Karsten Temme

She applies it by hand and then prays that the rains don't wash it away.

Because all it takes is one rainstorm, and that investment is washed away.

And with it, her family's security is upended.

So this is where the limits of fertilizer are most apparent, where there's no margin for safety.

So what Pivot's done is we've teamed up with MIT and local partners to adapt our product and supply chain to work for smallholders like Margaret.

We've shrunk our packaging.

We've built a just-in-time network where farmers can text the day they're ready to plant, and we can motorbike them the freshest microbes possible.

The results are astounding.

Not only are the crops more resilient to those rainstorms, yields have improved 60 percent.

You know, the biggest complaint we've received is farmers say, you haven't told me what the product is or where I can buy it.

So I started with this jar of soil.

The microbes inside have already transformed how fertilizer works across millions of hectares, making it smart, dynamic, living.

Since 2022, farmers have been able to prevent more than 1.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gases.

What's needed next is to be able to scale this system across hundreds of millions of hectares.

And here's what that's going to require.

It's going to require creating a global network for microbial manufacturing.

But it's different than building fertilizer factories that cost billions of dollars.

Biomanufacturing can scale at one two-hundredth the cost.

It also gives us an opportunity to rethink supply chains to make them local and flexible.

So in Michigan, that might mean FedEx is the best way to deliver those microbes, and a motorbike in Kenya might be the best last-mile solution.