The Business of Plant Communication with Shely Aronov

Agribusiness Matters with Venky Ramachandran

Inner Plant Founder and CEO Shely Aronov joins us to talk about strategic tradeoffs, the evolution of technology, commoditization, and disrupting the consolidation of the Big 6 agri-input landscape.

These are the questions we delved into:

1. Why does Inner Plant consider its core business to be in traits and not chemistry? Would the farmer pay for data or the trait?

2. Why does InnerPlant firmly believe in their customer mantra: “No additional work, no changes to operations, scalable, and affordable”?

3. What are the trade-offs in building a biosensor platform? Why does InnerPlant focus on the plant over its microbiome? What is the tradeoff between genetic potential and agronomic potential?

4. How does InnerPlant address the eternal conundrum faced by every agronomist - Is the problem coming from the ecology surrounding the plant (microbiome or rhizosphere) or is it coming from the plant (phyllosphere)? What does InnerPlant measure when they measure plant’s response to stress?

5. Why does InnerPlant’s focus on crop protection center on being agnostic to remedial action? Mind you, this is a 360-degree different approach when compared to the carrots approach of the Monsanto Big 6 paradigm which advocated a particular solution to get a better yield as promised by a seed trait’s genetic potential.

6. What would have happened had Monsanto launched the fungal-resistant soybean trait in 1995?

7. Ten years down the line, does shely see InnerPlant breaking the consolidation wave we see among Big 6 Agri-Input players with a step change in innovation?

8. Why do antitrust mechanisms fail to work in food and agriculture systems?

9. What are the implications of the recent US federal court announcing a ban on dicamba?

10. What does the future portfolio for Innerplant look like, especially for plants that are not genetically engineered? How does being a VC-funded agritech startup affect their portfolio?

11. What does a bear case analysis on InnerPlant look like? Given that InnerPlant is focusing on building ecosystems of sentinel plants, what are the implications of Darwinian natural selection operating on organisms over ecosystems?

12. What happens when farmers share data (for a commercial fee, let’s say) about fungal pressures of sentinel plots with other farmers who don’t have sentinel plots?

13. In response to sentinel plots, given that nature never rests, can weeds evolve to develop their signaling mechanisms and become sentient?

14. Will Innerplant open-source its biosensor platform to commoditize its innovation? What does Shely think about commoditizing and componentizing InnerPlant’s technology? What would technology transfer look like in the case of a biosensor platform?

15. Can John Deere’s See and Spray technology help in achieving sustainability goals? What happens when regulation is enforced in Europe without newer tools? What does Shely think about health and the Western diet? What does Shely think of the next wave of green revolution?