Karsten Temme – Pivot Bio – Creating Probiotics to Provide Cereal Crops with Essential Nutrients

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2018

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

With the advent and increasing use of fertilizer in industrialized agriculture, symbioses between crops and their nitrogen-fixing microbes (which have been evolving for billions of years) are losing their strength. The fertilizer that's being used provides nitrogen for crops, but it does so in abundance, which has not only resulted in the crops' microbes losing the ability to capture nitrogen, but has also led to financial problems for farmers and concerns about the effect of excess nitrogen in the environment.
The team at Pivot Bio is working on a solution: a probiotic for crops that forms a symbiotic relationship with them as soon as roots develop, allowing for the crops to obtain nitrogen in a self-sufficient way. There are plans for three generations of the product, the first of which will provide 20 percent of the nitrogen crops need. Karsten Temme, the founder and CEO of Pivot Bio, forecasts that the second generation product will provide about 50 percent of the nitrogen needed, and the third will provide 100 percent of it. This could have a significant impact on the environment, considering that 80 percent of the fertilizer used turns into pollution, either in the form of nitrate in the water or nitrous oxide in the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas that's 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The team at Pivot Bio has reached the last step before launch, with early adopters already testing the product on cereal crops, which provide over half the world's dietary energy. To learn more, visit pivotbio.com.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.
0:07.6	Future technologies are always to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast.
0:13.3	Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used.
0:17.8	We're just around the corner, from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more.
0:32.2	Coming to Dallas, Texas, September 14th, 15th, and 16th, 2018, the Blockchain and Future Tech
0:39.5	Expo.
0:40.6	This is going to be a gigantic conference of over 5,000 people.
0:44.7	We're going to be talking about blockchain and its applications.
0:47.6	We're going to be talking about quantum computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence,
0:52.0	and several other future technologies that are poised to and
0:56.4	actually changing our lives as we speak. Here's why you should attend. As you may know,
1:01.7	early adopters are the ones that investigated and profited from things like the gold rush
1:06.7	in the 1800s, from the dot-com boom in the 1990s, from the internet boom in 2005, from the
1:13.5	smartphone explosion in 2007, from the real estate boom that ended in 2008, and of course,
1:19.5	from the Bitcoin boom that started in 2012. Early adopters act now, they don't wait until
1:25.0	later. They go out west first and they're covered wagons. They
1:28.4	find the biggest gold nuggets. If you consider yourself an early adopter and you want to find
1:33.5	the biggest nuggets, then you owe it to yourself to attend this upcoming conference. Blockchain
1:38.2	is going to affect how we control and store our medical data, how we send money around the world,
1:43.9	how we bank, and more.
1:45.8	But artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and cybersecurity will play a pivotal role
1:50.7	in our lives as well.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Richard Jacobs, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Richard Jacobs and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.