Healthy Soil, Healthy Food

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now, the podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to Sashti Balasundaram, the founder and CEO of WeRadiate, a New York State company, that’s developed a systematic data-driven approach to improving soil nutrient levels. WeRadiate was awarded a $250,000 prize from the Grow New York Food and Ag Competition in 2021 and was also the recipient of a FuzeHub Award in 2018. In addition, WeRadiate has been involved with Launch, new York Scale for Climate Tech and NYSERDA. Sashti, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.

Sashti Balasundaram: Thanks, Steve, pleasure to connect and reconnect.

Steve Melito: You betcha. So Sashti, tell us about yourself. How did you become interested in soil?

Sashti Balasundaram: So my background is in public health, specifically environmental health, and in that space just interested in water issues or air issues, and was just trying to figure out what is the best pathway in this space. I became interested in soil, learning that 95% of the food that we eat you know, eat globally comes from soil itself. So essentially the nutrients that we’re putting into our bodies is coming from the soil and that has connections with so many items such as health or economics, financial, environmental. So I think that’s where I was very keen and interested in sort of how can I revitalize soil and to that extent, and that’s sort of where the idea of WeRadiate came forth.

Steve Melito: Yeah, soil is super important. It’s not just dirt. So how does soil become degraded and why is that a problem?

Sashti Balasundaram: There’s a couple of reasons. So they have estimated that we have 50 years left to grow food on arable land. So they meaning the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, the World Economic Forum so they’ve put out this research that the nutrient levels, or the nutrients in our current food is very, very low. So the saying that we’ve heard of is an apple a day keeps the doctor away. That might have been true 50 years ago, but we’ve depleted so much of our nutrients or vitamins and minerals. It’s now almost five apples a day that we need to eat to get that same nutrient level from 50 years back. And a couple of reasons can be due to excessive fertilizer use, pesticide use, compaction of the soil, monocropping. So we as a company are trying to figure out how do we put nutrients back into soil, and that’s sort of what we do both on a technology end and the services end as well.

Steve Melito: I see, and let’s talk about composting a little bit, so it seems simple enough. A lot of people do it at home, myself included, but what’s so challenging about it that someone would want a technology-driven solution?

Sashti Balasundaram: Cool. So the example was I do it in my backyard. That’s wonderful, that’s awesome. Now let’s think about scaling it up. So we work with larger scale facilities, government facilities, industrial facilities where there’s usually one or two or three people at most, processing essentially tons and tons and tons of whether it’s manure, food scraps, horticultural debris, in tons and tons of whether it’s manure, food scraps, horticultural debris. And doing it correctly, efficiently, is a science. So the science is pretty simple it’s water, air and getting the right ratio of carbon and nitrogen. But, if you do it incorrectly, that’s when a lot of issues can come and arise. So if you do it incorrectly, there’s issues with odor and smells which can actually shut down facilities due to odor complaints. There’s issues with rodents, there’s issues with pathogens and pests. So temperature monitoring is something we do and that is important because we could minimize E coli, minimize salmonella, which could obviously cause some issues with health. There’s also standards. We want to create highest quality standards, not only for, maybe, use for growing food, for organic certification. So that’s what we sort of do in terms of how do we improve the operations through technology, through science.

Steve Melito: Got it. So let’s stick with technology, and can you tell us more about the technology that you’ve developed? In other words, what are the components, how does it work and does it require specialized training to use?

Sashti Balasundaram: Cool. So our business model is a hardware B2B SaaS. If people don’t know what that means, SaaS is software as a subscription service. So we have sensors that are in the field tracking important variables and our business model is that data. So that is the really key, important piece of having that data for regulatory compliance, for reporting, so that’s sort of that software hardware angle. And we manufacture essentially locally. So we have really strong New York State-based stakeholders, strategic partners helping us build and scale, and we’re doing that this year in 2024. Something unique to us we are also incorporating a theme called DFS, which is Design for Sustainability. So we are in the sector called waste, but we don’t want to create products that are wasteful. So in our hardware we want to be able to refurbish, recycle or repair almost 100% of our building materials. So that’s something that’s special for us that we’re looking for additional funding for. So that’s something that’s special for us that we’re looking for additional funding for. But we know that’s a value of ours and something that’s unique where, let’s say, some farmers or clients don’t want to have old equipment, so that’s when we could pull that from the field, repair it and maybe give it to a community organization and in terms of training, we provide training at a number of different levels. We have workshops, we have educational curriculum. We also can go on site to teach and train the compost operators throughout our contracts with them.

Steve Melito: That’s fantastic, and you mentioned that you’re looking for grants, opportunities like that, and I’m confident that you’ll find them, because you’ve been a really good user of the New York State innovation ecosystem. How has that ecosystem helped you to advance your technology?

Sashti Balasundaram: Yeah, you mentioned some of the partners in the past. So FuzeHub helped us with working with an entity in Rochester who helped really innovate on a low volume manufacturing production line, which is very unusual for startups but very beneficial. So that entity with few sub-fundings, artworks, was helping us design and do really small, like a couple of dozen runs at a time, which is great for us to improve and increase that. So based on that initial grant, we now can do runs of 50, 100 at a time for various clients. NextCore has been amazing. We have an office in Rochester with NextCore. The Scale for Climate Tech team, as you mentioned, grow New York, who, when we won that award, we were able to leverage additional funding, almost another $200,000 in grant funding just based on that initial $250,000 award. So thank you for them. And then NYSERDA has been awesome with giving us mentorship guidance on a lot of different themes like fundraising, grant applications, business modeling, finance modeling. So NYSERDA ecosystem was wonderful. And then really our sort of strong allies with MCCI, who is based in Ithaca. They’re our hardware and software team strategic partner. Tresca Design is now helping us out. They’re based in Buffalo and they’re helping us assemble and even ship out a lot of our units together. So that’s all in New York State.

Steve Melito: That is a lot. So you mentioned clients and I’d like to talk about them a little bit. Who are some of the people and organizations that have used your technology so far?

Sashti Balasundaram: Yeah, so essentially our markets are working with farms and farmers. There’s government agencies and also parks. So locally to New York State right now we actually have clients across eight states, but those located in New York. In Troy, there is the town of Bethlehem which collects food scraps and horticulture materials. So they’re a client of ours as of last year and now in the future. So we’re just signing on to a second and third year. A big one that you know is actually PepsiCo. It’s a public company. They are using our equipment and platform for research on compostable packaging, so they’re trying to move in that direction with new materials. Farms as well. So in central New York and western New York there’s two farms that are wanting to create their own soil amendments or compost for feeding back into growing food. These include taproot fields in central New York and also Journey’s End, which is in Buffalo, and then also parks. So we also are in Manhattan. Hudson River Park is a state park that’s actually on the west side of Manhattan, so they have a compost operator that collects, I think, 5,000 pounds of material every single week, and so one operation, one person show using our equipment to help them improve their operations.

Steve Melito: That’s great, and earlier you had shared with me some information about a farm, I believe operated by some refugees. Would you like to talk about that as well?

Sashti Balasundaram: Cool. So that is the Journey’s End Farm in Buffalo, new York. So this is an environmental justice area. It is an area considered as a food desert through the USDA, but in sort of common terms now it’s considered maybe a food apartheid location. So what that term is, if you’re not familiar, is these are policies that are ingrained locally, that sort of make it difficult for access to healthy food and just cause more health issues if food is not readily available or affordable. So we’ve been working with them for three years, throughout pandemic and now, and we help them create the infrastructure for a composting system. Along with that, we train their farmers, and these farmers they’re new Americans, so they’re pretty much brand new and Buffalo is their new home. They’re refugees from potentially Bhutan, Nepal, Africa, South America, that in their home countries they were strong farmers and now this is an outlet to create that sort of similar food or similar crops that they grew back home. But also now there’s an economic or financial opportunity to sell this locally. So Journey’s End has a CSA and they also have a weekly farmers market in Buffalo and the Tri-Main building. So with WeRadiate, we not only supported them on minimizing fertilizer costs but also engage them on soil health. So we do soil sampling, we have done soil pH testing, even doing compost tea brews. So compost tea is nothing you drink, but these are ways to improve and invigorate the plants that are growing in that space. So these are trainings and workshops that we consistently do, and we love to do more of that with farms all across New York State.

Steve Melito: So WeRadiate is doing well, you’re also doing good. What are the next steps in growing your business?

Sashti Balasundaram: Yep, so we would love to continue working with farms and farmers. I didn’t share my background, but I sort of grew up on a farm. My father was a farmer and he had a small poultry chicken farm. So I resonate with farmers in that difficult lifestyle early mornings, long days. So I would say a son of a farmer and wanting to work more in this theme of regenerative agriculture. So these are practices that feed nutrients back into soil and we would love to provide that as a service to farmers across New York State. But this is also a global opportunity. Degradation of soil is not unique to a state or a region, so we’ve been getting interest from across the world. These are places in Kenya, Mexico, the Caribbean. I just received an email from Cyprus yesterday, so we do have a local presence, but I think the market is global.

Steve Melito: It’s fantastic. It’s really exciting and wonderful to hear. So last question, if I may how does someone contact you if they’d like to request a demo or if they just want to learn more about your company and its technology?

Sashti Balasundaram: Yes, I would love to connect with those who are interested. WeRadiate.ny at Gmail.com is a good way via email. We have a great website. We are updating it fairly regularly. That’s just WeRadiate.com. We are on social media and on LinkedIn, instagram and now we’re putting more videos on YouTube and that handles. At WeRadiate.ny. We can also schedule Calendly. So if you connect with us on email, we also have the Calendly account, for if you connect with us on email, we also have the Calendly account for about 30 minutes. So there’s multiple ways to get in touch with us and hopefully, Steve, you’ll put a small caption note of getting in touch with us as well. Last thing I would love to say is you know we have a tagline that usually say healthy soil creates healthy food, strong communities and sustainable cities healthy food, strong communities and sustainable cities, and together WeRadiate.

Steve Melito: I love it. Sashti, thanks so much for being part of New York State Manufacturing Now.

Sashti Balasundaram: Thank you, Steve, thank you, team.

Steve Melito: So we’ve been talking to Sashti Balasundaram, the founder and CEO of WeRadiate, a New York State company that’s developing a systematic data-driven approach to improving soil nutrient levels. Sashti has been a power user of New York State resources, and we at FuzeHub are eager to help other inventors and entrepreneurs like you to succeed. That’s why I’m inviting you to check out ViewSub’s Product Development Fundamentals Workshop on August 7th 2024. This hands-on, day-long event in New Paltz, New York, will help demystify the entrepreneurial process and provide you with resources that can help along the way. So check it out. Go to ViewSubub.com slash product-development-fundamentals, and if you didn’t get that URL, don’t worry, just email us at info at FuzeHub.com. So, on behalf of New York State Manufacturing Now and FuzeHub, this is Steve Melito signing off. Thank you.