Chris Chammoun With AgTech

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by on pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio and this is going to be a good one today. On the show, we have Chris Chammoun, who is the director of agricultural technology at the Georgia Center of Innovation, which is a division of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Chammoun: [00:00:45] Thanks for having me only.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to for the listener who isn’t familiar, can you share a little bit about AG tech? What is it and what should we know about it?

Chris Chammoun: [00:00:57] Sure, so it takes just short for AG technology, so most of your listeners may know that the largest industry in Georgia is agriculture, and our department put a focus on AG technology last year. So I’ve been in this role about a year. We’ve always had people focusing on agriculture, but we wanted to focus specifically on AG technology and the AG tech companies. So I am part of the Georgia Center of Innovation, which is a strategic arm of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. And most folks are somewhat familiar in the business community with economic development. Our State Department of Economic Development, we have various different arms of films, as you know, has been really big in the last few years. International trade, they’re hard at work on keeping the Port of Savannah as best as it can be. And probably the most visible division within our department is the Global Commerce Division. So you’ll see the governor make an announcement about a new business coming to Georgia or Georgia, business expanding. And that’s the global commerce in our group, the Georgia Center of Innovation. We’re more on the technical side of economic development. So we have six strategic areas where we work. Aerospace myself and AG tech team that works on energy, I.T., logistics and manufacturing. And we operate statewide. And what we do is primarily work with Georgia companies in those six strategic areas and help them clear the path for innovation. So basically sit down with them, find out what their struggles are and how we can help and how we can help move them forward and then also move that industry forward.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:40] Now you mentioned the importance of agriculture in the Georgia economy, and folks, that’s one of those things that are kind of in the background. There maybe doesn’t get the headlines, but are the unsung heroes of economics of Georgia. Can you talk about this kind of mash up between technology and agriculture? Obviously, technology is huge in Georgia, but maybe in the agricultural industry it’s something that has been going on, but maybe needed a new emphasis.

Chris Chammoun: [00:03:15] Exactly, so agriculture generally worldwide agriculture is seen as somewhat of a technology laggard when we’re talking about hardware and software and what your modern America, what we think of is technology. But if you look at the technology that’s been integrated within agriculture over the years, AG has been very tech savvy. Most of it around equipment machinery. At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, it was announced that John Deere is releasing their autonomous tractor. They’ve actually had that kind of technology since the late 90s when they come out. Several companies came out with GPS technology and it was integrated into the tractor. So yes, technology is constantly being integrated within AG. And if you look at the AG economy in Georgia in any given year, it’s 70 to 80 billion dollars. Well, only about 12 billion of that is 10 to 12 billion in any year is actually generated at the farm. So that’s the actual revenue we got at the farm gate value. So you think about that other 60 billion or so is the agribusiness side of it, and that’s where these technology companies come in. The logistics companies come in the food processors. Atlanta is home to some world renowned food processing companies, beverage companies. All that kind of goes into the agribusiness category. So what’s interesting in AG tech is, as we’re seeing it now, is integration of your existing agribusiness companies implementing that new technology.

Chris Chammoun: [00:04:55] And then we work closely with a lot of these ag tech, not necessarily startups, but kind of established companies that are that are actually selling the hardware that are making the new software. And there’s several around Georgia that are Georgia based, started in Georgia. Some of it is spinoffs of technology. They’re created at UGA or Georgia Tech or one of our other institutions. But it’s it’s an interesting, exciting space. And it really is like you mentioned, it’s that merger of our traditional agribusiness and the cotton, the peanuts, watermelon. People know Georgia for the Peach State, and it’s taking that new technology and just making it more efficient, creating new products within the space. We’ve kind of figured out there’s about there’s four major areas within Georgia AG Tech that we feel like are the growth areas that we’re going to see we’re already seeing and then we’re trying to kind of predict, I guess, the future. And the biggest player so far within this space is integrated precision AG. So precision agriculture is, as I mentioned earlier, autonomous tractors, all the new sensors, soul sensors, all kinds of data that we’re collecting at the farm level in Georgia as a state is really been a leader in that over the years. Some of the university research University of Georgia research in South Georgia has developed some pretty interesting precision ag tools, and we’re just going to continue to build off of that in the in the metro Atlanta area.

Chris Chammoun: [00:06:36] We’ve seen more controlled environment agriculture coming about, and this is kind of the second box that we’re looking at. Controlled environment agriculture is like, for instance, around Atlanta, there’s Calera, which is a large controlled environment AG. There are several small controlled environment eggs, but it’s the greenhouse operations. It’s the warehouse style farms. And this is really driven by the population growth, mainly in Atlanta, but the southeast as a whole. And with that population growth, we’ve seen consumers demanding more locally grown fresh produce. So, you know, years ago, I remember being in a meeting and we kind of joked about controlled environment AG saying, you know, it’d be great if we could have a Georgia grown salad because we don’t grow lettuce or a lot of the things that you would need for a salad only on a year-round basis. They can do that in California, but we’ve never been able to do it in Georgia. But this new technology is really what we’re seeing is the ability now to have that locally grown Georgia grown salad. And and again, it’s all consumer driven. The third of the four boxes is what we call food product innovation and basically through product innovation, is trying to add value to the commodities we grew.

Chris Chammoun: [00:07:51] I mentioned earlier about 10 to 12 billion of our AG economy every year is the revenue generated at the farm. So a lot of those crops are sold in that form that they’re harvested. So other than our road crops. So other than cotton and peanuts and corn and soybeans, if you look at all of our fruits and vegetables. The vast majority of those are sold in a fresh format, so go into the supermarket. Well, the issue that causes is the farmer has to just kind of take whatever price they can get. And there’s been a lot of emphasis on this innovation in the food space and creating adding value to those. So we have a great company and Tifton called CB2 Foods, and they take basically take peanuts and they make this powdered peanut butter. So it actually increases the shelf life of your average peanut butter. We also have some great companies that process peaches and strawberries, make various products like peach jam, strawberry jelly, that kind of thing. And there’s just been a lot of emphasis on this, mainly to help the farmer again create value, add value to that product, increase the shelf life and let the farmer dictate more of the price they would like to receive.

Chris Chammoun: [00:09:12] And the fourth box within the AG Tech space in Georgia is food system technology integration. So this really revolves around our existing large food processors, mainly in the poultry industry. A lot of people don’t realize, but Georgia is the number one poultry growing state. We produce a lot of chicken in any given year we’re about. If we were if Georgia was its own country, we would be the eighth largest poultry producing country. So we produce a lot of poultry. We’re very efficient at it. We export a good bit of it out of the port of Savannah. And a lot of this work has been done at Georgia Tech and University of Georgia over the years to really make this systems more efficient. And now we’re kind of on the, I wouldn’t say the final frontier, but we’re at this new frontier within poultry processing, where machine learning artificial intelligence is being introduced and tested in a way to even even increase the efficiency even more and even maybe remove the human from interacting as much with the food as it’s being processed. So a lot of exciting things going on, a lot of a lot of really neat things in Georgia, and some of these are introduced, you know, technologies introduced from other countries, and it’s just really neat to see the industry continue to grow.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:35] Now, as part of your job kind of being a bridge for like, maybe, say, a startup in Atlanta and then kind of pairing them up with a farmer in South Georgia to give him a chance to beta test an idea to see if this is something that flies and or is part of your job kind of kind of scouring the globe to say, Hey, this is an interesting technology. We have farmers here that might be willing to test this and then kind of mashing them up. So then it can create new jobs and new opportunities of maybe moving some firms to Georgia to kind of explore their idea and see if it is viable.

Chris Chammoun: [00:11:18] Yeah, Leigh, that’s exactly it, I mean, about half of our time is dealing with existing Georgia businesses to who again are trying to innovate, trying to do something different. And it is we don’t have the capacity to deal directly with startups from the beginning. Now, once they are established at DC, that everyone hopefully knows about, DC does a great job with helping the startups some idea to kind of implementation once they’re implemented, once they have a product in the market. We do work with those on really figuring out where their product fits. So again, it could be there are companies. I’ve also scoured the internet looking at companies from out of state and realized that, hey, there’s there’s some application for your product. Maybe it was developed in Silicon Valley and you’re testing it in the, you know, the San Joaquin Valley area of California, which is a major ag area. And then I’ll reach out to them and say, Have you thought about Georgia? So we do some of that and probably half our time is also spent just in this ecosystem building process and just talking with folks at universities and AG tech stretches across computer science, engineering, crop science, entomology and and we really like to think that that our group, the center of innovation, really is helping build and manage that ecosystem. So I spend a lot of time with university professors talking about what they’re what they’re working on, where can that kind of fit in the market? Is there currently companies trying to do this? Is there a way we can collaborate with companies already doing it? And and just really kind of build that ecosystem? And then we we do a lot again.

Chris Chammoun: [00:13:03] The existing company, sometimes its assistance is as simple as they call, and they’re talking about something that I make an introduction with somebody at university. Sometimes it’s connecting them with other businesses. We see that a lot. There’s some if there’s synergies between two business, we’ll do some business introductions. But again, yeah, it’s about building that ecosystem. And we’ve actually in my role, like I said, only about a year old. And we’re putting together March 2nd and tipped in their first ever Georgia AG Tech Summit. So we have a lot of different meetings. Of course, everybody each industry has a lot of meetings in Georgia agriculture. We have some great meetings, already great conferences. Georgia Farm Bureau does a great conference. Agribusiness camp for those are great conference. Each of the different commodity groups cotton, peanuts, corn, they all have their own respective conferences, but we’ve never had any dedicated day directed around AG technology. So on March 2nd and Tifton, we’re going to put together the first summit with industry, academia and government and really discussing where we at, what’s the current state of Georgia AG Tech? What can we be working on in the future? What technologies do we see coming down the road and really help see some collaboration to help spur more collaboration among the universities among our businesses? And then among, you know, folks like us at different state agencies?

Lee Kantor: [00:14:35] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Chris Chammoun: [00:14:37] Yeah. Again, I think this Georgia AG Tech Summit that we are putting together March 2nd. So if you go to our website, Georgia AG Tech, there’s a banner there. You can learn more about the AG Tech Summit. We’re doing this in collaboration with the Georgia Research Alliance, which is a close partner with our department and the Georgia Research Alliance and us. We’re able to do this so any attendee can can attend free of charge because of the sponsorship we’re able to in collaboration with Georgia Research Alliance. So Georgia, Georgia Tech and Georgia dot org is the main website for our department, so there’s a ton of different information there. But again, go to Georgia Board AG Tech. Read more about our summit. You can also read more about those four major areas that I talked about and feel free to. Anyone can reach out to me if they have a AG tech company in their neighborhood or if they’re an AG tech company and would always willing to support where we can.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:35] Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your story today.

Chris Chammoun: [00:15:38] Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:39] All right, this Lee Kantor. We’ll sail next time on Atlanta Business Radio.