HIBT Lab! Gro Intelligence: Sara Menker

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Roz. So have you ever wondered how a drought in one part of the world could impact the cost of food at your grocery store, or how extreme weather caused by climate change might change agriculture as we know it. Well, our global food markets are all incredibly connected and they require vast amounts of data to understand and analyze. Which is why Sarah Manker founded Grow Intelligence in twenty fourteen. Grow takes trillions of data points from a variety of sources and builds forecasts for thousands of unique agricultural products like chicken or wheat.

or corn or sunflower oil. Sarah's company helps clients like food suppliers and financial institutions navigate climate risk. understand supply models, predict the demand for crops, monitor conditions for farming around the world, and more. And as of this year, Grow has raised more than$125 million to support informed decision making in global food markets. Shermaker grew up in Ethiopia, where she saw the tragic consequences of food insecurity firsthand. Yeah, I mean it was you know, it was basically during what was known as sort of the Dirk regime, um, in Ethiopia and it was the communist regime.

And so it's a pretty dark time in the country. Uh, but everything was you know, run by the state and controlled by the state. So sugar Toilet paper, it was not even a rationing. With toilet paper wasn't even any rationing, it was an availability issue because most stuff was not imported. So it was all locally produced. Um

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.