When you’re born into a winemaking dynasty, there’s a lot of momentum to carry on the family business. But also a lot of pressure to make your own mark. Carlo Mondavi is the co-founder and Chief Farming Officer at Monarch, creators of the Monarch Tractor, an electric smart tractor that may offer a better and safer product than conventional diesel tractors. Today he joins Siobhan Montoya Lavender and Ross Kenyon to discuss.
The conversation begins with Carlo's heartfelt motivation behind creating the Monarch Tractor. Witnessing the devastating loss of biodiversity caused by conventional herbicides, Carlo was inspired to find a regenerative agriculture solution that would reduce herbicide usage while ensuring a safer, more eco-friendly farming experience. The Monarch Tractor provides a more mechanical solution than one that deeply changes the microbiota.
But sometimes it’s hard to change minds, and offering a better solution rather than finger-wagging can often be a better way to proceed. With or without subsidies, can the Monarch tractor succeed in changing one of the most common farm tools used?
Tune in to this episode to explore the efforts of Monarch Tractor to change farming and learn about their story to become the Tesla of farming.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the head of— wait, I have a new title now. I’m the director of creative and marketing. That’s new. That really sticks in my craw a little bit. Used to [unclear] the old ways. But yeah, joined by Siobhan Montoya Lavender, as we often do these shows together. Hey, Shiv.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Hey, Ross. How’s it going?
Ross Kenyon: It’s going well. I want you to introduce our guest. He has a very cool picture behind him. I feel like I just have a blank, blank wall behind me.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I know, he’s really upstaging us with the background here. Today we are joined by Carlo Mondavi, who is the co-founder and chief farming officer of Monarch Tractor. And so today we’re going to be learning all about smart electric tractors, how we’re going to revolutionize ag, how we’re going to cut carbon emissions and really build a regenerative system here. So welcome, Carlo.
Ross Kenyon: You’re just, like, first-person pluralizing that, huh? You want to take credit for— for—
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: We’re going to do this on this very podcast. Okay, share your— share your amazing story with us here.
Ross Kenyon: We’re going to take credit for it, so go ahead.
Carlo Mondavi: Hey, great. You know, there’s a huge, huge responsibility in being able to shine a light on things. So thank you guys for taking the time to meet with me and talk about this really, really incredible project that I’ve been able to get involved in. Yeah, my background’s a little different, in that I’m a farmer and a winemaker first. So how I got involved in technology and then Monarch Tractors is a little bit of a longer way about, in terms of just—
Ross Kenyon: You’re Napa royalty, right? You’re, like, personal friends with the Coppolas. I imagine it’s good. Nice.
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah. No. Yeah, farming. You know, I always remember the first time my father— because when my grandfather Robert was really trying to prove that we could make wines that can sit in the company of the best wines of the world here in California, that we didn’t have to be in Bordeaux, Burgundy or Piemonte in Italy, that we could do it right here, that we had the soil, the climate, the know-how. He really wanted to kind of dress the part. So at the time that was kind of like Mad Men, 1950s, more sport coats. And so I kind of grew up in a more formal setting.
And I remember the first time I heard, you know, we’re farmers first, it really hit me like that, because I love the farm, I love the dirt, I love working in the vineyards, and that’s where I spent most of my time. But just to know that when we’re out enjoying wines around the world, that it all comes from the dirt, it all comes from the farm. And so, yeah, Napa Valley is a beautiful place. And that’s one of the reasons why I got involved in Monarch Tractor.
Ross Kenyon: You’re wearing a Monarch hat right now. What’s with the name Monarch? Why did you choose that?
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah. So that name comes back from a movement that I began back around— I began the Monarch Challenge in 2016, and the Monarch Challenge is a name that stems from— since the beginning of Roundup in 1974, since the introduction of Roundup in ’74, which is a herbicide in farming. You know, there’s all sorts of things in the wintertime: after the rains, the grasses grow. We have to deal with all those grasses, and historically the way our great-grandparents and generations before would deal with that would be with just mowing, cutting the grasses. But it’s a lot of work. If it rains again, you have to go out and cut the grasses again.
And so since the introduction in ’74, this Roundup in ’74, this chemical became this really, really fast-growing product that farmers adopted to basically chemically mow their fields. And so I began seeing this around 2004, 2005, 2006 in California, in Napa Valley, and I began questioning why would you spray these chemicals that kill the grasses versus mowing, and why would you use these around the root ball of the plants that you’re trying to grow that create products that we eat, drink, etcetera.
And I quickly learned, through researching about glyphosate back in 1974, the introduction through with Monsanto, that since this introduction the monarch population of butterflies has declined by 99%. They’re now on the brink of extinction. And monarch butterflies are indicator species. They’re like the wolves of Yellowstone or the Pacific salmon of the north, or so many beautiful indicator species on our planet. If we can protect our planet’s indicator species, we can protect so much more.
And so I created this movement called the Monarch Challenge in 2016 to go out and just create awareness within my farming community, because I really felt that if farmers knew— this is before the Monsanto lawsuits and a lot of that, so this was kind of an unknown. I linked up with Doctor Stephanie Seneff, who’s a senior researcher at MIT, learned about the human health impact, talked with some professors at Harvard to learn more about the environmental impact, and wanted to create awareness within the farming community in Napa Valley.
I’ve always felt that the wine business can kind of help shine the light, that we have the financial fortitude — we’re not in the penny crops like corn and soy — that we can shine the light on this and hopefully elevate farming and create a path that other farmers can follow. And so I wanted to create awareness simply. I’ve always felt that if farmers know something— because not one farmer on this planet wants to harm Mother Earth. Every farmer on this planet cares deeply about their soils and their farm, and so by being able to create awareness about this, that we could hopefully migrate away from it. And so the name, the Monarch Challenge, came from the beautiful monarch butterflies.
And it’s tied to, you know, since the introduction— this is kind of a crazy number. This is a new study that came out of Europe, but that showed that since the year 2000, 80% of our planet’s, or Europe’s, insect biomass has disappeared, and with it 50% of the bird population. And scientists are saying that this is more of a global kind of number, that if you look in the US, if you look at India, if you look at Asia, that numbers are similar there, that there’s this huge insect and avian apocalypse happening right now.
And so back in 2016, I just wanted to create awareness and talk with farmers, because I figured, hey, we have this conversation and farms would just migrate away from it. And I quickly learned in talking with my friends and other fellow farmers that there was an economic divide. Many farmers that I would talk to would, with a tear in their eyes, say, look, we didn’t realize that this is hurting our soil microbiome, farm biology, and has all these human health implications and whatnot, but we’ve got to put food on our table, we’ve got to put our family, kids through college.
And I learned quickly that there was this economic divide, that to go without these chemicals you’d have to drive your tractor more, and that meant more hours. And that meant— there’s also, this is a crazy number, but there’s a huge labor shortage. I think that this is something that we all know, but I don’t know if— so, like, in 1900, half of the population of the United States was farming, and today it’s 1.8%. So there’s been this exodus. Literally farmers would say, hey, I’m working my butt off so my kids can go to college and become a doctor or a lawyer, or just get off the farm, type of thing. There’s been this exodus.
And so I also learned that it was something like 43% of farms in America are not profitable. And so when these families would tell me with a tear in their eye that they’ve got to put their kids through college— and also there was a lot of, you know, the chemical industry was really pushing up against, you know, I don’t want to say with misinformation, but they were really trying to say, hey, there was a point in time when people would say you can drink Roundup, you can drink glyphosate. It’s just, like, crazy.
Ross Kenyon: And it’s that safe.
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah, crazy. And so there was— it was, you know, it’s constant, like— it’s a capitalistic business, right? They’re trying to make money, and so they’re trying to grow their business. And so they’re trying to say how safe a lot of these things are. And it’s fine. It’s just that it’s simple: if you can mow, you can have 100% reduction of a chemical, right? And so this economic divide was just this huge, huge, massive divide for these families. You know, if 43% of farms are— are profitable, it means 57% of the farms in America are struggling.
And so I then would talk to larger farms at scale, and they would say, look, we realize that this chemical is something we don’t want to use. We agree it’s not great. But if you drive your tractor more — a small tractor the size of Monarch is like turning on 14 cars in its NOx, particulate and CO2. And so we also believe in climate change and we want to address climate change, so we want to drive our tractor less. So using these stronger chemicals actually helps us to have a lower carbon footprint, and also we have to report to our shareholders, and it costs less.
And so there’s this economic divide and this carbon footprint divide that was separating the clean world of agriculture, protecting our soil microbiome, farm biology and our climate. And so it’s a very tough time. This is around 2017, when the wildfires broke out in Napa Valley, and I was at probably my most depressed state, because I was just thinking to myself— it was a tough time. The fires in 2017 were incredibly devastating here in California, and then it came back in 2020. But it was one of those moments where you kind of said, hey, we have to find a way to be able to bridge the economic divide and the carbon footprint divide.
Because when you look at farming today, it encompasses 50% of our planet’s inhabitable land, it uses 70% of our fresh water resources, and it’s responsible for a third of our carbon footprint. So, like, California, for example, we’re 100 million acres of land, of which 43 of those million acres are agricultural. So all these products of the 9 billion pounds of pesticides, 5 billion are herbicides. Those get sprayed into our soils. They harm the soil microbiome, they harm the farm biology, they harm our water table, they harm the air, they harm the products that we’re growing, all of these things.
And so the Monarch Challenge literally just— it was to create awareness about this massive problem that we have in agriculture. And the reason why we innovated to create Monarch Tractor was simply because we had to bridge the economic divide and we had to bridge the carbon footprint divide. And so by being all electric, which our tractor is, we can go from the fossil fuel era of farming and into the renewable era of farming. And then by being autonomous — which, I think people don’t understand autonomy, and they think, oh, it’s AI, so that means that you’re just getting rid of labor, and that’s not the case at all.
The AI is actually helping protect us as farmers by taking us out of the most dangerous place on the farm, which is in the tractor seat. This year alone in Piemonte there’s been seven deaths of tractor operators. The last one was a 68-year-old gentleman who rolled the tractor and was tragically killed. So it’s not just that, it’s also the slow, you know, wearing a hazmat suit and driving the tractor and spraying — even organic contact sprays are not good to be in the plume of. But the autonomy isn’t just for the human health, it’s really for the ability for us to reduce all those chemicals. So there’s 9 billion pounds of pesticides, 100 million tons of fertilizer. By being able to slow things down, we can have 100% reductions of things like herbicides, massive reductions of fungicides and insecticides and things like that.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, yeah. Ross, did you have one? I picked up on—
Ross Kenyon: No. I saw a video the other day of a farm implement using lasers to kill certain kinds of weeds. I was just thinking about— I think people think— people think I’m looking outward from my own perspective, but I’m not from a farm family at all. So I don’t have this experience, but it does feel kind of settled, like the technology has been developed and not a lot changes and it’s just sort of the way that it is and kind of always has been for 50 years. But it’s cool to see things like that happening where you’re saying, oh, actually we don’t need to mess with a biological or chemical level in the field as much anymore. There’s technology coming that is actually much more mechanical and advanced and therefore much less interventionist in this microbiotic kind of way. It’s exciting to see.
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah, it’s super exciting, I think. When you look at the first half of the 20th century, it was the original, like, tractors, right? The first tractors, and those tractors were about how can we become more efficient as farmers. And in the second half of the 20th century, post World War One, World War Two, the whole, like, kind of green revolution — I always call it the chemical revolution — it was about how chemicals could make us more efficient, essentially. And today, now I think the exciting thing, through those types of technology like you’re talking about, those lasers, is how can we use technology to have a lower carbon footprint.
How can we use technology to use less inputs, chemicals, all those things, and go back to the way maybe that our great-grandparents farmed, but with technologies that allow for us to also deal with the labor challenges that we have and the economic challenges that we have and the massive need for us to be able to scale our food ecosystem. So technology has come a long way.
Ross Kenyon: Actually, the same— is that mechanical intervention is basically what it would be like if you had farm hands available? Speaking of, I was just listening to Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow, the World War Two memoir, and he was talking about how many of the Marines he served with were farm hands. How many farm hands have you met? Have you ever met someone who identifies as a farm hand? Like, this is definitely a time capsule kind of book.
Carlo Mondavi: I mean, I met a lot.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: [unclear]. Asking you is different.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that doesn’t count. Well, I think— it’s a civilian. Yeah, yeah.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I actually think, speaking of this, I think it’s really interesting that Monarch and this concept of an electric tractor is coming from a multigenerational farmer. Because I think we think a lot about disruption as something coming from outside, right? It’s like new first-gen farmers getting into the business, coming with fresh eyes. I think it’s really interesting and cool that here you are, a Mondavi, a generational farmer, and you were like, from within the system, no, no, I think I can see this differently, I think we could change this. And I think that just speaks a lot to your own kind of mindset. And I’m kind of curious more about how you became the guy who was like, let’s really shake things up, you know.
And I think, you know, obviously there’s some shaking up in your history of family. But you as a person— like, so I actually met Carlo long ago when I think I was probably about 10 years old and you were 17, more or less maybe. And at that time I thought you were going to be a professional snowboarder. And we should dive into that, because I think you were, for a little bit. Because what happened was, Carlo and a bunch of his friends lived at this private school, and they would come to my dad’s house, where I lived, to jump on the trampoline, because we had a big trampoline. And what they did is they took—
It was a very cool trampoline. It was a really good, super unsafe, like, no safety nets, one of those, like, giant rectangular shapes. And I remember what you guys did is you took a skateboard, you took off the wheels and then you drilled shoes onto it and then you wrapped it in duct tape so it wouldn’t damage the trampoline, and you guys would practice, like, grabs on the trampoline. And this, you know, I was a 10-year-old kid being like, these have to be the coolest humans on earth, that are doing [unclear] out here with their skateboard duct-taped. And so you went from, like, you’re a Mondavi, you’re this snowboarding person who left to do pro snowboarding— tell us a little about how you became this person who was like, I’m going to build a tractor that’s going to change the agricultural industry.
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah. No, I mean, so I guess going back to that thing— thanks, Siobhan. Those memories are so great. I love looking back at that. In Colorado — so this is in Colorado, up in, like, the mountains and the Rockies, and just absolutely the most beautiful place. And I grew up surfing and skateboarding here in California, and when I went out that way I got into snowboarding. And thanks again for letting us come over and use your trampoline. That was a lot of fun, being able to practice what we wanted to go do on a little bit more risky of a surface, with the icy snow and whatnot.
Yeah, going back to— you know, when I look at my grand— we, we’ve constantly— farmers and winemakers are innovators, right? We are constantly having to react to what’s happening with Mother Nature. So if something happens, we have to innovate and we have to be on the fly and we have to react quickly. So I’ve always thought about how each year we’re kind of engineering, and we’re working with climate to kind of engineer the vineyard to react. Like, how is the canopy laying out? Is it going to be a hot year? Do we need more dappled sunlight? Do we need more laterals? All these little things that we do in the vineyard.
But my grandfather really innovated back in the ’60s to pioneer stainless steel. It was the first time— he went to the milk industry to pioneer stainless steel for tanks, because we didn’t understand microbiology at the level we do now, and so we used—
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like standard at this point, right? Like, it’s pretty rare to use wood still, or it’s like a prestige item rather than the norm.
Carlo Mondavi: Well, now that we understand microbiology at a higher level, we can now know how to clean wood barrels. So people have gone back to wood barrels or wood tanks for fermentation and some of these, like, concrete vessels and whatnot. But back then we didn’t understand microbiology. So if you got Brett or Oenococcus or Pediococcus in your barrels or in your winery, it was kind of, oh well, that’s going to be there forever. So my grandfather pioneered stainless steel because he said, I want to have a blank canvas every year. I want to understand the site and I want to understand that vintage with a lot of transparency.
And so I’m kind of— this, like, long way around back to, you know, I think just that I had that innovative, like, kind of engineering background. Just, hey, we have to react, we have to figure out things. If something’s not working out, it doesn’t mean that that has to continue to be that way. You can innovate to make things work out. And so I think that that seed was planted in my mind from a young age. And the reason how I got involved with Monarch in this technology company — and I have to say it’s my three brilliant co-founders who are really the geniuses behind the engineering, they’ve got an incredible background in engineering. But the way that I got involved in this was through desperation.
You know, I kind of quickly realized that if we continue to farm the way that we’re farming using these chemicals— my family’s four generations of what I’d call beyond organic farming, but I kept seeing that at scale, as the consolidation of these small and medium sized family wineries were being consolidated into larger, larger, larger conglomerates, that there was this kind of 101 farming prescriptive that was very dangerous. And to be honest, everyone was kind of stuck. They were stuck because that was the only way they could do it, because of the exodus of the labor force, because there wasn’t the teams to do what they needed to do, and then because of the demand in the market, they had to also do that for economic reasons.
And so I saw this dangerous kind of— on the pesticides side, thing of happening with herbicides and all that, that I really wanted to change. And then I saw this other thing happening on the climate side, where the climate was becoming so inhospitable that it was becoming more and more difficult to be able to create a crop each year with relative consistency, just, you know, severe weather. And so I saw those things coming together. Monarch Challenge was going to fail because of the economic divide and the carbon footprint divide.
And that was when I got the introduction of a lifetime, to my co-founders, to Mark, Praveen and Zachary, who are brilliant engineers out of Silicon Valley. And I kind of put two and two together through technologies like Tesla — which Mark, who’s the president and my co-founder, had helped in the early days of Tesla to help kind of scale that business. But I put two and two together: if you can have an autonomous electric car going 80 miles an hour down the freeway, why couldn’t you have a tractor be electric and autonomous going down a farm row at two and three miles an hour? You know, it seems logical.
And so Praveen and Zachary had come to that conclusion independent of what I thought would be a good solution. They had said, hey, this is a great— so, needless to say, we came together and we began on our tractor. And so this was a long— this is four years ago. Our biggest challenge was really getting people to pay attention to agriculture in the technology sector. The technology sector was so focused on software as a service and just how can we get 80% returns and all this stuff, that the agricultural sector seemed kind of not very sexy to them.
And I think when you think about agriculture, it is the most important— you know, farmers are the most important people on our planet. They literally feed us, right? And when you look at farming, it is, I think, the most sexy job on the planet. We get to work with the dirt, we get to work with nature, we get to work and plant things and grow them and reap the benefits of working with the land. And so we’ve been working— things have changed so much. I think now that, you know, the last COP, the world’s governments talked about farming as an important subject matter to talk about addressing climate change for the first time. It was an actual, like, centerpiece of the conversation, which is crazy.
And so things are changing quickly, but we need all of these sectors to change for us to be successful. Agriculture was just one of the missing links. Shipping, travel, all of industry, certainly agriculture — we need to revolutionize them so we get away from the carbon footprint that’s associated with them, get to some sort of renewable footprint that’s regenerative, that allows for us to have healthy soils, healthy foods, healthy airs, healthy water and a planet that’s sustainable.
Ross Kenyon: Are you going to ask about “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” or do you want me to do it?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I was not. I was not.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have a real question?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Okay, I’ll leave those to you. I guess an important question for me is thinking about, you know, you being a farmer teaming up with some engineers. How is this being received by other farmers? Like, I think you have an inside track, but I think something we butt up against a lot in climate tech is, especially when it comes to ag, is like connecting with actual farmers on the ground and, like, how does it impact them? How are they receiving new tech?
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah, I know. It’s— so I think farmers are— as a farmer, I know all the pain points, right? I know how difficult it is when you’re going to pick a crop and you can’t get the team you need to pick it. I know a lot of the challenges that we’re facing as a community. And so, you know, with a tractor I was thinking a lot about how do we address a lot of the pain points that we have. No farmer— if you talk to farms, all farms simply want to leave the land in a better position than they received it, for their families. They want to be able to pass on that land to the next generation.
And we right now are put into a position where instead of— you know, well, let me just put it this way, sorry I rambled on that: the technology has been received really, really, really well. I think that when you look at— if you would go to a farmer before Monarch Tractor and you said, hey, don’t use herbicides on your farm, they would tell you to get the hell off your farm. You know, basically they’d say get out of here, man. But if you go to them and say, hey, what if we had something that could allow for you to not have to pay for herbicides anymore? What if you could save money on herbicides? What if you could reduce your cost on purchasing fungicides potentially? What if we could reduce your diesel costs and all of these things?
So if you can open the door and talk about saving farmers money, that’s kind of the way we can move forward in this, because right now it’s very difficult to be a farmer and to cut it. Climate change is making it more difficult. Farmers are on the front line of climate change. And so, I mean, just this— three weeks ago my brother-in-law in Italy had a hailstorm that took out just about 100% of his crop in about 10 minutes. And so we’re on the front lines of a lot of these challenges, severe weather.
And so, you know, so far this is the first of its type, and it’s something that I think all farmers want, to be able to automate mowing, for example — simply just mowing, being able to send the tractor out, to automate mowing, to automate spraying. Things like this allow for us to have a better quality of life, to be able to reduce inputs and to be able to make more money. So so far it’s been great. We’re now scaling. We have the world’s best customers, literally the best customers on the planet, here in California right now. We’re now going up to Oregon and Washington and throughout the rest of the US. We’ve just now sent two tractors over to Europe, where we’re going to begin promoting the tractors there at trade shows and start to build our team out there. So we’re just now starting to get out there, which is exciting. But so far the feedback’s been very good.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Is there a wait list?
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah, yes, yes, there it is. I kind of, like— we’re trying our best to get to a point where if you put in your deposit, so it’s a $500 deposit, you put in your deposit, that the tractors will be deployed, like, quickly in that growing season, within months, versus— we have very patient customers so far, that in the beginning days they signed up on our launch and now we’re just now releasing their tractors. And so now it’s about speed and scale. That’s also why we partnered with an incredible contract manufacturer to help us grow quickly.
Ross Kenyon: I like the approach in general. I think the finger-wagging approach you detailed of the don’t use herbicides, without offering— I mean, people are using herbicides for a reason, right? So, like, if you’re offering them a better solution to the underlying reason here that is healthier for them and their workers, it is automated so that maybe there’s less time involved for them having to be on the tractor going two or three miles an hour, which, by the way, does not sound that thrilling of a way to spend— enough. You just mentioned, I didn’t even know that there was, like, tractor deaths. That’s, you know, nothing that we’ve had to be concerned about, you’d think.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: You never answered how many farm hands you’ve met, so that’s—
Ross Kenyon: I’ve met quite a few farmers working on ag fields doing utility lines, so I promise you—
Carlo Mondavi: I can promise you’ve met a lot more farmers at the coffee shop and stuff, like, you didn’t know that they spent their day on the farm. I promise you.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s a better way to go, too. I think a lot of the conflict over climate and agriculture and the politics of it, I think they go away when you’re just offering people, hey, this will save you money, this is going to make you and your family and your workers healthier. Like, this is just a better way to go. The politics of this fall away really quickly.
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah. Yeah, I know. It’s— and we are, you know, one of the most conservative communities in the world, just because of the challenges that farmers face, in terms of, if you don’t get a crop, that’s your whole entire year’s work. So everyone has that muscle memory of that year, going back when something happened, whether it was a flood or severe winds or hail or a fire, when they lost the entire crop, and so they save up for that. And so when we’re able to hopefully make their lives a little bit more profitable, a little bit more resilient, and make each farm a little bit more independent, it helps and it’s exciting. It’s an exciting time in agriculture.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think is going to happen with car manufacturers getting away from the internal combustion engine generally? And I imagine there’s going to be state-level policies that are also encouraging that. I mean, Washington and California both have set, after a certain year, no more. Then we’ll be— so I imagine agriculture is excepted from this, but the trend is definitely towards electrification. How soon until someone like John Deere comes out with an electric tractor?
Carlo Mondavi: I mean, my stance is, like, the sooner that all these companies can kind of get on board, the better for our planet right now. I mean, I really look at this as a human-life-threatening issue with climate change. And so the faster that we can migrate away from the fossil fuel era into some renewable era, the better. I also think we’ve— internal combustion engines, you know how inefficient they are. We’ve been kind of marketed and sold something that’s not as efficient as an electric engine. It’s just a better vehicle. Like, zero to 60, an electric vehicle just smokes any combustion engine, period. It’s just a better vehicle. Regenerative braking means less brakes: you slow down, you’re charging your battery. Tractors is the same way. I mean, the ability to have twice the torque in a tractor — that’s exactly what you need, is you need torque in farming.
Ross Kenyon: Is there really that much of a performance difference between—
Carlo Mondavi: Huge performance difference. Yeah. And then I think it’s just, there’s all these things that we can— everything has been built, our whole entire ecosystem in terms of civilization right now has been built around the combustion kind of engine, if you think about, or some form of burning hydrocarbons. And so if we can get away from all of these things, there’s the ability to have, you know, off-grid— one of these tractors is greater than 100 kilowatt-hours, so 10 Monarchs is a mega— is greater than a megawatt-hour.
So if you have a farm of— and we do have farms, by the way, that have no electrical infrastructure. Literally someone has a huge diesel generator because it would cost them a quarter of a million dollars to have PG&E or an electrical line dug out to their farm. So instead of having electricity on the farm through the utility, they have a big diesel generator, and they turn that diesel generator on when they need lights and when they need to power different things.
And so the cool proposition is just this idea of, if you had no infrastructure, if you had no utility, now you can go and use sun — the same exact energy that’s growing the crop to power the farm, because you capture that with solar, or if it’s wind or geothermal or hydro. You’re now using renewable energy that you can store in the battery pack of the tractor. And then when the sun sets and you need lights, you can use the energy from the tractor as an exportable power to power your home, your farm and the needs that you have.
And so the tractor becomes this big energy piece. And when you look at, you know, if it’s 100 million acres in California, the total land, half that, you know, 43 million are agricultural — the farmlands become a piece of the energy solution. So now you’re literally mining the farmland for renewable energy to power the on-the-edge grid, which is kind of also an exciting proposition on a future where EVs, whether it’s cars or trucks or tractors, can help power our needs beyond just getting us from one place to the other.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Do you use the tractor yourself at RAEN Vineyards?
Carlo Mondavi: Yes, we do. Yeah, we do.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Paint us a picture. What’s it like being a farmer who uses it yourself?
Carlo Mondavi: The first most amazing memory I have with Monarch at RAEN was harvest. We’ve got two of the pilot series tractors out there to do a pick. And so we’re driving the tractors— we pick in the nighttime in California. There’s all sorts of reasons. First, it’s cooler, so it’s ideal for the fruit. If you pick the fruit when it’s hot and you bring it to the winery and you put it in your tank, you kind of lose a lot of the fruit and floral. So by picking when the fruit’s cold, you’ve helped fix that fruit and floral into the juice of the wine. And so picking at nighttime when it’s cold is ideal.
But when you pick at nighttime, you need lights. And so forever and a day we’d be out there in the middle of the night and you just hear the diesel engine rumbling and you’re like, someone turn the tractor off — but you realize that the diesel engine’s rumbling just to keep the lights on. And so I remember the first pick very well because of how quiet it was. There was lights, it was quiet. The air quality— you don’t realize when you’re sitting in a cloud of diesel, you know, it’s NOx, particulate and CO2 that those diesel tractors are just emitting at a huge volume. And you don’t realize how clean and fresh the air is when you’re not in the presence of that tractor, until you’re in the presence of an electric tractor and the lights are on and it’s quiet.
So I think that that was probably one of the biggest aha moments for me, just how nice this transition is. And the tractors are not totally silent. You know, when you turn the PTO on, the hydraulic pump on, to engage the implements on the back — which, this tractor is just like any other diesel tractor, it’s just electric, and it has autonomous features and data collection features, but it has a three-point hitch, so it can fit into all the different implements that we have today as farmers. But when you do connect those, there is some noise that’s made, because of the hydraulic pump or the PTO spinning. But it’s really silent when it’s just driving, and so when you’re just towing fruit through the field, it’s pretty magical.
Ross Kenyon: I actually just read The Wide Lens by Ron Adner, and it was talking about how businesses might innovate a new product that’s amazing, but if it depends upon an ecosystem of people or businesses or other groups, and you need all of them to basically be on board to make sure you don’t get stuck at the last mile, you really need to make sure that all the infrastructure is set up so that you don’t have incumbents who are blocking your progress. Even though nine out of 10 of the people in your ecosystem really love what you do, if one person hates it and they’re able to block it, or it’s inconvenient for them in some way, they might do so. And so businesses need to think quite hard about how to make sure that ecosystem is on board for supporting new technology. How does that apply here with tractors?
Carlo Mondavi: I think it’s always very tough to get farms to change, and I think that, thankfully, we have an incredible following. But when you look at— you have to make investments to migrate away from anything on your farm to something new, right? Whether it’s an old implement to a new implement, you have to make an investment. For tractors, our biggest challenges are just, okay, well, we need to set up charging infrastructure. Well, the really great thing about that is that most barns, most farms have the infrastructure for welding, and that welding electrical current is the same that we need to charge the tractor, so at a fast rate, right?
And so by being able to have that already there, we kind of have a leg up, but still some work needs to happen there. But when you look at farms, they’ve already done that. Most farms have a big old diesel tank. They have things set up there to manage what their investments were early on with the diesel tractors, right? So now we’re kind of asking them as farmers to divest from those things and invest into this clean future.
And this is kind of one of the reasons why we went into the White House to talk with Congress and the Senate, to lobby to be a part of the Farm Bill, is because there’s huge subsidies. You know, this last year globally the fossil fuel industry was subsidized by a trillion dollars — a trillion dollars to help make the fossil fuel industry more profitable. And so this is one of those areas where I think that we need to shift how we think and say, okay, instead of paying the fossil fuel industry that has so much money and subsidizing them, helping them, maybe we need to subsidize and help and take those monies and help the green companies that are trying to help create an environment that we can exist on this planet for longer.
And so there’s a lot of that happening right now. We have some really cool subsidies happening in California. One’s called the Carl Moyer FARMER program, where you can take a diesel tractor, an old diesel tractor — basically you have to essentially kill the tractor, but then you get a big subsidy to buy an electric tractor.
Exactly, exactly. And then there’s the subsidy, the straight subsidy called the CORE program. But we need these, and there’s subsidies for solar and there’s subsidies to help pay for the electrical infrastructure changes. And those are big, like 50% subsidy, and 50% of your cost, sometimes more — the CORE program 65%, and depending on which air district you’re in it could be even greater, to get up to 80% stuff, like straight cash back to go to the electric tractor.
So we are working on trying to funnel some of that fossil fuel pink diesel — because every farm has pink diesel, right? And the reason why it’s pink diesel is because they get subsidized to use the pink diesel. And the reason why it’s pink is so that if you’re driving down the freeway and a police officer pulls you over, they can stick a probe down into the gas tank to make sure you’re not using subsidized farm fuel for driving around the town.
And so what we’re trying to say with the world is, hey, let’s subsidize this movement. And it’s happening, by the way. We have an incredible team, an impact team, that’s driven towards trying to help make this transition more smooth for farms. But right now there are lots of challenges and we’re working through them. The good news is, once this transition’s happened, like the electrical charging infrastructure is set up, the kind of questions are answered, the farmers save a lot.
I think, like, just with our first 65 tractors that we deployed — this is like a month and a half ago — we pulled the numbers. It was something like, we had operated over 4,000 hours, right around 4,000 hours of operations. We had saved like 250 metric tons of CO2 from being emitted, and we had offset, I think it was 8,500 gallons of fuel from being burnt. So it was a big, big number for a very small fleet of tractors, and that’s going to grow exponentially, which is exciting.
Ross Kenyon: I was wondering about how much work can be done merely by repealing subsidies. Because right now, if you have a bunch of fossil fuel subsidies and then you add on a bunch of green farm subsidies, how much work could be done merely by repealing both of them? Like, would you actually need as much subsidization if you were just not competing on an uneven playing field against a policy favorite like fossil fuel? I think you might be able to win just on all the other benefits you’re providing, without taxpayer funds being funneled that way.
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah, I mean, in the end I think we’re all touching that somehow, like, it’s all being paid for in some way or another by us, by the taxpayers. But by funneling those over towards green, I think that, yeah, we’d be saving our— it probably speeds it up, for sure. Like, a farm might not, like, replace their fleet of machines as soon as they would if they’re getting 80% cash back in the right air district. Like that, they might wait an additional 10 or 15 years for that machine to crap out.
Yeah, well, I think that’s exactly it: it’ll help speed things up, and then the transition. And we’re also writing these programs right now with farms, like, 2030 climate goals. So, like, in seven years, if you have 20 tractors, we’ll trade out X amount of tractors every year until 2030. And that way— and we’re able to show and demonstrate, we have a calculator on our website that can demonstrate, like, each farmer might run their tractor 500 hours or 1,000 hours, it depends. Every farm has a different kind of operational book that they can kind of follow. And so by being able to customize with that calculator how many hours you operate, how much you pay your team, all those things, you can see what your savings would be.
And it’s impactful, but I think that, that on top of funneling some of these subsidies over will— is helping transition, because these are more expensive than a diesel baseline tractor. Although the tractors that I’ve replaced on my field, these come in just under, because I was paying like 100 to $110,000 for my diesel tractor, which is crazy. These are like $89,000, but the subsidies get them down significantly right now.
Ross Kenyon: And will the cost curve come down too, with, like, mass production?
Carlo Mondavi: So that’s a good question. I think that we’ll have to, like, see. But one thing Mark said, he’s like, if I can build — this is from back in the day — a Model Y Tesla for, you know, whatever, $50,000 or something like this, he’s like, I can damn well build a tractor for that type of thing. And so the scale of tractors is quite a bit smaller than cars. You know, there’s, I think, like three and a half million tractors sold annually, whereas automobiles is an individual part— I think BMW sells like 2 million cars a year, something like this, and Tesla’s on track to sell 2 million. They’re on track to outbeat Tesla in sales this year, or BMW in sales, which is awesome.
But the volume of tractors that moves is so much smaller. So that’s, I think, what— yeah. But we also don’t have the fancy leather interior and all of those things. But we are leveraging, like, this whole sensor suite that’s on the tractor with all the cameras and all the kind of GPUs and the ability to connect and all of that — that’s leveraging the automotive industry. That’s why we’re able to get the price down to the price that we are. When we first launched, we asked people what they thought the price would be, should be, and it was almost double, if not triple, the price that we have, just because of, when you look at all the expensive technology that’s on it— it’s actually, the prices have come down significantly on those, making it very, very, very accessible, very easy to fix and all those things. So it helps with making it far, far more frugal, so we can afford it.
Ross Kenyon: If a listener wants to buy a tractor— if a listener wants to get involved— do you have farmers who are listening? It is possible. It is possible sales come from this. I don’t know, I can’t guarantee it.
Carlo Mondavi: Half of our world’s population was farmers. You guys remember— that was back not that long ago, when our grand— so we’re just— we are all descendants of farmers. We’re all somehow the farmers.
Ross Kenyon: How can they get involved? How can they get in touch? Shout out your website and your resources here.
Carlo Mondavi: Yeah, monarchtractor.com is a great way. Just go through and surf that and play with the calculator, watch some videos. It’s, I think, the best way to learn about everything that we’re doing at Monarch right now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, thanks for hanging with us, Carlo. Always fun to talk about ag tractors. Cool. Like, I kept thinking, I’m like, what do I need one of these— I obviously do not need one of these.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I think the same thing too. I was like, I want this tractor. I was like, what?
Carlo Mondavi: Well, do you guys have— I do. I always say, like, if you guys have one or two things to do on your home farm area and you have a Powerwall, like, this is a massive, massive Powerwall. So it’s kind of— it depends if you’re in— depending on what state you’re in, the subsidies could make this really compelling from just a Powerwall perspective, because of how much energy density there is compared to the other Powerwalls that are kind of out there. But no.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s— let’s drop it. Show— it’s— it doesn’t— it literally makes no sense. It makes negative sense.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: You’re saying we can go in on this together?
Ross Kenyon: No, we’re not going to split a tractor right now. Let’s— Carlo, this— the show is getting stupid. It’s time to conclude. Thank you for being here.
Carlo Mondavi: Thanks, guys. Awesome. I appreciate you guys.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
