#193 Dan White, Co-Founder & CEO of Clean Crop Technologies

Dan White began working in agriculture in high school at a family orchard outside of Gettysburg, PA. After completing his BA at Dickinson College in philosophy and political science, he moved to Italy where he did international business development work for Italian artisans, igniting his passion for business and sales. Prior to Clean Crop, he spent more than a decade working around the world in agricultural development and consulting. He has focused his career on finding novel technologies with the potential to sustainably grow more food with less resources and bring them to market, with experiences across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

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Bigger Than Us #193

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Bigger Than Us #193

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Host Raj Daniels 00:46

Dan, how are you doing today?

Dan White 01:27

Doing great Raj. Thanks for having me.

Host Raj Daniels 01:29

Dan, thank you for joining us, Dan. I’d like to kick it off with this question. What are, and I might mispronounce this, but I’m going to give it my shot. What are aflatoxins? And should we as consumers be concerned about them?

Dan White 01:42

Yeah, great question. So aflatoxins are are what’s called a mycotoxin. So that’s a toxin that’s generated by a fungus. And they’re a big problem for a lot of dry food supply chains around the world. So think about grains, things like nuts. Around 40% of the world’s nuts and grains are at risk of some sort of mycotoxin contamination in any given year. And that’s mostly dependent how much rainfall, was there a drought, when the drought happened. And all that drives the extent to which there’s mold that’ll grow on those products. And sometimes that mold, if it’s a really bad year for that mold, will generate aflatoxins. 

So it’s particularly a problem for nut crops. So peanuts, in particular, have a big issue because obviously, they grow underground. And then also a number of others — almonds, corn crops, and wheat can have a range of different mycotoxins. And what’s particularly bad about them is they drive a lot of liver cancer. They’re a carcinogen. Around one in four cases of liver cancer are due to mycotoxin contamination, or to aflatoxin specifically. And once they get on a product, there’s not really any good way today to remove it without really damaging that food in the process. So they’re also a very potent trade barrier. Developed markets, like the US have very strict limits on aflatoxin. 

So if you end up with a with a lot of product that has high levels, there’s very little you can do with it that allows you to keep it in that human supply chain in those high value markets at this point.

Host Raj Daniels 03:21

So if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the harvest, let’s say peanuts, for example, are tested for aflatoxins before they go into production, let’s say, for peanut butter.

Dan White 03:33

Yep. So here in the US, we have a very strict monitoring program USDA manages. Every peanut that gets harvested and cleaned. Those lots get tested for aflatoxin before they go on to the folks that make our peanut butter. And so what this means is that the US peanut shelling industry loses quite a lot of money every year to aflatoxins. Some years are better than others. This past season happened to be a historically great year; there were very little incidents of aflatoxin. 

But 2019 was the opposite. I think something close to 40% of total US production failed the aflatoxin limits. And that has a lot of knock-on effects for the industry too because it means that exports to Europe get rejected at higher rates, it puts the US origin on a kind of a blacklist, so you have more stock that then gets tested more frequently, which means you find more stuff that fails, and it becomes a self fulfilling crisis that drives a lot of lost market share. So it’s a big issue for the industry.

Host Raj Daniels 04:31

And did I hear you correctly? You’re saying the cause of this aflatoxin could be based on rainfall, droughts, etc?

Dan White 04:40

Yeah, so it’s it’s a complicated arrangement, but you can just think about it as — there’s a fungus, Aspergillus flavus is one of the more common strains of mold that generate aflatoxin. If in a field, it has a very wet part of the early season, it can then contaminate the nuts. That in of itself is not necessarily a big problem. But it can be a big problem if there are really extensive drought conditions closer to harvest because that drought will stress out that mold, triggering it to generate the toxins. 

And so at a macro level, what we’re seeing with climate change — there’s been a number of studies, one that recently came out from Australia, looking at trying to model these changes in rainfall patterns and climate conditions. And they anticipate that you’re going to have a real expansion of the geographies that experience aflatoxin damage and risk. And that’s going to happen more frequently. So you’re going to have more incidents in any given decade of seasons that have very high pressure, both mold and toxin pressure. So it’s an issue that we only expect to get worse in the next few decades.

Host Raj Daniels 05:47

And can these aflatoxins cross-contaminate different products?

Dan White 05:54

Yeah, one of the pernicious issues is, let’s say you harvest a field, and 95% of it didn’t have any aflatoxin pressure. If you had mold in that one back corner, all of that product gets put in farmer storage together. It can actually cross and continue to propagate in that storage across the rest of that product. And so you do have a lot of cross-contamination risk, which is why, at the end of the day, we we set out to try to find a technology that could be a supply chain solution to that.

Host Raj Daniels 06:24

So speaking of the technology, can you give the audience an overview of Clean Crop Tech and your role, the organization?

Dan White 06:31

Yeah, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Clean Crop. We’re an ag tech startup based in Western Massachusetts. And we have a proprietary technology stack that uses electricity to have a lot of different effects across the supply chain. We use it to boost yields by treating seeds. We use it to generate these ionized gases that are highly excited that you can use to reduce waste and improve safety. And the way we do that is we have a machine that creates, for a very simplified explanation, we create an electron waterfall between two electrodes. And then we push gases, mostly air. But we can push other gases through that waterfall where it picks up those electrons, they get excited. And then you can use those excited gas species to do different things. 

So you can deploy them to food surfaces where they can break down contaminants. And this is pretty broad spectrum. So we can knock down things like salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, but also those contaminants that just drive short shelf life. So the brown mold that makes your lettuce go bad in the fridge, that white mold on berries. Those yeasts that make meat and seafood start to smell bad, we can reduce those populations by 99% plus, unlocking additional days of freshness and safety,

Host Raj Daniels 07:50

Which crops are most susceptible to this mold?

Dan White 07:55

The technology has a very broad application space. So it’s not just targeting aflatoxin. But that was kind of the first use case that we focused on, because it was one that my co-founding partner and I, in previous careers, we knew pretty well because we had worked in these nuts supply chains. And it sort of presented this compelling case of something that did not have an existing solution and had a very clear, quantified cost to the customer. Like they know how much it costs every time a lot of peanuts fails that aflatoxin test. It has this big regulatory structure that forces them to either pay that cost or to find a solution. 

So it was a perfect storm of a sort of market structure that had a technology gap in it that we wanted to capitalize on. And so that’s where we focused first. But over the last two years, we’ve expanded the R&D applications and building an academic literature that has shown that we can have similar decontamination effects on a wide range of other issues that crop up in other parts of the supply chain. We’ve looked at using surrogates, being able to knock down pathogens like salmonella, so we can achieve reductions in in those rates. And that’s a pervasive issue for obviously a wide range of products, as well as things like E. coli, Listeria, and, and like I said, those other molds that that sometimes can make you sick or other times just make you throw your food away earlier than you’d have to otherwise.

Host Raj Daniels 09:30

Where in the farm to table process does your application apply?

Dan White 09:36

Yeah, it’s a great question. And it’s kind of different depending on which supply chain we’re working on. But basically, our hardware can retrofit into almost any part of the supply chain where where it has access to the food in a loose bolt format. The only condition is that whatever food product we’re treating, it can’t already be in a bag or a tote or a bin — it needs to be going through processing. 

So within the nut supply chain, our machines sit in the peanut shelling facility. That’s where raw, in-shell peanuts come in from farmers. They get shelled, cleaned, sorted. And then they get bagged as raw peanuts, raw shelled nuts that go on to the people who make the CPGs that make all of our peanut butter and candy bars. And so our machine retro fits into that processing line and treats those nuts before they go into the bagger. And we are in the process of identifying similar entry points for the other verticals that we work in as well.

Host Raj Daniels 10:37

So does your machinery actually sit on the farm?

Dan White 10:41

It’s mostly a post-harvest, supply chain solution. So it’ll be post-harvest, post farm gate, somewhere at that processing phase. And that’s equally true for both the food applications as well as our seed treatment.

Host Raj Daniels 10:56

How did you come up with the idea?

Dan White 10:59

My co-founding partner and I, we’re not scientists. We’re not engineers. We squarely come from the the market side of agriculture. I started my career — I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a town called Gettysburg. Big apple growing country. And I started working in high school at a family orchard, kind of fell in love with agriculture at that point, but wanted to get out and see the world. 

I ended up moving and living in Europe for a while, where I kind of got into business, not on the agriculture side, but I worked for a little bit at the Chamber of Commerce in Florence, Italy, where I helped those small mom-and-pop artisans, if you’ve ever been there, who make craftswork and fashion, help them try to find international buyers and structure contracts. And really, at that point, I realized that I really enjoyed this business side of what I was doing, I didn’t care as much about $20,000 handbags. And I was missing the agriculture stuff. But I still wanted to travel the world, but wanted to keep working in agriculture. 

Basically, after that experience, I started working initially in sort of agricultural development work, so doing a lot of work for NGOs, and in companies that were implementing projects for the Gates Foundation, and USAID in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. And I did some consulting work over the years as well with companies that were trying to develop market share for biological inputs in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it seemed like there was an opportunity to head off some of the mistakes made in the Green Revolution. So you could get safer, healthier products that could do the same thing into the market before you had mass adoption of fertilizer at the same levels as you had in the US and Europe. 

And it was about eight years ago, I met my partner, Dan Cavanaugh, who at the time was working for an ADM subsidiary on some some peanut processing in Mozambique, eventually worked for Cargill. And he and I just partnered on projects over the years. And when you’re working at that supply chain side, and this is true almost anywhere in the world, you’re really playing this really fast game of Tetris, where your customer specs are always changing, market requirements are getting stricter — if you’re exporting stuff to the EU, it seems like every 12 months, there’s a longer and longer list of chemicals and other issues, other things that you can’t use on that product. And you’re trying to match those sell-side specs with with the buy-side that’s coming in from the farmer. 

Every season is different, you have different contaminants, different pest issues, they’ll have gluts and you’ll have shortages. And so you’re just trying to kind of fit these things together, like the 20 lots you get from this grower with this order from this from this buyer, and eke out a little bit of a margin on top. And that’s just kind of how most supply chains operate. And that’s kind of the way they’re supposed to if it’s a very efficient system. But we developed this thesis that one of the challenges you have is that by the time these products get contaminated with these toxins and pathogens and pests that drive a lot of this short shelf life, or drive a lot of these food safety issues, once they get to your warehouse, there’s very little you can do about it. 

And so we developed this thesis that if you could find a technology that could reliably and broadly turn back the clock on those contaminants, you could really unlock a pretty transformative amount of value across the supply chains. And so we spent around a year trying to find that technology. 

So we just read a lot of papers, talked to researchers, people who are selling stuff. Initially, we were just looking for something that we could go out and buy, and then commercialize it in these markets where we saw an application. We eventually met Dr. Kevin Keener, who is the inventor on our core tech. He’s a leader in these plasma applications for food safety in particular. We were impressed with some of his papers, built some foundational prototypes based on some schematics. And they worked. And so we went out, met with him, were impressed with with his work and started Clean Crop to basically take innovations from what he was doing and scale them up into services across the market. 

And there were really two things that drew us to this technology over some of the others that we looked at. Things like UV light, or high-pressure pasteurization, this broad category of what’s called non-thermal pasteurization technologies. All of the papers that are written about this stuff show really impressive results, but it’s always on 10 grams, 50 grams, 100 grams. It’s all petri dish scale. And as operators, our key focus was that we really want to find a technology that, when you crunch the numbers, even if it’s not there today, seems to have some sort of line of sight on being able to replicate these results on one ton, 10 tons, 50 tons, 100 tons an hour for some of these supply chains. And his technology seemed to have the clearest line of sight to doing that. The operational costs seemed to be closest to favorable unit economics. 

And it just had this broad-spectrum application. We knew that even though we were focused on this aflatoxin problem to begin with, that there were a lot of opportunities for us to to either pivot if we had to, or to scale horizontally into other verticals, with basically the same core technology stack. And that was really compelling.

Host Raj Daniels 16:28

Dan, from being on the apple orchards and making hard cider to here, at Clean Crop Tech, and on the journey you just described to us, it seems like there was a lot of time, effort, commitment on your behalf. What was your why? What continued to drive you?

Dan White 16:45

Initially, it was just a quality of life thing. I grew up in a pretty rural place. And I’ve lived in cities for a lot of my life, but I’ve always been drawn to rural areas. And so initially, it was really just that was where I found the most meaning and fulfillment was working outside. But the longer you work in these in agricultural supply chains, and particularly in emerging markets, one benefit I had from bouncing around these different projects and consulting assignments over the years was I really got a kind of a bird’s eye view across the state of our food system around the world. And it is, at a macro level, really alarming. 

What I’ve really tried to focus on in my career is in the context of this macro problem. There is no one size fits all solution. I think it’s totally true that 30% of food is wasted across supply chains, across countries. But when you really dig into the data, what gets wasted is totally different in emerging markets versus developed markets. The reasons why that waste happens are very complicated and very hard to peel apart. 

I think there’s a macro market failure that we are staring in the face of, which is that most of that trillion dollars, give or take, of waste, it exists because right now, nobody’s actually holding it on their balance sheet. A lot of that waste is externalized to consumers, or it’s externalized through other write-off mechanisms. And the challenge is we have technologies that that could really reduce that total number, but the biggest barrier to their adoption is solving that puzzle of, where in the supply chain does this technology need to insert to be able to really move the dial on reducing that key driver of waste? And does that match up with who’s gonna pay for that? 

And it’s that intersection of the technological capability, the technology constraints, and what is scientifically possible with the business context and trying to find that overlap where those two things match up is really what kind of gets me out of bed in the morning. This interplay between business and science within the context of agriculture that’s trying to push towards towards bending the curve on what is, I think, a structurally undervalued part of the story when it comes to us, making sure we can keep feeding people through the rest of this century and beyond.

Host Raj Daniels 19:30

Now, you mentioned trillion dollars of food waste, a state of our food system. I came across a quote in an interview you gave in 2020 and this is what it says. I’ll read it directly: “By the time you throw away that tomato in your fridge, it has already led to significant emissions.” Can you give an example of what those emissions might be?

Dan White 19:50

A lot of food has a lot of embedded emissions — it’s one way we can think of it: the fertilizer that went into that tomato, the cold storage had to sit in, from the truck to the packing shed to the grocery store. There’s a lot of energy that was embedded into that tomato, that, at the end of the day, it goes unrealized once you throw it away. And so there’s sort of two sides to this. One is trying to figure out how do we reduce the embedded admissions per calorie that we produce at the front end? How do we grow more efficiently? How do we use less resources? How do we shorten those food miles from the farm to the consumer to reduce some of those embedded emissions? But it’s also about just making sure that we’re getting as many calories out of the emissions that are there. So once those emissions are embedded reducing the amount of things that we throw away is another way of bending that curve.

Host Raj Daniels 20:56

Now, not gonna hold you to the exact number, obviously; lot of different forces at play. But let’s go back to the tomato, for example. Once the tomato goes through your process at Clean Crop Tech, how much longer might it last in the fridge?

Dan White 21:10

Yeah, so just as a disclaimer, it’s a product that’s in R&D, not something where we developed a solid number around. But in general, what we found for food is we’re able to extend it. It depends on the driver; there are different things that drive shelf life, but in general, we’re able to add anywhere from days to weeks of additional shelf life, which for products often translates into a 10% to 25% increase in their total shelf life from from the farm gate to that end consumer. Most industries have kind of a standard benchmark. If it’s meat, it’s from slaughter date to when you need to consume it. You’ve got 21 days for ground beef. For a lot of produce, it’s much longer, but there’s still a general range that you’re trying to target. And by and large, we’re able to stack an additional 10% to 25% of shelf life on to whatever that baseline is.

Host Raj Daniels 22:15

That really is amazing. Now, you mentioned meat. If I understand correctly, you are also able to treat meat with your product.

Dan White 22:23

Yep, we’re working on protein shelf life extension. There are a couple of different applications in that space that we’re pursuing, with in collaboration with some key partners. In that context, there are different things that drive shelf life on meat. One of the interesting things that I’ve learned are surprising things in that context is that there’s this whole kind of stack of bacterias and yeasts, many of which are just kind of there as a proxy for that meat going bad. So the things that actually make those sort of off smells for chicken or beed for seafood themselves are not actually dangerous. 

But we’ve developed this evolutionary ability to use those as a proxy for, “Oh, that’s probably going to make me sick because it smells this way.” But in practice, what we found is that you usually have a few additional days of viable shelf life, even after some of those smells begin to start. So if we can actually use our technology and reduce those populations, knock them back 99%. We can simultaneously reduce the salmonella or the E. coli that’s there that is the actual food safety threat, but we can also turn the dial back on those those signaling yeasts and in bacteria that are generating those off odors. So if we’re able to kind of knock both of those back, they do recover, but they just recover a couple days later.

Host Raj Daniels 23:53

Now, just to get a good visual, can you paint a picture of what your machinery or what the product looks like? I’m just trying to imagine how ground beef and fruits and vegetables and nuts and all the different products are kind of processing through your machine.

Dan White 24:10

The machine sort of changes depending on what you’re treating because every one of these supply chains is different. Ground beef sort of travels in a certain way. Filets of fish travel on a different different mechanism. But one way or another, our machine stacks on, to the extent possible, we’re stacking our machine top of existing processing hardware. So anywhere that it’s traveling, in a conveyance system, it can be tubular, it can be a conveyor bed, a belt, it can be any number of applications, we can retrofit around.

Host Raj Daniels 24:44

Now, we’ve mentioned many different products. Which product or market are you starting with first?

Dan White 24:49

Yeah, so we’ve really focused on the the nut application space, so mycotoxin reduction in peanuts and almonds, but we have a long tail of additional markets that we’re moving forward with in parallel to that. We are currently in the in the 11th hour of the regulatory process there and should be able to commercialize that very soon,

Host Raj Daniels 25:10

And how are the farmers receiving the product?

Dan White 25:14

So most of our most of our focus has been at the supply chain level. So we’ve been working with processors and have a couple of key partners that we’ve been collaborating with there, including some of the bigger CPGs that people would be familiar with. There’s been a lot of excitement for the technology. It would be first of a kind to be able to actually solve this problem. So the industry has been very bullish on it, but, at this point, we still need to show that we can hit the optimal scale for what they need to process.

Host Raj Daniels 25:49

So you’ve been in this journey about three years now? What are some of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned about yourself?

Dan White 25:57

Well, I, what I learned about myself is I, I’ve learned on On the plus side that I’m able to, I’m able to handle stress a lot better than I thought, just indexing to other people in the same world and and around me. You have to have kind of a mule-ish determination at certain times and be able to kind of weather those whiplashes between sort of ecstatic progress and unexpected crises. In the morning, it can feel like the wheels are coming off, and in the afternoon, you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders. And that’s something that friends that were entrepreneurs that always told me was the case, but you have to kind of actually live it to understand it. 

And what’s been interesting, kind of moving to this side of things to moving to being a service provider, trying to sell a novel technology to customers, is — I think something that we learned early on is an approach of radical transparency around what we know what we don’t know. And leaning into humility seems to cut through, particularly at this early stage, with with a lot of customers in a way that the hard sell doesn’t. A lot of the tropes that I think from the outside on selling that you think about are just totally untrue. And really, it comes down to building empathy with your customer and in turn, helping them build empathy with you and understanding what you need. And that, in the long run, makes for much better, stronger relationships, particularly when you’re doing enterprise sales like this.

Host Raj Daniels 27:49

Do you have a favorite stress relieving technique?

Dan White 27:52

I have taken up meditation, for sure. I journal a lot; I find it to be something that is immensely clarifying. And the only way that I can break through the fog, sometimes, of what do you have to do? What has to be done next? Trying to trim down the to-dos to something manageable is definitely the hardest part of the job.

Host Raj Daniels 28:18

Do you have a favorite time of day to journal?

Dan White 28:20

Whenever I can. I’ve got a four year old at home. And so it was more predictable. But yeah, in the morning, I try to get up, do a short workout. If I can, I’ll squeeze in some meditation or journaling then, but otherwise, oftentimes it’ll wind up happening at night.

Host Raj Daniels 28:39

So you have two startups. Yes. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So let’s fast forward to 2030. About eight years from now, if one of your favorite publications, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, were to write a headline about Clean Crop Technologies, would you like it to read?

Dan White 29:01

Headlines are tough. I think what excites me about this decade between now and that, when I look at analogs in other industries, plasma — people have commercialized it before, it’s not a new technology by any means. But it’s really been focused on very high-value applications in uniform industrial products. So plasma is used today as an etching tool on things like semiconductors. You know, it’s used to increase surface area on industrial materials. 

So applications where you can afford to build a machine that has an hourly operational cost of $1,000 or $10,000. In very niche applications with highly predictable repeatable substrates that you’re treating. At the same time, there’s been this bubbling up of academic research showing that, actually, there’s this huge set of applications for plasma in life sciences, in medical applications, in food and agriculture, biomass processing, that has kind of proven out the basic science around this. 

What’s really been missing has been this this link between the market applications that is proven out at the scientific level and actual deployment at scale. Looking backwards from 2030, I think this is really the decade where electrochemistry writ large, and plasma applications, in our case, in particular, are poised to displace or augment a lot of existing solutions across the agricultural space. And I’m thinking particularly about those that are very stubbornly hard to decarbonize. 

So I think today, you look at something like, like pesticides and fungicides that rely pretty heavily on a lot of synthetic compounds that are petrochemical derivatives. If we can get to a point where plasma is providing a distributed in-situ alternative to that for surface decontamination in seeds, for enhancing the performance of those seeds, it can actually be a huge part of the way to decarbonize production agriculture. 

Similarly, with pasteurization, a lot of pasteurization today has to be driven by natural gas, just based on the BTUs involved. Plasma can displace or significantly improve the efficiency of those systems. And so I think similarly to the advent of lithium ion batteries in the early 90s, that today are this bedrock of decarbonizing and electrifying transportation and electronics, I think we’re poised today to be able to do the same thing in some of these hard-to-decarbonize parts of of agriculture in the food space. 

And so my focus for Clean Crop is that we become the Dow Chemical of plasma companies that are building core market share, displacing a lot of these hard-to-decarbonize solutions across the supply chain in agriculture, and then leveraging a lot of those key technological innovations to then be cost-competitive across a much broader array of chemical production processes — displacing natural gas-driven thermal catalysis in chemical production. I think that is all possible. And it is all possible with on a technology stack that basically just uses electricity a the key input.

Host Raj Daniels 32:32

You know, it’s interesting, you brought up plasma. I did have that as my first question on my list here. High-voltage atmospheric cold plasma is something I took away from my research, which is a very, very cool set of words.

Dan White 32:47

Yeah, it’s a mouthful. It’s definitely not something that has passed the marketing department yet. So it’s still a work in progress.

Host Raj Daniels 32:57

It sounds like you’re building a comic book hero.

Dan White 33:01

Sometimes it feels that way, too.

Host Raj Daniels 33:03

So last question. And this could be professional or personal. We have a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening. If you could share some advice, words of wisdom or recommendations with the audience, what would it be?

Dan White 33:12

Where to start? Something that’s been top of mind for us a lot, and is for anyone out there that’s working on a startup in particular, or even just an existing product set that involves hardware of one kind or another: A lot of the conventional wisdom in 2018, 2019, and I think just still, in general, throughout the startup space, when you’re starting a company like this is to really just, “Outsource, outsource, outsource. Focus all of your work all of all of your time and effort on your core technology, and anything that you can kick out to somebody else, have them do it.” 

On the face of that, I think it makes sense. And I’m sure there are a lot of applications where that that works. And certainly, no one should be spending their precious time in a small team, really reinventing every wheel possible around them. But I think particularly in the context of the supply chain challenges that we’ve seen over the last several months, and just a cultural problem that we’ve run into is hardware development. And a lot of the people that do contract hardware development or have kind of worked in more legacy industries around it, whether it’s medical device, or aerospace, or whatever. It just doesn’t move fast enough. We’ve developed a an ecosystem to build hardware to a large extent, which is really great at taking an existing product and making it 5% better repeatedly over time. 

And if you’re in a startup, chances are you’re working on commercializing something that is much more fundamental, has a lot more ambiguity and, more importantly, just needs to move through iterations much faster. And what we found is actually strategically insourcing some of those fabrication capabilities has been not only a lot cheaper, once you kind of get your team up to speed on how to do it, and get the right people around the table, but also is really critical to that rate of innovation and that rate of development. And so I would just say to anyone out there that’s working on hardware, try to look past that initial instinct to just find someone to build your machine for you. 

It’s going to be a lot more valuable over the long run, and I think you’ll move a lot faster if you might thoughtfully look at insourcing some of those fabrication capabilities at the front end, and then just, at least at the prototyping phase, doing a lot more in-house.

Host Raj Daniels 35:38

Well, you know, the old adage, hardware is hard, right?

Dan White 35:41

That it is, yep.

Host Raj Daniels 35:42

Well, Dan, I really appreciate your time today. Wish you best of luck with Clean Crop Tech and look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Dan White 35:50

Thanks, Raj. It was a pleasure.

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