know are hot and there's kind of excess heat and we can use that excess heat and also the kind of energy, there's kind of excess energy as well. So you know if if we have this kind of integrated thinking then obviously I think the the commercial side of it actually starts making more sense. 

00:24:25 Gareth Mitchell 

And just being very simplistic about it, just saying, we don't need to have the green stuff out in the countryside and then the concretey and steely and glass stuff in the center of cities. You know, we can bring these things together in in many good ways. 

00:24:36 Ghislaine Boddington 

All the heat from data, I mean all the server heat in all these different buildings around here that can be fed into that for vertical farming within tower blocks and things, yeah. 

00:24:40 Gareth Mitchell 

That was a huge issue. 

00:24:47 Gareth Mitchell 

Just before we leave it then the maybe less clean aspects of cleantech and this comes to mind because not so long ago here on Somewhere on Earth, we looked at some of the unclean aspects of cleantech. For instance, some of the rare earth materials that are going into the likes of batteries, for instance and other kind of supposedly clean technology. 

00:25:09 Gareth Mitchell 

These materials being mined in illegal mining operations in Myanmar, overseen by the military junta, terrible human rights abuses, is awful working conditions, so a thorny issue to finish off with you Emmie Jones, if if you don't mind. And I know you're not a human rights lawyer, but nonetheless that must be something that's on your radar here in a law firm when you're talking to clients who’re maybe operating or could end up if they're not careful operating in areas where bad things are happening. So I'm just asking you really about the unclean aspects of cleantech here. 

00:25:40  Emmie Jones 

Certainly people need to be looking holistically at the entire project that they're investing in, whether it overall does produce decarbonisation or whether it just shifts some of the, for example, air miles into a different area and therefore there's just leakage of carbon rather than actually cleaning it up. 

00:26:00  Emmie Jones 

I mean just as an example, when we're talking about vertical farming. I was reading the founder of one vertical farm say that because of the energy costs, it was very difficult to run it profitably in EMEA. But they were looking at the Middle East. 

00:26:17  Emmie Jones 

And once you can of course understand that that means that the the light and the heat will be much easier to source. If what you're then doing is flying your lettuce back into the UK, that's probably not really a green project that will ultimately help us all out. 

00:26:32 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it's such an important point as well, isn't it Benz? You know when you're talking about so many, not just kind of vertical farming, but many of the of these other green techs. The question is do the crops and the produce end up reasonably close to the markets they need to serve and if not it's defeating the object, isn't it? 

00:26:48 Benz Kotzen 

Yes. I mean, I think a lot of a lot of the research that we do and it really needs to be kind of context based. So you know we're talking about vertical farms or we're talking about hydroponics and also one of the things that we're talking, we we get involved with is is aquaponics, so for example, and we've been looking at aquaponics, which is basically a system where it's it's it's kind of hydroponics with animals. 

00:27:08 Benz Kotzen 

So we have fish that are producing kind of nutrients by feeding the fish. The nutrients are made available to the plants. The plants clean the water, they absorb the nutrients, etcetera. And we've been looking at this. Of course, there's various aspects of this. 

00:27:26 Benz Kotzen 

You know is it, can it be commercially viable aquaponics, and it's kind of you know it's debatable on a big scale although it works in the United States. But for example we're looking at aquaponic systems for the developing world and those systems have to be very, very different and the context is very, very different. 

00:27:46 Benz Kotzen 

You know, in in the dry lands of Africa where they don't have enough water, if we can collect their water and in in the you know, people are living on very small plots of land for example and waiting for the rains and they grow a few crops which they can sell at the market and send their kids to school etcetera. You know, if we can have a a system which is kind of working all the time and is not based on kind of waiting for the rainfall, etcetera,  

00:28:12 Benz Kotzen 

that can work. You know in in that kind of context. So I think not every context is kind of you know, here in our environments and also for example, if we can have you know we have lots of meantime spaces in cities, places which are demolished or waiting for development, or rooftops. If we can have those kind of rooftop aquaponics or those kind of systems growing food for the local restaurants etcetera, those small business businesses can become viable. 

00:28:38 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. Final few words from you, Ghislaine Boddington. What have you learned today or observed? 

00:28:45 Ghislaine Boddington 

I think it's fascinating. I think we know, as we started the show on this whole thing, that food and water, as Benz mentioned, is so necessary for all of us for every, every living thing on Earth. 

00:28:56 Ghislaine Boddington 

And we know it is one of the areas that we've got to keep trying to stabilise and it isn't stabilised for many, many people it's not. There’s many people who go without food every day and the food scarcity side and the food wastage side, which are the two sides of the same problem, yeah, is so, so worrying I think worldwide. It's really good to to talk out some of these solutions. 

00:29:21 Ghislaine Boddington 

To see what the circular economies can do with it, but also to know actually very positively, that that's been looked at really seriously by big corporates, by bigger companies, by big investors. Yeah. Who are, you mentioned here, on a personal level, are taking an interest in this because they know these issues, wastage, shortage et cetera are not just for today,  they are for our descendants and we have to look at this carefully now. 

00:29:46 Gareth Mitchell 

Alright. Well, there, we'll leave it. Thank you very much indeed to you, Ghislaine Boddington and also you, Emmie Jones here at White and Case. And also you, Benz Kotzen of the University of Greenwich. And Stevie Arnoldi has been our audio engineer today, and the producer is Ania Lichtarowicz. The production manager is Liz Tuohy. I'm Gareth Mitchell and a a very big and heartfelt thank you to everybody here at the White and Case international law firm in the centre of London for accommodating us today. We'll see you next time, folks. Take care. Bye bye. 

00:30:26 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, let's carry on for a little bit of bonus podcast subscription extra. So we still have Emmie and we still have Benz and we still have Ghislaine and, well, obviously we have me because I'm talking. Right here we are then. Now I am quite interested Emmie in just what it will take in terms of investment for all these different countries to hit their net zero targets by like you know 2050, you know, whatever the target is. To me it just seems that reengineering the global economy is going to take so much investment isn’t it. 

00:30:58 Emmie Jones 

Absolutely. I mean, this is an area that's only going to become more important over the next couple of decades. To reach net zero by 2050, clean energy investment globally will need to more than triple in this decade to reach $4 trillion. So this is very much just the start of the conversation. 

00:31:16 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And I was fascinated during the main part of the podcast from when you were talking about how capital intensive all this stuff is and how the funding model needs to move away from the instantly scalable digital only businesses, and then you give that eye watering amount of capital that's needed and you can't help wondering how these deals are going to get made and how that's going to be achieved. 

00:31:42 Emmie Jones 

Yeah, it's tough actually. And investors, so at the point the businesses move to become scalable is probably at what we would call about a Series B, which is when you've had your friends and family around, people have put money in and then they are first beginning to get external investment from the VC houses. 

00:32:02 Emmie Jones 

And that is where there just isn't interest from investors. You've got much later stage companies are getting investment and much earlier stage companies are able to access government grants and things like that. But there is a scarcity right at the point that companies need to scale. And there's a big debate about how you might address that. 

00:32:23 Emmie Jones 

Partly, I think people want government intervention, not that you can of course force people to invest, but by making grants and other non-equity funding available, then governments can make it more viable for companies to raise funds. And then there are various tax breaks that governments give to investors in early stage companies. 

00:32:46 Emmie Jones 

But those tax breaks, for whatever reason, aren't currently available to certain cleantech investments, and so the request is, or the ask of government is that those rules be changed. 

00:32:57 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and clearly just leaving it to the market doesn't seem to be doing it. It's not as if any investment house has said, clearly there's this big business opportunity. There's a big hole in the market here. We can get into this because surely if that were the case, then loads of different kind of investment models would have emerged. From what I'm reading from you is that it does need some kind of intervention. 

00:33:17 Gareth Mitchell 

Or not, it’s it’s 

00:33:18 Emmie Jones 

Well it.  

00:33:18 Gareth Mitchell 

it's it's a controversial question and I'm sure people listening to this will have their own views, but. 

00:33:23 Emmie Jones 

Yeah, I mean, certainly there is a big rise in impact funds and funds where the sole purpose of it isn't just returns to the shareholders, they are also trying to make a very positive impact, but they still need to produce some returns to their investors because they're not just purely charities. And so however you structure this you do need to try and help these businesses become more investable. 

00:33:46 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, sure. And I guess some of the time frames are so long that you know that even outside, no VCs have a fairly longterm view, but not that long. And I just wonder if the time frame aspect is part of it when you're talking about these technologies. Ghislaine? 

00:33:58 Ghislaine Boddington 

I guess it links to what Benz was saying earlier in the show about the context and where it's happening and what's happening. And I think some of the experiments are still experiments and prototyping, aren't they, that's going on, a very contextual, they're very much based in, as you mentioned, particular areas of the world or particular needs and  they've still got to be tested and some of them don't always work and you've got a few stories around that haven’t you. 

00:34:29 Benz Kotzen 

I do, yes, if you. If you would like to hear. 

00:34:32 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah, there's a one about the mangroves, which is fascinating. Yeah. 

00:34:35 Benz Kotzen 

OK, well before the mangroves, right, there's always something prior to it. I became very interested in what we call seed bombing. And I'm sure you've all heard about seed bombing. 

00:34:45 Benz Kotzen 

So. So basically, I think most people recognize seed bombing as something that guerrilla gardeners kind of do. They'll get a clump of earth and put some seeds in it, and preferably probably native plants and throw them onto a roundabout or throw them over a, you know, into a derelict site. So we can actually get more nature and biodiversity into the environment. 

00:35:08 Benz Kotzen 

And I was doing some work in Kenya. Nothing to do with the kind of seed bombing. I've been very interested in kind of restoration. And I came across, I was in Samburu country, and I came across a whole bunch of people, Samburu people, and particularly one woman who was wearing a kind of bag around her waist which said, Looking Towards Alternative Livelihoods. Now the Samburu people are actually a pastoral people. 

00:35:37 Benz Kotzen 

And they they migrated with their, with their, their cattle, their sheep, their goats, the camels, etcetera. And they follow the rains and they follow the grass as it grows, etcetera. But this is not happening anymore. And so one of the things, um, I kind of thought well, how can we we we kind of put back these grasses when we get the rains, and how, because all the grasses have been decimated,  

00:35:59 Benz Kotzen 

and the problem is so vast, it's on such a huge scale, you just cannot do it by hand. You kind of, you can, you can sow it by hand, but it's going to take forever and a day to try and solve the problem. So the idea was, I thought, I would have this, envisage this Hercules kind of RAF plane dropping, first of all, this kind of vision that I had, these seeds in tea bags. OK, this was my original idea. 

00:36:22 Benz Kotzen 

And then you'd have the seeds in the bags and these bags would kind of hit the ground and  when the rains came up, would come the grasses and the trees and the shrubs, which the animals could eat. So this is kind of dealing with something, again, it's a nature based solution, but kind of technology. And I went into looking at different kinds of how do we make these seed bombs? 

00:36:43 Benz Kotzen 

And how do we get them onto the ground and then when the rains come, they release the seeds. Actually, I found that the easiest, the solution that took me a little bit of time to get to it, was to create something 

00:36:55 Benz Kotzen 

like a pod that you put in your washing machine. So which has got this kind of liquid in it. If we could have a pot like that with seeds with a little bit of fertilizer and some water retaining granules. Now the one thing we know is that when you put one of these pods in your washing machine, it dissolves immediately. And this is kind of the thing that I'm looking at. So that's that's kind of for. 

00:37:15 Gareth Mitchell 

But what about the mangroves though, where do they come? 

00:37:16 Ghislaine Boddington 

That's a really good example of experimentation, yeah. 

00:37:16 Benz Kotzen 

OK. Yeah. OK. So that that's the kind of where it kind of starts and so looking at, now we know we know that,  

00:37:26 Benz Kotzen 

we have climate change and one of the results of climate change or the consequences of climate change is sea level rise, and this is particularly felt in many of, kind of the Pacific islands and especially in Southeast Asia. What happened in the, I guess, probably starting in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, people took out the mangroves, which were kind of protecting the kind of  

00:37:48 Benz Kotzen 

land areas of flooding, etcetera and what they did in Southeast Asia, we kind of probably know about Thailand particularly because many of our kind of prawn species and some of our fish species 

00:38:02 Benz Kotzen 

that we import were coming from these kinds of areas. They took out the mangroves and they made fishponds or prawn ponds, et cetera. What's happened since then is we have sea level rises and not only is the sea coming in and destroying the ponds, it's now destroying infrastructure, roads and the livelihoods of people. 

00:38:23 Benz Kotzen 

So the whole idea again, like in Kenya, the problem is so vast and it's not only, it's not only Southeast Asia, it's in Africa, Senegal and the Caribbean and South America, it is so vast that you cannot deal with this on a scale of planting it by hand. It's very successful  

00:38:44 Benz Kotzen 

to plant it by hand. So what we need to do, and I think this is what I forgot to say in Kenya, is the only way that we can do it is with drones. 

00:38:54 Benz Kotzen 

And as drones get bigger and more powerful, etcetera, if we can drop these seed bombs by drones, I mentioned Hercules aircraft, to try and hire a Hercules aircraft, it's quite a formidable thing to do. 

00:39:05 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, they're they're probably quite tricky to get. Yeah. 

00:39:07 Benz Kotzen 

Tricky, quite tricky. I tried it with the RAF and they weren't interested. 

00:39:12 Gareth Mitchell 

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at that conversation. 

00:39:14 Benz Kotzen 

I think I got very very close, but I didn't get far enough, but this is the whole idea. 

00:39:18 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. OK. So anyway, so it's kind of dropping seed bombs through some kind of aerial means, presumably a drone. And, and sorry, it sounds as if I'm obsessed by mangroves, but do you mean as well, because you got this depletion of mangroves, and for people who don't know these are plants that grow in salt water, isn't it. Could seed bombs be the solution there? 

00:39:37 Benz Kotzen 

Yes, that's it. 

00:39:38 Gareth Mitchell 

So, I’ve got it. So then you restore the biodiversity in those areas. You mitigate the flooding risk that's come about. Everyone's a winner. Thanks to some drones. 

00:39:41 Benz Kotzen 

Exactly. 

00:39:45 Benz Kotzen 

Yes. And and you re-establish also, what happens also is that you re-establish this environment where people have again for centuries been using this environment as part of their livelihood. So they collect the crabs and the molluscs etcetera and they sell it, sell it at market. And not only that, it's that by putting in these mangroves some of these fish ponds again will become viable, because what's happening is these mangroves will now be cleaning the water for the fish ponds, which this has been a problem. The water quality has deteriorated since the mangroves have gone. So you'll be re-establishing and you know, just an amazing 

00:40:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Mangroves have a niche in the ecosystem for a reason. Let's put them back, I think would be how we could sum that up. 

00:40:27 Benz Kotzen 

Yes. Yes, please. 

00:40:28 Ghislaine Boddington 

And this is the complexity of experimentation and prototyping. And the scale that things needed to be done on and the different contexts and different worldwide situations which need to be slightly different in each case, really in different places, yeah. 

00:40:41 Benz Kotzen 

Sorry, can I just say one thing about the mangroves was, it's it's not just dropping the seeds. What you have to do and you mentioned for example, it's kind of coastal, it's an intertidal area. One of the things you got to make sure is that the seeds stick onto the ground and so you've got to have some kind of hook mechanism or some kind of anchor mechanism so that the seeds stays, and that's what we've been looking at. 

00:41:05 Gareth Mitchell 

And so you're working with the engineers? Yeah, multi-disciplinary, yeah absolutely.  

00:41:07 Benz Kotzen 

Yes, we need the engineers, exactly.  

00:41:05 Gareth Mitchell 

So Emmie then just to kind of finish this off, then what do you make of this when you hear conversations like this?  

00:41:15 Ghislaine Boddington 

Complexity of it. 

00:41:16 Gareth Mitchell 

And here we are sitting in a law firm talking about drones dropping seed bombs into formerly mangrove areas to try and restore them, and then the engineering solutions for the hooks to make them stick to the bottom. So oh my goodness, so, what do you make of all this? Just before we leave it. Is this your everyday kind of conversation here, is what I'm trying to get at. 

00:41:35 Emmie Jones 

This is very far from my everyday conversation. But what I do love about it is the fact that sitting here, we've got so many disciplines and so many perspectives. 

00:41:46 Emmie Jones 

And ultimately, we are talking about the same thing, but just from different angles. And I think that is what we all need to get to in order to be able to reach these net zero targets, and actually allow people to help the environment, as Benz has been describing. 

00:42:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Absolutely. So Ghislaine Boddington. We should have more of these conversations in summary. 

00:42:02 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes, I think, I do think so. I think we all need these, multiple different experts round the table. And actually hopefully this is the kind of conversation that actually can help investors to understand too how complicated it is, and the different levels like you said, the start up but also the mid-scale too for scale up situation that's required with capital of course, but also actually as people time actually to get these things to be prototyped, checked and tested and evidence found and then we can go further. 

00:42:36 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Yeah. There you go. So there you go, dear listener. It's not every day that you have a lawyer in conversation with a professor of landscape and nature-based solutions, and Ghislaine and me. But you got it there and some extra on this podcast subscription extra everybody and oh, I just love that. It's just you just never know where these conversations are gonna go. 

00:42:54 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah, I enjoyed that too. Yeah, very much. 

00:42:55 Gareth Mitchell 

Lots of mangroves. Great stuff. Thank you to you all. I've already name checked you and just another thank you to the White and Case international law firm because they've really taken good care of us here today. And that will do for now. There'll be more where this came from, but actually not where this came from cos we’ll be back in the studio. But you know what I mean, more anyway, next time. See you then. Bye bye.