Inside Agriculture’s Big Innovation Moment
Plus... data on the farm, robots picking fruit, and more from the frontiers of innovation.
Welcome back to Screw the Valley, the newsletter about all the technology and entrepreneurship happeing far from Silicon Valley. I’m glad you’re here.
In this issue:
· Inside Agriculture’s Big Innovation Moment
· Meet Ag’s Robot Overlords: A Q&A with Abundant Robotics CEO Dan Steere
· How Data is Transforming the Farm
· Now Read This: October 13, 2020
Inside Agriculture’s Big Innovation Moment
Sometimes it feels like farming and agriculture are always going through some sort of massive change. In the 40s, it was to meet spiking demand following WWII as millions of U.S. families set up in new suburban areas, riding the country’s postwar success to a higher quality of life and better diets to go along with it.
In the 60s and 70s, the chemicals arrived. Preservatives could keep an apple fresh for weeks, whether traveling from Washington state to Florida or sitting in a warehouse so that “fresh” fruit could be available year-round.
By the 90s, backlash to all this sprung up, driving new demand for organics and “better” options.
Now the supply chain is a point of discussion, with farm to table everything and new ways becoming available to more closely link all of us to the food we eat. COVID just accelerated all this.
[Here’s a good piece on that last one: Community Supported Agriculture is Surging Amid the Pandemic]
The point is, agriculture has never been as “traditional” as it seems. Farmers have for decades been working to do more with less, delivering quality and quantities of healthy food in ways that consumers want.
But something feels different about the latest agtech push. And COVID-19 is the reason why.
As Forbes recently explained:
“The recent attention on agtech is significant for a sector that to an extent remains an enigma even to farmers themselves. Agtech, which developed over the past seven years, includes any technology or innovation created to help farmers operate more efficiently namely automation, robotics, sensors and data analytics. Under growing challenges the largest being climate change, growers also face the pressure to feed a global population estimated at 9 billion by 2050.
The wave is in part driven by Covid-19, which has brought food to the forefront of global attention. The pandemic has spotlighted the need to access to fresh food along with big impact issues surrounding food safety and food waste. Growers, who once questioned the efficacy of agtech, are now seeking innovation to tackle problems such as severe labor shortage, water and land supply shortage and the loss of arable or farmable land.
Industry experts aren’t surprised by the rising interest in agtech from growers.
“The pandemic has laid bare the weaknesses of the current food and ag supply chain that can be addressed through innovation,” says Pam Marrone, the founder of Marrone Bio Innovations based in Davis, Calif. that creates bio-based products for pest management and plant health. “Furthermore, there is recognition that ag can become more climate smart so there are large initiatives and investments dedicated to reducing the carbon footprint of food and ag production. The rise of the ESG (environmental, social, governance) investor is driving investment as well.”
Read the full story here.
A few things to unpack here:
The pandemic has all of us more focused on our health and the food we eat to maintain it.
Related supply chain disruptions in the early days of quarantine (remember the empty store shelves?) drove home the limitations of the current system.
At the same time, the population is growing and we’re about to need a lot more food than we have right now.
Plus… many parts of the world are experiencing an epidemic of obesity and poor health that plays into this as well. We need healthier food.
Technology is addressing all of these problems, and that’s one reason why this time is different.
Think about it this way. The rise of the internet and digital communications in the 1990s turned into one of the largest tech market opportunities the world had ever known. That same surge is coming next courtesy of agriculture tech.
And it’s happening in areas outside the traditional sphere of innovation, where most agriculture actually happens.
Meet Ag’s Robot Overlords: A Q&A with Abundant Robotics CEO Dan Steere
I’m giving Dan (and myself) a pass here because he does happen to live and work in the Bay Area, but the tech his company, Abundant Robotics, is working on is so cool that we have to talk about it given what’s happening in terms of farm labor, immigration, etc. Short story: They’ve developed the world’s first commercial robotic apple harvester, replacing the work of dozens of human apple pickers.
STV: Let’s start at the top – what’s the hardest part about getting a robot to pick apples?
DS: The produce is delicate. The trees need to be in place and in good shape for 20 years before you can start picking, so the hard problems are being able to locate fruit, decide if it's right to harvest, and then ick it without damaging the apple or the tree. Then you have to move the apple into the bins that growers use to transport fruit out of the orchard and do all of that quickly and at low cost. It's not one problem, it's a hard set of problems. But it's also an interesting problem to solve that’s also very badly needed.
STV: That’s right. I’m hearing more and more about the challenges related to farm labor these days, and the fact that human labor is getting harder and harder for farmers to find.
DS: That's right. And there are other sectors of agriculture -- row crops like corn, wheat and soybeans-- that have been extensively automated over the last 100 years. But there's an entire sector of agriculture, basically fruits and vegetables, that just haven't been addressed yet. We just haven’t been able to automate those types of crops.
SCV: And why is that?
DS: It's just the fact that, if you look at fruit for example, traditional mechanical automation can’tremove most types of fruit from a tree without damaging the fruit. People have been trying for decades, it’s just been a very hard set of problems.
But the food that's healthiest for you is some of the least efficient to produce because of the dependence on manual labor. And that's just as true now as it was 20, 30 years ago. People have been trying to automate these crops for a long time, it's just only now becoming possible.
STV: So, how are you solving for that problem?
DS: Our team started at a research lab in Menlo Park, California called SRI international as part of the robotics division. We began working with the U.S. tree fruit industry in Washington state, about five years ago, putting together a variety of systems that are required to create an integrated commercial harvester for these fruit.
We actually use a type of vacuum to remove the apple from the tree. It uses several different types of computer vision and perception techniques to recognize fruit and decide if it's right to pick in order to automate how we navigate each orchard row. Then of course there are a lot of other mechanical handling systems to make sure we don't damage the fruit.
STV: Is there any human oversight needed? Or is this set it and forget it?
DS: There will always be people involved in field operations, but with our system they aren’t picking. Instead they are doing things like monitoring the equipment, making decisions about what needs to be done at a given time, how it the system is deployed. They’re involved, just without actively picking fruit.
STV: And apples are just the beginning, right?
DS: That's right. The first crop we're automating is apples, but we expect to eventually automate the harvest of many different types of fruits and vegetables. The same processes will be involved.
There is a very large and important sector of agriculture called specialty crops (including fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops, etc, per the USDA) that are among some of the healthiest foods for people to eat. But, as I mentioned, they are also some of the least efficient to produce. So our intention is to bring automation to this sector of agriculture to allow the same kind of productivity gains for these types of crops that the world has seen in staple like grains.
Learn more at AbundantRobotics.com
How Data Is Transforming the Farm
Old McDonald’s farm, like many things in our high-tech age, has gotten a lot smarter.
As crop information is increasingly tracked, digitized, and synced with other variables like soil composition and weather forecasts, farm equipment and processes are becoming more agile. Commonly called precision agriculture, new technologies that harness the power of data are revolutionizing how agriculture is managed and following food through the supply chain to your table.
Here are five ways that modern ag is embracing digital disruption and how these tools are changing the industry.
Seed location via GPS
For a farmer, the ability to know the precise location where seeds are planted is incredibly valuable because it allows them to come back to that same seed with the appropriate amount of water and fertilizer at the various stages of its development.
“Imagine you put a penny in the middle of your driveway and you wanted to use a GPS monitor to find it, you couldn’t with uncorrected GPS. To have that level of accuracy, you have to use ancillary paid correction signal,” says Chad Pfitzer of Trimble Advanced Positioning, which provides a corrected signal (as do companies like John Deere and New Holland). “GPS, which gives you the ability to position seeds more effectively and mark their precise location, is a pillar of precision farming.”
At its outset in the late 2000s, GPS was applied to farm equipment with aftermarket products. It was pretty much like buying a navigation system for your dashboard versus having a navigation system integrated into your car.
Eventually, this equipment and GPS-enabled functionality has becoming increasingly integrated by the industry. Today, the precision possible through GPS mapping is making farmers more knowledgeable than ever about their crops, which is helping them to manage more acreage, more strategically, and grow more crops.
Data-driven guidance
When automated guidance steers a tractor – no hands required— along a row to plant seeds and later fertilize them, it can create and manage fields with incredible accuracy. Far more accurate, in fact, than when humans do the job.
“It’s expensive to farm,” says Pfitzer. “One 50 pound bag of seed might cost $500 and only cover one or two rows. Now, imagine a seed in a row like a penny in the driveway. GPS allows farmers to mark the placement of the seed with incredible accuracy, come back to it with fertilizer, and carefully track its yield as needed.”
Guidance is also a great physical help for the farmer.
“Driving the tractor for row after row over ten thousand acres with one or two people is like driving from Denver to Des Moines in one day,” Pfitzer says. “It’s exhausting. Guidance allows the farmer to have free hands, to use their time in the tractor focused on farm management, or to read a book if they like.”
That totally changes the physical aspects of the job, transitioning farming from a task that involves driving heavy equipment all day to one that can spend more time focused on high-level management of the farm.
Smart irrigation
Imagine a center pivot irrigation system – those large watering sprinklers that move in circles over fields – that knows exactly how fast to move and where water is most needed at any given moment.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually in service now via something called Variable Rate Irrigation (VRI) technology. VRI systems gather field data including crop type, development stage of the crop, soil type, grade of the land, and weather information and use that information to distribute water as effectively as possible. This allows farms to control water distribution by zone, speed, and even individual sprinkler at each degree of the 360 degree circle, which prevents unnecessary watering (for example, avoiding ditches).
“If you are going to get six inches of rain tomorrow, the center pivot will know not to irrigate,” says Andrew Oerman, with Valley Irrigation, one company that’s working on VRI systems.
It is almost like another set of eyes in the field, automatically maintaining soil moisture, especially with critical crops.
Explains Greg Juul of G2 Farming in Hermiston, Oregon: “It gives us the opportunity to make some educated, quick decisions as to whether we need to turn on or shut off and what it looks like forecasted out four or five days, so we can actually make some good irrigation management decisions.”
Digital pasture management
By using GPS enabled ear tags, ranchers can better manage their pastures, move livestock strategically for rotational grazing, as well as troubleshoot issues quickly.
While cattle tagging has long been industry standard, electronic tags are more convenient and make it easier to identify and manage animals remotely. The rancher just has to scan their tag with a reader and their phone will light up with all the details they need about that particular animal. That’s a lot easier than reading a visual tag or tattoo number.
For example, “As cattle are being worked or loaded into a trailer, their EID tag can be scanned while they are in the chute or loading alley,” says Kristen Evans of Cattle Tags. Think of it as the “FedEx” style tracking of large animals.
Currently, only about 5% of cattle have electronic tags, as there are no mandatory tagging requirements. But that’s changing as the industry moves to address supply chain risks and food contamination.
“The trouble is that when there’s an outbreak of E. coli, for example, it can easily be traced to the producer (the meat plant), but not the source (the exact farm),” says Jim Matheson, Assistant Director of the American Bison Association. “If an animal is tagged, you should be able to track a piece of meat that you buy at a store back to the animal of origin.”
Blockchain and farm to table
A blockchain ledger is a unique code that carefully tracks goods through all parts of the transaction.
“Let’s say you have a small coffee shop that wants to know where the coffee they are purchasing came from to verify that it’s fair trade,” says Shalom Ben Or of Avenews-GT, which provides a digital trading platform for verified agri-businesses, farm and other ag transactions. “The digital platform easily allows the seller to give a guarantee that coffee is being sold, how much was paid, quality, etc.”
By providing a trusted, universal proof of ownership, blockchain technology is also helping to expedite purchases, minimize risk to buyers, and protect individual consumer (for example, in the case of the aforementioned e Coli outbreak).
These days, fitness trackers have invited a tiny bit of tech into everyday life, collecting details on sleep patterns, steps, heart rate, etc. with the goal of improving health and wellness.
On the modern farm, this functionality is at work as well. Except there, details are being tracked, analyzed, and applied to make agriculture more productive. Once the goods leave the farm or the ranch, their trail is then tracked to the retailer, which makes the consumer smarter.
And it’s helping one of the oldest industries on the planet scale up to meet the demands of a growing world.
Now Read This: October 13, 2020
Here are some of the stories I referenced when putting together this week’s issue, along with some other interesting insights I found along the way.
McKinsey: Agriculture’s connected future: How technology can yield new growth
GeekWire: How tech-savvy farmers are harnessing big data to tend the fields of the future
Adama: Agriculture 4.0
Startland News: Hyperloop taps West Virginia for $500M project; Missouri still in the running for future sites, advocate says
Quartz: India has over 93,000 job openings for data scientists
TechCrunch: HBO is profiling Elon Musk and the creation of SpaceX
Civil Eats: Community Supported Agriculture is Surging Amid the Pandemic
Forbes: This is agtech’s moment to shine
Until next week…