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“What we're doing is creating a win-win. We get the farmers using less to grow more and make more money. We're solving not only the technical compromise between drift and coverage, but we’re also solving that other compromise between profitability and sustainability, in effect making farmers more profitable by being sustainable.”

— Gary Wickham, CEO, MagrowTec

Spraying crops with herbicides, pesticides and fungicides is a vital part of commercial agriculture, but it’s a costly one. Existing sprayer technology generates 70% waste, the equivalent of $42 billion, according to Gary Wickham, CEO of MagrowTec.

MagrowTec invented a retrofit magnet system for sprayers to normalize droplet size, which reduces drift and increases plant coverage. As Wickham puts it, it’s helping farmers do more with less, and making them more profitable by being sustainable.

In this episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast, Wickham discusses the details of MagrowTec’s magnets for sprayers; the dealer, OEM and big-box retailer channels the company is pursuing to get their product onto more farms; his thoughts on OEMs’ interest in smart sprayers; and much more.

Full Transcript

Michaela Paukner:

I'm Michaela Paukner, associate editor of Precision Farming Dealer. Welcome to the latest episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast. New episodes of this series are available wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to get an alert when upcoming episodes are released.

Michaela Paukner:

Spraying crops with herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides is a vital part of commercial agriculture, but it's a costly one. Existing sprayer technology generates 70% waste, the equivalent of $42 billion. According to Gary Wickham, CEO of precision ag tech company MagrowTec, MagrowTec invented a retrofit magnet system for sprayers to normalize droplet size, which reduces drift and increases plant coverage. As Wickham puts it, it's helping farmers do more with less and making them more profitable by being sustainable.

Michaela Paukner:

In today's episode of Precision Farming Dealer Podcast, Wickham joins me to discuss the details of MagrowTec's magnets for sprayers, the dealer OEM and big box retailer channels the company is pursuing to get their product onto more farms, his thoughts on OEM's interest in smart sprayers and much more. Here's Wickham to get us started.

Gary Wickham:

Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I'm CEO of MagrowTec, a Dublin, Ireland-based company that started in NovaUCD, which is in incubator in the University College, Dublin. David Moore and myself were co-founders. I'm CEO. We, typical story, we started in a little tiny office and we've built out over the last few years an incredible technology to solve a major problem for farmers in the crop protection area.

Gary Wickham:

And the problem we solve is that we reduce pesticide waste. We need these vital crop protection products, or pesticides as people know them as, to feed the world, to kill pests, bacteria, fungi and so on for weeds and crops. The challenge is with existing technologies that they generate over 70% waste so that's an incredible $42 billion of product that doesn't go on the target weed or crop, and that doesn't help farmers to get the best yield out of their land. Going forward we need to do more with less, and that's what MagrowTec is based around. So we developed a technology to help farmers solve that problem, and so that we can get those products on target and not into the environment and dramatically reduce that waste.

Michaela Paukner:

So could you explain how you're doing that?

Gary Wickham:

Maybe to help your listeners, many who will know the problem very well and will understand the different technologies out there, so you've got a number of technologies. Most farmers use nozzles to control airborne drift, or exo drift as they know it. And in the need to try and solve that problem we've actually created a bigger problem called endo drift, which is where we create large droplets with coarse nozzles and water to try and stop the smaller droplets getting in the atmosphere.

Gary Wickham:

These larger droplets bounce or scatter off the weed or the target crop and you end up with this residue going into rivers and streams so you're compounding the problem. And these larger droplets actually lead to leaf burn. They're so large you can magnify them with the sun and damage the crop. And inside a larger droplet, you may have a hundred smaller droplets typically. Farmers know smaller droplets are better at killing pests, bacteria, fungi, and so on, and you don't have leaf burn, but up until now, they have been able to do that because of the inadequacies with conventional technology and not being able to use the off the shelf smaller nozzles.

Gary Wickham:

We developed a magnetic assist technology that basically uses [inaudible 00:03:53] magnets in sophisticated systems that effectively transform mainly the physical properties of the fluid, some chemical properties. And we transform the food properties by passing it through these magnetic fields and then allow farmers to use the smaller to medium off the shelf nozzles without the risk of airborne drift. And by controlling that drift and changing their properties, we get more on target. And also by changing their properties we help them to adhere better to the crop or weed. And so we solved that compromise between drift and coverage by using our technology. It's like a fluid conditioning. So we're actually, we're generating more of the right type of droplets.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay. That makes sense. So you're creating this magnetic field on the sprayer, what needs to be on there to create it?

Gary Wickham:

So what we do is we calculate how many we need in a system. And then once we build that into a system, we put eight stacks of aluminum manifolds on all tractor booms for our tractor boom products. And then we have these magnetic rods, which have an outer stainless steel core to protect the delicate coating on these Neodymium magnets that we use. We shove those inside the fluid line and it's [inaudible 00:05:03] secret sauce and our knowhow. We know what configurations to use to give the best performance for farmers.

Gary Wickham:

We designed it with farmers. We actually went through about seven or eight iterations, and this was key, getting on the ground, getting data, help, getting farmers to help us design it so that we had zero maintenance and solve another challenge that is labor and downtime. So we wanted something that was brand agnostic, robust, no maintenance, solving their labor problems and obviously then reducing things like chemical and water and getting more acres done in a day and improving their productivity.

Gary Wickham:

Installing it is very easy. We do it through dealer networks. We train a dealer in a day and once we do that, it's done. During COVID we did it remotely. And once they install, it typically maybe takes about a day, day and a half to retrofit a tractor boom. Once it's on, there's no maintenance and you can move it from spray to sprayer. And if you are taking modern day auto steer applications or other applications that a lot of the big OEMs and the big precision technology companies retrofit sprays with, it can take them up to three months. So we make sure farmers have minimal downtime and no downtime going forward. And once it's on and installed by the dealers, the dealers are actually making more money because they have no call outs, but they're there to support they grower, but they're never called out.

Michaela Paukner:

You said it's brand agnostic. Is there any limitation on that?

Gary Wickham:

And that's the good news. Our science is extremely complex, but our technology is that easy to use without any downsides, which is the way you want it. We've retrofit merely every major design, every major brand, from John Deere, Case, AGCO, HORSCH, Hardy to small kind of sprayers over in California, in Europe and over in Australia. Every major type are very sophisticated, various sprays, and we've done them all. Once we get them on, we know we're not going to have any issues. Indeed, we haven't had any.

Gary Wickham:

We're also brand agnostic around the chemicals they use, whether it's a Bayer or BSF or an other brands or make, and whether it's an insecticide, fungicide, or herbicide, we have no issues. Unlike a lot of these seek and spray technologies that tend to be green and brown, there's very few green and green. We don't have those, we don't have the electronics problems where they break down and they have issues, a lot of the expensive hardware and software, we don't have any of those downsides. And also once it's on, that's it. You're not going to have any problems. And it doesn't matter, as I said, what chemical you're using.

Gary Wickham:

And unlike the others, which are mainly herbicides, we work with herbicide, fungicide and insecticide, the full range, bio pesticides, bio stimulants. And again, we're a solution for bio pesticides because you probably know they're low toxic products, which is great, but they don't have a great kill rate and so they're quite expensive, unstable as well. And the reason their market share has struggled is they're novel and new, they're quite expensive to make and generate and develop, but getting them on target is the key so we can overcome the low toxicity by getting more of it on target. And so we're a solution provider, whether you're on the equipment side, the chemical side, whether it's conventional or bio pesticide or bio stimulants.

Michaela Paukner:

That makes sense. And then could you talk a little bit about what your dealer network looks like and how you're finding dealers to partner with?

Gary Wickham:

Yeah. That's our route to market. That's our core business model. Although we do have an evolving business model, which I'll discuss as well. We won the THRIVE Accelerator in California back in 2016, I think. And that was a launchpad into the U.S., getting to meet some key corporates. One of THRIVE's partners were Trimble. We signed a non-exclusive deal, worldwide access to some of their dealers. And we started off in the U.S., which is our biggest market. And for lots of reasons, massive market. American farmers are very progressive, early adopters of technology. They're not afraid to try new things out so a great market for us to target. Through Trimble we've got access to their dealers and over the last two years, we've onboarded a lot of their advantage dealers. And now we have their dealers beginning to reorder, which is a key step.

Gary Wickham:

Getting units sold, onto farms, so the model is for those dealers, they order through the Trimble store, then Trimble will pay us, we ship it over, the dealer installs it. And then both the dealer and ourselves have the relationship with the grower to make sure everything is working out. We find that, we have an advisory service too, is that a lot of farmers don't realize they have a problem so we developed a return on investment app to show them. We put in the number of sprayers, their rates, their pressure, and we show them what they can save with Magrow and then we demonstrate that through season-long studies, until they're up and running and using it. We kind of highlight the problem that they're using the wrong nozzles and pressures. And then obviously then that, combined with Magrow, gives them a turnkey solution to optimize their spray and get the best output using that, that I spoke about earlier.

Gary Wickham:

That's typically what we do with Trimble dealers. For other dealers we go direct, but it's a similar model. And then in Europe and Australia, we're working with large retail groups and your equivalent, I think would probably be something like Target or Walmart, that have a lot of growers direct and indirect, they have sustainability agendas. And so we're working with their large growers to start off with. And what we're doing is creating a win-win. We get the farmers using less to grow more, make more money. And now we're solving not only the technical compromise between drift and coverage, we're solving that other compromise between profitability and sustainability. We're effect making farmers more profitable, or indeed profitable by being sustainable. And then that helps the retail groups because they all have these sustainability agendas and targets. And so it's making them look good as well from a consumer point of view. So we're creating that win-win from the farmer, to the grower, to the planet, to the dealer and of course the consumer.

Michaela Paukner:

That's interesting working with the retail groups. Do you have plans to work with retail groups in the U.S.?

Gary Wickham:

Yes, we need a proper lead in. We are a relatively small team. From David and I, there's about maybe 50 of us spread around the world. Although we do have a U.S.-based CCO, we have about eight sales guys on the ground. We have crop science people on the ground, but we've opened an agricultural research center in the UK with one of the most sophisticated indoor track sprayers in the world. And we're going to build a similar facility in the U.S. We're going to open up manufacturing over there, massive market.

Gary Wickham:

I now have a strategic advisor who works with one of the biggest ag tech companies that has come out of the U.S. over the last few years. He is a strategic advisor to them and now to us, and he's basically helped me to build a team over there and connect to some of these big players like Walmart, Target, Nutriens of this world, some of the big OEMs in chemical companies, and a lot of big co-ops and landowners as well that have big farm holdings and that, whether they're contract spraying or they just have big operations. That's what we're working on.

Gary Wickham:

In Europe, we're very much focused on the datos because the dato blight is a big problem, and in the States as well, but it's a worldwide problem. And we're working with smaller OEMs, Trimble dealers, non-Trimble dealers, and again, some large retail growers and basically all the work we've done over the last year shows that we reduce late light by over 70%, again, because we're solving that coverage challenge.

Gary Wickham:

We're working now with InVivo in France, who are the biggest co-op, they have 250,000 growers. The way we like to do teams, and they do the same, is that we're installing on their test farms this summer and they'll do all the testing and basically it'll be their results using our technology. And then next year at their big events and shows we'll co-launch together.

Gary Wickham:

That's the way we like to do things. The same with Bayer. We recently won the THRIVE Bayer Sustainability Scaleup Award worldwide, and we're working with Bayer now across three fronts. We have a technology for small farm holders, which they were very interested in. We're going to be installing units in the States in their research centers for them to do their own studies on our boom product. And we're looking at doing some R and D projects together, to give you an idea of some of the collaborations we're trying to do. So probably a long winded way to get around to the retail thing, but it's all about getting in at the right level with the right people and building those relationships.

Michaela Paukner:

Definitely. And just to talk a little bit more about the retail side of it, when you're partnered with a retailer, how does that turn into your technology being implemented on the farm level?

Gary Wickham:

Yeah. And again, just returning to Australia, just because we're a bit more advanced versus Europe and America on that market, effectively what we agreed with them is we would go to their, half dozen of their top growers in each category and then prove the technology, get those large growers on board, really your early adopters, and then you get the followers and then eventually the laggerts. And the idea behind it is that we will get that and then we would sell that to the growers then either through our SAS Model that we're developing or direct. We get the dealers to install it but we then get the retail groups to come in and contribute towards that. So they create that win-win kind of ecosystem.

Gary Wickham:

It would be the same model in the U.S. We'll have to just talk to the relevant players at the time, and they may have a different view, but I know one thing is that between the grower, the dealer and the retail groups and our people like ourselves, we all have the same goal is to grow more food sustainably.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah, for sure. And it's nice to have buy-in from everybody in the chain of food production when you're trying to achieve those big goals.

Gary Wickham:

Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing advantages now. We might touch on to, typical farmer examples in a moment and benefits, but we're seeing examples around insurance premiums because our growers are spraying less. So they're spraying, when they do spray, they're using less chemical and water and they're getting more yields, more acres done. But when, there are also less spray events because we're doing such a good job, there's less spray events and all the while through compliance to drift risk and also farm accidents and so on, there's less spray events and there's less labor challenges. So we're reducing their risk profile across the board.

Michaela Paukner:

Before we get back to the conversation, I'd like to invite you to the upcoming Dealership Mind Summit in Iowa City, Iowa, July 26th through 27th. This two day dealers only conference offers knowledge-packed general sessions, panels, round table discussions, networking, and more. Mark your calendars for July 26th through 27th and register online at dealershipmindsummit.com. Now here's Wickham again, discussing MagrowTec's market and the announcement of a brand new pilot project.

Michaela Paukner:

Talking more about those farmer benefits, do you have some examples of how MagrowTec has benefited farmers in terms of reducing some of that loss?

Gary Wickham:

Yeah. I'm going to give you two if that's OK. One in the U.S., because it's our biggest market and your market and the one for your listeners, but also our first customer ever in Europe as well. One of the biggest seed potato growers in Europe. We have a cotton grower in Alabama, as an example, and many examples like this. He had particular challenges around labor, water, chemical enough wasn't at the beginning, but it is now because the cost of inputs have gone through the roof, as you know. There's a shortage of key products. There's a perfect storm for growers now. They need to grow more food. Water is a challenge almost everywhere. Chemicals have gone through the roof. Fertilizer prices have gone through the roof. This new compliance increasingly coming in day by day. There's a shortage of labor and they're trying to make money.

Gary Wickham:

90% of U.S. farmers do not make money. It's a shocking number, right? It's the same in Europe. They're all subsidized. We need to change that. We need to change it, that farmers can feed their families and then feed the world. What our technology does in that particular case, he started off cutting his water by half to cut his rates. So he, knowing he'd be using smaller droplets, he could get more acres done. He went from 500 acres a day to about 950. I think he quotes on our video, I think it's somewhere between 900-1,000 acres a day so he is nearly doubling his acres a day. What that meant is he needed one less sprayer, saved himself $300,000 on a sprayer, right? Our system for him, retail is about 45,000 U.S. dollars. Obviously the dealer gets a cut on that and other third parties would get cut on that, of course, but that's the price typically a grower using 140 foot boom would pay.

Gary Wickham:

But the ROI just in chemical savings alone is less than a year, the return on investment, but that's before you throw in these other savings. He had one less sprayer, he was using half the water, no maintenance. He was saving a ton of labor every day because he was getting nearly his spraying events done in one day, rather than several days. He needed less spray events on top of that. The dealer has no call outs or no maintenance whatsoever. And then he started, now he's cut his chemical by a third, And now we've heard because, and you have to let them make these claims because I hear a lot of people making yield claims, but I could produce a three page document showing you all of the factors that affect yield. Some of the claims that people make are outrageous.

Gary Wickham:

What you can do is that we solve drift and coverage. And we show them that through season-long studies or water sensitive paper testing, but when farmers do a season or two seasons using our technology and they make the yield claim, well, then you can stand over it. And in this case, they're getting a bit of a third higher yield using half the water and a third less chemical. If you remember, I talked about helping farmers be profitable at being sustainable. And that's what we've done.

Gary Wickham:

The example in Europe, biggest seed potato grower, very nervous live crop. This is four or five years ago, and we installed a system, convinced them, they have no issues and thankfully it turned out to be true. They went fro 10% less chemical, and I think we're over a third less chemical now. They're saving two hours per sprayer per day. They now would have, they now have it on three sprayers. They're saving I think about half their water. They're meeting the highest drift standards in the world, 97.5% drift standards. The Netherlands is the highest drift regulations in the world. And they're saving spray events. And obviously they're making more money and being sustainable and they haven't had one maintenance call since we installed it.

Michaela Paukner:

Wow. That's really impressive.

Gary Wickham:

They're two good examples, but there's multiples of those, whether it's in Australia, Europe, or indeed loads of USA and now Canada as well.

Michaela Paukner:

In your North American market, where are the people using the Magrow technology on their sprayers located?

Gary Wickham:

Yeah. I'll leave America to last because it's our biggest market. In Australia we focus on things like sugar, beets and cane, cotton, and then some leafy greens, kind of vegetable crops as well, wheat as well. It's a big wheat market. Europe mainly be [inaudible 00:20:22], some wheat. We were starting on sunflowers. It was only a small entry into the market, but the biggest country is Ukraine, but we will get back there supporting growers when, they need our help more than ever now so we will be back in that market as soon as we can.

Gary Wickham:

And then in the U.S., we have a number of territories in California around berries. It's a big berry market. And obviously in Salinas, the salad bowl around lettuce and other crops like that. And in the Northwest, grasses, potatoes, wheat, kind of Oregon, Washington state area. Canada, we started in canola and wheat. And then in the Delta, we're very heavily focused in the Delta, cottons, crop rotation around peanuts, soy, corn, vegetables, and some leafy greens and sugar, beets as well. They're a mixture of independent large growers, customers of those dealers. And now we're beginning to work with some co-ops as well, et cetera.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay. And are you publicly releasing the cost of the technology?

Gary Wickham:

Yeah. We give examples on our website, but people can just ring up our dealer and get quotes, but I've given you a typical example there of 130 foot boom for, in U.S. terms, that's the retail cost. Obviously for in California some of the booms might be only 40 to 60 foot wide in the berry market. They're much cheaper, so I don't say it's kind of a linear price, but typically a sprayer of that size might be about half the cost. We still have the eight manifolds on both spray types. It's only the rods that are different that go into the sprayer line, the bit that the farmers helped design. So, yeah.

Gary Wickham:

I think for, what we're looking to do on the business model side is that we've seen that to get our hockey stick growth in the boom product we will obviously continue to get direct sales. Where people can afford it they will pay for it with cash or finance it, but there are farmers that are cash poor, and no matter how good your ROI is. We're actually implementing a SAS Model on a pilot faced basis so you're one of the first to hear this, I think. And effectively we were going to put out probably minimum hundred units on pilots with some key strategic partners and growers that can't afford to buy it just now. And the idea behind that model is they pay a modest amount every month and effectively, like a phone contract, they pay monthly and then after a number of years to get an upgrade to the next version. And then we provide the data.

Gary Wickham:

We're going to eventually integrate through AI, through platform, probably through strategic partners who have these platforms and effectively provide the data that we're collecting so we can show them, not just with the app at the beginning, what the current state is, we can show them the future state then in terms of yields, acres, their forward speed, their wind speed, their pressure, their water usage, compliance data, link that back then to their insurance premiums. So complete that full ecosystem for them.

Michaela Paukner:

That's really interesting. Talking more about the potential for integrating AI, what would it end up looking like and what would the AI do?

Gary Wickham:

Yeah, so I see two phase strategies. So for the SAS Model, the hardware is a service. It's basically paying for our kit monthly so we get away from that cash problem, no matter how good your ROI is. Secondly, I'm a chemical engineer and so I used to work for quite a number of American multinationals in my pharmaceutical and chemical days so in the early days I brought in process optimization to take operator variability away. The best way to describe this, I always use a refrigerator analogy. If you put food in a refrigerator, it'll last longest than room temperature, but if you have it at maybe seven or eight degrees, it'll still be better than room temperature. The problem you have is when you put Magrow on, you get a huge, incremental improvement on all the benefits I talk about, but you still have operator variability.

Gary Wickham:

The vision we have is let's control this, the sensors on these sprayers anyway, but let's control the boom height like a carwash so it knows when it's above the canopy. Let's control the forward speed. We're moving into autonomous tractors anyway so most of that technology is there. What we want to do is real time capture the data into a platform and then have the Magrow as an Intel inside, or a Magrow inside, whether you retrofit or are in a new sprayer. And then we're giving that back to the farmer on their app for compliance, so manage their operations properly and obviously save money and do more with less again. We want to be able to provide that ecosystem. And the final component is added through our crop service team that we're advising farmers through our research center in the UK and the one we're going to build in the U.S. with this track sprayer, we can advise what nozzles to use, what pressures and so on.

Gary Wickham:

A lot of them right now, we can change. We change their operations overnight because they're using the wrong pressures, the wrong nozzles. They've been doing it for decades. And it's because they know no other way. That's the way they've been told, and it works, right? So when you don't know what your problem is, and you're using the same methodology for decades, it's hard to change. So we give them the data to make those informed decisions better.

Gary Wickham:

And the other thing is, as you probably know from doing these podcasts, is that farmers are inundated with new technology all the time. We're around, we spent four or five years developing it and then launching after working with farmers. They know their service is excellent. They know that we're there to provide support. They know we have a brilliant technology, but critically they know we're going to advise them. We're going to help them and their agronomists around nozzles pressures and help to optimize technology like Magrow. And so if we can provide a full system with partners of a platform, the data capture and the hardware, but then they don't have to go to parties and it's disjointed, and I think part of the challenge for farmers right now.

Michaela Paukner:

You mentioned that you want to be able to kind of integrate all of these different pieces of how to make decisions on the farm. Are you doing any of that right now, or are you just focused on the technology at this point?

Gary Wickham:

Right now it's the technology. Although we have launched our ROI app, which is the first phase of the SAS model so that's on the Apple and Android store. Effectively that's gone live so we go into a farmer, put in the number of sprayers, what they spray, their rates and so on. And then we show them what they can save. The next phase of that will be where we're starting some conversations. It'll probably take us a year to identify the right partners. And then once we have the partners, we'll build out that platform together on the AI. They have the platform, the sensors are there, connecting the AI that connects our hardware and software to generate the data real time for growers, so it's a two phase strategy. Yeah.

Michaela Paukner:

You kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but I had read this article not long ago that said agriculture is having this moment with sprayers, where essentially the manufacturers are realizing they can profit on what was undervalued at one point. And it sounds like this is something that you have identified early on. I was just curious what your thoughts were about that and where you see the sprayer market heading.

Gary Wickham:

Yeah. It's interesting and it's a great question. There's a number of challenges for growers. These machines are becoming really expensive, new sprayers, so they want to make their sprayer last as long as possible. With farmers who helped us design this technology, we've helped to overcome a number of problems. One is that you can move our system from sprayer to sprayer. So if a farmer says, "Well, I'm thinking of changing my sprayer in two years if my economic situation allows," but then they don't have to put that off because they can buy our kit, get immediate benefit and move it at any stage. So that's the first thing.

Gary Wickham:

Number two is we're extending the life of their existing machines. Number three, we're actually allowing them to use less machines because we're doubling their acres that they get done. We're making them more productive and they need less land. So if they were thinking of buying more land, well then if they're getting way more productivity, they need less land.

Gary Wickham:

The next thing is with the evolution between John Deere, Exacto buy and other technologies, we've actually seen anywhere we install our kits, we enhance that. We enhance the drift control and we actually, we solve the coverage. So we make sure that compromise is gone. It doesn't matter what they have, our system will bet in.

Gary Wickham:

And then you've seen a lot of these seek and spray technologies, right? They have a lot of cameras, a lot of expensive electronics. They break down, they run at slow speeds. With our technology, and obviously they mainly do weeds, we do weeds, insecticide and fungicide, but we have guys in Canada running at 20 miles an hour. We've guys who want to go out at wind speeds of 15 miles an hour. They do it with our technology without having to worry about drift. So we allow them to go out in more extended spray windows as well. We solve these challenges around the seek and spray technology.

Gary Wickham:

We haven't put our technology on the seek and spray machine because that's mainly new sprayers. We're very much focused on retrofit. However, we have installed, as an Intel inside, with some smaller OEMs, and we are having discussions with some of the big OEMs around the new sprayer market, as Magrows and Intel inside.

Gary Wickham:

And finally, I'm having discussions with an electric tractor maker and the challenges they have. They're going to be autonomous, right? Fully autonomous. They want to run 24/7. They're in specialized areas at the moment, in kind of citrus orchards and so on, vineyards, the challenges they all have is that if you're going to run those 24/7, you don't want to be breaking drift guidelines in California, for example, where you have communities and schools everywhere, people living, and you don't want this stuff drifting during the night and be shut down, right?

Gary Wickham:

With our technology on, suddenly you can be compliant to get the coverage and run 24 hours autonomously. So what we're looking at there is possibly either licensing our technology as an Intel inside, Magrow inside, or that we'll partner with them in JV with their, with some of these new models. We see nothing but opportunities. We see ourselves as a solution of choice, again, whether you sprayed all those different chemicals I talked about earlier, or doesn't matter what OEM type of machine you have and whether it's fully autonomous or not, or electric or indeed manual or extremely old, the good news is Magrow works for all.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah, that's great news. Was there anything else you wanted to add that I haven't asked you?

Gary Wickham:

As a scientist myself, we went with science based strategy. Some people develop a product and try and find a market or a solution to solve. We knew there was a massive problem to solve that I've talked about. We knew there was a massive market, but I knew that this technology that we wanted to bring forward, that it was hardware. We didn't have a brand. It was using existing sites in a different way. What I mean by that is permanent magnets are used in Tesla cars. The only way Tesla's cars have the market they have now is because of permanent magnets. They're used in wind turbines. They're used in para generation. They're used in MRI machines. They're used everywhere around us. Right? But they just haven't been used much in agriculture. There's a lot of wacko science about magnets used in water, not proper science.

Gary Wickham:

So we built out four pillars, a crop science pillar, applied research, an empirical science division, working with one of the leading experts in the magnetic treatments of fluid in Europe, in Dublin Trinity College, Dublin. And then we work on it with field research centers and customers so we have four pillars generating data. We spent probably about $12 million getting that right. Then we started installing on farms and getting two years of data then commercializing.

Gary Wickham:

And so what we've discovered effectively is we have three technologies now. We've got our magnetic assist, which is the one we've been talking about here today, used on our tractor booms. We're about to launch a greenhouse product with that same technology. That's going to go live this year. After two years of testing with a big greenhouse manufacturer, we did tests with them. They got independents to do tests. They got brilliant results. They didn't believe them. They got another group in and got even better results. And now they've ordered prototypes. That's going to be a MagrowTec inside model.

Gary Wickham:

What we're working across the magnetic assist technologies, or MagrowTec, is where we have products coming in the next two to four years, it'll vary. Air blast, vineyards in the pistachio/almond area, for orchards and citrus. We also have a technology that we're working with a company in Florida for nurseries that's spraying nurseries and orchards as well. Effectively it's an air assist with our technology, another example of a different technology and Magrow together, we enhance it. The two combined do a much better job than their technology on its own. We're looking at developing technology on the foliar spraying of fertilizers, which is a massive problem for farmers. And obviously nitrate runoff and trying to eliminate that.

Gary Wickham:

On irrigation, we did work with USDA which showed Magrow versus conventional reduced water waste nearly 40%. We two year R&D studies with our various technologies looking to validate that commercially and then scale it because there's massive amounts of money worldwide going to spend in irrigation. If we can save water there as well that's going to help farmers too across the cropping side. We have a number of products in the ag area coming.

Gary Wickham:

Then on the nanotechnology, this is a side or side effect or byproduct of our research. We discovered that we're generating very stable nano bubbles or tiny bubbles, and without getting too sophisticated or into the signs today, when you have stable bubbles, they have a memory effect, they don't break up for days or weeks, but you can carry things inside or outside of them. And so we're now looking at our technology as a tool for sanitization. It could be for treating COVID or other pathogens like at the moment we chlorinate chicken. So getting rid of chlorinated chicken and using a safe way of killing bacteria and fungi in food, and also for the post harvest treatment of crops, extending shelf life. Again, if we can extend shelf life, 30% of our food is thrown out so if we can reduce that number, it's also part of the solution of delivering sustainable intensification of global food production.

Gary Wickham:

And then, so in that nanotechnology space, we're looking at soil regeneration, better nutrient delivery to the root for crops as well. So that's a really exciting area. And I call that really disruptive science and the magnetic assist now is sustainable and disruptive. And then there's also a combination of the two. And for your listeners, the best way to describe that is in American terms, the gas engine or electric engine, in this case, it's a hybrid. We have three core technologies now. We're continuing to invest in our research centers, our facilities, our personnel, and obviously putting the right equipment in the U.S. like research centers and manufacturing to support our customers over there.

Michaela Paukner:

It's really amazing what you guys have discovered in this process of trying to apply this existing technology to agriculture, and then all the things that it can do into the future.

Gary Wickham:

Yeah. It's really exciting. It's revolutionary. So a lot of hard work to be done, rolled up our sleeves and we're looking, consistently looking for the right partners to work with us going forward because big challenge, we can't do this on our own.

Michaela Paukner:

Thanks to Gary Wickham for today's conversation. If you'd like to see what the magnets look like, I'll have a link to a product video from the National Farm Machinery Show in the web story for this podcast. As always, let me know what you've thought about this episode by emailing me at mpaukner@lessitermedia.com or calling me at (262) 777-2441. And if you're looking for more podcasts about precision farming, visit precisionfarmingdealer.com/podcast, or check out our episode library wherever you get your podcasts. From all of us here at Precision Farming Dealer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.