Transcript:

 

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello everybody, and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists for scientists…

KATIE ANSELMI 0:07
They saw a really stark contrast right away between some of the trees that were doing really well and some of the trees that were doing poorly, and they didn’t really understand why. They watered the trees the same and in terms of topography, the field is relatively flat, so it wasn’t like we were dealing with a really steep incline or anything. And they just kind of wanted to know, you know, they were fertilized the same, but the trees were just yielding at vastly different rates. And so they they were curious. They thought maybe it could have been a water issue, but they just didn’t know. And that’s kind of what we went to to figure out.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:43
That’s just a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil, plant, atmospheric continuum. Today’s guest is Katie Anselmi. Katie completed her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Technology at Colorado Mesa University, where she focused her studies on water quality and conservation, and she’s currently pursuing her master’s degree in Environmental Science at Brigham Young University. After that, she hopes to work in the industry for a few years before continuing on to her PhD. And today, she’s here to talk about her most recent work in Kenya, where she participated in a study to improve the management and yield of ethically sourced crops for essential oils. So Katie, thanks so much for being here.

KATIE ANSELMI 1:31
Thanks for having me. This is exciting!

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:33
Alright so we definitely want to start out as we do with all of our guests. If you could just give us a little background into yourself how you got into the sciences and what led you into, you know, the specialty that you’re working on right now, and your grad studies?

KATIE ANSELMI 1:48
Yeah, so I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, so I spent a lot of time growing up and just being outside. And I remember I would always hike around, and I would ask questions on, why does that tree look a certain way. And why does, why does that grass grow like that? And then, for my undergraduate degree, I went to Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction. And very I want, how would I phrase this? It’s there’s a lot of outdoor stuff to do. It’s very natural. You know, you have the the junction between the Gunnison River and the Colorado River. And I spent a lot of time hiking and biking, and I ended up working in the palisade peach orchards for one of my internships. And I just really liked being outside. I wanted a job that I could be outside and enjoy nature, and that’s what I did my undergrad in and then I ended up reaching out to my professor at Brigham Young University, and started working with him. So I’ve just, I’ve always been an outdoorsy type of person.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 2:44
And so picking your major advisor for your graduate studies is a, you know, a pretty important step along the process. What What attracted you to to Dr Hansen’s research in particular, to to choose to go there?

KATIE ANSELMI 2:55
Yeah, definitely. Dr Neil Hansen, he works with variable rate irrigation, which is water conservation in the agricultural world. And I really just being from Colorado, Colorado’s been in a drought pretty much since I’ve been born, so I understand that water use is really important. And then I went out to visit him the October before I applied and visited his lab, and I just really liked what I saw there, and he works a lot with the technology and with sensors, and I thought that was all really cool work. So the first summer I spent with him, we spent it mainly in fields in Utah and Idaho, so potato fields, alfalfa fields, and I got a really good feel to the agricultural side of things with him.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:55
I was going to say, Do you have a preference right now as to whether you prefer working with agriculture, irrigated crops, or, I know you’ve had some some work with on the turf side of things as well. Any any preferences there so far?

KATIE ANSELMI 3:51
Yeah, I don’t really have a preference. I think that the problems and the challenges you work with are so different, and they’re both complex. You know, I’d say I love football. I’m actually really big football fan, which is why, when they offered me the thesis to work with sports field management, I took it, and it’s been really cool to be able to work with the football field and to work with the turf manager there. But I don’t really have a preference. I think they’re, they’re both important in different ways, but they answer different questions. So it’s almost been good to work with both, because I’ve been able to diversify what I work with.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:24
And moving forward, we mentioned in your bio that you’re working on your masters right now. You’re hoping to to work in the industry for a bit and before moving on to your PhD, what do you what do you foresee that looking like here in the next few years?

KATIE ANSELMI 4:37
Yeah, I don’t. I don’t really know. Honestly, I don’t have any major plans, I think I I could go either way. I could do something more turf related, something more agricultural related. I’ve worked with I definitely want to go more into the private sector. I worked with the state at one point. I worked with the city at one point, and now I’m here, and I like the private sector part of things. I think. You get a little more leeway to be creative and kind of push your limits when you’re you’re in a private industry with other scientists that kind of want to do the same thing.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:10
Well, we want, really wanted to dig into this very interesting project that you were able to work on recently over in Kenya, working with local farmers there who are working in, in basically growing crops, trees for essential oils. And we wanted to know, yeah, how did that project come about? How did this collaboration with, with it was with doTERRA and Fair Oil Farms over in Kenya. How did this all all come about in the beginning? And then we can move on to talk about the project setup and everything afterward.

KATIE ANSELMI 5:43
Definitely. So it actually started with this podcast. So my advisor, Dr Neil Hansen, was on this podcast with Colin Campbell, and they were talking about his research with variable rate irrigation and using the sensors. And Campbell, who is the director of fair oils, he was listening to the podcast, and he was really interested. He was having some problems with his fields down in Kenya, and he reached out to doTERRA, which is one of their sourcing partners. And he said, Hey, you know doTERRA is in Pleasant Grove, Utah, BYU is in Provo Utah. Would you have any connections with the professor there. And so the doTERRA guys ended up reaching out to my advisor, and Campbell and Jacob from Kenya, they ended up flying over to Utah and visiting my professor and just touring the lab and kind of seeing what he does with his research. And then they said, Hey, we really like what you’re doing. Would you think you could come help us out?

BRAD NEWBOLD 6:39
And so with that being, I guess, what are the what are the main questions or concerns? So you said Campbell, over in Kenya, was having issues with with their their fields, what? What were some of the issues that they were seeing there?

KATIE ANSELMI 6:53
Yeah, their primary issues were yield issues. So they had some trees that were doing really well. They looked really healthy, and their yield was very high. And then they had other trees on the same field that were yielding a lot lower, or nothing at all. And the crop that we work with, it’s Ylang-ylang. It’s one of the highest yielding and one of the highest value essential oil crops there they really have out there. It’s in Chanel #5. It’s in a whole bunch of other high profile essential oils and perfumes, and it is one of the most expensive oils on the market, and so yield in that case, is really important, because just a couple 1000 grams of oil is a hundreds of dollars difference.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 7:37
Ylang-ylang, I’m not, I’m not familiar with with That plant, is it native to Kenya?

KATIE ANSELMI 7:43
So it’s not native to Kenya. Actually, it’s native to Indomalaysia. But it was brought over by the French to Madagascar first, and then it traveled its way up to Kenya, and it grows very well in Kenya and in Madagascar. But it is not native. It’s also it’s a taproot tree, which means that the roots grow vertically down instead of horizontally across, which we found later on. Ended up having some challenges with the Kenyan soil. We were right kind of by the water. We were by the Indian Ocean, it’s only about 30 kilometers from the ocean, and so we kind of had to work with saltwater intrusion and a lot of clays in the soil, so, and we can get into that later on.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 8:25
So really challenging conditions for definitely growing a commercial crop.

KATIE ANSELMI 8:30
Yeah, but that’s not something that Fair oils could have foreseen technically when they bought this land. You know, it was just a field that they had used for growing plants in the past, and they decided to buy it and grow Ylang-ylang instead.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 8:41
And so you mentioned that they were struggling with the yield in certain cases? What, what are they harvesting on this?

KATIE ANSELMI 8:53
So they actually harvest the flower of Ylang-ylang when it is flowering, and it flowers year round, which means that they can actually harvest year round. Yeah, with it being right on an on the equator, that really helps. But yeah, as long as it’s flowering, they can harvest and they actually take the flower, and that’s what they squeeze to produce the oil.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 9:13
And so what was the variability? Did they have, like targets that they weren’t hitting, or expectations?

KATIE ANSELMI 9:20
I think that they, they don’t necessarily had targets this, this field is relatively new. They only started planting in 2021, so and they, they saw a really stark contrast right away between some of the trees that were doing really well and some of the trees that were doing poorly, and they didn’t really understand why they watered the trees the same. And in terms of topography, the field is relatively flat, so it wasn’t like we were dealing with a really steep incline or anything. And they just kind of wanted to know, you know, they were fertilized the same, but the trees were just yielding at vastly different rates. And so they they were curious. They thought maybe it could have been a water issue, but they just didn’t know. And that’s kind of what we went to to figure out.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 10:07
And so how did you start picking apart the problem? It sounds like just a really general something. How do, how do we understand this? How did, how did you begin to?

KATIE ANSELMI 10:16
Yeah, definitely. We went about it kind of the way we would do with any agricultural field. We did some soil mapping using satellite and GPS, GIS and just kind of seeing, what does the greenness look like, what does the topography look like? We learned a lot about the crop itself and how it grows. We learned that it doesn’t like to grow in saline or very salty soils, which would could be an issue because we are so close to the ocean, we learned kind of about what do the soil composition look like in that area, usually just so we could prepare ourselves to, you know, what we were expecting when we started digging down there, and then, yeah, just just kind of listing in our minds, mind you, we had no clue until we got to the field what our problems would be, but just kind of a general list of, what does watering look like. You know, we went and we talked with the farmers about management, and we got all of their management details to when do you water? How much do you water? When do you fertilize? How much do you fertilize? You know, what does the soil type look like? Where do you get the trees from? Right? Because these trees are transplanted. They’re not grown from seed there. They’re transplanted from their nursery. What is the planting process look like? You know, how big is the hole? How far does it go down? Just things like that. So we could get a general idea of how did the tree end up there, and how was it managed from there?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 11:45
Wow, sounds like a lot of work.

KATIE ANSELMI 11:47
It was a lot of work. And then on top of that, because it was an international project, we had to deal with all of the permitting for soil sampling and tissue sampling. We had to deal with our own vaccines and visas, which BYU helped us out with, thankfully, but it was definitely quite a process. It took up a large portion of our lives. Pretty much as soon as I finished finals, it was all Kenya, until the day we left.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 12:12
And so what jumped out at you, what were, what were the first things that started leading you down, down the path that you needed to follow to answer the questions that you had?

KATIE ANSELMI 12:22
I think we didn’t really start noticing those stark contrasts until we ended up on the field, you know, and we walked around, and it was definitely that the southern end of the field, the trees were just huge, and they were flowering all of the time. The flowers were big. We could kind of tell just based off of where the harvesters and where the workers were, where the flowers were really doing the best. And then from there we just, we just started digging. You know, the best way to kind of figure anything out is to just pull out a shovel and start digging a hole. Yeah, see what it looks like. Yeah. So, and the first thing we did is we created a soil moisture map using the TEROS 12 that we we made this PVC pipe in the Hopkins lab, and we put it on the PVC pipe, and we we had the the reader or the sensor, and it was attached to our phones. And so we did a lot of that process by hand, but pretty much what we did is we statistically decided how many samples do we need for this field? The field is one kilometer in diameter, so it’s pretty decently sized. It’s it’s a crop circle. And then from there, we decided we needed 74 samples. Using statistics, we decided to do a nested plot on those samples, so we had two different grids that we nested on top of each other, and then we had GPS coordinates for those different sampling points. And we would take our GPS and we would walk around the field until we got close enough to that coordinate point, and then we would take a sample log of the GPS point of where we took the sample and just continued from there. So that took about an entire day. The first day we were there, we were just doing the soil moisture map, and then from there, we sent all of the coordinates and all of the measurements back to BYU, actually, which is really nice because Kenya’s nine hours ahead of Provo. So we were able to finish all of our work, send them the spreadsheet that had all of the GPS coordinates, and then the team in Provo made a map for us, using QGIS to determine where would be the best place to put the sensors and kind of get a feel of what does the water content look like over the entire field, what does salinity look like over the entire field?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 14:40
And so were you able to kind of identify some zones that that and get a handle on the variability, like, how variable was it?

KATIE ANSELMI 14:48
Yeah, we were actually there was definitely some variability between three major zones, and that ended up being the three major areas that we put our sensors we needed, because we only had. Had three locations for sensor installation. We needed to make sure that we were putting them in the right place, classic sampling problem, definitely, yeah, especially with a field that big. So yeah. From there, we sent the information back to Provo. They sent us back with a map, kind of saying, This is what the salinity looks like. This is what the water content looks like. This is together, what they look like and what we think the zone should be from here. And then on top of that, when, whenever you’re in a field, you just kind of need to look around, you know, use some deductive reasoning and pick up on different details and patterns that you’re seeing. So a couple of patterns that we saw is that the trees actually all kind of grow, I don’t want to say completely sideways, but they grow with a curve because of the prevailing wind from the ocean. So even the larger trees would have that curve to it. And then there were some trees that were a little a little lower, like I said, the topography was relatively flat, but there was definitely some trees that ended up either, either in a divot or some sort of, like an like an old irrigation line that ended up just growing out. So,

CHRIS CHAMBERS 16:10
huh? And you mentioned earlier that you know some of the trees were doing visibly Well, as far as flowering, vegetative growth and just looking healthy. Did that match up with the zones? Did you kind of see a correlation between what you could observe in the vegetation and what was happening with your with your soil map?

KATIE ANSELMI 16:29
It did.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 16:30
Oh!

KATIE ANSELMI 16:30
Definitely.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 16:30
Nice, yeah.

KATIE ANSELMI 16:31
And it correlated even more when we started digging and we started taking soil samples, the trees that were doing well, were the trees that were in more of a sandy loam, or maybe just a regular loam, okay? And the trees that were doing poorly, there was a lot of clay, to the point where, in Block C, there was so much clay that we were soil augering and we just couldn’t go any further. Wow, about 24 inches. And like that auger was done, we would need something mechanical to get any deeper.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 16:31
And how deep do you see? You see? You mentioned that they have a taproot. How deep do Ylang-ylang roots typically, typically go?

KATIE ANSELMI 17:06
It depends on the size of the tree, right? With Ylang-ylang, having a really high growth rate, they grow drop. They can grow it at 16 feet per year. Oh my gosh, if they’re in ideal conditions, and these trees were not in ideal conditions, but they can grow meters upon meters down if they have the right conditions to so the fact that there was so much clay at 24 inches kind of gave us a good indication that there was something going on, and maybe there wasn’t. And also, when you get that much clay, there’s a potential for there to be waterlogging, and that’s something we talked about, as well when we were there with the farmers, is just, there’s not a lot of drainage.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 17:45
There’s a water table there.

KATIE ANSELMI 17:46
Definitely, definitely, we were talking about a potential hard pan with that clay where the water just couldn’t drain out. And especially, we were there during the rainy season, so there was a ton of water around. It wasn’t really a water issue. It’s not like in the Western United States, where the first question is, well, is it getting enough water? The question there was, there’s probably too much water and not enough drainage. So these trees, the roots get very anaerobic, and they can’t grow in the way that they should.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:16
I was going to ask along with that. I mean, you’re talking about these trees getting enough water. Previously, you said that that the managers of the of the field were also doing some watering. What are those, those irrigation practices? What are they they look like? You mentioned you’ve got a, a what was it a one kilometer diameter? Is a circular field? Yes. And, and so, yeah, what did, what did their, their previous, yeah, irrigation practices, what are those look like?

KATIE ANSELMI 18:16
Yeah, so this field is really interesting. It is based on a center pivot, right? So it’s a circular field, but it is also they’re trees, right? It’s not your typical so the center pivot goes over the trees. The trees are only about, I don’t know. I’d say the tallest one was maybe eight feet high. And then the water itself is actually from a hose. So they have hoses that are extended down from the center pivot. And then they have workers that water by hand. With Kenya having the different seasons, the rainy season and the dry season, they don’t irrigate as much as maybe we do here in the Western United States, right? Their irrigation is definitely more sporadic. It’s pretty much just when the dry season gets to a certain point they know when to water, and they just kind of try to water all the trees the same. So there’s not really any timed irrigation. They just kind of slowly move the pivot around and water the trees one at a time.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 19:37
There’s another tricky variable into the into the whole equation.

KATIE ANSELMI 19:40
Definitely, yeah, which is why, when we installed sensors, we decided to do two trees, so that if in the future we wanted to see kind of with that irrigation, if there was a lot of variability just with people watering by hand, you’re going to get some. And then if in the future, if we do want to run a study, we set it up where we could have two different irrigation treatments with two trees in the same zone.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 20:05
Tell us about the sensors. What would you install? How did it go? What anything interesting happened during the installation?

KATIE ANSELMI 20:14
Yeah, so we installed TEROS 12’s and TEROS 21’s. We had three different stations in three different zones, and then we had the logger boxes, and we brought down one of the ATMOS 41W weather stations.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 20:29
Nice.

KATIE ANSELMI 20:29
So that was kind of our setup. A couple of things that were a little different for us. Is we had to deal a lot with security. They have a lot of vandalization down there. It’s pretty rural, but there’s some people in neighboring towns, and they’re used to a lot of people just walking on the field and taking things, cutting things. So we had to put all of our wires through conduit. We had to actually cement a pole into the field, not just, you know, using a driver pole. And then we had separate security boxes to put on top of the logger boxes. And then they ended up doing an entire fence around the weather station with a very tall pool with the weather station. We just augured holes and put a TEROS 12 at 24 inches, and then a TEROS 12 at 6 inches, and a TEROS 12, 21, at 6 inches.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 21:25
Great. I love the I love the paired water content and matrix potential. Definitely any particular challenges or anything unexpected during the installation, or it’d go pretty smooth,

KATIE ANSELMI 21:36
not with the installation. I think the only challenge we had was with that clay. We added clay in block C and D, and so it made it a little harder to dig. But as far as the sensors, they worked great, awesome. We dug the hole, we installed them, we plugged them into the data loggers, and they started working right away.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 21:56
Nice. Any Have you seen anything in the data yet? Or are you needing to collect some more data before anything really jumps out?

KATIE ANSELMI 22:05
Yeah, we started seeing patterns right away. Even before we left Kenya, we could pull some things out at the 24 inch depth, the water content was really high. Was at almost 50% which is definitely high for a field that hopefully would be getting more drainage, right, and that was pretty uniform, but the zones where the trees weren’t doing as well, that water content was higher, which we think indicated some sort of either water logging, lack of drainage. Like I said before, it isn’t an irrigation issue. It’s definitely more a soil composition issue, I guess, just watching the matrix potential, that was something we found later, is we installed during the rainy season. So the matric potential, you know, was around zero, honestly. But as soon as the dry season hit, it was around the first of June that matric potential started dropping. Right away.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 22:58
Oh, wow.

KATIE ANSELMI 22:58
In all of the zones so, and it’s, it’s really nice. We maintain close communication with the people who managed down there in Kenya. And so as soon as I saw that matrix potential dropping, I reached out to them, and they said, Yeah, it’s the dry season. You know, we usually get a couple good rains, and then, you know, we start watering from there. But the TEROS 21 picked up on that pretty much right away.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 23:21
Great that’s cool.

KATIE ANSELMI 23:22
Yeah, the sensors worked really well, and I really liked using the TEROS 12 for that soil mapping. I think it’s a really cool tool, and I would love to use it in the future. I think one of the reasons is just because, when you install a sensor in the ground, you can’t move it, no, you can’t go anywhere else with it, not without a lot of work. But with that TEROS, we called it the TEROS 12 stick right? Because it was the TEROS 12 on the PVC pipe, we actually left it with them. And what they do is they walk around the entire field and can just take spot measurements from there. So even if a tree isn’t doing well, they can take a spot measurement. And I think that might have been one of their favorite tools that we left with them.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 24:01
Yeah, it’s really easy to see kind of get some instant gratification with your data too.

KATIE ANSELMI 24:06
Yeah, definitely.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 24:07
So did you map off the EC then or the water content?

KATIE ANSELMI 24:11
We mapped both. Okay, yeah, so we mapped water content and EC, and we picked up with the EC that there was a dry riverbed, and that was not something that they told us, until we did the map, and we showed the map to the managers, and they’re like, Oh yeah, there’s a there’s a dry riverbed that, you know, runs right through that field. So that’s probably why the the EC is a little higher there. But it’s cool that we picked up on that without even knowing.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 24:35
Yeah, totally, totally. And so what’s next? Are you collecting some more data. Do you have kind of a timeline for when you’re going to start, you know, reporting to the major stakeholders? How does it play out from here?

KATIE ANSELMI 24:51
Yeah, so I think right now, the next thing that we’re going to deal with is funding. We have a couple of different ideas of what we want to do with research projects. One of the biggest ones is. Kind of playing around with the installation of the trees, which doesn’t really help the trees that are planted now, but definitely in the future, we’re thinking of digging a hole and then actually drilling deeper past that, that clay layer.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 25:13
Making sure they can get down through there.

KATIE ANSELMI 25:15
Backfilling with sand to get the roots to grow a little deeper. We think that that will definitely help the trees. Yeah, and we would just want to do some other studies. Another thing that we found was the trees genetically differed based on the year that they were planted, and the trees that did better were all planted in one year. Mind you, they were also planted in the same area. But we want to figure out, is genetics a factor? Is it just the soil composition and the water logging that’s really making these trees, you know, not yield as well or yield higher? So we have a lot of questions. And so from here, we want to kind of figure out, okay, what are our top questions? How do we go about researching this? I know BYU has definitely talked about just with the plants and wildlife Sciences Department working with this further, because there’s not a lot of published research with essential oil plants. Oh, right. Even when we were doing our literature review, which is something we did before we left, we found a lot of research that had to do with medical use for Ylang-ylang, but not a lot of research on management of Ylang-ylang.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 26:25
So not having, you don’t have very much information about the genotype that is actually or what to expect? Yeah, as far as variability?

KATIE ANSELMI 26:32
There’s definitely a lot of work to be done with the plant. So we’ll just, we’ll just have to see. But yeah, we’re, we’re working with doTERRA to hopefully get some more funding for that research and working with the farmers, but hopefully at some point, there will either be a master’s student working on research down there, or maybe even a study abroad of students from BYU that go down there and work on studying Ylang-ylang.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:57
I wanted to touch on, I guess, kind of shifting gears a little bit. I want to touch on the human element as well, about the village that’s there in Kenya and the local farmers. And can you tell us a little bit about about how the what the research you’re working on, how that will impact the local community there? You know, when it comes to empowering local farmers and helping them with increasing yield along those lines?

KATIE ANSELMI 27:23
So it’s definitely worth noting that the field that we were working in was very rural. It was in southern Kenya, kind of right on the border with Tanzania, and there’s not a lot out there. There’s just a couple small villages. And all, most of the workers that work, their coaches, come from the villages, right? And they just walk there. And the human element was probably one of my favorite parts of the project, just getting to work with the farmers and getting to see how this industry of essential oils, which is something that you hear about in the States, but I don’t know. I didn’t know anything about essential oils before starting this project. You I couldn’t even told you what they were used for, but just to see kind of the agency that this industry gives them, you know, they’re able to work for a living. A couple things that fair oils really focuses on, is ethically sourced. All of these workers are giving a given a living Kenyan wage, which is around $200 and that’s that’s a big deal, right? And one of the impacts that you kind of see later on is, because the farmers are working and they’re making a living wage, they don’t have to pull their children out of school quite as early. So the children get to stay in school longer. They get to be older, to the point where they can end up, you know, going to high school or maybe going to college, versus having to get pulled out at 10, 11, years old to work to support their family. And we got to visit the school that fair oils kind of works with it’s right next to the field, and they they help the school out. They not only give them money, but they were able to pipe some of the treated water from the farm down to the school, and then the school can then sell that water in the village in order to make some some revenue for the school itself. But, yeah, I think it was really cool to just see ethically sourced product, the way that fair oils does it. And even, I mean, they feed their workers when they’re working, they feed them breakfast, lunch and dinner. Really, as long as you’re there and you’re working, you get to eat, which is a big deal, especially in that part of the country where there’s there’s not a lot of jobs, there’s not a lot of work. So a living Kenyan wage can go a long way. And that was the same we went. We visited um, the production plant, where they actually make the oil. You know, they take the raw product, and there’s a lot of oil that they make there. It was in Nairobi. So that’s another 200 workers that are employed. So it’s, it’s a big industry, and they employ a lot of people.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:56
I was going to say, along with that, you’ve, you’ve been able to work now with. Um, with farmers and growers here in in the US, and now farmers and growers there in Kenya. I was just wondering if, I mean, we don’t have to do pros and cons or anything like that, but, but what are some of the some of the similarities? What are some of the insights that you’ve gained in being able to work with farmers from from very different cultures and and societies?

KATIE ANSELMI 30:18
I would say about both, they know their craft, and it is amazing to work with farmers, both in the States and in Kenya. They know what they’re talking about. They know what they’re doing. I’d say one of the best things about working with them, and this actually goes for with the the turf managers too. They they know how to do things, and they know the different practices, but they don’t know why those practices work. They know they work. They don’t know why. And we’ve been able to show with using the sensors, why their practices work, and kind of back up and solidify, why they water a certain way, why they fertilize a certain way. On average, the farmers that I work with, both here and the states, they can be a little skeptical of doing things differently, right? And we have to be really respectful of that, because they’re it’s their livelihood sets on the line, right? We don’t want to go into a farm and mess with their yield, because that’s, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line for these farmers. And that’s also in the case in Kenya. You know, it’s not any different. But I’d say that the farmers that we work with are open, and a lot of cases, the farmers that we work with have a problem, and they just have no real way to fix it, and that’s why they reach out to us in the first place.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 31:33
And hopefully the data gives them another tool in their toolkit to…

KATIE ANSELMI 31:36
Definitely to, yeah, better. And we’ve seen that both with working on the agricultural fields and working with the turf fields is the data can can back up their practices. It can help them make the transition from one irrigation system to another, you know, irrigation scheduling and things like that, because there’s a lot of push, and this is more in the Western United States, for farmers to use less water, right? But what a lot of people don’t understand is that’s that’s really complicated, and that’s really scary for a farmer to do, you know, because they don’t want to use less water and then lose their crop. So having the data and the sensors to kind of back up the fact that the yields are going to be okay, and you can use less water, or you can not waste as much water, I think is really beneficial. But I love working with farmers. They’re really great. They work really hard, and they know what they’re talking about.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 31:36
How was the experience for you? Have you traveled very much? Was, do you have very much experience going overseas? Or was this kind of one of your first one of your first trips?

KATIE ANSELMI 32:39
Yeah, so this was my first trip to Africa, really, one of my first trips outside of the United States. And it’s definitely worth noting, this wasn’t a vacation. We got to do some fun stuff, but doing research in a foreign country, doing research in a country that doesn’t have as many resources. You know, it wasn’t like, oh, we forgot something. We have to go to the store to get it right. No, like, as soon as we were out there, if we didn’t have it, we didn’t have it, you know, and we had to make do without it. But I liked traveling. I’m definitely adventurous myself, and I loved meeting the people. They spoke mostly Swahili. They would speak English with us, but they would speak Swahili to each other. So it was interesting going back to Provo, Utah, and everyone was speaking English. Again. I got so used to people speaking and I didn’t understand what they were saying, but it was, it was a really good experience, and BYU helped make sure it was a good experience for us to travel. Kenya’s on their restricted travel list, which is why only two grad students and one professor were allowed to go, and so we had to, you know, go through all the safety briefs and stuff for that. But it ended up being a wonderful experience, and we didn’t have any issues in country.

BRAD NEWBOLD 33:53
Yeah, I was gonna say with this. And now I know you’re still in kind of relative, relatively preliminary stages of this project. I mean, there’s still things to see, you know, in the next next couple years, or whatever, to see how these yields change or increase, hopefully, and those kinds of things, are there any thoughts about expanding this type of exploratory research into other crops, whether it’s related to what doTERRA is sourcing? Or otherwise?

KATIE ANSELMI 33:53
Yeah, definitely. I would say this trip was really good to figure out methodology, right? Because we hadn’t really ever done something exploratory like this before, with creating the soil map and taking soil samples and taking tissue samples and learning about this new crop, but the methods that we did here could apply to any crop, really, on any agricultural field. And we have talked and mind you, it is all about funding, but definitely working with doTERRA in the future, or even just other farmers that the soil mapping is great because it can be done in a day, you know, and then based. On GIS knowledge. That’s probably the harder part of it, right, is working with GIS. But it would, it would definitely be cool to get into more of this research of seeing how soil mapping and soil sampling at a smaller scale, because another thing that we work with with farmers is farmers don’t have a lot of time, right? A farmer’s day is packed from the moment they wake up to pretty much the moment they go to sleep, and we definitely want to be respectful of that. So we were kind of thinking in terms of, okay, if we could go out there for one day, or if the farmer could go out there for one day, how much information would they get in turn for that? So kind of the the time use versus the reward, and we want to make sure with this project, kind of perfecting it. Moving forward, how could they take the least amount of samples, the least amount of time and get the best results and the most data.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:53
Chambers touched on this a little bit, but future, what do you see? What do you envision in the next, you know, five to 10 years, with this kind of setup, but also at the same time, is there any sensing technology or other things that you wish you would have had? I mean, here in the in the US, we can do, you know, we can get, throw some drones up, or get some satellite data, or other things like that. Are those? Are there things along those lines that you wish you would have had, or could have had? I guess so, carte blanche. If you had blank check to create your own research project. Again, coming back to the same location, how would that look? What would you want to have? What would future potentially Dr. Katie wish to achieve there?

KATIE ANSELMI 36:35
Yeah, so the first thing that I would love to have is actually something that I’m working with here at METER now. Juniper systems has their Mesa tablet and their geode. And I remember talking with my intern, and she kind of showed me how this worked. And I watched a video, and I was like, Are you kidding me? We did all of that by hand in Kenya. We had our phones, we had paper that we were writing down the coordinates and the readings for, and then we had to transcribe all of that onto an Excel spreadsheet and then bring all of that into a mapping system. And with that system, we could have done it in half the time, you know, or even that. So that’s one of the things that I think would be amazing, just working forward with this research, is finding a way to, and we’ve talked about this with juniper systems, kind of integrating the sensors with a GPS component. I think that would be huge, because as soon as you can integrate sensors with a GPS component, you can map, and once you map, you can just it’s pretty much the world at your fingertips. Once you have that CSV that you can put into GIS, right? And that’s a lot of fun to work with. So I’d say that in terms of funding, we would have loved to take more soil samples. You know, we always want to sample more, but it takes a lot of money to run soil samples. It takes money to ship them back here. So if we had unlimited funding, we would have done multiple depths with the sampling and really gotten a good understanding of what the soil composition is like over the entire field. We also, and this is kind of less we would have wanted to dig up some trees and look at the rooting system, but because, you know, those trees are worth money, we didn’t want to, we didn’t want to do that, right? We didn’t want to kill trees, but in the future, we would like to potentially dig up some trees and really study the root system with them.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 38:27
This is great. So glad you came on to the chat with us about this. And I love the story about how I got started with someone listening to a podcast and then going and talking to someone, and that’s, that’s hilarious and awesome.

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:40
Yeah, definitely. I was gonna say that’s, that’s, I think that’s a first that we’ve seen. I know Katie, when you came to to METER here and gave your presentation, a lot of us here in the marketing department, like, yes, something’s working. You know, I know that. I know there’s a lot of people out there that listen to this podcast and share it with others, but to be able to hear this, yeah, that that an actual project. And, you know, being able to to do something came successfully from, from the podcast. It, it’s, yeah, really cool to hear about that.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 39:11
Warm fuzzies all around!

KATIE ANSELMI 39:12
Yeah, definitely. I’d say on the the BYU end, we were the same way. You know, we spend so much of our time reaching out to farmers and pretty much saying, hey, we’ll do this all for free. Please, just let us use our land. Please just let us come out and install some sensors and take some samples, and we’ll take the least amount of your time as we possibly can. So for someone to reach out to my advisor and say, Hey, I’ve seen the research, I’ve seen the work that you do. Can you come help us? We were thrilled. And even I remember when I started on Dr Hansen’s team. He’s like, so listen, a lot of other professors get to go lots of cool places and do lots of cool things, and my research is in Utah and Idaho, so I hope you’re okay with that. And I was like, Yeah, sure. I love that. I love the work that you do. And then I remember going into his office, and he’s like, so I have some news. You’re going to Kenya, so that was a surprise, but yeah, we’re also really happy that this all worked out.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 40:09
All right, well our time is up for today. Thank you again, Katie, for stopping by and sharing your time and your research. We really appreciate this. It’s been a really interesting conversation.

KATIE ANSELMI 40:19
Yeah, thank you for having me. This has been great.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:22
And if you in the audience have any questions about this topic or want to hear more, feel free to contact us at metergroup.com or reach out to us on Twitter @meter_env and you can also view the full transcript from today in the podcast description. That’s all for now, stay safe, and we’ll catch you next time on We Measure the World.