USA - Silicon Valley’s Next Disruption Is on the Farm
Technology doesn’t make farming easier, according to Jay Hill, a New Mexico grower whose 1,000 acres near Las Cruces are planted with vegetables and commodity crops. “It makes farming possible.”
Self-driving tractors, flying drones, and smartphone-controlled drip irrigation systems have kept him competitive, he says. Robotic lettuce harvesters are next. Thanks to technology, “I’m 20 times larger than when I started 15 years ago,” he says, and only one of four survivors out of what had been dozens of neighboring farms.
So far, the higher costs haven’t led to higher profits. Technology has improved productivity for many farmers, but resulting bumper crops undercut prices. U.S. farm incomes in 2015 were down 36 percent from the prior year, the lowest since 2006. Hill’s profits are stuck where he started when he was in high school.
The next wave of farm technology—big data—is supposed to fix that by cutting costs and minimizing environmental stress from farming. At least that’s the hype.
“Interpreting farm data is the key to the agricultural revolution,” says Paul Noglows, executive producer of the Forbes AgTech Summit, Silicon Valley’s foremost agriculture conference. “This is a shift to increased efficiency, rather than just jamming out more crops.”
Parts of the big data play are simple. Powerful cloud-based computer programs are fed decades of weather and soil data. Terabytes of imagery are collected by satellites, airplanes, and drones and layered into the computer analysis. Combined with field-level data gathered by sensors attached to tractors, dropped down water wells, and embedded in smartphones—yes, the lauded “internet of things”—software will deliver the personalized farming prescriptions directly to smartphones in the hands of individual farmers.
This is the dawn of the digital age in farming, says Josette Lewis, who tracks agriculture industry progress as director of the World Food Center at the University of California, Davis. In every other industry, however, it is more like high noon. “Agriculture is one of the last major economic sectors to integrate data technology into operations.”
So expect a rapid rollout. Silicon Valley saw this coming and has pumped tens of millions of dollars into Farm Link, Farm Business Network, Granular, Farmers Edge, and Conservis.
These data services help growers make better economic decisions, says Lewis, which include reducing applications of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. “We could see substantial reductions in farming’s environmental footprint.” More efficient farms will also reduce demand for land and thus reduce global deforestation, a major contributor to climate warming.
Grower investments in technology will have doubled during the five years ending in 2019, with data analysis topping the shopping list, according to a recent report by Robert Hill of Caledonia Solutions.
Big data is being used to reduce food insecurity. Launched in 2012, Global Open Data for Agriculture & Nutrition, an international group of more than 380 governments, agriculture companies, universities, and research organizations, is using cloud-based data services to give subsistence farmers around the world access to weather forecasts, market information, and crop insurance through their cell phones.
“Agriculture is playing catch-up,” says Tim Shaw, who advises food company clients at Teradata. But while big data services have been overhyped in other industries, they could genuinely transform agriculture. Better use of weather data is critical for an industry susceptible to drought, floods, and the ravages of climate change.
At this early point, The Climate Corporation has the most refined and complete platform, although it is focused on commodity crops such as corn and soy. Google data scientist David Friedberg launched the company in 2006 on a hunch that weather prediction might be useful to many businesses; he identified the agriculture industry as his target market and raised $100 million in venture funding for a weather-sensitive crop insurance company.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="568"] The Climate Corporation's Climate Fieldview monitoring app uses satellite mapping technology to track and show field health. (Photo: Courtesy Climate.com)[/caption]
In a billion-dollar deal that dwarfs every ag-tech transaction before or since, St. Louis–based agrochemical giant Monsanto bought The Climate Corporation in 2013. It sold off the insurance service and pivoted to a digital platform that it hopes every farmer in the world will use. German company Bayer’s recent purchase of Monsanto for $56 billion guarantees that The Climate Corporation’s services will serve farmers around the world.
“There are 90 million acres of corn planted in the U.S.,” says Mike Stern, CEO of The Climate Corporation. (Friedberg has since left the company.) “Some farmers get 170 bushels an acre. Others harvest 520 bushels. We bridge that gap so more farmers have higher yields. Our tools allow farmers to monitor their fields meter by meter and alter their farming accordingly. We make it easy for data to go from tractor to cloud.”
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="569"] The Climate Corporation's Nitrogen monitoring app can determine the smartest amount of Nitrogen to apply and the best time to do it. (Photo: Courtesy Climate.com)[/caption]
Farmers have uploaded 100 million acres of crop data to The Climate Corporation’s platform through a free weather and soil information service. Paying customers represent 15 million acres of crop data on The Climate Corporation, an average of 2,000 acres per farmer, and receive Monsanto’s customized analytics.
The world’s largest seed company, Monsanto has a global customer base, giving The Climate Corporation an edge over its competition, says Stern. A recent announcement by Monsanto that it has opened The Climate Corporation’s platform to outside app developers—in much the same way that Facebook hosts Zynga games or Snapchat hosts a Vice channel—could further broaden its appeal and accelerate innovation.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="634"] Satellite mapping technology allows the tractor driver to plot growing and harvesting pathways in The Climate Corporation's CabView field monitoring app. (Photo: Courtesy Climate.com)[/caption]
“We are bringing outside innovators in to expand our services,” says Mark Young, The Climate Corporation’s chief technology officer. Getting new ideas in front of farmers on the platform will support fledgling services that otherwise might not make it to market.
“A lot of smart people are working on the new data platforms,” says Jonathan Mi of Brightpath Capital Partners, a technology venture fund. “It is too early to say if there will be one or many” farm data platforms and how they will function. So far, farmers are hanging back, nervous about disclosing their data, even though it will be anonymous when crunched into a giant database.
“This sector has been driven by Silicon Valley. They don’t necessarily have experience in farming,” says UC Davis’ Lewis. These programmers don’t understand how sensitive farmers are about sharing data.
Ken Dalenberg signed up with The Climate Corporation six years ago to try to control costs on his 3,300-acre corn and soy farm, and he now uses it every day—just as he uses several of the other ag-data platforms. In his combine while he harvested corn recently, “I looked at yields trying to determine what hybrids we should plant where next year. It helps with new decisions, verifies decisions we made a year ago,” says the Champaign, Illinois, grower.
All the platforms crunch the same data, he says, but no one platform is the best at everything, and they can’t talk to one another. “Too much money is backing too many platforms. Consolidation will take the best of each and put them into a new model,” he predicts.
If you own an iPhone, Dalenberg says you can handle the technology, and he isn’t worried about sharing data. He says everyone with a smartphone already puts personal data on a central server, so what’s the big deal? Google sends more ads to him than Monsanto ever has, he says. “As the farm economy improves, which it always does, the people who use the data platforms are the ones who will be in business for the long term.”
In New Mexico, ag-tech enthusiast Jay Hill gets it. But he is staying on the sidelines for now. Sharing operating data with other farmers still feels to him like sharing trade secrets. “Agriculture is a competitive business,” he says.
Source - http://www.takepart.com
