YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Menker

lines on the record: 122
first: 2019-08-28
most recent: 2019-08-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“More pigs, making more picks. Well, pigs eat soybeans. Well, soybeans are at the heart of the US China trade war. Soybeans are also at the heart of China's trade with Brazil. So now you start to say, okay, how does this play out with the trade war? How does this play out with Brazil's relationship? Well, if Chinese don't eat pigs, do they eat chickens? Well, if they eat chicken, chicken... Eat soybeans. So you're now thinking of other feedstock. Where are they getting that from? So you basically end up in this really like entangled web of asking a series of nested questions that you have to have answers to. So the predictive AI you have to have around that is incredibly like complex. And until you can start to play that out and automate that knowledge, we have no hope.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a big topic right now. Let's talk about things in China. China produces 60% of the world's pork. It's also the largest consumer of pork per capita in the world. Well, this year, there's African swine fever, which is basically a disease that's killing off the pig herd. That's right. Estimation is about 30% of pigs in China could be already gone and up to 50% some are forecasting up to 50% will be gone by 2020. There's not enough pigs in the world to make up for that shortfall unless people basically start.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, model risk. You need data. Right, exactly. And the amount of data that you need when it comes to modeling agriculture is just at a completely different level. Because, you know, if you take something as simple as...”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies that are interacting with farmers and their cost of capital is managed, they don't transfer that on to the farmer, right? There's this like, it just like this ripple effect that occurs.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the agricultural market. It's crazy. Take a place like the US. The top 30 banks combined. The JP Morgan's, et cetera. Top 30 combined have an agricultural portfolio exposure of less than $20 billion a year. Wow. And to me, if you cannot fix capital markets around agriculture, you do not fix a system. You don't lead to increased productivity. Increased productivity, but it costs a lot to do so, then you don't fix the problem because you still have. So to me, it's like, how do you reduce the cost of access to capital? How do you make that more efficiently by farmers? And really by the system too, right? Because if you can start to lend better to”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bring down the cost of capital, right? Let me give you a statistic. Okay. 63%. This is the best dinner I ever had, by the way.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, think of anyone who sells anything into farms. So, seed, crop protection, fertilizer, banks, insurance, then intermediaries, intermediaries are basically traders. So we work with hedge funds and we work with kind of your physical traders that are moving stuff around the world. And then buyers, so the buyers tend to be basically your consumer goods, like companies, as well as your retailers of fresh produce, etc. And then we work a lot with the public sector as well. So we work with foundations, we work with academia. We actually do a lot of joint R&D research with academic institutions. So we've taken a slightly different approach, but essentially saying if you don't get this ecosystem of players to start communicating in some type of way that makes sense and get them to agree, you don't fix it.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much. And actually, a very big strategic decision we made was we don't sell anything to farmers. We actually don't work with farmers because we realized that the system There actually has never been a baseline understanding of agriculture that actually allows the transfer of risk to occur. And the farmer ends up getting hurt in this process because they're kind of caught in the middle. And so for us, it was how do we fix the system around the farm? Because then the farmer can truly start to benefit because you start to drive down essentially the cost of capital, you drive down volatility. Kind of what is fundamentally. So”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, and what we had to do is first go out and essentially, like I said, harvest all of this data and we designed an ontology that essentially normalizes all of it. And then we realized that there were also data gaps. So we started using that data itself to generate new data. So we're essentially using AI to organize the data, but we're also then using it to generate new types of data. So we are using it to generate data around what crops are grown where. A lot of countries don't report that. So we look at image classification and look at satellite imagery around the world and classify that. And we combine that with more of the macroeconomic data that comes out to start kind of mapping out that supply and demand picture.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More importantly, like, what is growing where and when, and how much of it, and what's at risk and what needs to go where? I mean, just the even basic question of, you know, how much wheat is Russia producing this year is actually not a simple question to answer as most people think it is. Right.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very much that. And so that's really what we did as we built a platform that ingests very large, very disparate data sets that come in multiple formats and languages because agriculture is global and each country tends to actually report in its local language at least the best data for that country. So the formatting is from like the 1970s. I mean healthcare is like way advanced compared to agriculture. But agriculture is way behind. And again, when we think of agriculture, oftentimes people are thinking of like corn and soybean farmers, but it's also like black pepper and vanilla and blueberries and raspberries. And so it's like so diverse in terms of what it represents. It's highly fragmented on the supply side because you can have a half acre farmer or a 50,000 acre farmer and then demand kind of runs down to like people like you and I in the cup of coffee I'm having this morning. And so how do you essentially model a real world system that's incredible?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody understands the system. Like, we're all talking about it, but there was no basis for understanding it because the data had not been organized. And that's kind of where the idea for intelligence came from.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That became kind of like this fascination turned complete obsession over another four years. And then at some point, I was like, you know what? I just, I had nothing left in me to continue being an energy trader. But I was just like completely obsessed with how can you have a system that's so broken? And how do you fix it? And I had seen in the energy markets actually how information and data had truly transformed the basically flow of capital to make it A, so much more efficient, B, make markets significantly less volatile than they were, and C, make it much more longer term, which is kind of what you need to make markets work. Agriculture has none of it. And so to me, I said, I'm not going to be a farmer, but I need to figure out a way to fix the system. And to fix a system, you first need to understand it. And I quickly realized.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They still are. Yeah, they still are. It's one of the hardest jobs in the world. Part of why it's really difficult to make the economics work. And by the way, it's the same in the US. It's just that the government subsidizes it. But it's essentially that by the time you get land and say it's cheap, in that case it was actually like a dollar an acre, but you realize I have to level the land. Well, I have to build out the roads myself. I need to build out my own infrastructure. Oh, I need power. Where do I get my crop insurance? Who's my banker? By the time you realize what that true cost of production is, you're basically better off buying land in the Midwest. So, you know, Midwest is like 10, 11, 12,000 dollars an acre versus a dollar an acre. It's still kind of not really a real arbitrage. And so to me.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What did you think was so difficult? I mean, it is difficult. I think farmers are our first entrepreneur. We used to have a very entrepreneurial culture because farmers had to be very entrepreneurial, whether it was the weather, whether it was what to grow, whether what prices. It was such an entrepreneurial job. And it's not necessarily thought of that way.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quickly realized that making the economics of farming work no matter how much capital you had was actually really difficult So, I didn't buy land or farmland at least.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I decided to buy land to spite him. And then going through this journey of trying to buy cheap agricultural land, which didn't exist in the US, it didn't exist in Brazil, I kind of went back to my roots in Africa and said, I'll buy land in Africa because there's lots of arable land. I have money. We can collect money. I can raise money and do this. Anyway.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, you know, if the world comes to an end, I'd rather trade a sack of potatoes for a bar of gold. Why would you not buy land and like just be a farmer? Like if you truly believe the world's coming to an end?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I was an energy trader, and if you remember the financial crisis in 2008-09, who doesn't, I was kind of living in this very polarized world where on one end I was going to work every day and people thought the world was coming to the end. And I was like, well, that world is not really coming to an end. I mean, Morgan, I was working at Morgan Stanley at the time. I was like, our stock going to zero sucks, but it's not the end of the world. And the guy next to me at the time actually was buying gold because he thought the world was really coming to an end. The preppers.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was born and raised in Ethiopia and I ended up coming to the US for college and then started my career in Wall Street. And I became an oil and gas trader. Right. Okay. Which is a very natural thing to do.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we met at an event, but you started talking about ag tech, and something I've been very interested in for a long time. I've talked to the head of Landa Legs, all kinds of things, and we've obviously had a lot of the food technology people on the podcast. But the idea of big tech being pushed up against lots of different areas of industry is really interesting. And agriculture tech to me is super interesting. You started reeling off all kinds of fascinating statistics. Like, why is this person who looks like she stepped right out of New York City talking to me about agriculture technology? Talk to me about that. Talk to me about how you got there.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am Kara Swisher, editor at large of recode. You may know me as someone who harvests hot takes and grows them into podcasts, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Sarah Menker, the CEO of Grow Intelligence. AgTech is a very interesting new, not new area, but an area that people aren't focused on, and we're going to do that today. Sarah, welcome to Rico Decode.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT