Climate Confident

Reducing Climate Emissions In The Aviation Sector Using Plants - A Chat With Yield10 Bioscience's Olly Peoples

July 27, 2022 Tom Raftery / Olly Peoples Season 1 Episode 82
Climate Confident
Reducing Climate Emissions In The Aviation Sector Using Plants - A Chat With Yield10 Bioscience's Olly Peoples
Climate Confident +
Become a supporter of the show!
Starting at $3/month
Support
Show Notes Transcript

The aviation industry is one the hardest to decarbonise. One way to get its climate emissions down in the short term is to use sustainable aviation fuels (SAF).

One company in this space has come up with a plant that can not only produce oil that can be used to create SAF, but it can do so in a way that is economically advantageous for the farmer, without taking land from food production.

We had a fascinating conversation covering how camelina can be used to create sustainable aviation fuel, as another source of Omega3, and to produce bioplastics.

This was a truly fascinating episode of the podcast and I learned loads as always, and I hope you do too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability, and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Support the show

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's amazing supporters:

  • Lorcan Sheehan
  • Hal Good
  • Jerry Sweeney
  • Andreas Werner
  • Devaang Bhatt
  • Stephen Carroll
  • Marcel Roquette
  • Roger Arnold

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Climate Confident episodes like this one.

Contact
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - get in touch via direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show.

Credits
Music credits - Intro by Joseph McDade, and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Olly Peoples:

And so this is again, kind of unique set of factors coming together, a winter cover crop readily genetically programmed to make sustainable products initially enhanced for biofuel production leading then to Omega 3 production leading then to ultimately production of bioplastic oil and protein. But in every case you're increasing protein production

Tom Raftery:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate 21 podcast, the number one podcast, showcasing best practices in climate emissions reductions, and I'm your host global vice president for SAP, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast in your podcast app of choice, to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi everyone. Welcome to the climate 21 podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP and with me on the show today, I have my special guest Olly. Olly welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Olly Peoples:

Thanks, Tom I'm basically Olly Peoples I'm the president and CEO of Yield10 Bioscience, an agricultural biotechnology company. We are located in Woburn, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. But we also have operations up in Saskatoon, Canada.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And that's a strong Boston accent you don't have there, Olly.

Olly Peoples:

Yes, it's a strong Boston accent via Scotland originally. I was fortunate to come to the US many years ago from Aberdeen Scotland and spent quite a number of years at MIT before founding a company called metabolics in the, I would say the advanced what's now referred to as synthetic biology space.

Tom Raftery:

And what are you guys doing in Yield10 bioscience. And why are you on the climate 21 podcast?

Olly Peoples:

We formed Yield10 essentially after we sold off the earlier business, we formed it back in, in 2017. And really our focus was really around how do you improve the productivity of crops? And that's really where the name Yield10 came from. When you think about, you know, improving the productivity of let's take two oil seed crops, because oil seeds are gonna be the primary topic this morning. But when you think about what would be the economic impact, and this is obviously for conveying to investors of increasing the productivity of canola and soybean in north America by about 10 bushels per acre. And at the time we came up with this if you, if you multiply that up based on, on harvest from 2016 in the market values that represents an incremental 10 billion dollars in revenue. So hence the name Yield10, 10 bushels of acre, 10 billion seems like a pretty nice story, right? And so, you know, obviously improving the productivity of crops is really not easy. And what was unique about Yield10 was our sort of history as an advanced synthetic biology company. And our goal really was to take crops as they are, and through a combination of sophisticated modelling. Using a platform now called grain, which stands for gene ranking, artificial intelligence network, kind of a fancy title for something that says, you know, literally what you're trying to do with crop discovery or gene discovery is you are really trying to find mechanism to pick that magic 1, 2, 3 genes, and identify them in crop let's just say corn, or soybean, or canola, or even camelina. And then knowing, those are really important. You can, then you can then change the reactivity using a combination of tech tools. So the whole idea was initially, how do we identify those gene targets and what the industry refers to that as that they refer to those as genetic traits. So that's how we started. Now a key component of grain was an oil seed called camelina sativa, which most people haven't heard of. But camelina has been an oil seed used in food production in Europe for thousands of years, basically. In fact, I recently saw that they may have originally came out of Ukraine, which was gonna its own trials and tribulations at the moment. And we started using it as far back as 2010, really, as a way to test these genetic changes in, a crop that we could actually then do field trials with, because when you identify a genetic change, you want to make, you can make it using these tools, but then ultimately what you really care about is does it work in the field, under the variable weather and climatic conditions, et cetera, cetera. And the crop we chose for that was Camelina. And it turns out we chose very wisely. And I haven't always been able to say that in my career, but I can act we've chose very wisely because what we did is over those years, we build up a phenomenal capability to uh, identify gene targets, modify using genetic engineering or genetic engineering tools, including CRISPR genome editing and field tests fairly rapidly, some of these, these outputs. And so what I did is I positioned us really as a company, having a strong platform in a crop that has tremendous potential in North America as a new source of vegetable oli.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And to what end and why, again, climate 21?

Olly Peoples:

So to what end? So the initial focus was, uh, , really to, to look initially, at how do you increase the productivity of food? Because we've got in addition to climate change which is gonna have a big impact on food production. And you're seeing that with last year's weather in Pacific Northwest, we're seeing the fires in, in, in Europe ongoing we've seen the devastation in California. Really we have to, the initial focus is really to increase food productivity in the major crops. These are the grains there's a lot of talk about growing, produce in vertical farming, et cetera, but when it comes down to calories and then amount of calories needed to feed a growing global population as it moves close to nine and a half billion over the next 30 years or so you know, what you really need to do is you need to increase food production, primarily protein production by about 50%. So the productivity of agriculture has to increase. Now on the negative side you got less arable land due to infrastructure growth, more people, more roads, all of the things that go with it more pressures on everything. But the other issue is essentially, you know, the impact of climate change of weather patterns and the variability and unpredictability of weather patterns. And so when you add all those up, really, that's where you get the idea we have to increase food productivity to, to meet all these criteria and to be able to feed the world. So that's kind of how we got into it. However, as we evolved as an organization and built this platform, we started looking at camelina as a new crop. So when you talk about increasing productivity of protein, for example, there's a couple of different ways of doing it. One is obviously to increase the productivity of soybean from its current, you know, 50, 60 bushels per acre to 80 bushels per acre, that allows you to get from the same acreage, a lot more protein. But another way to do it is to introduce new crops that can perform well in regions of the country, which are not really suitable for things like soybean or canola. And so that gives you access to, to other acres, particularly with a crop like camelina that has low inputs. And that's another way to do the same thing. And so that's where we really started. The other thing that's I think even more exciting for camelina however, is it's a very fast crop it's probably 110, 110 days from planting to harvest.

Tom Raftery:

Can you just quickly put that into context? 110 days from planting to harvest means nothing to people who, you know.

Olly Peoples:

Three or four months, I mean, three or, you know, planting it and with three and three or four months, you get a harvest. Yeah.

Tom Raftery:

Compared to wheat or barley compared to corn?

Olly Peoples:

Yeah. and, and the challenge there of course is and why is that? Let me tell you why it's important. So. As you move into the sort of Northwest of the, of North America what you end up with is what they call fewer frost free days.

Tom Raftery:

Okay.

Olly Peoples:

So you get longer the, the further north you go the longer the winter is, the shorter the summer. So obviously finding crops that can fit into that narrow window. Is really important. And so that's really, what's important about it in the first instance. And then there's some new things that we are learning as we go along here. So we've been developing winter varieties so that we would be able to use Catalina as a what's called a winter cover crop. In other words, we would plant it in the fall after you harvest stage soybean it would essentially come up outta the ground and it will lay dormant through the winter. And we know this works because we've been doing it for a few years and including fairly significant trial this year. And basically what happens it'll lie essentially dormant through the winter and it comes up very quickly in the spring. And the idea being you could harvest that crop before you plant the next year's corn, or soybean or whatever it is. And that's particularly exciting from the point of view of a) plant productivity, because now you're getting a second harvest from the same land. That's really the key to cover cropping is generating revenue for farmers. So that's really important. The second thing that happens is by planting a cover crop, you're reducing nutrient runoff and essentially the loss of organic soil carbon from the soil. So that's really important as well. So there's both environmental climate change benefits as well as productivity benefits. And that allows you to then have this second harvest and how did we get to the sort of climate change and biofuel as well. That's really in response to market demand. So although we were initially looking at camelina as a specialty oil. What we've discovered is that there's a tremendous new demand for vegetable oil for essentially aviation biofuel and for a product called renewable diesel. And these are two markets that are not likely to be supplanted by essentially batteries and these types of technologies. It's gonna be a very long time before I fly across the pond as they say in a battery powered the airplane. I'm not quite prepared to do that. I don't think I will be for a long time. So we've sort of recognized the market demand. We are well positioned and over the last two years really Yield10 has been really beginning to build the commercialization capabilities to begin to supply camelina oil into that market.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. So the main market you've identified is the sustainable aviation fuel market.

Olly Peoples:

In the near term, I would say it's really sustainable aviation fuel and the product comes renewable diesel. The driver behind them is pretty simple. It's decarbonizing the energy sector in the right response to climate change impacts. The reason that the aviation biofuel over the longer term, I think is ultimately where this will end up with the advances in battery technologies and hydrogen, there may be ways to decarbonize trucking alternative ways. But I think when you look at aviation, we see that as something that's gonna be very difficult to replace.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah, yeah. Indeed. Indeed. What's your competition for sustainable aviation fuel in this space? What other sources are being used today to generate sustainable aviation fuel?

Olly Peoples:

Yeah. So, so right now I would say uh, the starting point for pretty much every company, whether it's a small player, like Yield10 or a large player for example, like, Exxon or Shell or BP or Chevron, it doesn't really matter. The starting point for everybody and the most attractive from a carbon perspective has been to really look at using waste fat from the animal production business or recycled vegetable oil. However, of course that supply has kind of been used up already. So with what they call the low carbon fuel standards in California, where in order to sell diesel fuel to a trucker, you have to have a certain carbon score either through buying carbon credits from the market, or alternatively, by using a blend of petroleum diesel with renewable diesel, where the renewable diesel has a lower carbon content. And in terms of its production. And that's really how you beat that demand. So, you know, if you look in the US, I think there's probably five to 6 billion gallons of capacity being built or had up and running. And so that's a tremendous amount of additional vegetable oil requirement. And just to give you an idea of that, we'd have to increase acreage of soybean by 60% and you know, it's a massive number. And so we are talking 50 billion pounds of vegetable oil. I mean it's a massive amount and obviously that's not gonna be met by soybean, or canola where they've already to a large degree, although they're still creeping through plant breeding, et cetera. They're still creeping further north than Northwest. Really those resources are sort of getting pretty much to the point of being maxed out. And so that's really where crops like camelina come in. And what we've found is when you look at competition in terms of alternative crops, I think there's probably a couple of alternatives that make sense. One is obviously like we believe camelina is the most attractive if you like combination of factors. But there's also a crop called Carenada, which is being commercialized by new seat in and I think British petroleum, BP as a major contract with new seat for the oil from that. For their renewable fuels. There's a crop called penny cress, which is an oil seed that's sort of, um, prevalent throughout North America. It's you know, it's a weed it's been around forever, but it's also very suitable as a cover crop. So penny cress is another oil seed that could be used as an additional source of supply. But when we look to all these factors including the ability to rapidly accelerate the productivity of the crop and by productivity , I mean yield, I mean, oil content, I mean, essentially, you know, integrating traits for herbicide and disease tolerance, you know, camelina, at least in our minds came right to the top, which is why we selected it.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And we've seen that, uh, as you mentioned, trucking may or may not be a, a, a place in long term, but in the short term probably is for renewable diesel. And aviation, it's gonna be a lot longer because it's a much harder nut to crack, as you say, it'll be a while yet, particularly with current technologies before we, we have planes flying any considerable distance with any considerable number of passengers on batteries alone. So given that, is this something that you think has got a long lifetime, as in if we get trucks on batteries. If we get planes eventually on some electric technology, where does that leave the likes of camelina?

Olly Peoples:

Well, I think the beauty of this is, that, you know, it's almost what we're really doing is we're leveraging this nearterm opportunity to build a new crop. As a sort of winter cover crop, winter cash cover crop for farmers and keep in mind the products of this are vegetable oil. Camelina vegetable oil is actually a pretty healthy oil it has interesting fatty acid profile and there's some already some publications from the scientific community indicating how it can be useful in sort of, health and wellness. So that's always going to be there. I think the second thing is, is that we see camelina as a platform because of its unique characteristics and because it's not something that's native to North America much the same as soybean, actually, it wasn't negative here either came from China. It's a crop that's really readily segregated. It's currently not used in the food chain, if you like. And we see it as a platform for producing additional decarbonizing and I would say sustainable products and we're working on two that'll come in over, over the longer term. So. We see the biofuel as really providing that near term market pool. This will allow us to scale our operations, to build a robust camelina based vegetable oil supply business. But ultimately we see camelina as a platform that can be used to produce additional sustainable products nearest than that is actually something that's very important for health. And that, that is essentially omega3 oils. These are oils, that are essentially direct replacement for fish oil. And again, when you look at the impact of climate change on ocean temperatures, , scientists are already finding that the levels of omega3 in the ocean are actually going down because the function of omega threes. Is really to protect organisms against cold, right? So warmer, it gets the less Omega3. Second thing is, is we've again, overfished as it natural for humans. And uh, you're seeing tremendous pressure on fisheries, you know, along the coast of Africa, south America we hear these rumors of massive Chinese fleets vacuuming up the ocean. And really what you have is you have a situation where you've got a tremendously important food resource under pressure and a major transition away from ocean harvesting to essentially aquaculture farmed salmon, for example, and farm salmon is about 85% of all the salmon consumed globally. Tremendously attractive protein source. You know, the difference between farmed salmon and some of these synthetic meat products is you don't have to formulate it already tastes good. So you don't have to go up with fat and salt and various quote unquote additives to make something that's already appealing to the human palate. It's a very attractive protein source, but of course it's dependent on these omega3 fatty acids, which come today, primarily from ocean harvest. And that's just not sustainable. And so, we work with a group in the UK Uh, the Rothamstead Research Institute, which is probably the oldest ag research Institute in the world. And they there's a scientist there Jonathan Napier, Irish fellow, who has actually, genetically engineered camelina seed to produce high levels of the two most important omega3 acids or EPA DHA, and demonstrated that's not only a direct replacement for fish oil in aquafeed and salmon production, but also can be used to replace fish oil directly in the human diet, through clinical studies. So Yield10 has the rights to that technology. That's likely to be the second product out, out the door in terms of where we are going as a, as a company. And that really brings us to what I think is the cherry on the cake, if you like. And that is the history of Yield10 is really quite, quite long. We were the original bioplastic company making biodegradable plastics using microorganisms in large steel tanks and that really was the Genesis of the entire operation, but we always had the vision that that's a very expensive process. If you could make these natural polymers, because plastics are polymers and what a plastic is, it's just a polymer that you can heat up and then it softens. And when it softens, you can shape it into bottles, caps, lids, films, whatever you want. That's all a thermal plastic is. Well, nature happens to make a family of these natural polymers. They're polyesters. You know, when we think of polyesters, we think of retirees in Florida. We also think of things like things like PET bottles, you know, the bottles for soda, et cetera, right. Coke, Pepsi. And of course we see those things everywhere and they're not degradable and they hang around and they accumulate and we have this massive plastic waste problem on one side. On the other side all of that plastic comes from oil and gas. So it's the same issue you're taking stored carbon outta the ground. You make chemicals with it, and then you use those chemicals to make these polymers. Those polymers provide a tremendous amount of functionality and utility for us human population. But of course they end up in the environment. Because recycling has fundamentally not worked. And what happens then is we're accumulating all this plastic trash I know we start worrying about the impact of plastic trash on the all these plastic microparticles, which are beginning to accumulate, not just in the ocean, but now they're beginning to see them in the food chain. And the fact, I think there's a very recent clinical study indicating that some of these things are beginning to appear the bloodstream of humans. So, you know, we are, we're sort of, when you look at the situation globally in climate change, as a major you know, there's a lot of factors going into this. And so what's unique about the plastics we were making is they're natural number one. And when you think about natural materials, think paper, now, you don't have to convince the public that paper is degradable. You don't right, or wood. Right. We spend a tremendous amount of money trying to protect wood from essentially degrading the environment. Would we build a fence or a shed or something? Right. So all natural polymers are inherently biodegradable. But these what's unique about the materials we were making and the technical name is poly hydroxy can its PHAs what's unique about them is it's the family materials they're polyesters and those can be processed into pretty much, probably 25 to 50% of the plastics we use. You could get the same type of functionality and use but if it gets into the environment, they completely go away. So film will go away in, you know, about a month. Something like a cup for example, will go away in, you know, one to two years, depending on how thick it is, but inherently you have, have a sort of a solution to this waste problem and what yield 10 is doing quite frankly, is instead of taking sugar produced from corn or vegetable oil produced from oil seeds, which has already got tremendous demand on it, which has driven the price up. We've actually genetically engineered camelina seed to produce this natural material directly in the seed and so it's really, instead of carbon outta the ground to produce chemicals to produce the polymer non-degradable our thesis is very simple CO2 outta camelina seed produce the polymer, produce protein polymer and vegetable oil, take that polymer use it to make the plastic articles that be used in everyday use, particularly, things that are sort of a short lifetime, like food service wear, packaging, you know, can you imagine we make, I don't know, 200 million tons of packaging in food service wear items and they last in terms of the use less than six months. So just think about the scale of this. It's crazy. So with something like this you know, you have a solution to a problem that's scalable because of camelina's scalable.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And just to clarify those three products, that you can get from camelina are not competitive. So with each other, I mean.

Olly Peoples:

It's even better than that. It's not just about competitive. What you've really done is you've increased the value of that harvest. For the grower number one. So that's kind of important, cuz otherwise it won't be grown. Right?, number two, you still get vegetable oil, which could go into again, biofuel or food in the longer term. But number three, you still get the protein. And when you look at this need to increase food production by 60%, you know, it's pretty clear if you look just go visit anywhere in the south, in the us, or most anywhere in the us, or India or China now. And what you'll see is you'll see. So a tremendous problem of overproduction of starch and sugar, called obesity. Right? And so what we really need to do is we need to increase protein production. And so this is again, kind of unique set of factors coming together, a winter cover crop readily genetically programmed to make sustainable products initially enhanced for biofuel production leading then to Omega 3 production leading then to ultimately production of bioplastic oil and protein. But in every case you're increasing protein production and you're doing so in a way that's economically attractive to the farmer. Which of course is the only way you'll ever get anything grown.

Tom Raftery:

Sure. Sure, sure. And would it be suitable for example? I mean, you mentioned the, proteins that are now being used to, for example, create fish substitutes and meat substitutes. Could the protein from camelina would it be suitable for, for doing that?

Olly Peoples:

Yeah, absolutely. There's different companies using different protein sources, but I think Nestle did a big study several years ago on all the different proteins. You know, you look at protein, you look at soybean, you, you look at corn. I mean, anything that's available in bulk and relatively cheap is kind of the key starting point. And the reason for that is you have to process it to extract it from everything else that's there. So when you when you people talk about, well, we're using pea protein, you know, peas mostly starch. So of course, what you do is you have a process of kind of engineering process that takes the protein you want out of the pea. And then you've got this, it's not waste, but you've got what's left. And that usually goes into animal feed which kind of compromise views the sustainability story a little bit, but anyway, the point is, you've got this pure protein plus the residues, those residues typically would go into feed applications. And that's really how you do. And, and that's a starting point and you take that protein, which, you know, it's really about, mainly about two things. It's about the flavor. Preferably it should have no flavor. That would be the ideal situation. Right. But of course, you know, there's a reason people don't eat just soybean. I mean, there are off flavors in soybean that come along with some of the molecules that are present in the seed. Essentially what you want is you want be really a perfect, if you could get it a perfect amino acid composition, that's really, what's important. It's the composition of the protein. And so I think camelina, you know, canola, pea, soybean, they all have fairly similar amino acid compositions. The question really is, is, what's the cost of that material as a starting point for making these synthetic protein products. And so right now, just because, you know, soybean is such a large crop, it's obviously the cheapest, pea is more expensive, cuz it's a pretty small crop. Canola actually, most of that protein for canola is actually currently going into dairy feed because it's very effective increasing milk production. And so, you know, all of these things will ultimately be somewhat fungible, and it really depends on, on scale production and cost and provided. It's got a decent amino acid composition and protein content. It's obviously an attractive source of some of those applications.

Tom Raftery:

What kind of food applications does camelina have? I mean, you mentioned it's been grown here in Europe thousands of years for what?

Olly Peoples:

The oil,

Tom Raftery:

The oil. Okay.

Olly Peoples:

Actually, the oil the vegetable oil, I mean, basically you harvest once you harvest the seed or grain as we call it, it's very similar to canola or, you know, sunflower levels. It's different, it's a different shape, but it's basically the same thing. The seed is comprised roughly, you know, if you look at oil seeds, whether it's sunflower, soybean cotton seed, camelina. There're really two main components in those there's oil, that oil is vegetable oil, basically. And the differences between them are obviously the chemical composition of the fatty acid composition of those seeds mean that's really the difference. So that's why, you know, when you look at the preference for something like olive oil, obviously that would be kind of the pinnacle of flavor, et cetera, and, uh, very attractive oil. Then you go down and you sort of get to things like sunflowers, very healthy oil .Canola oil well, when it was still known as rape seed, that wasn't a very healthy oil because it had a fatty acid in there called uricic acid. That was very bad off flavors. And of course, nobody wants to have a foul tasting salad, oil light that doesn't really help, but the breeders in Canada actually are, were able to successfully remove that and develop uh, canola oil as, as we know it today. And of course canola oil is a very healthy oil. And then you go keep further down the chain and you end up ultimately with soybean, which is really not a very healthy oil for human consumption. It was really the source of the feed stop for making all these, trans fats, right. Which they don't want and that was how they modified soybean oil chemically to get it to something that would have a role in food. And obviously due to health concerns, that's all been phased out. But camelina oil is naturally a pretty healthy oil. It still has uricic acid in it., which was one of the problems in, in, in canola, but it's actually been, knocked out if you like using genome editing CRISPR. And so we have lines of camelina that don't have uricic acid, but it has a very good fatty acid profile, a good ratio of omega three to omega six. It actually has quite a lot of uh, ALA. ALA is, an omega-3 fatty acid. It's the same, omega3 fatty acids that's in flax seed. And so it's already, there's improved versions of camelina oil for the food sector. The process for getting the oil out is there's two processes. One is either to crush it cold crush it, you basically put it through essentially heated, you know, heated or chilled rollers, and you literally squeeze the oil out and that of course leaves some oil in, in, in, in protein. But you really, what you're doing is you're separating the protein fraction and the oil fraction, a liquid and a solid the protein fraction today actually is used, can be used in animal feed. It's already approved by the regulatory bodies in the us and Canada for a number of animal feed applications and that's per mildly where it's going, it's going into essentially chickens. it can go into, to, I think, beef cattle it could go into aqua feed formulations. And so again, it's another additional source of protein for those feed applications.

Tom Raftery:

Cool. Cool. Cool. We are coming towards the end of the podcast now, Olly. Is there any question I have not asked that you wish I had, or any aspect of this we've not touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Olly Peoples:

I think the main thing is to keep an open mind when you look at the global situation, we face, you look at what's going on in Europe with fires setting aside Ukraine, right. And the impact that's having on food costs globally. Potentially shortages. And in some parts of, of the middle east and Africa, you know, you're gonna look at the reality of the challenges we face and we need all the technologies we can to address these. These are not simple problems. This is not, internet marketing, you know, non GMO or non this and non that, you know, it's very easy to be against something it's really very difficult to develop robust solutions to these very large and large problems. And so that's really what we're doing with these tools and technologies. And we're very excited about the future of this. I think obviously starting off in the biofuel space where we have this market pool leading, ultimately to obviously more sophisticated products. With higher value is, is obviously the path we're on. But you know, what I would say is that the need for agricultural innovation has never been greater in the history of society. And of course the challenges of, if anything have just, you know, exploded it's even more complicated today. We have more people, we have more pressures on what you can and can't do to the regulations are really important they have a very important role to play and obviously everything that we do and everyone else has, does has to ultimately be safe. But when you look at the challenges ahead, obviously we're gonna need all the types of technologies we can in terms of crop product production, not just on the. If you like the genetic side, you know, using these new tools like CRISPR and our grain modeling, but also in terms of farm practices improving the sustainability overall of agriculture using cover cropping ,protecting that hugely important resource to land. And of course, more importantly, making sure that our farms are really economically robust. You need a robust farm economy to meet this.

Tom Raftery:

Makes sense. Makes sense. Great. Olly, have people who like to know more about yourself or about Yield10 or about camelina? Where would you have me direct them?

Olly Peoples:

Yeah. So you should go to our website at yieldtenbioscience.com. Y I E L D one zero. B I o.com.

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Fantastic. Olly. That's been great. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Olly Peoples:

Thank you, sir. And appreciate the opportunity. Take care.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about Climate 21, feel free to drop me an email to Tom dot Raftery @ sap.com or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you liked the show, please don't forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks catch you all next time.

Podcasts we love