Opinion
Menker: The Russia-Ukraine war exacerbated, but did not start, the food crisis
“The Russia-Ukraine war didn't start a food security crisis. It added fuel to an already, like, long burning fire. And I think it's really, really important to sort of highlight that, because if the war went away tomorrow, the crisis we're in doesn't go away, r…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Menker: Gro predicts data months before the USDA with near-perfect accuracy
“Even in the U.S., our models are predictive and accurate four to six months in
In advance of when the USDA comes out with its numbers within like, 98 to 99% accuracy.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Menker: Gro insights outpace foreign government agricultural reports by two years
“In places like India, in places like Russia, in places like China, in places like Africa, our lead time for sort of our insights is one to two years at times.”
Opinion
Menker: Gold is the worst apocalyptic investment because it cannot be eaten
“Like if you think the world's coming to an end, like that just gold seems like the worst investment idea.”
Assertion Partly supported
Menker: China transitioned into a structural importer of core grains in 2020
“In twenty-twenty, it turned into a structural importer of grains. That means that the world's sort of largest economy went from being self-sufficient in some of these core grains to being insufficient.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Menker: Nitrogen shortages will cut global food supply by 216 trillion calories
“What we see now is that basically just the nitrogen problem alone is going to lead to a reduction of 216 trillion calories around the world. And that's just simply due to the fact that using less fertilizer is going to lead to a reduction in yield.”
Insight
Menker: Global food security requires understanding complex agricultural systems first
“At some point it became clear to me, we were like trying to fix a system we didn't even understand.”
Assertion Supported
Menker: Basic food prices surged up to 1900 percent globally since 2020
“The price of a basket of basic products in Sudan is up 1900%. In Syria, it's up 700%. In Ethiopia, it's up 175%. In Argentina, it's up 300%. Even in the U.S., it's up 67%. Europe, 80%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Menker: Gro Intelligence aggregates agricultural data from 50,000 global sources
“We get data from 50,000 sources around the world.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Menker: Gro Intelligence runs 28 frameworks to generate 2 million unique models
“Today we have 28 modeling frameworks in the system... And so today, those 28 modeling frameworks actually develop two million unique models by Grow.”
Assertion Supported
Menker: Russia and Ukraine drove global agricultural production growth for 15 years
“Russia and Ukraine over sort of the last 15 years had emerged as sort of the major growth areas of the world for agricultural production to fill sort of that demand gap that was coming from areas like Sub-Saharan Africa, et cetera, where economies were growing…”
Assertion Supported
Menker: Natural gas drives 70 to 90 percent of nitrogen fertilizer costs
“70 to 90% of the cost of producing nitrogen-based fertilizer is the cost of natural gas.”
Disclosure
Menker: Gro Intelligence software costs up to 50,000 dollars per seat
“And one application can be 10,000 dollars Per seat. Another one can be 15. Another one's 50. Depends on the use case, and then depends number of seats or whether it's an enterprise license or not, and so we've been able to sort of build out this licensing mode…”
Disclosure
Menker: Gro Intelligence prioritized hiring domain experts before hiring software technologists
“So before actually thinking of the technologists, we thought about the domain experts. Who are people who know agriculture? We need agronomists. We need people who traded agricultural markets. We need climate scientists.”
