Thank you for that.
I've had an opportunity to pretty well travel the whole world and look at issues related to agriculture, and one of the greatest threats we have coming in the next decade is global climate change. It's certainly going to be a major factor, as it is already happening in many parts of the world.
The second will be the increasing cost of production to growers, and this is in the cost of fertilizers, particularly phosphate and potash, and of course as oil prices go up, it will also be the nitrogen components.
So one of the areas we would really like to approach is how to make plants much more efficient in the use of these materials in soil and also how to create conditions so that plants are much more resistant to the stresses of environmental change. Believe it or not, a lot of this comes from the root systems.
Agriculture has undergone what we call the green revolution. That has occurred based on the selection of crop plants based on very high fertility inputs, because they were dirt cheap; they were really inexpensive. But as the prices increased, the cost to growers continued to go up.
Over the last 50 years, roots have never been considered as something breeders ever looked at. They were not looked at because they're underground and it was too much work to look at them. So we have created a perfect top part of the plant, but we lost everything below the ground, and our efforts will be to look at components in the root systems that will allow for much improved plant growth and at the same time reduce the input costs in the form of fertility. We're looking at biofertilizers. We're looking at those interactions between plants that make plants grow better. Just like in legumes, the only microbes we use extensively are the nodulating bacteria, which probably produce more fertilizer in one year than all the artificial fertilizers we have ever applied. So that's going to be the focus of our company.