June 23, 2025 • 46 mins
As climate change accelerates and traditional crops face mounting pressures from drought, extreme weather, and soil depletion, innovative solutions are emerging from unexpected sources. Explore the soil-restoring potential of the pongamia tree with Marc Diaz, Chief Commercialization Officer at Terviva, an agtech company that has spent over a decade unlocking this hardy species’ dual capabilities as a nutritious food source and sustainable fuel feedstock. Through their Ponova platform, Terviva is demonstrating how pongamia can restore degraded agricultural land while building equitable supply chains that empower smallholder farmers, particularly women in India, with above-market wages and technical support. The tree’s versatility extends beyond environmental benefits. Pongamia beans are rich in both protein and oil, positioning them as valuable ingredients for food applications while simultaneously serving as feedstock for biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel.
Marc explains how pongamia’s nitrogen-fixing properties improve soil health over time, making it ideal for regenerative agriculture practices, while its protein- and oil-rich beans serve as valuable ingredients for both food applications and biofuel production. With recent partnerships involving Chevron Renewable Energy Group and Japan’s Idemitsu scaling pongamia cultivation for sustainable aviation fuel, and expansion into citrus-depleted regions of Florida and California, this versatile tree exemplifies the kind of adaptive, multi-purpose approach needed for climate-resilient agriculture. He also shares insights into what farmers need most when transitioning to climate-resilient crops: technical support, financial backing, and education about new cultivation methods. By addressing these needs while placing equity at the center of their business model, Terviva is proving that commercial success doesn’t require compromising social impact.Tune in to discover how one species is helping reimagine food and fuel systems for a changing world, and learn more at terviva.com and ponovafoods.com.
Marc explains how pongamia’s nitrogen-fixing properties improve soil health over time, making it ideal for regenerative agriculture practices, while its protein- and oil-rich beans serve as valuable ingredients for both food applications and biofuel production. With recent partnerships involving Chevron Renewable Energy Group and Japan’s Idemitsu scaling pongamia cultivation for sustainable aviation fuel, and expansion into citrus-depleted regions of Florida and California, this versatile tree exemplifies the kind of adaptive, multi-purpose approach needed for climate-resilient agriculture. He also shares insights into what farmers need most when transitioning to climate-resilient crops: technical support, financial backing, and education about new cultivation methods. By addressing these needs while placing equity at the center of their business model, Terviva is proving that commercial success doesn’t require compromising social impact.Tune in to discover how one species is helping reimagine food and fuel systems for a changing world, and learn more at terviva.com and ponovafoods.com.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host Metracliffe. Thank you for joining the conversation today.
As the climate and biodiversity crises accelerate, the world needs
(00:31):
solutions that actively regenerate ecosystems and communities. Terviva, an ag
temp company, has spent over a decade unlocking the potential
of the pongamia. It's a hardy tree that can restore
degraded land while creating low carbon food and fuel alternatives.
Mark Diaz, Treviva's chief commercialization officer, will join us for
(00:52):
a conversation about the potential for the pongamia in agriculture,
for food and sustainable aviation fuel. Mark brings decades experience
and sustainability in global markets, and we'll explore how the
pongamia is replacing citrus groves in California and Florida, empowering
women farmers in India, and proving that commercialization doesn't necessarily
(01:12):
require compromising climate impact or social equity. Through its Panova platform,
Treviva transforms wild harvested pangamia beans into healthy food ingredients
while building an equitable supply chain from India to Australia.
Recent partnerships with Chevron's Renewable Energy Group and Japan's Idimetsu
(01:33):
are scaling the pangamia for aviation and biofuel development, and
at the same time, Treviva's Panova Foods division is developing
regenerative ingredients for restaurants and food brands. You can learn
more at Terviva dot com and at Panovafoods dot com.
Panova Foods is all one word, no space, no dash,
panovafoods dot com. We'll get to the conversation right after
(01:56):
this brief commercial break. Welcome to the show. Mark, how
you doing today?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Doing great?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Niche Well, thank you for joining me. You know I've
spent some time doing research on the pongamia and the
beans it produces. It's a stately looking tree. But tell
us about the tree. What's it like to be in
the presence of a pagambia tree.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It's a marvelous tree, in part because it's a tree
of many colors. You find it as a street tree
in some of the world's most urban locations, whether you're
in Miami or Honolulu, or it's ancestral home in India.
The big cities of India are chocolate block with these
(02:43):
hearty vigors growing trees that have a beautiful pink flower
in the spring and produce these oil seeds you know,
these beans in a good abundance on an annual basis.
In the countryside, the tree is used traditionally in communities
as much of a boundary setting tree, as a shade
(03:07):
tree that you or I might have in our backyard.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
What makes it a unique and timely solution for both
food cultivation and fuel production.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
We're moving through a world that is increasingly unpredictable, and
this moment that we're experiencing in our wider world is
pitch perfect for the pongamea tree. The context for Turviva's
energy over the last fifteen years as a company organized
(03:37):
entirely around pongamia is to provide people with food and
energy from a natural solution that's resilient, that's adaptive, that
can deal with the shocks and the natural world, but
also in our broader environment, our politics, our trade, and
that's where pungamea really shines. It comes out of a
(03:59):
part of the world, in the monsoonal areas of the world,
in the subtropics, that is where more and more of
our farmland is going extremes of dry and wet, extremes
of heat and cold periods. And it's really that volatility
those extremes where pongamia can perform well, generate an abundant crop,
(04:23):
make use of permanent agriculture in a time in which
we have extremes of precipitation or temperature, and where we
need more efficiency, more yield from the same acre of
land and can't afford to rely on the traditional crops
that have gotten us here, the corn soils, for example,
(04:43):
the oil palms right that require lots of inputs and
increasingly create lots of complexity, not just to deliver when
the conditions aren't perfect, but also when our trade barriers
suddenly cut off whole regions of the world from affordable
access to supply well.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Now, one of the most important things it does is
restore the soil, and because it's a legame like a
pea plant, it helps move nitrogen into the soil. How
does that compare to other types of crops. Is the
Pondamia a superhero?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, you know, we call it a super tree in
part because it's a legging as you said, and it
fixes that nitrogen in a symbiotic way with the soils.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
So, the great bargain it makes is by making its
own biology accessible. It's a five or seven meter tall plant.
It's bringing all of those photosynthetic sugars into the soil system.
It's getting you know, the nitrogen exchange it needs. But
it's also got a few other superpowers that we like
(05:49):
to talk about. One is it's got a powerful root system,
both a surface spreading root and a deep tap root
that helped to create a more permeable soil strata and
allow water to be recharged but also to be distributed
within the soil for the trees use in a way
(06:11):
that's more flexible, more adaptive to those periods of dry
and wet that you find in monsoonal regions. Additionally, we
focus a lot on its natural bioactives. These bioactives are
functionally defenses that the tree is accumulated over millions of
years of evolution. They taste bitter. They taste bitter to
(06:34):
you or I if we were to eat one of
the beans off the field, and they taste bitter to
pests and to the things that often prey on plants
in the natural world. So because those adaptive compounds are there,
they reduce the need for things like pesticides, right, which
have those follow on effects that are negative in the
(06:55):
environmental context, but also cost a lot if you're a
commercial producer. Like that basket of the resilience the soil strengthening,
the water storage and water management capacity, and the fact
that you have more biodiversity in the field, more resilience
in the plant because of those bioactives.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Okay, so I see how it can be a major
contributor to introducing more regenerative agricultural practices. But how do
you know one crop, one monol crop isn't a solution
either does How does the pogamia coexist with other plants
and potentially agricultural products that people might be looking for.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, great, great point. We think there's a world of
incremental production that we need. So we're in all of
the above, advocate, we need to find a way to
steward all the corn and soil and calm we already have,
because that's already spoken for. But people are going to
need a lot more calories, a lot more electrons to
(07:58):
move and to live in the ways that many of
us get to live and move today as the population grows.
And so part of this is bringing areas that are
out of production into production. I'll give you an example.
You know, one of the places I know well is Florida,
State of Florida in the US, and I was a
(08:18):
kid who grew up there in the nineteen eighties, you know,
drinking my fair share of orange juice every day. And
in the year two thousand million acres of citrus was
available for production in Florida. Citrus greening disease and a
strong shift in markets for orange juice, which is the
primary product those oranges were delivering, has resulted in three
(08:41):
quarters of those acres going away. The seven hundred and
fifty thousand acres are available in a tough climate where
there aren't a lot of obvious alternatives. People have tried
annual crops, people have tried other tree crops, and they
don't work so well. Pangamia drops into that land which
would otherwise be unavailable for food and energy production. And
(09:03):
that's an example of one of the things we need
to do to find those underused pieces of land and
bring them back into production and bring them into more
abundant production. The second thing to your point on what
do we grow alongside pongamia is to get more imaginative
around how we govern our farm fields. We luckily get
(09:24):
to turn to traditional communities that work with pongamia today.
So in India where we do work directly with farmers
who are already working with pongamia, we see two different
approaches to making pungamia part of a system. One is
what we would call agroforestry truly, where you're alternating the
crop with other crops three crops, and pongamia is no different.
(09:47):
Take a few years to establish a harvestable yield. In
those early years you get a lot of light and
a lot of resources still coming to the farm field.
So we plant annual crops that are regionally specific. In
some parts of the world, it could be a commodity
like sorghum, it could be a fresh fruit and vegetable
like pineapple, and as the trees come up and get
(10:08):
more economically producted, you can turn that cycle over to
more reliance on the pongamia. The other thing we see
is an intercropping where you're genuinely going to keep different
crops in production in a consistent way. Another example we
draw on from traditional communities is coffee production in India,
(10:30):
where you've got a shade tree in the form of
pongamia with an understory, a coffee production that can benefit
the legium fixing. Additional nitrogen in the soil benefits the
coffee tree that also needs the shade to be productive.
So we'll see more of those types of systems in
the future, we believe, not only in traditional communities places
(10:54):
like India, but also in more commercial agriculture geographies like
the US.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
In Australia, I was impressed by the way that you're
working with smallholder farmers, particularly women in India and paying
above market wages. How do you work with those farmers.
What's the program consist of?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Well, it starts with buying what the farmer makes today,
and that's where we begin. We buy the harvest that
they either cultivate from their community trees or that they
go into the wild harvest right the public forest areas
to gather and to sell. And when you help a
(11:33):
farmer make a living today, they're much more interested in
building a long term relationship with you tomorrow, and so
it's really engaging them today in their traditional collections, which
might be as little as a few dozen kilo. You know,
a small regional group of women who might aggregate supply
and have a ton or two, and we help connect
(11:56):
them to higher value markets so we can afford to
pay more or in part because we take the attributes
of what they do when we make them visible to
the market. In the energy markets, for example, oil seeds
are used as an input to make liquid fuels things
like sustainable aviation fuel, renewable diesel, and there's real concern
(12:17):
that if you're taking soybeans that are displacing habitat to
put in a jet plane, that you're contributing to climate
change as much as you're providing an alternative to a
fossil fuel. So we trace end to end the community
level collections that we deliver to ultimately the end refiner,
(12:41):
and for making that traced connection, the end refiner has
greater confidence and has customers who want that confidence that
we're not displacing a natural area and contributing to climate
change on the back end, and they pay a premium.
We do that with certifications, which enables us to then
deliver that extra value back in the purchase price and
(13:02):
to the market participants along the way store and crush
and make those end products. So that's the real intention there,
so that we can be engaged in the conversation of
purpose planted acres and growing more cultivation in a long
term relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Well, and as I listened to you in the range
of yields that you're talking about, it sounds like you
could even integrate urban farming into this because these trees
could provide shade, reduce heat effect and so forth while
producing the fruit. How should we think about recalibrating not
just our agricultural land, but our entire landscape to be
(13:42):
consistently regenerative in the cities and in the country as
we shift into this new era.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
You know, it's a thoughtful prompt, manch The absence of
imagination is not a permanent human condition. Sometimes the stress
and the scarcity we experience pushes us to see things
in areas where we haven't. I'll give you two quick examples.
(14:11):
One are boundary plantations. Traditionally in large monoculture, you know,
agricultural enterprises. We've seen a focus on a core farm landscape,
and then there's the farm roads and the boundary areas.
We do a lot of work in Northeast India and
the tea plantation region where you can travel for miles
(14:32):
and tea estates that have been planted the same way
for one hundred and fifty years. It turns out that
they have been planting pongamia incidentally almost as a boundary
plantation to the road soils right from putting all of
that material into the edge of the tea plantation, reducing erosion,
(14:53):
to gather water and prevent flooding for the transport and
the effective management of a broader orchard system. And they realize, geez,
these trees thrive on the edge of fields because they
get some of the runoff, because they get lots of light.
They're great wind breaks that make the tea plantation, the
core plantation more productive. And some of our partners have
(15:14):
already begun taking those leave, the leaf litter and the
bean pods from the pongamea trees and tapping them for
those bioactive compounds to provide a national natural pest protection
to spray back on their tea lead. Interesting, so you
see organically right, a system coming. If we can deliver
(15:38):
them consistently high yielding trees, they have a secondary crop. Similarly,
if you look at you so that that's that sort
of edge system, and inda the state of Florida, you
see the growth as you see in many areas traditional
agriculture of renewable energy Florida happens to be solar panels
(16:01):
because it's the sunshine steak. When you put a solar
array in, you're tilting it in a particular orientation to
maximize the sun exposure, and regulation says you can only
make it so big, and then you end up with
all these leftover parcels, right, these odd block bits and
pieces that traditionally we're too small to farm on their own,
(16:21):
but taken together as a portfolio, these little triangles, these
sort of little end pieces could be highly productive orchards
just distributed again, not in a traditional monocrop block. And
so we're working with partners like those who haven't traditionally
thought about those edge areas, those interstitial spaces as places
(16:46):
to farm, and we're having both secondary crops having incremental
sources or revenue, turning the cost of land management into
the benefit of farming, you bring more crop into production,
and that's really exciting for us.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
It's really a fascinating vision of a great green fill
in that takes advantage of all the waste that we
have built into the structure of our cities and our communities.
I want to take a quick commercial break, but where
you want to come back and talk a lot more.
Thinks Mark will be right back. Now. Let's get back
(17:24):
to the discussion with Mark Diaz. He's chief commercialization officer
at Treviva. It's a food and biofuels innovation company that
has adopted the pongamia tree as the basis for its
regenerative agricultural programs and it's aimed at low income farmers
in India and recently the United States. So, Mark, one
of the things that I noticed is you've just signed
(17:45):
deals with Chevron and Iamitsu. They've invested in scaling pangamia
cultivation for biofuel and to make sustainable aviation. Fueller saff
What are these partnerships enable for Taviva that wasn't possible before.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Pongimo many tree crops is really a generational investment, So
you need to be looking at the product you want
to deliver the money you want to make and the
change you want to have in the world over a
twenty five thirty year period, and so we needed big
global partners who had that same decision making time frame
(18:21):
and the resources to operate on a generational scale. I'm
so grateful for groups like Chevron, need A, Mitsu, and
Mitsubishi whove all invested interview this business system because that
twenty five year time period lines up with our twenty
fifty goals for net zero. As a global community. Sometimes
(18:41):
you got to be lucky and good, and we think
we're both to be offering a crop in this market
moment where we're still too far away from pure electrification
where we won't need liquid fuels to help us fly
our big planes to help us manage which are large
industrial equipment things for example like it Emitsu might use
(19:05):
in the mining sector where they own direct minds that
they use to provision the products the inputs that we
need to make the steel and and and you know
other types of development uh focused end products that that
are going to be needed you know over the generations
to come same same on. You know, Chevron being able
(19:27):
to provide low cost, low carbon jet fuel to comply
with the global community that says we want to move
to net zero on aviation by the middle of the century,
and we also want to fly more people than ever
before longer distances, and so the drop in replacement of
(19:48):
our existing fossil based jet fuel system is essential if
we want to keep things like transport affordable accessible. So
so those partners say, here's a new source of supply
with a carbon footprint that's seventy five percent lower than
the fossil standard that creates these code benefits in communities
(20:13):
like we were talking about in the last segment. Also,
I can match over the next twenty five years my
source of supply. I basically get a green oil well,
which is a really familiar business to them.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Right, continue yield too.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Exactly right. So I've got a tree that I can
point to look at know is there. I have a
predictable amount of yield because I've partnered with Terniva that's
got a track record of planting and delivering these same trees,
this team of super trees that as a system deliver
that yield year in and year out because they're resilient
(20:51):
whether it's a hotter year or a cooler year. Whether
it's a wetter year or a drier year, within reasonable
system boundaries. Right, we as a partnerh ship set, the
agriatech company, the big global distributor come together and help
work our way responsibly through this transition. And that's the
exciting vision they're helping us lift up right now.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
One of the things that comes up every time we
talk about a biofuel or a sustainable aviation biofuel is
the competition between the years of agricultural land for fuel
production and for human food consumption. How do you make
decisions and balance the sustainability values of TRABBA with the
(21:34):
operational goals of these large partners like Chevron, arad to Mitche.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
It's an important point to hold. We focus on it
at the level of every being we produce and every
field we plant, At the level of every being we
produce our pongamia oil seed. Our being is one third
oil and two thirds high protein flour. That's an important country.
(22:00):
So every time you add upon gama a tree into
the food system and harvest a bean, you're adding one
part potential biofuel feedstock and two parts human or animal food.
And that's no small thing. We need that contribution of
incremental yield, and we do it off of a five
meter tall platform that compared to let's say a soybean,
(22:23):
which is a similar type of crop only a meter tall,
an annual crop that also discharges carbon every time you
cut it down each year. We hold that higher yield
breaker over a longer period of time without that negative
carbon attribution. The second thing we think about is every
field we plant. If we go in and plant in
(22:46):
the area where we're competing with where a great food
crop could grow, we're not making a net contribution. So
the superpower of our tree is in fact to take
land that's on the sidelines off the sidelines because it's
called a waste land, it's desertified, it's traditionally outside of
(23:06):
the boundaries of the heat profile or the water profile
right for a more conventional crop, or because there are
pressures in the environment from pests, from degraded, depleted soils
that can't be overcome. 'll give you an example. We're
working with colleagues in Belize who are cultivating sugar cane
(23:28):
at a large scale. They're really energized about the idea
of using pongamia to revitalize land where the sugar cane
they're producing has had significant declines in yield through depleted soils,
and an absence of revitalization will help them to strengthen
back those soils and take them as marginally areas of
(23:50):
production out and a generation from now they may choose
to put those back into sugar cane production without having
sacrifice productivity, adding human food into the system and also energy.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
So let's talk about the food products. But that can
be produced from pangamia. You mentioned the flower, so what
could the flour be used for? I know it's a
high protein flower too.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
It's a great flower that has a few interesting characteristics.
The first is, as you noted, the nutritional balance a
high protein flower in a time where I don't know
about you, but every isle of the grocery store they
seem to be trying to pack the protein in everything
I'm eating from my pastas where this is a great
(24:38):
high protein but also it's quite resilient in its form,
a gluten like property without those gluten attributes that you know,
cause the upset stomach or simply you know, don't agree
with people's dietary choices. What does that mean if you
get something like preps like a chickpea, flower, lentil flour
(25:01):
into a pasta. You boil it up and you notice
it kind of has either that sort of fiber's quality
or kind of breaks apart. Pongamia is a flour has
that balance that hold together, that firmness that we all
like al dente. And so that's an example of one
of the products where we're really shining, and it speaks
(25:22):
to the functionality and the nutrition of the flour. Another
thing that we think about is we're adding protein to
new forms of plant based foods, and so you're looking
for something that might have good water holding capacity if
you need to be in a beverage and that's a
place where a high protein beverage ripple is made with
(25:46):
yellow pea. Again, you've got to put a lot of
stuff into that and shake it up really well to
keep it in suspension and to integrate well. We find
our plant protein does a great job in those types
of applications.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Now, you mentioned that the trees bioactive ingredients are bitter.
What's the smell or flavor profile of the pangamia oil
and have you tested this with chefs and product developers,
what's their feelings about it?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Sure? And so in nature you'll find the pongamia tree
has a kind of a pungent quality, a very kind
of back of your mouth sort of snap to it.
And so what we've done is we've used existing food
processing technology and systems to be able to dial that down.
(26:38):
And by dialing that down, we've gotten it to a
level that has this preserves this beautiful golden color. For example,
in the pungamy oil. When we've dialed down the flavor
profile and made it golden, we call it panova. We've
taken a strategy that reape seed and Canola did to
distinguish the wild crop of rape seed from canola the
(26:58):
oil that you were I could go to the store
and get. So we've got it dialed down, but we
haven't gotten rid of it. We didn't want to make
a vanilla corn oil soy oil kind of you know,
buy your ankles in the grocery store type of product.
And we consulted all sorts of chefs from you know,
folks who work in hook cuisine to folks who formulate
(27:22):
for the big package food companies, and they said, can
you get me something that's beautiful? And so our oil
is jewel like a gorgeous amber glow. Can you get
me something that plays well with other ingredients? So we do.
Ours has two qualities that chefs and formulators lift up.
A buttery mouth feel. It coats, it integrates, it holds together.
(27:46):
Our signature product, our first release product with Panova oil,
is the Aloha Bar. The Aloha Bar is a lovely
nutritional bar that takes the set of natural ingredients and
uses the Panova oil as the back bone that integrates them,
that holds them all together, so you don't get that
crumbly granola bar feel or that kind of tacky feel
(28:08):
you might get in other types of nutrition bars. The
other aspect that we like a lot is that while
it has a golden buttery flavor, it typically enhances in
cooked or in formulated applications some of the visual qualities.
So it browns beautifully for chefs who cook, it coats evenly,
(28:29):
and so you get a nice finish or crisp whether
again you're pan frying a chicken breast, making an egg
using the oil directly, or a formulator is looking for
an evenness in the quality of the product that they're
packaging up.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, you mentioned trace ability earlier when we were talking
about fuel, but you've also got the potential to tell
consumers about the shores and benefits that were created by
growing the product that made the the product that they're buying.
How are you trying to provide that environmental impact, social impact,
and regenerative benefits information to consumers.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
It's where people's minds and mindsets have shifted. We expect
to know not only everything we want to know about
the product we're using, but also where did it come
from and who touched it along the way? Right, you're wrongly,
we don't have the luxury of hiding that in commodities
(29:34):
and supply chains, and so we've partnered with companies who
want to lift that up. Aloha did that. Alha Foods
did that with their first bar product called the ConA Bar,
this nutrition bar that included Panova oil. And when they
released the bar, they did two things that were powerful.
They told the story of the farms in Hawaii where
(29:57):
we harvested the punkin beans and made them into the
Panova that went into that ConA bar. They told it
on the package visually showing the tree truly an image
of a bean and the tree and a lovely illustration
and there was a QR code where you could go
in on the back of pack, you know, if you
(30:17):
wanted to go to a website and see the actual
farm where the produce came from, to see the farmers
in Hawaii who were bringing it in. And so that
level of storytelling and partners who are committed to that
you are required if we're going to lift up the
kind of ingredients we want to use. By the way,
the market validated that this was one of their most
(30:39):
successful new product launches ever and they sell it at
a higher gross margin than conventional products. So what we
do know is that if accurate, sincere right, and consistent
with the values that the consumer has, consumers are willing
to pay a little bit more for something that they
(31:00):
believe is truly differentiated.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Well, yeah, there's a story there that makes the value
come to the fore for them. And here's one that
you're working with Florida and California browers who have lost
citrus trees. Is there an opportunity here to create a
regional food supply and use that storytelling to really get
people to buy into purchasing locally or regionally produced Panova product.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I think there is absolutely Mitch I think, particularly in
the case of Florida, Florida built a whole brand around
orange juice, not generically, but Florida's own. Florida's natural is
even a brand, right, which speaks to that. And the
way in which that can occur, in our view, is
(31:49):
that more and more the economics of moving product from
one part of the world around the world twice, you know,
to process it and to get it to an endmark
market are running into the realities of tariffs and trade
policy and supply chain shocks and high energy prices, right.
And so two reasons are in our view regionalizing production. One,
(32:14):
there's not a big differential in wages across the farming
world across the manufacturing world the way there was thirty
or forty years ago. Still gaps, still differences, but it's
not necessarily the big return by growing it in the
cheap place and selling it in the expensive place. The
second is you're seeing real efficiency in scaled regional production, right.
(32:39):
More and more, the big you know, you know, megaplants
that produce hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tons
of year grain or product, they don't carry the per
unit economic cost advantage. In fact, being able to book
out your plant in advance with customers who have more
stable pricing is attractive. So we could see Florida Panova products,
(33:04):
for example, tapping into the existing infrastructure in the orange
juice industry, right the same plants, the same storehouses. We
even use an old citrus packing house to have our
you know, small scale processing equipment for a lot of
our sampling and demo work. And we think as the
(33:25):
industry grows in Florida, those physical assets, the back hall
of transport right from the farm field to areas, will
be really valuable. And then you know, you have to
be a bit creative and you reimagine those products that
come from places. I'm often reminded that you even in
American agriculture, the face of areas like our you know
(33:48):
kind of great planes have changed over time. Right, what
used to produce oats to power the fuel of the
nineteenth century, you know, horses today produces corn and soil
that powers jet planes and puts foam into cushions and
also feeds lots of animals to make the hamburgers and
the you know, the chicken tenders that you know are
(34:10):
the backbone of our diet.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
I think that's a really inspiring way of thinking about
what we can do with the development of this entire
agricultural infrastructure that we are desperately needing to reorient to
the climate era. You mentioned earlier society's goal to be
net zero by twenty fifty. What's Curviva's goal to be
net zero? When will you or are you currently well
(34:35):
on the way toward being net zero or minimally impactful?
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, So to our own net zero goals. You know,
we're functionally a technology company, so we have that sort
of easy right as a team of around one hundred folks,
most of whom you end up working behind screens or
in labs or even in farming and nurser environments. We're
often transferring our technology to partners. Our footprint is pretty modest.
(35:07):
We spend a lot more time helping our partners think
about how they achieve their climate goals. I'll the two
areas of real focus for us today. One is on
scope three emissions for a lot of the big agri
companies food and agri companies around the world, and the
second is around how you accelerate the intermediate targets to
(35:29):
twenty thirty. So let's take those two in turn on three.
You know, if you were to go to the unilevers,
the Nestle's ninety five plus percent of their carbon footprint
is in their agricultural supply chain. It's really scary for them,
in particular because regardless of the local market politics, those
(35:50):
industry leading global firms have already set where they need
to be on the horizon line, and they have huge
incumbent brands and product categories rely on things like soy
and palm right to power those products, so they're not
easy to turn over. And those broad crop categories are
creating a lot of carbon overhang because again they need
(36:13):
more of them. All those markets are growing, and so
they need to not only address the existing base of
you know, billions of dollars of production, but also the
incremental growth they're going to drive by selling more of
the same and so having products where you can reformulate
with no real functional difference at a price that the
(36:34):
product can bear, but with a dramatically lower footprint. I mean,
we can have the footprint of soy without the indirect
land use contribution, because again we're working in areas that
are outside of the farming system. Minimally productive. That's really
important to them. So we're spending a lot of time
trying to think about how we migrate that scope three
(36:56):
system and then you know, to the to the point
of the intermediate goals. One of the challenges a lot
of firms have our everyone's thinking about twenty fifty, but
how do they get to twenty thirty forty percent reduction?
For example. One of the ways they can do it
is to start to allocate, to assign these low carbon
(37:17):
intensity fuels, for example, within their book of business their
own vers to the most forward leaning and so we
help them to match from our wild harvested sources supply
that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation,
we helped to match today, bringing thousands of tons of
product to bear for the customers they care most about,
(37:39):
and we kind of tip the scale right. We start
to be the leading indicator of what they can do
over the next twenty five years right in the first
five and help them to make the kind of big
gains early on the seventy five percent production by taking
the dirtiest piece of fossil they might have in their
energy mix out and putting in this super clean low
(38:01):
carbon intensity, you know with co benefit feedstock for the
customers they have right who have again the most forward
leaning targets for twenty thirty and so that's that's that strategy,
you know, where we're as an enabler an accelerant of decarbonization.
We feel like Turviva can be a great partner to
big organizations in the energy space like the Chevron's Mitsubishies
(38:25):
eat a mitsus in. In the food and agri.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Space, pangemia is quite a story and thank you for
starting to peel back some of the complexity of the tail.
How can people stay tuned to both your food and
fuel efforts.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Well as you move forward listeners and folks who care
about these topics. There'll be two areas where you'll see
Treviva doing more in Pungania doing The first is we
don't sneak up on anyone. So we're going to be
announcing some big planting commitments with product companies and landowners
(39:02):
and farming partners in areas of the world in particular India,
Southeast Asia, and Latin America in the next couple of years,
with an eye to growing our platforms that already exist
in the US, Australia and Belize. And the reason we're
doing that is really, you know, once we have a
basi of supply in each of these places, a whole
(39:24):
industry can grow up around it. The first thing you'll
see is commitments to farm, to bring high quality trees
that we have a lot of performance history on and
that we can produce in an affordable way to these
farming communities. The second thing you'll see is we'll start
to lift up the specific products for their low carbon
(39:44):
and social environmental benefit. The way that shows up and
food will be through Panova. Today it's Panova Oil. In
the next couple of years you'll start to see more
products with Panova protein. In the energy space. It will
be by having the story of pung the green oil
well the field to fuel story told. We think, as
(40:07):
you know some of our refinery partners do their first
deliveries of fuel to end customers, that you'll see more
of those aviation customers, in particular, tell the story. Our
CEO was recently featured in Hawaiian Airlines simply because Hawaiian
wanted to talk about the types of Pungamia trees that
were already growing in Hawaii that were coming as the
(40:29):
future source of fuel, the future source of food for
visitors who make that long trip wherever they're coming from
over and open ocean, and who want to have a
great time while they're on vacation but don't want to
do a lot of damage to get there. And so
that to me is the hope that listeners will start
to see those stories from us and start to expect
(40:51):
those stories from the kinds of solutions we're using in decarbonization.
Not enough to do less bad right, but to really
lift up the way we're re making and improving landscapes
and communities and all the places that we find.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Well, Mark, I hope that we achieved that vision. I
appreciate the time it took to tell us the story today.
It's been fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Thank you so much, Mitch, and to your listeners for
hanging on with us. I'm excited to share the story
of Terviva and Pongamia as we as we look ahead
and always open for these types of great exchanges.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
You've been listening to my conversation with Mark Diash of Treviva,
an ag tech innovator focused on developing food and fuel
from the Pongamia tree. Learn more about the company at
Turviva dot com and check out Panovafoods dot com to
find more information about the Panova oil, flour and oil
products that will be coming to market soon. You know,
(41:51):
we lived at time when the food supply is stressed
by drought, extreme weather, and soil depletion due to overfertilization
and destructive tilling practices. It's beginning a radical change in composition.
Add to that that demand for sustainable fuels to keep
society and supply chains moving, and it's clear the pongamia
is just one of many changes in the field that
(42:13):
we're going to see over the next two or three decades.
But change is what humans do. I mean, consider corn
or maize, as most of the world knows the grain.
It was introduced as a major crop only about one
hundred and fifty years ago. In fact, it rose with
the industrial era to become a global crop. One of
the first perhaps we will see the pongamia and other
potentially sustainable crops that can be used to make food
(42:35):
and fuel, including camelina, maringa, keernza or azola which is
an aquatic fern, become household staples. Something we all refer
to with the same familiarity that we do corn and wheat.
The pongamia is flexibility. It can be a field crop
that replaces orange production in California and Florida, as well
as an urban tree that could be harvested by urban
(42:55):
farmers while cooling their communities. That flexibility will be key
to developing a diverse, mixed cropping strategy that displaces the
increasingly fragile monocropped approach that can be disrupted by a
single pathogen, mold, or invasive insect. For example, among the
things that we count on today that are under threat
(43:16):
include wheat, rice, corn, and bananas. We could see the
pongamia grown as part of a polyculture, the mixing of
crops grown concurrently, or as part of regenerative strategies that
rely on the tree's shade to support an ecosystem of
crops grown amid Pongamia trees to provide a diverse food supply.
You know, Native Americans practice polyculture planting what they described
(43:37):
as the three sister crops maize, beans, and squash. Mixed
crops are more resistant to disease and pests. But we
need not just three sisters, but dozens of new plants
to step into the growing gaps in the industrial food supply,
So how do we reach scale. I think we can
find a lot of inspiration in what Mark described about
Terviva's work with women farmers in India. It's just one
(44:00):
example of starting at the bottom of the ladder and
cultivating a global market from the edges. With people gathering
pongamia beans for local use or to be shipped for
processing into fuel or food. The next generation of agricultural
crops will not replace one single plant with another single plant,
but intermixed with others in new combinations that fit local contexts.
(44:22):
We also need to think about balancing fuel production with
the demand for food, and that tradeoff may be the
hardest to negotiate. If fossil fuel companies shift entirely toward
fuel producing crops, they have the money to dominate agricultural planning,
and that could lead to another round of monocropping. But
we're not just talking about what grows in fields, and
that's where new food and fuel economies can be built.
(44:45):
Around other technologies, particularly biomanufacturing. We have the ability to
make foods including dairy fats, animal free proteins, sweeteners, and
many other valuable sources of nutrition along with fuel, often
from CO two captured from the atmosphere. The pongamia is
just one piece of a new food and fuel puzzle,
(45:06):
and many of those pieces are ready for widespread testing
and deployment. So stay tuned. We will continue to talk
with the people leading this Dare I say it revolution?
And would you take a moment to share this or
any of the more than five hundred episodes of Sustainability
in your Ear with one of your friends or family
right now? You know, writing a review on your favorite
(45:26):
podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. As I
say every week, folks, you're the amplifiers that can spread
more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family,
and coworkers that can find sustainability in your ear on
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible and whatever purveyor of podcast
(45:47):
goodness they prefer. Thanks, folks for your support. I'm Metracliff.
This is Earth nine one one's Sustainability in your Ear
and we will be back with another innovator interview soon.
In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of
one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful
planet of ours, have a green day.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host Metracliffe. Thank you for joining the conversation today.
As the climate and biodiversity crises accelerate, the world needs
(00:31):
solutions that actively regenerate ecosystems and communities. Terviva, an ag
temp company, has spent over a decade unlocking the potential
of the pongamia. It's a hardy tree that can restore
degraded land while creating low carbon food and fuel alternatives.
Mark Diaz, Treviva's chief commercialization officer, will join us for
(00:52):
a conversation about the potential for the pongamia in agriculture,
for food and sustainable aviation fuel. Mark brings decades experience
and sustainability in global markets, and we'll explore how the
pongamia is replacing citrus groves in California and Florida, empowering
women farmers in India, and proving that commercialization doesn't necessarily
(01:12):
require compromising climate impact or social equity. Through its Panova platform,
Treviva transforms wild harvested pangamia beans into healthy food ingredients
while building an equitable supply chain from India to Australia.
Recent partnerships with Chevron's Renewable Energy Group and Japan's Idimetsu
(01:33):
are scaling the pangamia for aviation and biofuel development, and
at the same time, Treviva's Panova Foods division is developing
regenerative ingredients for restaurants and food brands. You can learn
more at Terviva dot com and at Panovafoods dot com.
Panova Foods is all one word, no space, no dash,
panovafoods dot com. We'll get to the conversation right after
(01:56):
this brief commercial break. Welcome to the show. Mark, how
you doing today?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Doing great?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Niche Well, thank you for joining me. You know I've
spent some time doing research on the pongamia and the
beans it produces. It's a stately looking tree. But tell
us about the tree. What's it like to be in
the presence of a pagambia tree.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It's a marvelous tree, in part because it's a tree
of many colors. You find it as a street tree
in some of the world's most urban locations, whether you're
in Miami or Honolulu, or it's ancestral home in India.
The big cities of India are chocolate block with these
(02:43):
hearty vigors growing trees that have a beautiful pink flower
in the spring and produce these oil seeds you know,
these beans in a good abundance on an annual basis.
In the countryside, the tree is used traditionally in communities
as much of a boundary setting tree, as a shade
(03:07):
tree that you or I might have in our backyard.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
What makes it a unique and timely solution for both
food cultivation and fuel production.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
We're moving through a world that is increasingly unpredictable, and
this moment that we're experiencing in our wider world is
pitch perfect for the pongamea tree. The context for Turviva's
energy over the last fifteen years as a company organized
(03:37):
entirely around pongamia is to provide people with food and
energy from a natural solution that's resilient, that's adaptive, that
can deal with the shocks and the natural world, but
also in our broader environment, our politics, our trade, and
that's where pungamea really shines. It comes out of a
(03:59):
part of the world, in the monsoonal areas of the world,
in the subtropics, that is where more and more of
our farmland is going extremes of dry and wet, extremes
of heat and cold periods. And it's really that volatility
those extremes where pongamia can perform well, generate an abundant crop,
(04:23):
make use of permanent agriculture in a time in which
we have extremes of precipitation or temperature, and where we
need more efficiency, more yield from the same acre of
land and can't afford to rely on the traditional crops
that have gotten us here, the corn soils, for example,
(04:43):
the oil palms right that require lots of inputs and
increasingly create lots of complexity, not just to deliver when
the conditions aren't perfect, but also when our trade barriers
suddenly cut off whole regions of the world from affordable
access to supply well.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Now, one of the most important things it does is
restore the soil, and because it's a legame like a
pea plant, it helps move nitrogen into the soil. How
does that compare to other types of crops. Is the
Pondamia a superhero?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, you know, we call it a super tree in
part because it's a legging as you said, and it
fixes that nitrogen in a symbiotic way with the soils.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
So, the great bargain it makes is by making its
own biology accessible. It's a five or seven meter tall plant.
It's bringing all of those photosynthetic sugars into the soil system.
It's getting you know, the nitrogen exchange it needs. But
it's also got a few other superpowers that we like
(05:49):
to talk about. One is it's got a powerful root system,
both a surface spreading root and a deep tap root
that helped to create a more permeable soil strata and
allow water to be recharged but also to be distributed
within the soil for the trees use in a way
(06:11):
that's more flexible, more adaptive to those periods of dry
and wet that you find in monsoonal regions. Additionally, we
focus a lot on its natural bioactives. These bioactives are
functionally defenses that the tree is accumulated over millions of
years of evolution. They taste bitter. They taste bitter to
(06:34):
you or I if we were to eat one of
the beans off the field, and they taste bitter to
pests and to the things that often prey on plants
in the natural world. So because those adaptive compounds are there,
they reduce the need for things like pesticides, right, which
have those follow on effects that are negative in the
(06:55):
environmental context, but also cost a lot if you're a
commercial producer. Like that basket of the resilience the soil strengthening,
the water storage and water management capacity, and the fact
that you have more biodiversity in the field, more resilience
in the plant because of those bioactives.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Okay, so I see how it can be a major
contributor to introducing more regenerative agricultural practices. But how do
you know one crop, one monol crop isn't a solution
either does How does the pogamia coexist with other plants
and potentially agricultural products that people might be looking for.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, great, great point. We think there's a world of
incremental production that we need. So we're in all of
the above, advocate, we need to find a way to
steward all the corn and soil and calm we already have,
because that's already spoken for. But people are going to
need a lot more calories, a lot more electrons to
(07:58):
move and to live in the ways that many of
us get to live and move today as the population grows.
And so part of this is bringing areas that are
out of production into production. I'll give you an example.
You know, one of the places I know well is Florida,
State of Florida in the US, and I was a
(08:18):
kid who grew up there in the nineteen eighties, you know,
drinking my fair share of orange juice every day. And
in the year two thousand million acres of citrus was
available for production in Florida. Citrus greening disease and a
strong shift in markets for orange juice, which is the
primary product those oranges were delivering, has resulted in three
(08:41):
quarters of those acres going away. The seven hundred and
fifty thousand acres are available in a tough climate where
there aren't a lot of obvious alternatives. People have tried
annual crops, people have tried other tree crops, and they
don't work so well. Pangamia drops into that land which
would otherwise be unavailable for food and energy production. And
(09:03):
that's an example of one of the things we need
to do to find those underused pieces of land and
bring them back into production and bring them into more
abundant production. The second thing to your point on what
do we grow alongside pongamia is to get more imaginative
around how we govern our farm fields. We luckily get
(09:24):
to turn to traditional communities that work with pongamia today.
So in India where we do work directly with farmers
who are already working with pongamia, we see two different
approaches to making pungamia part of a system. One is
what we would call agroforestry truly, where you're alternating the
crop with other crops three crops, and pongamia is no different.
(09:47):
Take a few years to establish a harvestable yield. In
those early years you get a lot of light and
a lot of resources still coming to the farm field.
So we plant annual crops that are regionally specific. In
some parts of the world, it could be a commodity
like sorghum, it could be a fresh fruit and vegetable
like pineapple, and as the trees come up and get
(10:08):
more economically producted, you can turn that cycle over to
more reliance on the pongamia. The other thing we see
is an intercropping where you're genuinely going to keep different
crops in production in a consistent way. Another example we
draw on from traditional communities is coffee production in India,
(10:30):
where you've got a shade tree in the form of
pongamia with an understory, a coffee production that can benefit
the legium fixing. Additional nitrogen in the soil benefits the
coffee tree that also needs the shade to be productive.
So we'll see more of those types of systems in
the future, we believe, not only in traditional communities places
(10:54):
like India, but also in more commercial agriculture geographies like
the US.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
In Australia, I was impressed by the way that you're
working with smallholder farmers, particularly women in India and paying
above market wages. How do you work with those farmers.
What's the program consist of?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Well, it starts with buying what the farmer makes today,
and that's where we begin. We buy the harvest that
they either cultivate from their community trees or that they
go into the wild harvest right the public forest areas
to gather and to sell. And when you help a
(11:33):
farmer make a living today, they're much more interested in
building a long term relationship with you tomorrow, and so
it's really engaging them today in their traditional collections, which
might be as little as a few dozen kilo. You know,
a small regional group of women who might aggregate supply
and have a ton or two, and we help connect
(11:56):
them to higher value markets so we can afford to
pay more or in part because we take the attributes
of what they do when we make them visible to
the market. In the energy markets, for example, oil seeds
are used as an input to make liquid fuels things
like sustainable aviation fuel, renewable diesel, and there's real concern
(12:17):
that if you're taking soybeans that are displacing habitat to
put in a jet plane, that you're contributing to climate
change as much as you're providing an alternative to a
fossil fuel. So we trace end to end the community
level collections that we deliver to ultimately the end refiner,
(12:41):
and for making that traced connection, the end refiner has
greater confidence and has customers who want that confidence that
we're not displacing a natural area and contributing to climate
change on the back end, and they pay a premium.
We do that with certifications, which enables us to then
deliver that extra value back in the purchase price and
(13:02):
to the market participants along the way store and crush
and make those end products. So that's the real intention there,
so that we can be engaged in the conversation of
purpose planted acres and growing more cultivation in a long
term relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Well, and as I listened to you in the range
of yields that you're talking about, it sounds like you
could even integrate urban farming into this because these trees
could provide shade, reduce heat effect and so forth while
producing the fruit. How should we think about recalibrating not
just our agricultural land, but our entire landscape to be
(13:42):
consistently regenerative in the cities and in the country as
we shift into this new era.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
You know, it's a thoughtful prompt, manch The absence of
imagination is not a permanent human condition. Sometimes the stress
and the scarcity we experience pushes us to see things
in areas where we haven't. I'll give you two quick examples.
(14:11):
One are boundary plantations. Traditionally in large monoculture, you know,
agricultural enterprises. We've seen a focus on a core farm landscape,
and then there's the farm roads and the boundary areas.
We do a lot of work in Northeast India and
the tea plantation region where you can travel for miles
(14:32):
and tea estates that have been planted the same way
for one hundred and fifty years. It turns out that
they have been planting pongamia incidentally almost as a boundary
plantation to the road soils right from putting all of
that material into the edge of the tea plantation, reducing erosion,
(14:53):
to gather water and prevent flooding for the transport and
the effective management of a broader orchard system. And they realize, geez,
these trees thrive on the edge of fields because they
get some of the runoff, because they get lots of light.
They're great wind breaks that make the tea plantation, the
core plantation more productive. And some of our partners have
(15:14):
already begun taking those leave, the leaf litter and the
bean pods from the pongamea trees and tapping them for
those bioactive compounds to provide a national natural pest protection
to spray back on their tea lead. Interesting, so you
see organically right, a system coming. If we can deliver
(15:38):
them consistently high yielding trees, they have a secondary crop. Similarly,
if you look at you so that that's that sort
of edge system, and inda the state of Florida, you
see the growth as you see in many areas traditional
agriculture of renewable energy Florida happens to be solar panels
(16:01):
because it's the sunshine steak. When you put a solar
array in, you're tilting it in a particular orientation to
maximize the sun exposure, and regulation says you can only
make it so big, and then you end up with
all these leftover parcels, right, these odd block bits and
pieces that traditionally we're too small to farm on their own,
(16:21):
but taken together as a portfolio, these little triangles, these
sort of little end pieces could be highly productive orchards
just distributed again, not in a traditional monocrop block. And
so we're working with partners like those who haven't traditionally
thought about those edge areas, those interstitial spaces as places
(16:46):
to farm, and we're having both secondary crops having incremental
sources or revenue, turning the cost of land management into
the benefit of farming, you bring more crop into production,
and that's really exciting for us.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
It's really a fascinating vision of a great green fill
in that takes advantage of all the waste that we
have built into the structure of our cities and our communities.
I want to take a quick commercial break, but where
you want to come back and talk a lot more.
Thinks Mark will be right back. Now. Let's get back
(17:24):
to the discussion with Mark Diaz. He's chief commercialization officer
at Treviva. It's a food and biofuels innovation company that
has adopted the pongamia tree as the basis for its
regenerative agricultural programs and it's aimed at low income farmers
in India and recently the United States. So, Mark, one
of the things that I noticed is you've just signed
(17:45):
deals with Chevron and Iamitsu. They've invested in scaling pangamia
cultivation for biofuel and to make sustainable aviation. Fueller saff
What are these partnerships enable for Taviva that wasn't possible before.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Pongimo many tree crops is really a generational investment, So
you need to be looking at the product you want
to deliver the money you want to make and the
change you want to have in the world over a
twenty five thirty year period, and so we needed big
global partners who had that same decision making time frame
(18:21):
and the resources to operate on a generational scale. I'm
so grateful for groups like Chevron, need A, Mitsu, and
Mitsubishi whove all invested interview this business system because that
twenty five year time period lines up with our twenty
fifty goals for net zero. As a global community. Sometimes
(18:41):
you got to be lucky and good, and we think
we're both to be offering a crop in this market
moment where we're still too far away from pure electrification
where we won't need liquid fuels to help us fly
our big planes to help us manage which are large
industrial equipment things for example like it Emitsu might use
(19:05):
in the mining sector where they own direct minds that
they use to provision the products the inputs that we
need to make the steel and and and you know
other types of development uh focused end products that that
are going to be needed you know over the generations
to come same same on. You know, Chevron being able
(19:27):
to provide low cost, low carbon jet fuel to comply
with the global community that says we want to move
to net zero on aviation by the middle of the century,
and we also want to fly more people than ever
before longer distances, and so the drop in replacement of
(19:48):
our existing fossil based jet fuel system is essential if
we want to keep things like transport affordable accessible. So
so those partners say, here's a new source of supply
with a carbon footprint that's seventy five percent lower than
the fossil standard that creates these code benefits in communities
(20:13):
like we were talking about in the last segment. Also,
I can match over the next twenty five years my
source of supply. I basically get a green oil well,
which is a really familiar business to them.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Right, continue yield too.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Exactly right. So I've got a tree that I can
point to look at know is there. I have a
predictable amount of yield because I've partnered with Terniva that's
got a track record of planting and delivering these same trees,
this team of super trees that as a system deliver
that yield year in and year out because they're resilient
(20:51):
whether it's a hotter year or a cooler year. Whether
it's a wetter year or a drier year, within reasonable
system boundaries. Right, we as a partnerh ship set, the
agriatech company, the big global distributor come together and help
work our way responsibly through this transition. And that's the
exciting vision they're helping us lift up right now.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
One of the things that comes up every time we
talk about a biofuel or a sustainable aviation biofuel is
the competition between the years of agricultural land for fuel
production and for human food consumption. How do you make
decisions and balance the sustainability values of TRABBA with the
(21:34):
operational goals of these large partners like Chevron, arad to Mitche.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
It's an important point to hold. We focus on it
at the level of every being we produce and every
field we plant, At the level of every being we
produce our pongamia oil seed. Our being is one third
oil and two thirds high protein flour. That's an important country.
(22:00):
So every time you add upon gama a tree into
the food system and harvest a bean, you're adding one
part potential biofuel feedstock and two parts human or animal food.
And that's no small thing. We need that contribution of
incremental yield, and we do it off of a five
meter tall platform that compared to let's say a soybean,
(22:23):
which is a similar type of crop only a meter tall,
an annual crop that also discharges carbon every time you
cut it down each year. We hold that higher yield
breaker over a longer period of time without that negative
carbon attribution. The second thing we think about is every
field we plant. If we go in and plant in
(22:46):
the area where we're competing with where a great food
crop could grow, we're not making a net contribution. So
the superpower of our tree is in fact to take
land that's on the sidelines off the sidelines because it's
called a waste land, it's desertified, it's traditionally outside of
(23:06):
the boundaries of the heat profile or the water profile
right for a more conventional crop, or because there are
pressures in the environment from pests, from degraded, depleted soils
that can't be overcome. 'll give you an example. We're
working with colleagues in Belize who are cultivating sugar cane
(23:28):
at a large scale. They're really energized about the idea
of using pongamia to revitalize land where the sugar cane
they're producing has had significant declines in yield through depleted soils,
and an absence of revitalization will help them to strengthen
back those soils and take them as marginally areas of
(23:50):
production out and a generation from now they may choose
to put those back into sugar cane production without having
sacrifice productivity, adding human food into the system and also energy.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
So let's talk about the food products. But that can
be produced from pangamia. You mentioned the flower, so what
could the flour be used for? I know it's a
high protein flower too.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
It's a great flower that has a few interesting characteristics.
The first is, as you noted, the nutritional balance a
high protein flower in a time where I don't know
about you, but every isle of the grocery store they
seem to be trying to pack the protein in everything
I'm eating from my pastas where this is a great
(24:38):
high protein but also it's quite resilient in its form,
a gluten like property without those gluten attributes that you know,
cause the upset stomach or simply you know, don't agree
with people's dietary choices. What does that mean if you
get something like preps like a chickpea, flower, lentil flour
(25:01):
into a pasta. You boil it up and you notice
it kind of has either that sort of fiber's quality
or kind of breaks apart. Pongamia is a flour has
that balance that hold together, that firmness that we all
like al dente. And so that's an example of one
of the products where we're really shining, and it speaks
(25:22):
to the functionality and the nutrition of the flour. Another
thing that we think about is we're adding protein to
new forms of plant based foods, and so you're looking
for something that might have good water holding capacity if
you need to be in a beverage and that's a
place where a high protein beverage ripple is made with
(25:46):
yellow pea. Again, you've got to put a lot of
stuff into that and shake it up really well to
keep it in suspension and to integrate well. We find
our plant protein does a great job in those types
of applications.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Now, you mentioned that the trees bioactive ingredients are bitter.
What's the smell or flavor profile of the pangamia oil
and have you tested this with chefs and product developers,
what's their feelings about it?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Sure? And so in nature you'll find the pongamia tree
has a kind of a pungent quality, a very kind
of back of your mouth sort of snap to it.
And so what we've done is we've used existing food
processing technology and systems to be able to dial that down.
(26:38):
And by dialing that down, we've gotten it to a
level that has this preserves this beautiful golden color. For example,
in the pungamy oil. When we've dialed down the flavor
profile and made it golden, we call it panova. We've
taken a strategy that reape seed and Canola did to
distinguish the wild crop of rape seed from canola the
(26:58):
oil that you were I could go to the store
and get. So we've got it dialed down, but we
haven't gotten rid of it. We didn't want to make
a vanilla corn oil soy oil kind of you know,
buy your ankles in the grocery store type of product.
And we consulted all sorts of chefs from you know,
folks who work in hook cuisine to folks who formulate
(27:22):
for the big package food companies, and they said, can
you get me something that's beautiful? And so our oil
is jewel like a gorgeous amber glow. Can you get
me something that plays well with other ingredients? So we do.
Ours has two qualities that chefs and formulators lift up.
A buttery mouth feel. It coats, it integrates, it holds together.
(27:46):
Our signature product, our first release product with Panova oil,
is the Aloha Bar. The Aloha Bar is a lovely
nutritional bar that takes the set of natural ingredients and
uses the Panova oil as the back bone that integrates them,
that holds them all together, so you don't get that
crumbly granola bar feel or that kind of tacky feel
(28:08):
you might get in other types of nutrition bars. The
other aspect that we like a lot is that while
it has a golden buttery flavor, it typically enhances in
cooked or in formulated applications some of the visual qualities.
So it browns beautifully for chefs who cook, it coats evenly,
(28:29):
and so you get a nice finish or crisp whether
again you're pan frying a chicken breast, making an egg
using the oil directly, or a formulator is looking for
an evenness in the quality of the product that they're
packaging up.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, you mentioned trace ability earlier when we were talking
about fuel, but you've also got the potential to tell
consumers about the shores and benefits that were created by
growing the product that made the the product that they're buying.
How are you trying to provide that environmental impact, social impact,
and regenerative benefits information to consumers.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
It's where people's minds and mindsets have shifted. We expect
to know not only everything we want to know about
the product we're using, but also where did it come
from and who touched it along the way? Right, you're wrongly,
we don't have the luxury of hiding that in commodities
(29:34):
and supply chains, and so we've partnered with companies who
want to lift that up. Aloha did that. Alha Foods
did that with their first bar product called the ConA Bar,
this nutrition bar that included Panova oil. And when they
released the bar, they did two things that were powerful.
They told the story of the farms in Hawaii where
(29:57):
we harvested the punkin beans and made them into the
Panova that went into that ConA bar. They told it
on the package visually showing the tree truly an image
of a bean and the tree and a lovely illustration
and there was a QR code where you could go
in on the back of pack, you know, if you
(30:17):
wanted to go to a website and see the actual
farm where the produce came from, to see the farmers
in Hawaii who were bringing it in. And so that
level of storytelling and partners who are committed to that
you are required if we're going to lift up the
kind of ingredients we want to use. By the way,
the market validated that this was one of their most
(30:39):
successful new product launches ever and they sell it at
a higher gross margin than conventional products. So what we
do know is that if accurate, sincere right, and consistent
with the values that the consumer has, consumers are willing
to pay a little bit more for something that they
(31:00):
believe is truly differentiated.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Well, yeah, there's a story there that makes the value
come to the fore for them. And here's one that
you're working with Florida and California browers who have lost
citrus trees. Is there an opportunity here to create a
regional food supply and use that storytelling to really get
people to buy into purchasing locally or regionally produced Panova product.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I think there is absolutely Mitch I think, particularly in
the case of Florida, Florida built a whole brand around
orange juice, not generically, but Florida's own. Florida's natural is
even a brand, right, which speaks to that. And the
way in which that can occur, in our view, is
(31:49):
that more and more the economics of moving product from
one part of the world around the world twice, you know,
to process it and to get it to an endmark
market are running into the realities of tariffs and trade
policy and supply chain shocks and high energy prices, right.
And so two reasons are in our view regionalizing production. One,
(32:14):
there's not a big differential in wages across the farming
world across the manufacturing world the way there was thirty
or forty years ago. Still gaps, still differences, but it's
not necessarily the big return by growing it in the
cheap place and selling it in the expensive place. The
second is you're seeing real efficiency in scaled regional production, right.
(32:39):
More and more, the big you know, you know, megaplants
that produce hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tons
of year grain or product, they don't carry the per
unit economic cost advantage. In fact, being able to book
out your plant in advance with customers who have more
stable pricing is attractive. So we could see Florida Panova products,
(33:04):
for example, tapping into the existing infrastructure in the orange
juice industry, right the same plants, the same storehouses. We
even use an old citrus packing house to have our
you know, small scale processing equipment for a lot of
our sampling and demo work. And we think as the
(33:25):
industry grows in Florida, those physical assets, the back hall
of transport right from the farm field to areas, will
be really valuable. And then you know, you have to
be a bit creative and you reimagine those products that
come from places. I'm often reminded that you even in
American agriculture, the face of areas like our you know
(33:48):
kind of great planes have changed over time. Right, what
used to produce oats to power the fuel of the
nineteenth century, you know, horses today produces corn and soil
that powers jet planes and puts foam into cushions and
also feeds lots of animals to make the hamburgers and
the you know, the chicken tenders that you know are
(34:10):
the backbone of our diet.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
I think that's a really inspiring way of thinking about
what we can do with the development of this entire
agricultural infrastructure that we are desperately needing to reorient to
the climate era. You mentioned earlier society's goal to be
net zero by twenty fifty. What's Curviva's goal to be
net zero? When will you or are you currently well
(34:35):
on the way toward being net zero or minimally impactful?
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, So to our own net zero goals. You know,
we're functionally a technology company, so we have that sort
of easy right as a team of around one hundred folks,
most of whom you end up working behind screens or
in labs or even in farming and nurser environments. We're
often transferring our technology to partners. Our footprint is pretty modest.
(35:07):
We spend a lot more time helping our partners think
about how they achieve their climate goals. I'll the two
areas of real focus for us today. One is on
scope three emissions for a lot of the big agri
companies food and agri companies around the world, and the
second is around how you accelerate the intermediate targets to
(35:29):
twenty thirty. So let's take those two in turn on three.
You know, if you were to go to the unilevers,
the Nestle's ninety five plus percent of their carbon footprint
is in their agricultural supply chain. It's really scary for them,
in particular because regardless of the local market politics, those
(35:50):
industry leading global firms have already set where they need
to be on the horizon line, and they have huge
incumbent brands and product categories rely on things like soy
and palm right to power those products, so they're not
easy to turn over. And those broad crop categories are
creating a lot of carbon overhang because again they need
(36:13):
more of them. All those markets are growing, and so
they need to not only address the existing base of
you know, billions of dollars of production, but also the
incremental growth they're going to drive by selling more of
the same and so having products where you can reformulate
with no real functional difference at a price that the
(36:34):
product can bear, but with a dramatically lower footprint. I mean,
we can have the footprint of soy without the indirect
land use contribution, because again we're working in areas that
are outside of the farming system. Minimally productive. That's really
important to them. So we're spending a lot of time
trying to think about how we migrate that scope three
(36:56):
system and then you know, to the to the point
of the intermediate goals. One of the challenges a lot
of firms have our everyone's thinking about twenty fifty, but
how do they get to twenty thirty forty percent reduction?
For example. One of the ways they can do it
is to start to allocate, to assign these low carbon
(37:17):
intensity fuels, for example, within their book of business their
own vers to the most forward leaning and so we
help them to match from our wild harvested sources supply
that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation,
we helped to match today, bringing thousands of tons of
product to bear for the customers they care most about,
(37:39):
and we kind of tip the scale right. We start
to be the leading indicator of what they can do
over the next twenty five years right in the first
five and help them to make the kind of big
gains early on the seventy five percent production by taking
the dirtiest piece of fossil they might have in their
energy mix out and putting in this super clean low
(38:01):
carbon intensity, you know with co benefit feedstock for the
customers they have right who have again the most forward
leaning targets for twenty thirty and so that's that's that strategy,
you know, where we're as an enabler an accelerant of decarbonization.
We feel like Turviva can be a great partner to
big organizations in the energy space like the Chevron's Mitsubishies
(38:25):
eat a mitsus in. In the food and agri.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Space, pangemia is quite a story and thank you for
starting to peel back some of the complexity of the tail.
How can people stay tuned to both your food and
fuel efforts.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Well as you move forward listeners and folks who care
about these topics. There'll be two areas where you'll see
Treviva doing more in Pungania doing The first is we
don't sneak up on anyone. So we're going to be
announcing some big planting commitments with product companies and landowners
(39:02):
and farming partners in areas of the world in particular India,
Southeast Asia, and Latin America in the next couple of years,
with an eye to growing our platforms that already exist
in the US, Australia and Belize. And the reason we're
doing that is really, you know, once we have a
basi of supply in each of these places, a whole
(39:24):
industry can grow up around it. The first thing you'll
see is commitments to farm, to bring high quality trees
that we have a lot of performance history on and
that we can produce in an affordable way to these
farming communities. The second thing you'll see is we'll start
to lift up the specific products for their low carbon
(39:44):
and social environmental benefit. The way that shows up and
food will be through Panova. Today it's Panova Oil. In
the next couple of years you'll start to see more
products with Panova protein. In the energy space. It will
be by having the story of pung the green oil
well the field to fuel story told. We think, as
(40:07):
you know some of our refinery partners do their first
deliveries of fuel to end customers, that you'll see more
of those aviation customers, in particular, tell the story. Our
CEO was recently featured in Hawaiian Airlines simply because Hawaiian
wanted to talk about the types of Pungamia trees that
were already growing in Hawaii that were coming as the
(40:29):
future source of fuel, the future source of food for
visitors who make that long trip wherever they're coming from
over and open ocean, and who want to have a
great time while they're on vacation but don't want to
do a lot of damage to get there. And so
that to me is the hope that listeners will start
to see those stories from us and start to expect
(40:51):
those stories from the kinds of solutions we're using in decarbonization.
Not enough to do less bad right, but to really
lift up the way we're re making and improving landscapes
and communities and all the places that we find.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Well, Mark, I hope that we achieved that vision. I
appreciate the time it took to tell us the story today.
It's been fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Thank you so much, Mitch, and to your listeners for
hanging on with us. I'm excited to share the story
of Terviva and Pongamia as we as we look ahead
and always open for these types of great exchanges.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
You've been listening to my conversation with Mark Diash of Treviva,
an ag tech innovator focused on developing food and fuel
from the Pongamia tree. Learn more about the company at
Turviva dot com and check out Panovafoods dot com to
find more information about the Panova oil, flour and oil
products that will be coming to market soon. You know,
(41:51):
we lived at time when the food supply is stressed
by drought, extreme weather, and soil depletion due to overfertilization
and destructive tilling practices. It's beginning a radical change in composition.
Add to that that demand for sustainable fuels to keep
society and supply chains moving, and it's clear the pongamia
is just one of many changes in the field that
(42:13):
we're going to see over the next two or three decades.
But change is what humans do. I mean, consider corn
or maize, as most of the world knows the grain.
It was introduced as a major crop only about one
hundred and fifty years ago. In fact, it rose with
the industrial era to become a global crop. One of
the first perhaps we will see the pongamia and other
potentially sustainable crops that can be used to make food
(42:35):
and fuel, including camelina, maringa, keernza or azola which is
an aquatic fern, become household staples. Something we all refer
to with the same familiarity that we do corn and wheat.
The pongamia is flexibility. It can be a field crop
that replaces orange production in California and Florida, as well
as an urban tree that could be harvested by urban
(42:55):
farmers while cooling their communities. That flexibility will be key
to developing a diverse, mixed cropping strategy that displaces the
increasingly fragile monocropped approach that can be disrupted by a
single pathogen, mold, or invasive insect. For example, among the
things that we count on today that are under threat
(43:16):
include wheat, rice, corn, and bananas. We could see the
pongamia grown as part of a polyculture, the mixing of
crops grown concurrently, or as part of regenerative strategies that
rely on the tree's shade to support an ecosystem of
crops grown amid Pongamia trees to provide a diverse food supply.
You know, Native Americans practice polyculture planting what they described
(43:37):
as the three sister crops maize, beans, and squash. Mixed
crops are more resistant to disease and pests. But we
need not just three sisters, but dozens of new plants
to step into the growing gaps in the industrial food supply,
So how do we reach scale. I think we can
find a lot of inspiration in what Mark described about
Terviva's work with women farmers in India. It's just one
(44:00):
example of starting at the bottom of the ladder and
cultivating a global market from the edges. With people gathering
pongamia beans for local use or to be shipped for
processing into fuel or food. The next generation of agricultural
crops will not replace one single plant with another single plant,
but intermixed with others in new combinations that fit local contexts.
(44:22):
We also need to think about balancing fuel production with
the demand for food, and that tradeoff may be the
hardest to negotiate. If fossil fuel companies shift entirely toward
fuel producing crops, they have the money to dominate agricultural planning,
and that could lead to another round of monocropping. But
we're not just talking about what grows in fields, and
that's where new food and fuel economies can be built.
(44:45):
Around other technologies, particularly biomanufacturing. We have the ability to
make foods including dairy fats, animal free proteins, sweeteners, and
many other valuable sources of nutrition along with fuel, often
from CO two captured from the atmosphere. The pongamia is
just one piece of a new food and fuel puzzle,
(45:06):
and many of those pieces are ready for widespread testing
and deployment. So stay tuned. We will continue to talk
with the people leading this Dare I say it revolution?
And would you take a moment to share this or
any of the more than five hundred episodes of Sustainability
in your Ear with one of your friends or family
right now? You know, writing a review on your favorite
(45:26):
podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. As I
say every week, folks, you're the amplifiers that can spread
more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family,
and coworkers that can find sustainability in your ear on
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible and whatever purveyor of podcast
(45:47):
goodness they prefer. Thanks, folks for your support. I'm Metracliff.
This is Earth nine one one's Sustainability in your Ear
and we will be back with another innovator interview soon.
In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of
one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful
planet of ours, have a green day.
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