There’s a grand challenge in agriculture:
1. Fertilizers today are responsible for up to 5% of global emissions.
2. They are needed to feed billions of people, close to half of the world's population.
3. But the global population continues to grow, driven by Asia...
In the face of climate change, how do we square these?
In short, we'll need new approaches that increase yields and ultimately reduce the level of fertilizer usage.
And one promising technology to help with this key problem is bioelectric seed treatment - and we’re excited to invest into an innovator in this emerging field, Rainstick.
Rainstick has developed a novel system to apply electric fields to seeds prior to planting, with the goal to increase germination and establishment, seedling vigour and biomass.
Or put another way, by mimicking lightning, seeds are treated in a way that can help them grow faster and produce bigger yields.
Rainstick's Variable Electric Field Treatment (VEFTTM) is believed to trigger biological and electrochemical changes that can be tailored to encourage different traits in early seedling growth.
Whilst it's gaining attention recently, it’s a concept whose roots are not at all new.
Co-founder Darryl Lyons, a proud Maiawali man and serial entrepreneur was inspired by his mob's traditional use of a ‘chuggera’ – a rain stick used in ceremony significant to indigenous knowledge around the relationship between growth of plants, fungi and lightning.
The tricky part to apply this to agriculture today is in figuring out the right protocols to treat different types of seeds and conditions. Being able to run a large number of experiments, efficiently analyse, iterate and optimise is a true big data and a machine learning problem.
That’s where Rainstick's other founder Mic Black comes in. He is a third time founder with a strong background in biotech hardware and software development, AI, process automation and robotics. Mic's prior work on high voltage influences on biological systems and interest in bioelectrics is what brought the two together to form a strong founding team to tackle this new opportunity.
The combination of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge technology is what excites us about Rainstick.
With promising early results and growing interest from customers and partners in Australia and regionally, we believe Rainstick has the potential to revolutionize how we grow food, contributing to a more sustainable and food-secure future and help solve this grand challenge.
We are proud to be part of their journey.