Rethinking Agriculture as a Climate Solution

Hi. This is Paul Zolizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce somebody I've been trying to get on the podcast for about a year, maybe more, Carlos Pereyo.

And we are talking about rethinking agriculture as a climate solution. Carlos is the CEO of Teddaveta, a company dedicated to making it easier for farmers to grow valuable crops without the use of synthetic pesticides. They're often linked to major environmental damage and health issues in our food. Their solutions are people, plant, pollinator, and planet friendly, and can unlock significant profitability. Carlos is particularly excited about the work they are doing to help save the honeybees. And as soon as I got to New Mexico and moved to Albuquerque, people are like, you need to talk to Carlos, and he's doing awesome work about food in general and bees in particular. Carlos, welcome to the show.

Paul, it's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

I literally just got a message for, I don't know how many, the 5th time. I'm looking at you, Sandy Hirschberg, who said, Paul, have you interviewed anybody from? I was like, I'm talking to Carlos on Monday. So that was on Friday. New Mexico wants us to talk, Carlos. And before we get into the specifics of what you're doing and how agriculture can be a climate solution, you've had you you're the serial entrepreneur. You've had a few interesting rodeos. So give our listeners a little bit of a taste of your serial entrepreneur journey.

Yeah. Just a brief background. So I'm a New Mexico born and bred. I say I grew up here and went to school here, got an engineering degree from UNM, and then was fortunate enough to go to business school in Silicon Valley at Stanford, and that kind of unlocked the first part of my career, which is really in the technology sector. I was interested in technology and how it could be applied, but ended up at a large company Intel, but figured out a way to get from Silicon Valley back to New Mexico and that meant I got into manufacturing and out of marketing and staff type of roles in Silicon Valley. And then really have the taste of entrepreneurship though and you know Silicon Valley will do that and I think naturally inquisitive people kind of veer this way often. So I went to go work for other companies in Silicon Valley mostly in the semiconductor space and that was interesting, but I really always had the passion for doing my own companies and also for being back in New Mexico. So in the 2004 or 5 time frame, I had the brilliant idea to get a group of investors to back me and a partner and I told them would find a company to buy, would relocate it to New Mexico and unbeknownst to them and me I found a company in New Mexico to purchase and that company was Mioxx and Mioxx was doing water treatment for the US military.

So in a weird way, I became an impact entrepreneur by accident merely by following this opportunity to go treat water. The goal of MYOX was to treat water anywhere, anytime, and make it drinkable. Had been developed extensively for the US military and the navy in particular and we took it out commercialized it in a number of ways and the value properly was to make water safer and to have less byproducts than chlorine and traditional treatment methods. So we scaled that company and had a brief interlude into somebody else's company, a publicly traded company, which got me into the legal cannabis space and then lo and behold that got me to Teravera, which is a story unto itself, but Teravera was really born out of the idea that we could treat agriculture with products that are safer for people and planet and pollinators as you mentioned, but mostly because I worry about what's on my food and I think most of our viewers or listeners hopefully do the same.

And when did you start Tarradar?

We started as a concept in 2017, 2018 and at the time I was working as an executive for a publicly traded company that was buying cannabis assets all over the US and it's a story unto itself how I got to do that but it was a really interesting opportunity I was buying these licenses all over the US and I kept asking these growers and we would buy these licenses for 1,000,000 of dollars and we put 1,000,000 more into these cultivations to grow in indoors or in greenhouses and ultimately cannabis is an agricultural prop like many others and one of the issues that we kept running into is plant disease. We would find that we would have a very difficult time growing these plants in high density and doing it economically and the plants were getting diseases just like strawberries will or grapes will or apples will. Different set of diseases, but same kind of concept, and I really became fascinated with how could we do this better and and that led me to Teravera, which ironically was born out of the company I had scaled and sold, Myox, and and the core technology is loosely based on the Myox concept, although we've taken it in a very different direction and advanced it quite a bit, but the technical foundations really find themselves in Los Alamos and the U. S. Department of Defense, where we were looking for better ways of controlling pathogens and 20 years later, lo and behold, we found a way to apply this to agriculture.

Very cool. And my son likes to say, who was born and raised here in New Mexico, is the 2 interesting facts for our listeners. One is New Mexico is the state that has the least surface water in the US. So that makes sense that this technology around water was developed here. And also, that New Mexico is the highest proportion of PhDs in the country, partially because we have a very small population under 2,500,000 people in the entire state. And we have these incredible resources like Sandia National Labs, and Los Alamos National Labs, and Space Force, and other NASA's overrepresented here, and we just got this incredible amount of PhDs here. Super smart people working on technologies that they haven't always thought about commercializing, and then people like yourself, Carlos, come along and say, that's an interesting technology. We should do something with that.

So just give you a little flavor in New Mexico here, and, thanks for doing the great work. So 2017, you come up with the idea. Alright. We've got this technology, but there's something that can happen here that's really about making agriculture more sustainable and less toxic. And give us a sense of, like, early on, what did you know, we go back 7 or 8 years ago. What did the company look like then? And also the question that I always get, Paul, how do people fund their startup? So, Carlos, what did it look like when you started it? How did you fund it?

Yeah. Both great questions. Yeah. One more anecdotal and one hopefully advice for folks. Then I can certainly tell fake people what not to do, but, you know, that's entrepreneurship, right? Is figuring out a lot of things.

Exactly, how not to do a startup and then you do something different, right?

Yeah, well, that's the benefit of being an entrepreneur. You got to iterate quickly, hopefully, and successfully, ultimately. So in 20 17 18 you know I'm an executive for a publicly traded company buying these licenses all over the US and yeah the licenses at that time and limited license states were very expensive and the amount of money we put into these cultivations was very significant and in the cannabis industry even more than food people might be surprised very high level of regulation both in what is on the product when it is delivered to the customer making sure it's free of molds and other pathogens or toxins that could harm people but also what's put onto it because we aspirate or light cannabis that has a different set of health conditions and issues much like tobacco. So very highly regulated what you can put on it and what is on it at the end of the process, and we would see these failures for molds and mildews. And I went back to the company, not to the company, but to the partner I had at MYONGS, a gentleman named Justin Sands, who's a brilliant guy, also from New Mexico, multiple degrees from MIT, and more importantly just really one of the world's experts in a process called electrolysis, which I can explain a little bit more later. I said, hey, Justin, we were killing viruses, bacteria, and water, and now I need to do this on food. And he's now part of a big multinational company that had bought Myox and treating water all over the world. And he said, hey, ironically, I've developed this technology that I think might have an application.

And I jumped to the chance to sample the technology and the chemistry. I gave it to my growers and they said, Carlos, how do we get this? I've never seen anything that is so effective and you're telling me it's completely safe. And I said, yep. And so I went to this company and said, hey, I wanna purchase this and get you into this agricultural space, and they said, no, we treat water, we don't really treat ag, and and what do you want to use it for specifically? I said, well, starting with cannabis, woah, not even close to something we want to get into. And so at this point, the company is owned by a family in Milan, Italy, and they're interested in taking the company public, and they have no interest in my application. So I did what any entrepreneur would do and said, hey. Well, if you won't sell it to me, will you sell me the technology so I I can use it? And that's what happened. They licensed technology and what they didn't know what happened is that Justin Sanchez, their CTO would join me in starting the company and quite frankly the story there is really relevant because he said, look Carlos, I have no interest in cannabis and helping cannabis growers.

It's not my thing. No offense. And I said, well, you know, the opportunity is much bigger than that. It's really about food and the same exact same chemistry can be used in in wine grapes and strawberries and other crops that have the same diseases and he said that's interesting and so we tried it for about a year and a half just sampled it with my team and then we'd learned it was very effective and licensed technology and then Justin and I started the company and we started officially in February of 2020.

Oh, yeah. Was there anything happening in the world then?

Yeah. Yeah. Little irony of timing, you know, timing is everything in life or at least a big part of it. So we had a team we had a team that had agricultural experience, a gentleman who had grown every commercial crop in Florida and then he was also growing cannabis for me at this company, a woman who was with me, Catherine Rodovan, who is an ex investment banker who did all the financial analysis, this gentleman Darren who was a horticulturalist, Justin, myself and another team member and these folks were living in California and Massachusetts, New York and Florida and then Justin and I here in New Mexico. So we flew everybody out to to our home office in in literally my garage, and we got 4 days into this, and then, flight started getting restricted. And this wonderful thing about COVID started popping up, and, yeah, the world changed overnight.

Wow.

So that's that was our our our bad timing beginnings, but that led to some really interesting things right out of the gate. But to answer your second question, you know, funding, how do we get funding? We initially did 2 things. I I bootstrapped some of this myself. I wrote checks to the company and self funded and, of course, went without a salary for a period of time. And then we started getting customers, which is the best form of funding I can encourage any entrepreneur to get. Right? We we sign up customers right out of the gate that we're excited about using us because we could help them make a lot more money, not just save money, but make more money in their crops. And that's really what got us started.

Cool. And you had quite the accomplished team, Carlos, like, when you started listing. This is our CTO, and this was our financial person, and you had CEO experience. Like, any suggestions for people in start up about getting the best team that you possibly can come in out of the gate?

Yes. Probably 2 fundamentals. I mean, the the most significant one I would say is, you know, have an ambitious goal. I think excuse me. I think when we tell folks, you know, hey, I want to make it 5% cheaper for people to buy crops or I want to take, you know, a nasty chemical out of the environment. You know, that's interesting, but it's not the same thing as, hey, I want to change agriculture, I want to turn on its head, You know, I wanna really make it economical for people to get access to organic and pesticide free product. So have an ambitious vision and goal for what you're trying to do, and I think that attracts people who are like minded. But also my experience is the people who have the most choices, the meaning, the most educated successful folks gravitate towards big problems.

They don't gravitate towards small incremental issues. So have an ambitious company. And then the second part is you're gonna meet people at big companies, and I did at Intel, and you're gonna meet people in all kinds of walks of life. And when you find people who you resonate with, who share your value set, who you believe in, who you trust, those are the folks you really want to to work with. And, you know, I worked with Justin at Intel, sponsored him to go to MIT and that isn't why he joined me later, but I hired him at MYOX and he within a couple years became my CTO. Catherine was working with me at this publicly traded company called Ianthus and I brought her along and so we create these relationships through life and sometimes they may not be the right time to fit into whatever company, but that doesn't mean they won't at some stage. And so getting complimentary skills from people you trust and know and then having a really ambitious game plan that really can, you know, get people excited. I think those are the case.

Absolutely. I think I hear 2 things, but I just wanna see if you'd agree with this, Carlos. Number 1 is make those connections and stay in touch with people. Like, even though in the moment, you might not be ready to launch that thing right here and now, stay in touch with quality people. I do a lot of that on LinkedIn. Right? But really notice when if you've got a financial person who's also somebody you're really values aligned, and they're really good at finances, don't ghost them because you change roles. Right? Stay in touch because when you need that financial person because you launch the next thing or they launch the next thing, and you wanna be a top of mind or you wanna be able to send that email and say, hey. I got this really cool thing, and let's talk.

And you want them to say, yeah. Tell me what that really cool thing. Is that fair to say?

It is. It absolutely is. And then, you know, the second part, if you're gonna get to it is, you know, know, make sure that what you're doing is worth their while.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's we're gonna get to the climate part of Tera Verra in just a second. But I think of, again, LinkedIn, the whole open door climate policy hashtag. Right now, there are incredibly smart people who want to leave their job at you name any company in the world that's not doing something impact oriented, especially around climate, that's really, really on the on paper, like or, you know, on on the web as a company that you wanna work for, they want to leave Google or Facebook or whatever big company and come work for a really interesting climate start up because the world's on fire. So if you've got a really big idea that's gonna make a dent in the climate universe, don't be too stressed that you can't pay somebody half a $1,000,000 a year plus equity. Like, do great work and have a great business model that looks like it's gonna do something interesting. And I'm watching people, like, literally go out of their way and trying to network into the kind of company that you just described, Carlos.

I don't know if you're seeing that, but I'm seeing that everywhere. Like, young people are, like, reaching out to me. Who can I work for? I'm working in one of the sexiest startup in my ecosystem, and I can't wait to leave and go work for Climate.

No. I think I agree with all of what you said. I I think the way I put it to some people is you've gotta give folks an emotional paycheck to go along with financial paycheck.

Oh, that I've never heard that saying before. And I'm okay. Now I'm gonna quote you on that. An emotional paycheck to go for the financial paycheck. Yeah.

And and and, you know, I I don't I believe I coined it. I don't know. I may have picked it up or aggregated it from some other thing that I do at a time time where I'll take

multiple quotes and ideas. I'm gonna quote you whether you like it or not, Carlos. I'm now

gonna quote you forevermore. But but I think that's, you know, to to regardless of where the origin is that the idea is really simple, which is if people want to be successful because at their core, it gives them joy and value and validation and a sense of accomplishment. You know, at some point you can only drive a car at a time. You can only have so big of a house. You can only have so much material things. Is more salary nice as a part of the capitalistic way? I have nothing against that. I also give all my employees equity in the company because it's an alignment tool and that's how I was brought up in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur. But the fundamental thing is I want people to personalize it and to feel proud of what they're doing and, you know, I hear my employees just resonate with the vision as if it's their own because they believe in what it is.

And I think the one the one place you said something that I maybe I don't know that I disagree with you but I think we get focused on it's about young folks. That young folks really wanna work at impact companies and have a role in climate change and and bringing that back if if, you know, holding it, if not reversing it. But I think this applies to everybody. It's not it's not unique to old and young. It's not unique to Democrats or Republicans or Progressives and conservatives. I have found that when people understand that they can be part of something that's bigger than themselves and that they believe in it, it it just changes everything. And we've not had much difficulty recruiting the people we want, and we've had no problem retaining the folks on the team. We've had 0 undesired turnover in the I guess now 4 plus years we've been in business.

And, you know, I don't attribute it that we pay better or that we have better working conditions or we give people better benefits. I think we're fair, but I think people love what they do and they like to be part of that and and that is what makes a difference.

100% agree, and I'm gonna reach back a couple episodes. 0 undesired turnover. That's a very unique situation. And I'm thinking of Megan Batt, who we interviewed a few episodes back from Positive Energy Solar. 120 employees. They do work around B Corp and profit sharing, so it's very unique along the lines of what you're talking about. 120 employees, and they haven't had an opening for, like, a year and a half. People are waiting and trying to get into positive enter.

A 120 employees, and most employers right now are complaining about their workforce and how they can't keep people and can't hire good people, and people are knocking at the door to work at companies like Terravera and Positive Energy. So and when you think about not just an emotional paycheck and a financial one, when you look at the research of what it takes to onboard somebody, recruit somebody, onboard them, and when somebody leaves, how much time, energy, and money gets wasted? Like, there is incredible financial payoffs to the way you're doing business. People like Megan are doing business, Carlos, that are not getting the attention they deserve in an economy where people are complaining about the workforce. I don't see that at all in the impact space. If it's a well run company and if people feel like they're actually doing something interesting and not just busy work, I do wanna qualify. So, Carlos, talk to us a little bit right now. Let's let's talk about what does it look like now. You're, like, 7, 8 years in.

You're, like, you know, getting some scale. You've got some customers. Like, give us a sense of what's on the ground right now.

But we've kinda had a couple of cycles of the company. So the first iteration, like I said, we had customers. We were very fortunate, you know, in the pandemic. The one thing that was a challenge was we had to almost prove to people that what we had was something that they could, you know, get excited about and work with. It was almost a too good to be true kind of scenario. So we were not in a place where we had enough reference customers or enough cycles to work on a Zoom basis or a remote basis very effectively, so we had to get in front of customers. So weirdly enough, I think even before we got to the first cycle of real customer adoption, we ended up getting caught in the pandemic where we ended up providing a lot of chemistry for different applications that were not the intent. So our chemistry basically will it's an oxidant.

It's a very special kind of oxidant, but it works like ozone or bleach or peroxide. Those are all oxidants and it will kill pathogens, it will kill microbiological pathogens. So in the pandemic, we were giving and selling chemistry to all kinds of folks, including police departments and National Guard and because the nature of what we do is we can generate those oxidants on demand, we were not caught in the same supply chain issues. And that's one of the fundamental benefits of Teravera is even though our chemistry is inherently unstable, not meaning bad way, it just wants to revert back to salts and amino acids. So it wants to revert back to benign compounds. So we have to generate on-site on demand. When we do that, we generate a lot of environmental benefit. So think of this as, you know, if you were to buy, you know, a product hate to use Coca Cola, but, you know, let's use that as an example and all the shipping associated with those cans and those bottles etcetera versus I could make this out of syrup at home combining with water.

Coffee is probably a better example. Right? When we make coffee, we typically use beans. A bag of beans will make gallons and gallons of coffee. Our chemistry is the same way. We take a small amount of what we call precursor. We make large amounts of chemistry fresh on demand. So the first cycle of this was just proving our technology and in the beginning our technology was very expensive compared to alternatives, but the value creation was very strong. So we did that and we scaled the company and we started to see growth in the cannabis industry with adoption.

We have some of the biggest most successful companies in the US that use us exclusively for controlling plant disease and so that's been a nice check-in the box that somebody will buy our technology and it adds value and it creates value and it's worthwhile. The next phase of the company really was cost reducing the technology to make it appropriate for general agriculture. So we started to do that process and have been successful and we've started to get customers growing ornamental plants or food or other crops. But along the way, we had a I call it our post it note moment if you're familiar with post it note. Right? It wasn't developed to be a sticky for collaboration and note taking. It was developed to be an adhesive and it just didn't work very well for that, but it worked great for this other application. So our post it note moment was we had a customer who said, hey. You never told us that this would kill mites.

We knew this would kill these molds and mildews, and we said, tell us more. Like, what are you doing? What else are you using? And how are you treating this? And through a customer interaction, we learned that we were very effective at killing a couple mites. And that And

dust the bees. You talk about Carlos in New Mexico. Somebody's gonna say he's the bee guy.

I'm the bee. I like that. I'll take that that moniker any day. I think that's a great a great label to have. So we we started doing some testing and it wasn't long before somebody and there was a confluence of events, but the most memorable one and maybe the impactful one was I I ran to a an old high school classmate. She and I grew up together and went to different high schools ultimately. And she asked me what I was doing at this reunion. It was somebody else's reunion, but we were there.

And I told her what we were doing. I said, well, you know, we're killing diseases on plants, but we learned that we might kill mites. And she goes, varroa mite. And I I'd heard this term before, and I was like, you know, tell me more. She goes, I'm into beekeeping and varroa are killing our colonies. Can you do anything? And so before we knew it, we had some field testing, and then before we knew it, there's some testing with some folks at UC Davis. And we were showing really good efficacy against Varroa killing the mite and then of course the next question was were we harming the bees and we did enough work to convince ourselves that we weren't harming bees since then we've done a lot more work to understand we can kill mites very effectively and not harm bees even in their development or larval stage, and we really decided to not pivot, but really add this to our cycle and really focus this as an area and you know, as an entrepreneur, you want to run this balance between I know what I'm doing, I've got a solution, and I wanna just persevere versus I wanna figure out what's gonna work. I'm gonna throw 10 things against the wall, and then I'll iterate and figure out.

And so there's always this balance. And so I tell people, you know, to be an entrepreneur, you have to have a really good sense of self confidence that you're on the right track even when people don't see what you're going after and enough humility to realize you're probably wrong most of the time. And

I love that balance. That's awesome.

So it was just the market. The market told us we had to come to this space, and and I had a particular gentleman. His name is doctor Sammy Ramsey. He's very well regarded in the bee industry as an expert in Virella. And I invited him to dinner at a conference. So this is this January, so only 9 months ago. And I said, hey, doctor Ramsey, we're thinking about taking our technology in the space, here's the data, here's the work that's been done to date. I I said, what do you think? And I, you know, I thought this is gonna be an hour long conversation.

He'd tell me the pros and cons. And before the night was over, after 3 and a half hour dinner, he said, Carlos, you have a moral obligation to come help us in the b industry. And that really resonated with me. When I when I heard those words, you know, they came out of a PhD researcher, not, you know, some industry zealot. And we looked internally, and we said, we're gonna go really bet the company's future that we can go help the bee industry. And so far, 8, 9 months later, you know, we've made some really great progress and I don't have no regrets, but I still have some worries. We've signed up as an adviser, one of the world's experts in in honeybees, gentleman, doctor Jeff Pettis and that's brought a lot of notoriety and a lot of credibility to what we're doing. But but we think this is an area that's tremendously important and if your listeners aren't familiar with this concept, bees have been under colony collapse for a variety of reasons.

So there's 3 primary reasons. 1 is, you know, climate related. We've climate and environmental, we've taken away a lot of their habitat and their food supply and climate stressors with temperatures and extreme weather. The second is the use of pesticides and that is an area that we touch on. The pesticides are killing honeybees and native pollinators at alarming rates or at least harming them and then causing a cascade of effect. And the 3rd area for the honey bee in particular is the Varroa mite. And last year if you're a commercial or even a hobbyist beekeeper in the US, you had about a fiftyfifty chance of losing your hive over the winter. And so that that's just not sustainable.

So why should we all care? Well, about 70% of the food that we consume is made possible by pollinators and honeybees in particular in the US are responsible for about 30 to 40% of what you get in the produce aisle. And without them, we have a really catastrophic problem on our end. So, you know, it's, it it's been a fun journey, and I will say beekeepers are amongst the most inquisitive and

Awesome humans.

Yeah. They they just yeah. They just they're welcoming. I I have loved getting to know the industry and, you know, we've become beekeepers ourselves. We now maintain hives ourselves to do ongoing development research and I could tell you a bunch of fun facts about bees.

I bet you could. And I'm on the gardening end. If you've been a listener here for a while, you know that I'm a passionate gardener. I was telling Carlos that before we hit record, I knew how to be a commercial farmer in a very sustainable way and both sustainable for the planet but also sustainable financially, I would. I don't, but I do grow as much of my own food as I can. And just a big bow to you, Carlos, and I've heard so many beekeepers talk about colony collapse and what it's meant for them. It's really been catastrophic in many cases, both in terms of the pollination and the gardener end, but also the sustainability of trying to be a beekeeper with the confluence of those three factors that you were talking about, the mites, climate change, and reducing the habitat for bees. It's just

And don't forget don't forget the use of of pesticide use.

And pesticides. Yes. Yes.

And and to kinda bring it back, I think the the thing that we have to to realize if we take a giant step back, not just from bees, but all the conversation, we've got a non sustainable food supply and that ties into climate and let me explain it this way. So we struggle to keep pace with demand for food and so what we do is we have farmers use more and more chemistries and GMO and other processes to keep up and make it economical to be a farmer of any kind. Well, many of those chemicals and most of those processes are really not good for the environment. They're not good for our food supply, they're not good for us.

They're burning out the soil, all the organic matter is getting burned out, it's terrible.

And it's it's not just that. We're really Our

water we're poisoning our water.

Yeah. But we're we're also creating excess fertilizer and other issues. So if we think about, say, the red algae blooms in Florida, they're messing up coral reefs, well, guess what? Most of that's tied to over fertilization in Brazil. Yeah. So we do this cycle and then what happens is we ruin the land, we pollute the water, and now farmers are under more pressure and so we come up with these other means of improving yields. And so we're in this negative cycle, if you will, of kind of like the Hampshire on the wheel trying to catch up, but we're falling further and further behind. So why aren't more people buying and consuming organic? So 90% of the population says I want pesticide free food, at least in the US, but 6% is grown organically. So think about that disparity of supply and demand works, we would have a huge supply of organic produce at the shelf.

The reason it doesn't work is if you're an organic farmer, you lose money by increased losses due to past some disease, but also the added cost organic and sustainable practices. So you can't make that up at the shell, people aren't willing to pay 30 or 50%, maybe they pay 10 or 20%. So organic farming isn't economically sustainable any more than traditional Ag is environmentally sustainable. And that's really what we're trying to change, but if you take even a broader step back, what I think some of your listeners might be surprised at is the way in which we do farming today is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gases. We use about on par with commercial airlines and not very far from commercial transportation in terms of CO2 emissions and there's other impacts from all this as well And if you look at the flip side and if I was giving your viewers one resource to go, there's a great documentary, The Ground Beneath Us, I believe is what the name of it is, I'll verify that. But it's really about how when we have good ecosystems, it changes the environmental climb climate impact dramatically. And reforestation is a big part of that equation and how we grow crops, the homotocrop issue is big part of that, but it it really ties back into climate in a fundamental way.

Absolutely, Carlos. I'm thinking of in my little garden, I have a pear tree that's got these beautiful red pears that are booming underneath it. Our garlic chives and, say, it's this whole little ecosystem done in a rock garden kinda way, but it takes years to get something like that up and running. Right? And the difference of what it means climbing, I'm putting organic matter. I'm putting carbon into the soil as opposed to extracting it and putting it into the earth, but it takes time. And it takes know how, and it's not how we typically farm. So, Carlos, let's do this. In a minute, I wanna come back and ask you about some of the specifics of what you've learned and where Tarvera is going.

Before we do that, I just wanna take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you passionate about making a difference but feeling stuck on how to take your mission driven business to the next level? You don't need a lengthy coaching program. You need targeted advice from someone who understands the unique challenges that social entrepreneurs face. With my strategy session package, we'll focus on your most pressing decisions, whether it's clarifying your value proposition, optimizing your marketing strategy, launching a new product or service, or adjusting your pricing to align with your mission. These sessions are perfect when you know the direction you wanna go, but you need someone with the experience to help you get there. If you're ready to unlock your potential and amplify your impact, book your strategy session now. The link is in the show notes. So welcome back, everybody.

I'm honored to be here with Carlos Perera, and we are talking about Rethinking Agriculture as a Climate Solution. Carlos, in the time we have remaining, I wanna think about you gave us such a great vision of how Tarvera has gotten to this point. Now when you look ahead, if you look ahead 2 to 3 to 5 years, where do you think it's going?

So our first goal, really, in the near term is to get our products into the commercial and hobbyist beekeeping market in the US, and

like you think What percentage of that is your revenue right now has to do with

bees? Revenue wise, almost nothing minuscule because we're still in the development stage. So we are now in the process of signing up larger scale, what we call beta users or trial users of the of the chemistry. But we have, you know, both development cycles to go through and then we also have regulatory cycles. Right? EPA does care about this stuff. It turns out the EPA is very focused on bees because the industry has been up in arms over the lack of good solutions. Right?

A mentor of mine says, if you like to eat, you should care about bees.

That's a that's a

good starting point. Yeah.

If you like to eat and, so the EPA gets this. Right? So we're in this process of working with the EPA to get our products approved and working with commercial and hobbyist beekeepers to finalize the chemistries and delivery methods, etcetera. We suspect that by this fall, we'll be submitting to the EPA and then by spring, we think we can get fast tracked. We have some products and services that may not require EPA approval, so we will get some revenue from that, but I suspect that we will eclipse revenue from our plant side, which is growing nicely by this time next year. So fee revenue will take off and it's really because it's not the largest market we can go after, but it's such a problem. We keep running these commercial beekeepers and some of these folks have 20,301,501,000 hives, So you can imagine the economics that when they lose half of those hives

You lose 50,000 hives a year. That's pretty I I have enough knowledge to translate that into dollars. But if our listeners have no sense, what would it mean to lose 10,000 or 50000 hives? Can you give any sense of what You

know, every time you lose a hive, it's probably a 2 to $300 proposition

Right.

To replace that hive. So, you know, do the quick math of, you know, a1000

A1000 to replace, but lost revenue on the honey. Like, have you seen what a jar of honey cost in the grocery store these and if it's

Not not enough. And that's a whole another topic. We do a whole topic on adult treated honey and

On top of good honey. Like, real honey. Right? Real honey. What think of if you go in and you buy and you get into organic honey. Right? Like You know, it it's

it's tens of 1,000,000 of dollars for

these

for these big commercial beekeepers. So Yeah. For us to come in with a solution, we think that we will quickly generate significant revenues. And for us, significant revenues is the, you know, 1,000,000 and tens of 1,000,000 in the bee industry. We know that there are other places for us to take our technology and if you would ask me a year ago, I would have said, hey. Our our next areas are other crops that are suffering from these same diseases that cannabis has suffered from. So powdery mildew is one of the biggest impactors to wine grapes. And, you know, if you think about it from a business standpoint, you wanna go after high value added crop before you go after low value added crops.

It's just a matter of the economics. And wine grapes are in huge danger for climate change. We all who drink wine, you know, are worried about, are we gonna lose, you know, the pinot noirs in Willamette? Are we gonna lose our California calves, etcetera? And climate change is making it really hard for wine growers as is, you know, the byproduct of climate change, the forest fires, etcetera. So the diseases controlling those diseases is more important than ever. So I would have thought we would have probably gone into the viticulture space and we may very well when we're properly resourced and we are doing research in that area, But I I'm very interested in where else can we control some of these pests now that we have had success with mites. And the Varroa mite on honeybees is a key one, but there's plenty of other mites. We know we can kill aphids. And, and more importantly, when we say we can kill or control these, we're doing it in a way that is not harming the environment.

It degrades into nutrients or in the case of the bees, it degrades into amino acids that are actually helpful to the bees. And

we can

get a whole conversation about why bees are not just important to the ecosystem, but how you create a healthy bee is not unlike how you create a healthy person in nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. But I think that's where we're going to end up is in other paths and we're looking at some as well. It's too early to give any of the listeners a preview because some of this may not pan out, but some of it looks very promising, but you know why are we losing our citrus crops? It's due to a psyllid that the solutions are very toxic and is not working very well, and, you know, that looks like a promising area as one example.

Awesome. And if you think, listeners, about, you know, what you're highlighting for us, Carlos, if you think about cannabis. Right? You think about wine. You think about honey as we do we're just talking about real honey, not the part that they put sugary syrups in to make it stretch and just put a little bit of honey in and put some food coloring. But, like, real honey, it's expensive. Which means that if you can provide value to the people growing it and help them increase their profit and also their sustainability, that's a really nice way to make a living. So you're you're giving you're modeling something, Carlos. That doesn't mean that you might not someday provide a lot of value to wheat growers, but that's a different economics.

You know? Like, weed is so incredibly it's a weird economy of something like we I can't even understand all the various factors, but there's more profit margin in something like wine grapes than there is something like weed or oats or those kinds of cash, you know, props that have all these weird economics that I can't even explain. But it just makes sense to me that what you're saying, you're looking for high value opportunities to get started, and then you can leverage the technology, get it to scale, get the economy of scale going, and then you can lean into something that might be a little less premium in terms of what the cost to the consumer is, maybe oranges compared to a nice wine. Right? I like what you're modeling there.

Yeah. You know, and and we're not unique that way. We we can look at other industries and, you know, I realized that, you know, EVs have their own pluses and minuses environmentally and, you know, I'm certainly aware that they're not an economic environmental panacea for all kinds of reasons. But if you look at, you know, the pluses and minuses, there's probably much many more pluses environmentally, especially when you look at the life cycle. And and how did Tesla and again, Tesla has its own pluses and minuses, but they didn't start with an SUV or Sedan. They started with a sports car. And we we have this a lot with people at Terreba like, oh, you start in cannabis and that's bad. And it's, you know, I'm like, well, first of all, cannabis has a whole bunch of medical benefits and we can get into that.

And and, you know, it's a lot better for you than alcohol by any objective measure, and so there's a whole can of worms that we could get into. But the bottom line is the value of that crop was sufficient for us to get early revenues and to really figure out how to cost reduce our technology, which is really important. And the weird thing is is I think indoor ad, which is another topic onto itself, is gonna take root and has to take root for a lot of reasons, and it's gonna be enabled by what we did in cannabis, weirdly enough. And we see this in other industries as well. So why do you and I have the Zoom call with high bandwidth? It's because video drove this and the Internet drove this. And guess what drove a lot of Internet traffic, a lot of things that we don't wanna talk about, you know, adult entertainment as one example. But these industries that we might look down on for all kinds of moral and other reasons drive these processes and these innovations and these improvements and then we can proliferate them. And I think what's going to happen with cannabis is you and I are gonna have access to cheaper, better, more nutritious tomatoes and strawberries because the cannabis industry became legal.

And and I could spend an hour or more on that topic and I think your viewers or listeners would find it fascinating that even if you're not into cannabis, it's important that we invest in this space in order to see these benefits in these other areas.

The strategy, whether you're, like, okay, values wise, leaning into cannabis or not, The the the strategy that you're highlighting, Carlos, and I see a lot of entrepreneurs feel like they gotta raise money for the end product and don't be smart about what you're talking about. How can I find something that brings in revenue early on so I don't have to raise as much, and I can be more lean and not get stuck in investors' goals, which may or may not line up with founders sometimes? We've you've probably seen that. You've been around long enough. I've certainly seen that, that I've seen entrepreneurs put themselves out of business by trying to fund the end product when it would cost too much as opposed to thinking lean. How do I get revenue now and build towards the more sustainable, big picture, more inclusive vision like you referenced with Tesla or like you're doing with cannabis? And I just wanna highlight, listeners, if you can think incrementally building towards something and have that long term vision, but not necessarily try to fund it out of the gates unless it makes sense economically, I think we'd see a whole lot more social entrepreneurs succeeding than we're currently seeing.

Yeah. Let me let me give you and and the listeners just kind of a metaphor. So how do you how do you climb a ladder?

One wrong at a time. Right?

Yeah. And, hopefully, you have it up against the right wall

or the right That helps too. Yeah.

Yeah. So so figuring out where you wanna put it is key, and then figuring out, hey. There's a step and there's another step. And, you know, that is a lot about how you build a company. Impact, you know, environmental or or not. And I think we often get focused on, well, I wanna get to the top of the ladder in one fell swoop, so I need to go raise $10,000,000. And the reality is, most of the time, that's a really fatal problem because you're not gonna get the money you need or you're gonna get it from sources that aren't aligned. And, you know, the best the best revenue or I'm sorry.

The best source of funding is revenue that you get from customers for sure. I mean, there are many others and I'm not against equity and diluted funding. I will say in this cycle, I could have raised money in Silicon Valley just like I did for MYOX, you know, that's one of the benefits of growing up there professionally. But I really wanted to create more opportunity for the New Mexican or I'll call it private equity investor or angel investor. And so this cycle instead of just going to Silicon Valley and getting, you know, $5,000,000 $10,000,000 checks, we spent a lot of time I spent a lot of my time talking with people, not just in New Mexico, but all over that really resonated with what we were trying to do that aligned with what we're trying to do, that I valued them and and they valued us and what we're and so we have some really neat folks. We have some local New Mexicans and a lot of folks don't realize how many talented entrepreneurs and investors we have here. But, you know, we have a gentleman who built one of the biggest solar companies at the time, and he's an investor. We have the the guy, one of the names from Ben and Jerry's as an investor.

We all know their social and environmental stances. We have another investor locally who was responsible for starting one of the what became one of the biggest networks of venture capital in the US or in the world. He's one of our investors. And so there are these folks in the ecosystem. And and I think that the danger of most entrepreneurs is getting focused on trying to please the investor as opposed to, let me show you investor that I have a customer and a market, and I'm solving a pain point. And if you do that really, really well, you should be judicious with who you take on as investors because they're really hard. It's like a marriage. Right? It's easy to do, but it's really hard to dissolve.

So be really selective, and I could say, you know, I have more investors now than I would have thought at this stage because they're smaller in check size, but I love taking calls from each and every one of them. They all have, you know, good questions, good ideas, good inputs, and, you know, eventually we'll grow to a point where I won't know all our investors or they'll be bigger investors and they'll have different set of objectives, but I think be selective is is probably my best advice to an entrepreneur is don't just take money because somebody's offering it to you. As a matter of fact, if it's easy to get money from that group or person or VC, be wary because, you know, there there's probably something else going on. And

Yeah. 100%. I I couldn't agree more, and I've done a deeper dive in the past year and a half being a consultant for New Mexico Angels than, than I have at any other point in my 17 career 17 years of doing this. And I can say as soon as I started going to Angels more regularly, people started saying, oh, you do social impact work. Do you know Carlos? You should know Tara. Like, you're you're well thought about in that community, Carlos. Like, so yeah.

So As long as their reputation precedes me and not exceeds me Yeah.

Well yeah. No. You're you're you're you're held up as a model. Hey. Here's one of the good impact companies, and and I agree now that I get to know you a little bit. So, Carlos, I could hang out with you all day, and you're busy. Our listeners are busy. I'm certainly gonna put lots of links of, you know, everything from the former company, Mayak's, to some of the beekeeping experts and certainly your website.

All that'll be in the show notes. As we start to wind down, if there was something that we didn't cover on this topic of agriculture as a climate solution, bees, and all the great work you've done in your career that you wanted to pass on to our listeners or something about this topic that you wanna highlight as we're winding down, what would that be?

You know, be involved. You don't have to start a company. Just take an interest in what you're purchasing and what you're spending your money on as a consumer. You know, ask the tough questions. Hey. If this is organic, does that mean it's chemical free? You might be surprised that organic rules and regulations give a lot of leeway. But, you know, just educate yourself on what you're doing. I mean, we you know, you go buy a house or a car, you do all kinds of research, but, you know, arguably, what you put in your body is probably more impactful to your health overall than those things.

And so take the time to educate yourself and make good choices as a consumer and I think demand transparency. I'm a big believer in the market will move in the right direction if people get good information And, you know, we can all make a difference and I think we all do a lot of things that are against our own interest or against environmental interests and yet we want to be good stewards, we want to be sustainable. Just, you know, take the time to educate yourself and that that's why people like you are valuable in what you do. Right? Getting that information out to people that that need it and might make some different decisions.

Thanks, Carlos. Appreciate that. So if somebody is interested, they wanna write you a check, they wanna find out more about your technology, How should they reach out?

Really easy. Terravera.com is where they can find a lot about us, and we do post a lot of information. We try and make, you know, the data very transparent, including, you know, studies and universities and all the other customer testimonies, whatever it might be. But my email is really simple. It's carlos@terravera.com, and I love hearing from folks whether it's, you know, good experience, bad experience, what the heck are you up to. You know, I love when I get challenged. You know, what's tell me about the chemistry, tell me about the technology because we the more you learn, I think the more you'll like. And so we like to be transparent and open, and I love hearing from folks.

So

Awesome. I'll put all that in the show notes. And, Carlos, thanks for the work you do, and thanks for sharing it with our listeners today.

Well, thank you for what you do. It's crucially important. So keep getting the messages out and keep, keep amplifying. That's that's key.

Fun job. I like amplifying, and thanks, New Mexico, for making sure that Carlos and I got to sit down and have this conversation. If you are oh, and, again, check out the show notes. Everything we talked about today will be there. If you have an idea for an episode, we'd love listeners suggested topics, like at least 5 different people. Yeah. Drew Tolchin, I'm looking at you too. Drew is like, you need to interview Carlos.

Right? So if you're a listener and you have an idea, I'm giving those examples to say, literally, this is one of those episodes that listeners suggested. If you have an idea for a topic or an episode, please go to the Awarepreneurs web website on our contact page. We have 3 simple guidelines. Take a look at those, and if you feel like it's a fit, send your ideas in. And finally, I wanna say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times, and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.