Velkommen til Lørn.Tech - en læringsdugnad om teknologi og samfunn. Med Silvija Seres og venner.

Silvija Seres: Hello and welcome to Lørn Oslo Innovation Week. I'm Silvija Seres and my guest is Synne Foss Budal from Nofence. Welcome.

Synne Foss Budal: Thank you for having me.

Silvija: So I'm just going to say a few words about this conversation and who the series belongs to. Lørn has partnered with Oslo Innovation Week to communicate in advance some of the most exciting events and talks that will be happening during this week in October. And the idea is that if people think that this is interesting and would like to hear more, then they can look at the program and register to participate in the live event itself, which will be mainly digital. And there are five main tracks, and this is the conversation that we have selected for the track called Scaling for Growth or Scaling Your Growth. And Nofence is a company I'm really, really fascinated by. And I'm very much looking forward to hearing your story, both in terms of innovation and research sustainability, but also as a scaling and very successful international business. So welcome. And we always start by asking people to say a few words by themselves. So this is not a kind of a stiff interview. This is a chat. And who is Synne and why should we listen to her?

Synne: I am currently the general manager of Nathan's UK and my background is a degree in economics and politics in the UK. So I do apologize for my accent being affected by many years in the UK. And then prior to that my family and I, we lived down in Singapore so that my high school was all UAB diploma. Other than school and work it's been a lot of golf. But right now my life is pretty much the same. So me and my partner have moved to the UK so we currently live just outside of Birmingham and our office is based in the epicenter and, and this is what we do now. I am very much enjoying this adventure with my friends.

Silvija: Very cool. So see I'd like so we usually ask people if they have some sort of an eccentric hobby, but being an entrepreneur maybe that's eccentric enough.

Synne: Yes! It takes over your life really. But I do enjoy it and I think especially when you go into new markets like we do, it's key to be there for your customers. So all 130 customers have my private number. So I get texts on Saturday evenings and it's important to be there and help out. So for us, we have the fact that both of us work in Nofence and eventually it just becomes a part of your life. But I enjoy that. I think it's nice.

Silvija: Very cool. So tell us about Nofence.

Synne: What we do at Nofence is virtual fencing for livestock - cattle, sheep and goats. And it is a system where you collar the animals. So you put a GPS tracker around their neck. And then we have an app that our customers download on their phone where they draw pastures, they put down posts. And what happens then when the animal gets to the boundary is that there is a pitch or a note that gets higher and higher in pitch. And if they then hear the audio and they cross the boundary and they turn around because they know if I don’t turn around, I have a pulse. So my normal way of talking about it is that when you have visible physical fences that we're used to, the animals use their eyes so they can see the fence and avoid the discomfort. Now we're just swapping, so we're using listening skills. And if you think about it, I would say listening skills will work a lot better in the dark. As you can hear the fence regardless of the light. So it's a bit revolutionary because I think that fencing hasn't really seen a proper update since we had electrical fencing back in the seventies.

Synne: So there is that collar, which looks a bit awkward at the moment. It doesn't look very delicate at the moment but we'll get there. But it works. So it is a box underneath the neck. And then there is a chain that goes around the neck. You can imagine being a positive and a negative. So the pulse is applied around the neck if necessary. In the future it may be different. We don’t know yet.

Silvija: And so tell us what's the advantage of having this apart from in the dark, obviously, but are there other advantages like animal welfare or management of your livestock?

Synne: So I think animal welfare definitely and we need to agree on where we start when we talk about animal welfare. Because I think animal welfare for livestock is to do their natural behavior. And the actual behavior for a cattle is the fact I've got four legs and I'm going to use them to find my own food. And that is what the cattle is made to do. It's not made to stand and be fed. It's an outdoor animal. And livestock has always been part of our ecosystem and they've moved in herds across our landscape. We have domesticated them. So it's important for us to create a system where we can create the natural pattern of their movements in a city or around the city because we build infrastructure, we build roads, which makes it impossible then for them to move in the pattern that they would. So there is that the animal welfare goes down to doing what you're meant to do. And then I think the sustainability and the opportunity lies in utilising our grasslands. So Norway is a good example of how we have a lot of area that we're not using. So the animals have moved closer and closer to the farm because it's not effective to have animals outside and in our uncultivated mountain landscape, but they actually belong there. So we need to put them back out there and utilise that area. And then I think about the second part, which is exciting, but which is when we come to the UK and we look at rotational grazing or regenerative agriculture where you put the management of the animals because everyone here is pretty much using the land they have available. But now we're looking at how can we actually move the animals in a pattern to maximise the growth of the grass and animal health and animal growth. And that's really exciting.

Silvija: So there is innovation here at several, several levels. So I can see how this can both be a good thing for the beauty of the landscape and the management of your livestock. So there's the virtual side, but there's also the dynamic side where you say that there is this rotational use of pastures maybe we need. So it's not just virtual, it's also dynamic in the sense that you can decide that today my pasture is here and tomorrow it's there. And actually, in the meantime, I also want my stock to move. And I'm kind of directing them as I'm planning this.

Synne: So I always talk about it as if you look at Nofence replacing your stock fencing where it's just like posts around the field. You don't see the full potential because the full potential is when you ask how can I actually move my stock according to a plan to optimize their performance? So definitely you picked up on the right thing, which is dynamic because it is instead of going out on the field and moving fences, you're looking at doing it on the phone. I have customers in the UK whose fence I have. But worst case, I think he told me in the high season during summer he spends 5 hours a day moving fences. It is physically going to a field, rolling up temporary electric fences and then putting them back out and moving stock. And now we're looking at that happening on your phone and you can imagine then the potential is big. Right now it's just a tool. But we want to become carpenters as well. So we have all that data that we are accumulating, on amount of steps, on how often the animals lay down, how often they stand up, and how can we become that tool for the farmer to maximize or optimize their grazing. Because right now it's just it belongs to experts or hippies in the field. But we want it to become the conventional way of doing livestock management.

Silvija: So there are two things here I'd really like to go further with. What is the business case for the farmer? The reason why your company is growing is because you are able to present this as a kind of a no brainer, both in terms of sustainability, but also in terms of economics. Let's start with that. So there is the saved money, I guess, from all this movement of fences. Then there is also better collaboration with nature management and municipal administration, etc. That's the dynamic bit also with your neighbors. And perhaps then the third bit is also eventually figuring out what you can learn about your livestock and optimizing their lives from all this movement data definitely.

Synne: And I think that what the farmer gets back there are the pure financial things that the farmer is looking for is how much meat can I produce with the input that I put in? And what we're looking at as we're looking at a replacement for a lot of the things that farmers will have on their list of expenses right now. So right now they'll have fertilizers and then, like in Norway, you have long winter seasons. Winter feeding is the biggest cost for most farmers. You can imagine if we can, by optimizing the grazing management, we can stretch the grazing season. Let's say we can do a month in one end and then the month and the other end then that is the proper bottom line change for a farmer. Having that learning ability to see how my animals perform the best? Because a lot of that has been tied up to genetics and improving choosing the breed that gains the most weight. But now we can look at if we can actually give the animals good quality grass all the time or for a longer time, then you earn more money per animal without putting any more in, which is what we want.

Silvija: So one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about is that you are very good at translating things to the bottom line, but also very good at learning, I think, from other related areas. So in Norway we have fish farming and we use a lot of data and AI and some of the most interesting kind of smart farming solutions I've seen in the world related to these fish farms. And one of the things that they use a lot is fish visual eye, but also just positioning data and keeping an eye on that to understand the level of stress in the fish, to understand the health of the fish, to understand the growth of the fish, etc.. And I'm thinking if you use the movement data of the stock, if you have enough of it, eventually, do you see that you can use the data on how the sheep move, for example, to understand if they have been extra hungry or extra stressed lately.

Synne: Definitely. And that's definitely there. We can already see from our data. Obviously, I don't want to give anything to customers that they're not going to find any value in. So right now, it's something that we have, we can see when an animal is in heat. So when we say that an animal's head heat as it's ready to breathe basically and the activity data, we can compare it to the herd so we can see when an animal's underperforming compared to the rest of the herd. And yeah, this movement data is so valuable to tell something about an animal's health, then it becomes, do we need to measure the temperature of the animal? Can we say something about how much they're laying down? Does that say anything about health? And that is definitely going to become a thing. Right now the data is related to the collar, so the movements of the collar not necessarily connected to this, although we put it on one. You can take it off and take it on another animal. So that disturbs the data. But one day when they get to the point where we can collect the data that we collect with an animal I.D., I think we are competing about the space around an animal's neck because agriculture is becoming so data driven that whoever has everything that the farmer needs is going to win that space. And in order to do that, I think we definitely need to develop animal health as part of it.

Silvija: Very interesting. So now if we start looking at scaling. Tell us a little bit about your growth story as a company and what are the success factors?

Synne: So Norway, I think Nofence’s advantage is the fact we have never been massively funded ever. We've always been a company where we kind of lived on the edge of what we can handle and we ended up in a place where we'd sold prototypes in the market. But what we've learned from that is so much because we've collected 75 billion hours of grazing on pasture, and I just had to take my hat off to all the Norwegian farmers who have brought our products and have to ship them back. And there's been issues with the GPS and there's been this and that, but we've learnt so much from actually having the product where it needs to be because we can we can drop the collar from tall buildings and we can run tractors over it, but the proper test is to put it on animals in a growing season and to see the effect and learn from that.. And then we had a successful mission which was really good after the year of COVID, where everything kind of just for a second there just completely dropped down. And, and the growth in the UK, I think when I went into the UK, I think it was focusing a lot on what the UK farmers need and what they are looking to improve, because I think Norway is unique in the way that we do farming and the way our country is. And now that we go to the UK it's completely different settings and we need to understand what are they trying to do in the UK and how can we fit in?

Silvija: Very cool. I also like the fact that you're talking both about lean and agile hardware development. So obviously you've been testing both the robustness and the animal friendliness of your product, but also the software side of it. If I understand you correctly, 65000000 hours.

Synne: 75000000 hours counting. That is hours of grazing when an animal has been wearing the collar.

Silvija: And are you collaborating with somebody who can kind of beat the shit out of this data? So we can find some interesting things that we didn't know about animal welfare and health.

Synne: So we do a lot of research with that now. I think we have up to 15 projects across the world with universities. But we're at the point where right now it'ssort of a breaking point in my eyes, because we're at the point where we have a fence function that works because you can't have a product that doesn't work. So for us, that's been really key. And our bedrock is what we live for. So as long as we have a good budget now, we can start building on that added value service and looking in and analyzing all that data. And I think that's certainly going to come up in the next couple of months or so because the real potential is there and the product in itself is so revolutionary and we mustn't forget that, although I think that there is still a lot to pick up.

Silvija: Very cool. So. How do you go international? So you've worked really well with Norwegian farmers. Norway, I don't know if everybody who listens to us knows because we have an international audience now. It is a very digital, fast moving country. So we have a great network infrastructure and everybody, all the farmers including are digitally enabled. Everybody has the latest phone and the latest whatever they need for their work and they're comfortable using it. So you managed to open up the market in Norway and then and then you said you work with universities for some international entries, but still, how does one go? And I think many companies in Norway struggle with exactly that step. So how do you go from being a very interesting Norwegian company to being an interesting global company?

Synne: Oh, that is a very good question. I would have to say, starting with what is your unique selling point? What are you trying to do and finding how can I fit in to other countries and understanding the context of where you go in? So for us, we have a few no brainers with the system today that helps us kind of guide, alright, where to go, where not to go. Being a Norwegian company for us it was kind of self said, as long as we are Norwegian we need to be in a country where we can speak English for one matter. Because let's say we launched in a country and there is support and we can't handle it because it's in a language we don't know. So that's one thing. And then it is looking at finding those countries. For us, it was finding those countries that are forward leading as well. So the UK as an example has where the government's said we're going to be world leaders on agritech in you know in the next couple of years and it's been one of their strategies and that's something that we try to pick up.

Synne: And for us also our products are quite particular with animal welfare and legal regulations. So it's been trying to do some research, figuring out right where, where is, where can we go and where can't we go? There are some countries who have bans on collars on animals. Then obviously you don't go there. I think the biggest one we probably followed is where the interest is because we are in the lucky position where there isn't we don't have many competitors. I'm hopeful that they're going to arrive because I think it's good with competition. And the interest is from all over the world. So every day we get requests from Africa, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada and the UK. And that’s why we went to the UK because we saw that the interest was there, they had the ability to pay and the legal side of things was it was easier for us to enter. So I don't know if I have any other advice then it's a bit of follow your gut as well. 

Silvija: And then it's a matter of basically being able to find people. How do you go about that? Do you have international events where you make sure that you look for talent or.

Synne: I think the key thing is to build a network in the right for us. Agritech and agriculture is quite nice in that way because it's often quite close knit and people get in touch with us. We've been in the fortunate position where we can have people come to us and say, we want to work with you because what you're doing is the next chapter, which is really nice to hear. So for us it's been firstly building communities with customers because customers are the best ones to spread the news. They're much better than marketing in my eyes, because we talk about benefits, we talk about a neighbor effect, we call it because if I have one farmer who uses Nofence, then I can have ten farmers around that who's also going to pick up on the fence because they talk to each other and farmers, they trust each other. Say for me, it's been about when I looked at customers for the first year, I was trying to find ways that I can spread out who are the ones that are going to talk about us and then building a community of those. And that helps us then connect with organizations, connect with the Farmers Union, and then we can pick up on the Red Tractor shows, which is a quality scheme. And there's always that person who knows someone and then eventually governments. So I would start there. And the nice thing about customers that are keen is that they're such a driving force because they pretty much do anything to get your product.

Silvija: Finding these evangelists for your product is really important. So I want to ask you something else. So you talk about the business case in Norway is basically cutting the cost of the fencing, but also being able to do dynamic movement of your livestock. In England, the rotational stuff is very important, perhaps also collaboration with neighbors. Maybe you can share your grounds today or this year and his grounds next year? Or are there other countries with completely new needs that you still haven't opened up? You know, maybe there are countries where you actually have to protect livestock from wild animals or maybe you need to know special watering rights where you have to manage that in this particular way.

Synne: There is always something I can tell you for sure. So every place you go there is something new that you have to have to overcome and definitely the one we did choose, the UK for the particular reason that the lack of predators means physical fences aren’t vital. So I think we haven't yet seen something that's unusual because we are going quite specifically towards those who want to manage their grazing better. 

Silvija: Right. So that we are moving towards the end of our allotted time. And I want to spend the last 3 minutes asking you three questions. We usually ask people to recommend another really interesting innovation case. And you've mentioned orbital machines as a case. You are impressed. Who are they?

Synne: So I think the interesting thing about that case is, they are spun out of my hometown, which I obviously like! They created this pump at the University of Trondheim. It's a tiny little Norwegian innovation that NASA's been interested in. They picked up funding and they now have a setup in Germany as well. And I think the cool thing about it, which I think we can learn from, is to understand that we in Norway are really good at those kinds of tiny little things. But then we need to make it scalable. So we need to take it out of Norway and make it scalable and apply it somewhere else. And that's why I like Orbital Machines because I think they're a good example of something that we need to get better at because we need to have something after the oil. And I think that is a good example of where we're going.

Silvija: I think you're very right. I think we are extremely good at creating industrially applicable technology that's super advanced and also very digitally clever. And we are very, very good at things like cybernetics and sensors and communication tech and networks and all of these combined for amazing hardware and software. And we need to get better at positioning it for sales and new business models. And that's what both Nolan's and Orbital machines do really well. I want to ask you also, you recommended a documentary on Netflix called Kiss the Ground. And I am a fan of learning from Netflix. But what's Kiss the Ground about?

Synne: So Kiss The Ground is actually a climate change documentary about how we can battle climate change. And I feel it gives me hope that there actually is something that we can turn around. Because every time I look at the way we handle climate change, we talk about small things, we talk about electric cars, we talk about sort of how we can remove diesel cars or we can put this new tax on.

Silvija: Plastic straws.

Synne: You know, plastic bags. And I'm thinking these are like that. They're so tiny. But then Kiss the ground gives us hope that if we regenerate our soil, which is basically what can hold our CO2, our carbon, the issue is not then carbon. And that one talks about where the carbon should be and it should be in our soil and be productive and not be in the atmosphere, increasing global temperatures. So it's really good. I will say it's American in the sense that they quite like it's emotional but enjoyable. So I do recommend it.

Silvija: Yeah, very cool. And then my final question is, what's the most important thing we talked about? What do you want people to remember from our conversation?

Synne: Oh, that is a good one. I would say that Norwegian technology is groundbreaking, but we need to take it a step further and bring it into the world. And for that, we need a lot of people. So we don't just need people who know technology and can do or create technology, but we need those that can actually push it and push it out to a global community. Because I'm not a technician. I never have been. But so we need young people today to need to own their future. And like you've said before, you know that the future belongs to those who create it. And we really have the set up to do that in a way. Just take it out.

Silvija: See, thank you so much for this inspiring and educational conversation.

Synne: Thank you too.

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