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Vanta is the platform, the from over 16,000
vaccinated under name Wiesentezia, Nandos, and Granola genotst wird, the medkaidi Zukunft gestalten. And kairi-sicken, immer einschritt, forausant. Now, more fun and her Vanta.com. Have you ever wanted to be part of a community with other TED
“Talks Daily listeners or hear more from TED speakers?”
Becoming a TED member gets you closer to the ideas you love, and supports TED's non-profit mission to activate those ideas for a brighter future. Join our community to spark real-world change and get exclusive access to virtual events
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Astronaut Chris Hadfield, social scientist, Jonathan Height, and many more. Learn more and become a member today at TED.com/join. [MUSIC PLAYING] As a journalist, I've covered the intersection
of tech and climate for years. I've reported on new companies and old companies,
“ground-breaking advancements, and boots on the ground”
strategies. And across the board, I've noticed an interesting thread. In climate tech, we don't like talking about money. Somehow, we've been taught that profit is a dirty word, or a capitalist distraction from the real work
of saving the planet. But what if we've had it backward? Early in my career, I saw plenty of came-changing startups launched with massive grants and noble missions only to vanish the moment the initial funding dried up.
They just couldn't figure out their economic plan, and they weren't financially sustainable in the long run. It's hard to watch this cycle play out over and over, especially when it comes to such an urgent issue. And it doesn't just hurt investors.
It leaves communities. The people, these technologies were meant to serve, stuck in the lurch. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED.
I'm your host, Cheryl Dorsey. Farmworks, CEO, Yeely, walked on the TED stage with a confession.
It might sound scandalous at first.
She doesn't care about the traditional metrics of impact as much as she cares about her bottom line. Ye is a technologist and entrepreneur who started with a perfect climate smart plan for canyon farmers. That's how farmworks was worn.
But she quickly learned that a high tech farm doesn't mean anything to metals are rotting in the shed because no one is buying them. Yeely's journey takes us from the quiet rows of an irrigation fed field to the chaotic 5AM energy
of the Marquis' wholesale market in the robie. Her story shows us how to translate big, climate ideals into a language that actually works for the people on the ground. The language of income is profit the enemy of the planet,
“or is it an engine that can actually allow us to save it?”
One moment has passed and already it's the advantage of the part of the car. Or the one that's stuck on the roof of the tank. Shared in the end, most of them are at a minimum moment. But no words. We are aliens. They're there. In half of three days, we're 80% of the aliens.
Shared can be believed in the world, or you're a person in an alien adventure in your country. More info is at alianz.de/sharden, or a person for us. Alianz, for your life.
3,000 farmers supported.
Fifty times the food waste prevented every month.
These numbers represent farmer's impact over the last five years.
“But what if I tell you, they're no longer the most important metrics to me anymore?”
Today, the number one metric that I care about as CEO of farmer's is our profitability. Now, before you judge me and think, how did we let this capitalist on the stage? Hear me out. Five years ago, I co-founded farmer's was a grand mission to build one thousand climate smart highly productive farms across Kenya. We invested in water dams, net houses, trip irrigation, organic fertilizers.
We had every red climate solution by the book.
But then, harvest time came, and I realized when walking into our grading shed, there were creative tomatoes rotting away because we didn't have enough water. Our storage room was bursting with onions. It looks almost funny. But I was standing there thinking, "Great, now what?" At the end of the day, every farmer has to answer one question.
“Who is going to buy my produce and pay for all my hard work and investment?”
Without the financial outcomes, climate initiatives cannot sustain themselves. This lesson hit me particularly hard a few years ago during one of our investor visits. The investor asked our group of farmers, "So, how do you like working with farmers so far?" One farmer said, "Yeah, we like them a lot so far, but you see, every two years, there is a new organization coming to us with a new project.
It is a beer after two years, so we'll see how long farmers can last." I filled my stomach drop in a moment. These farmers have gotten used to countless NGOs, donors, startups, growing with grand climate visions, big promises, only to vanish when funding dries up.
“And without a financial sustainability, we too would be gone in just a few seasons.”
In that moment, finding financial sustainability for farmers, meant we had to sell all of our produce. So that's who I am nice to do myself until Kenya's vegetable wholesale market. This is 5 am at a marketee, one of the largest wholesale markets in downtown Nairobi. It was chaotic. So many sellers fighting for the best spot to sell, the customers are fighting for the highest quality creative tomatoes. And I'm Chinese, so I'm very much used to crowds
and competition. But this was next level. I immediately knew I had to be part of this excitement. I started delivering tomatoes with our trucks to go markets. And on my first day, I got pushed down to the ground by a market vendor. Not exactly the war come. I was expecting. But over the years, I learned to be part of the market. I figured out how prices actually work, how weather can totally change supply and demand overnight. And the
made friends with market ladies, many of them who are now our customers, proudly selling produce from farm markets. What's the market figured out? We were able to sell almost everything. In fact,
we realized that our own farms could never be enough to meet the footing meant. In the end,
people are eating every day of the year, but no farmer can be harvesting 365 days of the year. So we decided to partner with more farmers, starting by training them with climate smart techniques. And this is what surprised me. When we gave farmers, trippy irrigation kits, sometimes this is not used. When we showed them the more hygienic crop support structures, they were still using the same old method. It was hard to admit, but the reality is,
we were imposing solutions, but not really solving problems. The trippy irrigation can save water, but cost fuel to operate. The more hygienic crop support structure might prevent disease, but cost money to buy. We were providing knowledge, but not really capital, or a guaranteed return. And without enough financial incentives, the farmers cannot really afford to implement those good ideas. So we changed our approach. Instead of focusing on training, we simply started buying
and distributing the farmers produce and give them a real income. What happened next, shocked me even more, because with the income from us, the farmers actually started to invest
In better practices, better equipment, investing in their own farms.
economics was more powerful than the right knowledge. And you know what else? Supposedly,
young people are not very interested in agriculture. That is not true. Young people in Kenya love agriculture, but what they love even more is to have a decent job and earn a decent income. At farmworks, one of the 80% of our employees are under the age of 30. We aren't an agriculture business made by young talent. Over the years, we have grown into one of the largest vegetable wholesalers in Kenya. In 2024, we sold 100 million tomatoes. That might sound like a lot.
“So we still have a lot of revenue to grow and a long way to go. And remember, my original”
dream of building one's own farms, that is still being realized, but in a different way. Today, the farms are being built, not by us, but by the farmers who know their own land and communities the best. With steady market of take and consistent income from us, they are not able to invest in their own farms and reach out to us when they need help. Finding financial system ability was not easy. For years, after finding our market, we were still bleeding money.
I had to make difficult decisions of shutting down price demonstration farms, hoting new partnerships, even closing regions that were too far away for us to serve.
“Turns out it was really difficult to save money compared to spending it. But I knew the only way”
for us to survive and grow our impact is through finding financial sustainability. Today, we are a business with healthy margins and growth, whether 300 employees work for us and more than 10,000 market vendors rely on us for their daily supplies. The hard lesson I learned from the years of being a social entrepreneur is that
real sustainability, climate or otherwise, must come from economics first. I'm not talking about
stress and profit over planet, but I have recognized that without the viable economics, our climate projects and initiatives might remain as expensive experiments, but not really scalable solutions. Think about it. When farmers in an income, they can invest in better practices. When companies achieve profitability, we can protect and scale our impact. When communities prosper economically, they're able and can't afford to care about their environment in the long term.
“So here is my message. The best thing we can do for our climate is to build economically viable”
solutions. Let there be economics first. Then, and only then, can we unlock real lasting climate
impact. Thank you. That was Yee Lee at TED Countdown 2025. Ever since hearing Yee's talk, it keeps thinking about this. Yee went to Kenya with the science already figured out. The dams, the irrigation systems, the organic inputs. She had all the technical ingredients for a climate smart farm, and it still wasn't enough. A farm can be perfectly designed for the planet and still fail the farmer. And if it fails the farmer, it fails the planet too. The missing piece
wasn't technology. It was economic sustainability. It was making sure the people working the land could actually build a livelihood from it. That realization challenges a core assumption driving billions of dollars of climate investment. The common assumption is that if you build something that's good for the earth, adoption will follow. Yee's experience says, not without the market, not without the money making sense on the ground. So that raises the next question. If we accept
that economic viability has to be baked in from the start, then what does the ideal farm actually look like? How do we build a farm that considers both climate and profit at scale across the planet that needs to feed billions more people in the decades ahead? That's exactly what food system scientists Brent Lowkin wants to know too. For a TED Ed lesson of the day, Brent explores an idea that sounds almost too ambitious to take seriously. Can we create the perfect farm?
You are a person in a alliance against your own country.
More info, find us at aliance.de/shadden or a person for Ort.
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“Vanta is the platform for over 16,000 people, like Santasia, Nandos, and Granola,”
who will be able to deal with Kayi and Kayi and Irisi. Now, let's go to Vanta.com. A random influencer, a friend who read something somewhere, your doctor. It can be hard to know where to get trusted health information. Ted Health is a podcast that will help you focus on the stuff that you actually need
to know to live your healthiest life. I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerliter, a practicing internist, and I share weekly TED talks
from certified health experts that break down the questions you're always getting different answers to.
Get the science-backed ideas for a healthier you, with Ted Health, wherever you get your podcasts. About 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm. This agricultural revolution was a turning point in our history, that enabled people to settle, build, and create. In short, agriculture enabled the existence of civilization.
Today, approximately 40% of our planet is farmland. Spread all over the world, these agricultural lands are the pieces to a global puzzle we are all facing.
“In the future, how can we feed every member of a growing population a healthy diet?”
Meeting this goal will require nothing short of a second agricultural revolution.
The first agricultural revolution was characterized by expansion and exploitation, feeding people at the expense of forests, wildlife and water, and destabilizing the climate in the process. That's not an option the next time around. Agriculture depends on a stable climate, with predictable seasons and weather patterns.
This means we can't keep expanding our agricultural lands, because doing so will undermine the environmental conditions that make agriculture possible in the first place.
“Instead, the next agricultural revolution will have to increase the output of our existing farmland for the long term,”
while protecting biodiversity, conserving water, and reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. So what will the future farms look like? This drone is part of a fleet that monitors the crops below. The farm may look haphazard, but is a delicately engineered use of the land that intertwines crops and livestock with wild habitats. Conventional farming methods cleared large swathes of land and planted them with a single crop,
eradicating wildlife and emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases in the process. This approach aims to correct that damage. Meanwhile, moving among the crops teams of field robots apply fertilizer in targeted doses. Inside the soil, hundreds of sensors gather data on nutrients and water levels. This information reduces unnecessary water use and tells farmers where they should apply more and less fertilizer,
instead of causing pollution by showering it across the whole farm. But the farms of the future won't be all sensors and robots. These technologies are designed to help us produce food in a way that works with the environment rather than against it. Taking into account the nuances of local ecosystems. Lower cost agricultural practices can also serve those same goals and are much more accessible to many farmers.
In fact, many such practices are already in use today and stand to have an increasingly large impact as more farmers adopt them. In Costa Rica, farmers have intertwined farmland with tropical habitat so successfully that they've significantly contributed to doubling the country's forest cover. This provides food and habitat for wildlife, as well as natural pollination and pest control from the birds and insects these farms attract. Producing food while restoring the planet.
In the United States, ranchers are raising cattle on grasslands composed of n...
generating a valuable protein source using production methods that store carbon and protect biodiversity.
“In Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal, new approaches to rice production may dramatically decrease”
greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Rice is a staple food for 3 billion people and the main source of
livelihood for millions of households. More than 90% of rice is grown in flooded paddies, which use a lot of water and release 11% of annual methane emissions, which accounts for 1 to 2% of total annual greenhouse gas emissions globally. By experimenting with new strains of rice, irrigating less and adopting less labor intensive ways of planting seeds, farmers in these countries have already increased their incomes and crop yields while cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
In Zambia, numerous organizations are investing in locally specific methods to improve crop production,
“reduce forest loss and improve livelihoods for local farmers. These efforts are projected to increase”
crop yields by almost a quarter over the next few decades. If combined with methods to combat
deforestation in the region, they could move the country toward a resilient, climate-focused agricultural sector. And in India, where up to 40% of post-harvest food is lost or wasted due to poor infrastructure, farmers have already started to implement solar powered cold storage capsules that help thousands of rural farmers preserve their produce and become a viable part of the supply chain. It will take all of these methods from the most high tech to the lowest cost to revolutionize farming.
High tech interventions stand to amplify climate and conservation oriented approaches to farming,
and large producers will need to invest in implementing these technologies. Meanwhile,
we'll have to expand access to the lower cost methods for smaller scale farmers. This vision of future farming will also require a global shift toward more plant-based diets and huge reductions in food loss and waste. Both of which will reduce pressure on the land and allow farmers to do more with what they have available. If we optimize food production, both on land and sea, we can feed humanity within the environmental limits of the earth, but there's a very small
margin of error, and it will take unprecedented global cooperation and coordination of the agricultural
“lands we have today. That was food-system-scientist Brent Logan. Can you imagine a perfect farm?”
We've been farming for 10,000 years and we're still working out what that even means. What strikes me is that both of today's speakers are circling the same problem from different angles. Yi is on the ground in Kenya, learning that sustainability has to pay for itself. Brent to Logan is zooming all the way out, looking at the entire planet as a single food system, asking where each acre can do the most good. And together, they leave us with something worth
sitting with. We already have the most of the science we need to feed the world without destroying it. The harder work is building the economic systems, the policy structures, the market incentives, they make it easy and sustainable to do the right thing for the farmer in Nairobi and for the planet she's feeding. So maybe the real question isn't whether we can create the perfect farm. It's whether we're willing to redesign the systems around it.
I'm Cheryl Dorsey. Thanks for thinking alongside us today on TED Tech. TED Tech is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Raheem Anasa. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. In the show is Fact Checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Consanza, Galardo, Daniellella, Belaruso, Rio Latias, Tanticus, San Manivon, and Roxanne High Lash. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a
review. I'm Cheryl Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more. Have you ever wanted to be part of a community with other TED Talks daily listeners or hear more from TED speakers? Becoming a TED member gets you closer to the ideas you love and supports
TED's nonprofit mission to activate those ideas for a brighter future.
spark real-world change and get exclusive access to virtual events with speakers like author and patch it. Astronaut Chris Hadfield, social scientist Jonathan Height, and many more. Learn more and become a member today at TED.com/join.
