ADVANSEE – INTERVIEW translated in english

This interview is about e-Gleek, a French company who innovate and can inspire your
entrepreneurial project!

Can you introduce yourself and your company?

My name is Thierry Corbella, I'm a little over 60 years old now and so I've been an electronics
engineer for quite a few years already. I have worked for about 35 years in microelectronics,
i.e. the manufacture of memory microprocessor components. First in the Paris region and then
I came back to Nantes afterwards when the structure was set up to manufacture its
components. My job consisted mainly in developing microprocessors for very specific
applications such as space, so everything that will equip satellites and rockets and things like
that. You have really very special components to end up with applications in high-energy
physics, so there is really fundamental research into the world of particles and then the last
activity within this company is marketing and defining products for automotive applications.

So we understand that it was you who set up the Advansee company?

Yes that's me, so in fact as I was working in an American company in fact after a while there
are decisions that are made that are very much oriented towards improving the performance
of American equities in this case. And so these were the actions that eventually justified the
closure of a company or at least of departments and so we were laid off in 2009 for economic
reasons. It was on this occasion that I created Advansee with 2 other colleagues, a company
that started out as an electronic development service, so in fact we receive specifications from
a number of clients and we developed electronic solutions, both electronic cards and software
to meet these specifications.

So that was 2009, about my background, I was raised on a farm with my grandparents and so
I was there all my youth. I was completely free to be able to walk in nature, count the flowers,
watch the bees, play with the whistling birds, that was really something that is fundamental to
my story, so in 2009/2010 I was actually confronted with a question that I was wondering about,
which was "why does my brother-in-law, who is a farmer in the Vendée, use his sprayer and
chemicals so easily to treat his fields". Because I consider that to the same extent we can
monitor with sensors, we can react correctly rather than doing preventive work, that is, putting
phytochemicals everywhere, and I manage the risk in this way.

So in 2013 I took the initiative to actually go and join the "végépolys" competitiveness cluster,
which is a competitiveness cluster that deals with everything related to vegetable production
and ornamental horticulture, so that I could actually spend some time meeting the players in
the sector to actually find out what they need or to give testimonials on their methods, what
type of monitoring and set up to react at the right time rather than once again doing preventive
work. It is clear that today nothing is being done, very little is being done on a certain number
of components of this agricultural biodiversity, we have a lot of things on the weather, so there
are a lot of sensors that exist, there are a lot of things on the quality of the soil and it is improving
more and more, but there is a lack of information on the quality of the soil component that is
not controlled at all is the insect component and when we imagine what the place of this insect
component is in the whole biodiversity and value chain we realize that if we kill all insects we
will not only reduce a lot of pollination capacity but also affect birds.

Birds are something that is particularly dear to me because they were the companions of youth.
I said to myself that these insects need to be better known and we are going to build tools to
observe and characterize the behavior of insects, to characterize the interactions that there
can be between insects and plants and so on. So I met with various partners and we started
the great adventure of tools to characterize the insect components of biodiversity at that time,
so that's kind of the idea.

First it was the development of a fairly robust camera associated with software to characterize
the activity of a bee hive, for example. We also have software to count the number of visits that
a flower will receive, by visit I mean flying or crawling insects or insects that come to visit the
flower, are there any pollination activities associated with it, can we promote or improve things
or on the contrary make observations of the absence of pollination because there are no insect
populations. These are really things that are so intimately linked that if we have this
characterization we can probably react on interesting levers on "I have a reduction in the
population of the hive, can I associate it with chemical spraying on for example sunflowers next
to it or on the contrary because events actually promote the health of the hive on a daily basis".
So that was really the leitmotiv, insect/bird and why I make these tools. After that it's
complicated in terms of market because there is not necessarily an identifiable need on the
part of professionals to use this kind of tool. There are a lot of things that are done for the
industry to improve yields and so on but very little in the sense that I am interested in
biodiversity and I promote this diversity.

In spite of everything, we met a very special partner called the CPIFL, which is an organization
that actually manages the work methods concerning the production of vegetables and fruits
(such as apples and pears) and we worked with them on a kind of characterization of the
interactions between plant species and animal species, insects that will actually promote this
presence rather than using chemicals, make repellent and thus push beyond the crops the
species that will be critical for the plants, and it worked very well. There are publications that
have been made on the basis of our tools and software that show that there are indeed pairs
that are plant and insect combinations that work perfectly. So that's the first point, it's a kind of
desire to characterize the interactions and then there's another point that I also thought was
very critical, which is that, once again, chemical spraying was done in a bit of a haphazard way
at any time. The reaction of my brother-in-law: he was mostly "well listen to me I'm going to
take out my sprayer because the neighbor he went out I'm going to do the same I'm going to
take out my sprayer because the weather is going to change or the weather has changed here
I'm going to do a little bit what I want when I want when I want". So I said to myself: "There is
certainly a way to find sensors that can actually manage the risk instead, at least better than
the producer does today, and generate alarms when indeed there is a particular event that
occurs on the plot and require a reaction from him and there is the e-gleek so the trap
connected. It makes it possible to capture insects, to follow populations and to manage the
alarm system which will thus warn the producer that insects have arrived or on the contrary
there is nothing but in all the cases if insects arrived it is insects which interest me? are they
pests and if they are pests do I have to intervene with adapted reactions and the adapted
reactions one will wonder what it is. Today, the chemical alternatives are very weak. Innovation
obviously consists of assuming the risk, managing the risk in the place of the producer, so it's
a tool that consumes very little energy, that does all the work locally, that doesn't need a large
external database, that communicates only when necessary. All the construction part of the
tool has been optimized to generate a minimum of CO2 but also you have a work in progress
that concerns your projections or forecasts of insect arrival so that you can set up biocontrol
solutions, so these solutions are for example the use of auxiliary insects that will naturally fight
against insect pests in order to balance the forces a little and reduce the damage that these
pests will generate on the plantations. And there in fact there is a question about the time of
implementation if you use chemical products, the action of chemical products is immediate as
soon as you have done your spraying, you have killed all the insects, and I mean all the insects:
those that you are trying to eliminate, therefore the pests, but also all the others, so we will
have an immediate impoverishment of biodiversity. If you work in modules with a desire for
biodiversity and therefore sustainable agriculture that will allow you to continue, you need time.
For example, you need time: Aphids have natural enemies that are ladybug larvae. However,
between the moment you are going to deposit these larvae and the moment when the action
of these larvae on the aphids is visible, it takes about ten days, which means that if you start
deploying your biocontrol solutions, i.e. ladybug eggs for example, on plants, the action will
only be effective after a fortnight and the aphid may have caused the damage that it is used to
doing in the meantime. The idea is therefore to anticipate the arrival of these aphids in order
to allow the implementation of all these biocontrol solutions, therefore auxiliary and so on and
so forth and so on and so forth and it goes through the mapping of insect pressure: We are
mapping the territory with sensors that provide information on insect density and locally we will
be able to trace the immigration of these insects over time in order to predict with models the
presence of these insects in future locations and therefore, since we have saved a little time,
we probably have the possibility of setting up all these biocontrol solutions.

We also wanted to ask you about your business, it's quite technological and you also
pointed out that you had grown up on a farm and so on, so that's when you combined
the two, so are you sure what exactly did you study?

I studied electronics. I consider that when you do a technical training of any kind, it allows you
to tackle problems with methods. I do electronics, I could probably have done other jobs and
still provide solutions to critical situations such as reducing biodiversity, for example. It's easier
when you can use adapted tools, but we're talking more about method and will, in fact,
motivation and the method that will provide solutions.

We really feel that you are committed to the protection of the environment. Is there a
particular moment in your company where you really felt committed, for example I don't
know when you had the idea or when you sold your first product when it was completed,
what you have a moment like that that really marked you.

I think the process is a little longer than that, it's really something that's pending, that is to say
we're waiting for it, we imagine that it can't last what clearly when we walk in the fields and
then see at the end of the field in the bottom of the field dozens of cans that carry skulls
because it's chemical products for spraying to kill bugs or for weeding, it's not possible and it
doesn't seem acceptable to me.

I think the real trigger was a walk afterwards from a field. My brother-in-law, he used to produce
bull calves to excess, that is to say, in a stable, the animal does not move from an enclosure
that is 15 square meters in size and is permanently fed with silage and pellets, so it's already
a.from an ethical point of view, I'm shocked to learn that to feed these animals with silage, you
have to make corn or wheat or grass and you grow grass, well, it's the same thing, it's been
the same thing. From an ethical point of view we will say energy saving for the respect of the
planet is quite questionable and at the end of the corn field to find dozens of empty cans in a
ditch that actually pollutes the water in the ditch is even less acceptable. That's when I
approached végépolys to see if technical, technological solutions could in fact solve situations
like these that were unacceptable.

When you created your company, were you at that time associated with other people
for the creation of the company and were they in fact as committed as you were? (20min)

In the 3 who created the company, two were nature oriented and one was much more
technologically oriented, a computer geek who globally liked to do computer code.
Because of the environmental cause, have you received funding from organizations that
promote companies for the protection of the environment?

No, not directly, not as a project leader. The idea, if you want innovation in France, is to group
together a certain number of companies around certain themes. Here we worked in the
framework of collaborative projects with other companies, first of all with research laboratories
that have a very fine competence on the characterization of environments, it will be people
who will apply the tools, approaches and processes such as agricultural cooperatives or
technical centers very specialized in the production of leeks for example. We are in fact
bringing a technological solution where we improve existing technological solutions to meet
needs, so it's really very collaborative and it's through this collaboration and these partnerships
that we find funding, which comes in particular from the Ministry of Agriculture, which funds
research.When you created the company, did you encounter any difficulties and if so, what
were they?

So we didn't create a company to protect the environment, once again we were a company to
provide services in electronics, we worked in different fields: automotive, start-ups with
connected sensors, etc. It was really a kind of migration, but it was voluntary to focus on
products intended for the agricultural world for a better knowledge and protection of the
environment, which was something that came to fruition 4-5 years after the creation of the
company.

In your opinion, what were the qualities necessary for the success of this project? What was
essential and what was essential for the creation of your company to succeed?

There is a personal motivation that is obvious, we use it, and then it is perseverance because
we believe in things, we develop solutions to bring alternatives to producers, users,
cooperators and technicians, but unfortunately the market is not available right away, it doesn't
respond. It's difficult to convince that the alternatives will be effective and there is also the fact
that for many years we don't make money, so without perseverance it wouldn't work. I think
that these are the 2 essential qualities: motivation and a quality of perseverance because once
again we don't make a lot of money.

Yasmine did the part with the creation of the company and now I'm going to do the part
concerning the e-Gleek innovation and so you've already explained what it's all about. So I
don't know if I understood everything 100 percent because I'm not French, so the innovation
prevents the use of pesticides?

There are 2 actions, today the producers, when they have productions which are far from their
farm, their company, do preventive. That is to say that there is a risk associated with the insect
and the management of the risk of these insects at present is to do things by default, that is to
say to go and put insecticides even if there are no insects on the plot. So that's preventive and
it's a risk management like any other, they manage the risk in this way, that is to say by making
chemical spraying we feel that it is really necessary. Regulations are evolving: The controls on
the use of phytochemical products are increasingly strict, so the idea of these tools is to be
able to provide indications to producers when there is no other alternative than chemical
products that it is the right time to do so, rather than using them preventively and regularly, we
will use these products just when the insect is present, so risk management is done through
continuous monitoring using the tool, and effectiveness is achieved because the tool has
detected insects and it will be effective, which is what it is.

PHOTO 1 Here we have an image where we will have insects that will stick to a sheet because
they are attracted by the color and we go behind it after processing this image in order to
observe or count the insects that interest us. Here we are in productions of rapeseed, plants
used to make oil and to feed animals.

PHOTO 2 What we are going to do next, we are going to work with software algorithms to
recognize the insects that have this shape and we are going to count them and provide the
farmer with temporal information. We will change the sticky sheet according to the arrival of
insects, but globally it can be every 2 days, or every week, or even every 15 days. It depends
on the density of insects. Then we tell the farmers when it would be most efficient to use
pesticides but as little as possible.

PHOTO 3 Here we are monitoring the population of aphids, which are insects that carry and
inoculate viruses in cereals. These viruses are pathogenic for the human and animal species
and therefore the idea is to manage its curves. Here, for example, there has been a great
increase in the number of insects, which means that there has been a massive arrival and
therefore a flight, so winged adults have arrived and landed on the cereals and therefore on
the sheets. This is the kind of event that we will observe and that will serve to alert the producer
that there was an event on the field and that he will have to intervene. As long as we're here
on the set, there's nothing to do, so there he changed the sheet you see, we lowered the
counter to practically 0 and so here we have a second massive arrival of insects and so the
producer, rather than making a chemical intervention here and here and here and here, in fact
he will reduce his chemical intervention, only at the right time and he will do it again.

PHOTO 4 For the last operation, we will be able to trace in time the insects' migrations. For
example, here, we observed the first ones around the end of September, here in mid-October
and then here until the end of October. This means that if we have a model that describes the
progression of the insects on the territory, as soon as we observe the first ones here we will
be able to say to those who are a little further north "you can start to implement biocontrol" and
the implementation time will be sufficient to have an efficiency of this biocontrol. That's what
the trap is all about: replacing all chemicals with biocontrol solutions in order to really preserve
biodiversity.

You developed this innovation with the two people with whom you created the company,
right?

Especially a lot of external partners since there is a real desire to reduce to the maximum, or
even totally eliminate, chemicals. But we have to find alternatives that work because producers
won't accept the risk of yield losses, so we have to find a solution. These solutions, once again,
found with the partners. The partners being companies that work essentially in the cultural
methods "how I create where I make my culture". They are technical centers, they are users,
these users, producers, have the desire to reduce phyto and are really partners in all its
actions. In this case, this work was financed by Europe, a European project called agri Fab
Lab, which gave us a grant to work in this field.

But you have developed it with them in association or on your own or with whom?

It's an idea that I had. I told myself that we had to anticipate and therefore give time for it to be
effective, for biocontrol solutions to be effective. The means were to try to draw these migration
maps so as to give time to producers so that they could implement their solutions.

How would you describe the mission of this innovation in one or two sentences?
The vocation of the innovation is to reduce the use of phytosanitary products used in agriculture
and promote the implementation of alternative solutions, in particular the use of auxiliaries to
combat pests.

Do you think that in the coming years it will be possible to completely avoid pesticides?

Completely, I think it's a bit of an illusion to say that we're going to eliminate everything because
there are still situations where there are no alternative solutions. In spite of everything, I think
that all the work we are doing is part of a better understanding of the interactions and all this
learning precisely favors levers against pests, through the use of what are called auxiliary
insects or other mechanisms. The implementation of these mechanisms, with the anticipations
provided by the models, will make it possible to reduce, eliminate completely I don't think, but
to reduce very strongly the use of chemical products.

What has been the impact of e-gleek on the company?

The company does 80% of its activity on this e-gleek trap now. We have completely abandoned
the business services part, we develop more electronics for the others. We do innovation,
improvement, and systems. We have gone from a simple insect detector to a detector that
identifies insects and therefore manages specific alarms for insect parts. We are now working
on a model for predicting the appearance and emergence of insects. Like the graph I showed
you, the prediction of the appearance of insects on the territory, so all this will promote
prevention rather than chemical "cures", once again, and this is the direction we are taking in
the company today.

Can we say that this innovation is very successful?

The innovation is very successful indeed, the producers who use it on a daily basis and who
see the results are extremely satisfied.

Do you sell this innovation directly to farmers or is there an intermediary in the sale?

The structure of agriculture is much more complicated than that. Farmers are supervised by
cooperatives and cooperative technicians, and it is these cooperative entities and their
technicians who propose and implement the tools. I still have very few farmers who work
directly with the tool. It is the cooperatives that decide which tools, which methods, which
chemical product, if any, are to be applied to monitor and manage the crop. So the use of the
tools requires recommendations, recommendations from the cooperatives, so we have to
convince the cooperatives rather than the direct producers.

We also wondered who the target really was. So it would be farmers in general, right?

Farmers absolutely. It is important to know that today farmers monitor insect populations in
their production through its sticky leaves, yellow blue orange and so on. He is supposed to go
regularly in the field to check, count the insects that are stuck on the leaf. So for reasons of
travel time, availability, money et cetera, the monitoring is actually very light, hence the
excessive use of pesticides.

Are there more organic farmers who are interested in e-Gleek or not?

Both are interested (organic and not organic), the organic ones obviously because it is even
more true for them, they have very few effective solutions authorized but when they are going
to be allowed to use a product once a year it is absolutely necessary to put this product at the
right time. Being able to do alarm monitoring for them is therefore something that interests
them a lot. Conventional producers use chemical products but once again the regulations
require them to reduce the use of these chemicals in a very important way and therefore they
are also looking for efficiency, they are interested in the tool and use it to reduce the use of
phytos and obtain a better efficiency.

And what is the feedback from your customers in general?

Extremely interested. Very surprised by the efficiency of the tool, the negative point is that they
consider that it is an automatic tool even if it is necessary to change the sheet, it is necessary
to change the battery finally it remains that it remains electronic tools and that it is the object
in fact of the questioning on their part on the interest of the robustness of the monitoring.

It's the farmers who change the sheets themselves?

Yes they do.

PHOTO 5 When we take a sheet like this, it's flies that we find in the walnut trees at last the
production of walnuts. So they are pretty, they have beautiful mouths. So these flies will stick
on the sheet and they will fill the sheet.

So we have an alarm that is sent to the producer to tell him "beware, the sheet contains a lot
of insects, you have to change it".

PHOTO 6 The sheets can also be very loaded. When you have things like that, you don't know
how to count. There are too many insects and you don't have enough definition to be able to
count them.

For the future do you have prospects for development?

Yes, we want to work on models, so we want to promote a network of more cautious sensors
on a territorial scale in order to obtain more precise mapping of insect pressures and thus
create models and provide the models to organizations that will be able to say to producers
"watch out, in two weeks you can count on an arrival of insects and therefore put in place your
biological protections".

Concerning customers, are they only customers in France or internationally?

It's completely international. Today we work with Europe and we have customers mainly in
Europe: Germany, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, England, Italy and Spain.