Agriculture Archives - Artemis Water Strategy

Jun 18 2018

Are farmers pioneering the next mobile app ecosystem?

“To succeed, innovation usually requires pressure, necessity and even adversity; the fear of loss often proves more powerful than the hope of gain,” writes competition expert Michael Porter in examining how world-class technology industries have emerged. As the surviving remnant of small farmers in North America struggles to harness the latest wave of agtech innovations, they are looking beyond conventional farm systems paradigms. From the heartland, farmers are leapfrogging their urban brethren to use the latest capabilities of mobile devices and cloud data systems. They may be pioneering a new mobile app ecosystem for food daa.

The Nestle Purina/Cargill pilot project announced last month presents a snapshot of opportunity that AgIoT offers farmers and also the new operations challenges that it brings. In partnership with the Nature Conservancy, the pilot combines smart weather sensors in crop fields with weather data and irrigation automation, delivering data to field workers and managers in the field.

As US farmers face the fifth year of falling income, agricultural Internet-of-Things (AgIoT) helps farmers tune when they plant, irrigate and harvest. Perhaps most compelling, farmers can share crop data with supply chain partners to strengthen their connection to better ways of selling their crops. According to Cargill, more than 50 percent of water used in US beef production is dedicated to irrigating the row crops that become feed for cattle. “By putting first-of-its-kind, cost-effective irrigation technology in the hands of farmers, the amount of water needed for row crop irrigation is reduced, as is the environmental impact of the beef supply chain,” states Courtney Hall, Cargill technical sustainability manager. “This program could help save 2.4 billion gallons of irrigation water over three years, which is equivalent to roughly 7,200 households over that period,” said Hannah Birge, water and agriculture program manager at The Nature Conservancy.

Today, US Farmers have access to a swelling tide of data– data that can help them grow more with fewer chemicals and water, data that can help them spot disease early. Established industry leaders have joined the growing corps of scrappy start-ups looking beyond the traditional customers to smaller farmers.

Historically, the business of farming had been a story of scale and sophistication. Since World War II, the farmers that invested capital in innovative approaches improved profits and expanded. The agriculture industry focused its innovation on the biggest farms. Today, less than three percent of the two million US farms make more than $1.0 M a year, but they produce more than 42% of total production. Corporate farms, less than one percent of the total, provide an additional 11 percent of US production. Five years ago, precision agriculture was not considered cost-efficient for farms smaller than 5,000 acres. Thanks to a generation of cheaper, more powerful sensors, many of the newest solutions—like Arable Lab’s Mark, CropX, and Taranis, offer affordable precision agriculture to the much larger population of smaller farms.

While million-dollar farms might have a staff to administer data on PCs, small farmers need access to data on the go. Smartphone technology that has emerged over the last decade is enabling farmers to access rich data from mobile devices and record location-specific field information in real time. A recent study of Canadian farmers by research firm Ipsos found that 80 percent use a smartphone, an adoption rate higher than the overall population. Field workers are using mobile devices to input data in real time, while field managers use that data to make decisions—when to irrigate, plant, spray and harvest.

Beyond the scope of these pilots, farmers are struggling to integrate the flood of data into their farm management systems. According to Stratus Ag Research, almost 70 percent of North American growers capture precision ag data, but less than half use software to analyze it. “What began as a slew of single-purpose tools has now evolved to include apps that integrate different types of information to give farmers a ‘dashboard’ view of their land,” notes Kenneth Qin. “With the plethora of technology companies and organizations ready to use farm data, how can farmers protect the information collected from their fields? What if it winds up in the hands of competitors? Could a farmer’s competitive edge in planting practices, fertilizer use or pricing be revealed?” Leading voices in the farm community, like former US Grains Council board member Dale Artho from Wildorado Texas, leery of privacy issues. Artho says that he rejected cloud-based systems like Granular in favor of “spreadsheets and my memory” to build my budgets.

Current agtech industry leaders are engaged in a “land grab” for ownership of the farm management dashboard. However, given the capabilities available today, and the significant premium that supply chain partners can offer for sharing data, might agriculture be ripe for a new app ecosystem? As consumers, farmers are a fragmented market that loves competition and resist centralized control.

“You’ve got a mobile audience that is very attractive,” explains Colin Siren of Ipsos. “They’re heavy users of technology, applications, wireless content — and they are key decision-makers for their business… While farmers are certainly using their mobile devices for social media, banking, news, texting — over 40 percent had downloaded one or more apps related to running the farm.”

• What kinds of data platforms (Amazon, Google, others?) would enable farmers and to monetize their data without ceding control or privacy?
• Would app ecosystems allow technology developers to engage farmers and farm workers to use apps?
• Could this platform use advertising to pay farmers for data?

Apr 02 2018

Where is the Eden app for farmers?

Pictures are part of Walmart’s secret sauce in Eden’s ground-breaking user-interface for food inspection.

Last month, we had one of the first public views of Eden, Walmart’s suite of produce management applications. Eden may be one of the most ambitious efforts to harness the power of food data. An internal application aimed for use by Walmart’s associates, it addresses the three critical challenges that have been holding back the use of supply chain data. Eden might offer an important model for farmers using big data at the other end of the supply chain.

1—First and foremost, Eden distills a mountain of data— combining the latest information from Walmart’s distributors with USDA food product specifications and Walmart’s own product standards. Walmart has used more than a million photos to create what it calls a “freshness algorithm” that prioritizes the flow of perishable goods from farm to store. Industry analyst Dan Alaimo writes that Eden provides a framework for integrating existing data flows from the supply chain. Today, Eden tracks a continuous record of storage area temperatures and temperature control devices on trucks. According to Parvez Musani, Walmart’s Vice President of Supply Chain Technology Engineering at Walmart Labs, the technology will soon tap into data from the farms of Walmart’s suppliers. “We’ll have drones flying over the farms” to monitor temperatures and other factors that determine the quality of the produce Walmart is getting from suppliers, Musani said. For example, bananas, one of Walmart’s most popular items, travel from seven countries in Latin America to over 4,000 stores in the U.S. In the future, Eden will be able to track storage temperature during transport, recalculate the freshness factor and re-route the shipment.

2—Eden structures and prioritizes data: Walmart has defined a data ontology that drives mission-critical day-to-day operations, from tracking food safety to delivery schedules. The Eden system is designed to learn, comparing images scanned in the field, at a distribution center, or a store with a library of acceptable and unacceptable samples in the database. With Eden, Walmart aims to estimate an exact shelf-life for each product.

Eden is a major investment and presents some business risk as well as business opportunity. Computer-driven produce management may miss details that long-established manual processes track today. No doubt Walmart will need to track operational issues that emerge with the new system and invest to develop data sources.

3— Eden is a pioneering application because is aims to provide this complex store of data to a massive population of associates throughout Walmart stores in the US. “Eden leverages sophisticated technologies such as machine learning, but we’ve made it simple enough for all of our associates to use, “ notes Musani. Employees at Walmart’s distribution centers use Eden on handheld devices to create a digital record of defects and remove produce that doesn’t pass USDA and Walmart quality requirements.

Since it deployed Eden to 43 food-distribution centers in January of 2017, Walmart estimates that it has saved $86 million in food waste, according to Musani. Over the next five years, Walmart aims to save $2 billion in food waste. Reliably stocking high-quality produce might be a major competitive advantage over other grocery retailers.

“Shoppers frequently make their harshest and sometimes final decisions about the desirability of a grocery store based on the quality and freshness of its produce. It’s often their first and most lasting impression,” notes Alaimo. Big data offers massive efficiencies to grocers, but its value is proportional to the degree to which Walmart can deliver insights to the associates on the front lines, in the stores, in the distribution centers, in the merchandise buying groups.

As farmers decide when to plant, spray, irrigate and harvest, they need to consider data on weather, soil, historic yields and market pricing. On a single screen, Walmart’s Eden shows weight, defect grade, size, and temperature, with easy access to detailed reports. Which agtech company will develop the Eden app for growers?

Quality produce is a decisive element of retail success today. Credit: Walmart

Jan 31 2018

Tracking the Emergence of the New American Farmer

As American farmers struggle through the fourth year of a historic dip in world grain prices, they’re increasingly looking to urban tech geeks in places like the Silicon Valley for answers. Last week at the Cleantech Forum, agtech leaders gathered to consider what solutions will rise on the 21st Century farm: Wade Barnes from Farmers Edge and Chris Paterson from Bayer Crop Science joined Analog Devices blockchain project lead Rob O’Reilly and Chuck Templeton from S2G Ventures.

Innovations in sensors, communications, and AI are bringing Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that were first developed for sophisticated manufacturing to precision agriculture.

Data and communications technologies give farmers access to a flood of data about their farms. Hyperlocal data on moisture, soil, and temperature can help growers increase yield, minimize the use of costly fertilizers and pesticides while giving them the agility to respond to unpredictable weather. The largest and the most sophisticated farms are showing that agricultural technologies raise farm yields and profitability. Retailers and specialty food producers are paying premiums to monitor the status of crops before they are delivered. With these early successes, venture investment in agtech is rising. More money went into funding agricultural technology start-ups last year than the previous two combined, but they continue to be cautious about the potential for selling technology to farmers like those in the US. How many of the 2 million US farms will join the 21st-century agtech revolution?

The battle for the hearts and minds of US farmers will center around helping them get beyond data collection and analysis into action. How can they get beyond a sea of data and get out to their fields? How can they lock in profitable crop sales with data without compromising their operations? According to the latest US census, the largest 10 percent of US farms own more than 70 percent of cropland in the United States; the top 2.2 percent alone takes up more than a third. The tiny three percent of the 2.04 million US farms that are considered large account for 42 percent of the production. Experts estimate that today large farms can extract nearly four times the value of production of major arable crops or principal livestock breeds per acre that small farmers can. Although 75 percent of farms do not generate enough revenue to cover costs, more than 60 percent of the largest farms can boast margins of more than 20 percent.

As agtech companies grow beyond early adopters, their success will depend on how they can help the 97% of farmers battling to survive consolidation. Farmers are looking for data management solutions that seem to match the DNA of Silicon Valley start-ups, bringing complex data streams to streamlined consumer applications like Google Maps, Zillow, Mint or Venmo.

“We’ve created a scalable solution that works for our global network of growers and one that can be tailored to support the needs of individual fields, from grain production in Brazil to variant weather in Australia. Predictive forecasting models are the next step towards achieving higher global crop yields, sustainably,” notes Barnes from Farmers Edge.

For agtech start-ups to succeed, they need to reach beyond the farms with multi-million dollar combines and tractors.

What would be the value of a technology that would provide a single dashboard to help growers get out of the office and into the cab of their tractors? What would it take to bring a mass migration of growers to adopt that platform? Would that opportunity provide the 10x returns on investment that define the sweet spot for venture capital investment?

Jun 01 2017

Is Agriculture IoT a Ripe Target for Softbank’s Next Big Windfall?

In his career finale, a pioneering investor aims to lead a massive shift in communications.

Last week, Japanese investment giant SoftBank announced that it had closed $93 billion in committed capital for its massive Vision Fund, putting it within striking distance of the $100 billion target it announced last year. The Vision Fund dwarfs even the world’s biggest private equity vehicles, including the $22.5B mega fund that Apollo Global Management announced last month set to have been the largest in recent history. The Vision Fund would exceed the size of the five biggest private equity funds combined, according to investment research firm Pitchbook.

ARM acquisition provides a launchpad into IoT

Since the Internet boom of the late ‘90s, Softbank has set the pace for tech investing, betting huge sums to chase the rapid growth of the Internet, then retail distribution via online portals. It has made tens of billions in returns from investments in companies from Alibaba, to Yahoo and Supercell Oy. The first closing of the Vision Fund comes just three months after Softbank’s founder, Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son made the biggest bet of his career with the $32 billion acquisition of chipmaker ARM Holdings Plc. ARM provides technology for 95% of all smartphones and seems poised to play a central role in the emerging “Internet of Things” (IoT) market that will network devices, vehicles, and buildings via remote sensors and processors. “ARM will be the center of the Internet of Things, in which everything will be connected,” he told reporters. “IoT is going to be the biggest paradigm shift in human history (and) we have always invested at the beginning of every paradigm shift.”

Ambitious vision set to shake up the investment community

Softbank’s Vision Fund is rumbling the investment community because of its size, but also because of its ambitions. It is the cornerstone for Softbank’s founder, Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son’s final mission for Softbank to bring Japan’s third largest company to a new level of global leadership. Last year, Son decided to postpone his retirement to “work on a few more crazy ideas.” “I feel my work is not done,” he stated. Mr. Son said. “This will require me to be C.E.O. for at least another five to 10 years.” According to Bloomberg, Son has laid out a 300-year plan to make the company the most valuable in the world.

Historically, SoftBank invests in a range of businesses, from established players to tiny start-ups. Recent examples include a $130 million in the biotech startup Zymergen, $5 billion to Chinese Uber competitor Didi Chuxing as well as big bets on co-working space provider WeWork and India’s Paytm, a mobile payments company.

Venture capital vehicles, known for making the types of tech investments the Vision Fund is targeting, are typically even smaller than the giant private equity funds. For example, Technology Crossover Ventures’ 2007 fund VII was one of the biggest in history at only $3 billion. Only a small group of the hundreds of venture funds have established vehicles that total more than $1 billion.

Which markets will bloom with Vision Fund investment?

Industry observers wonder whether a behemoth investor of this size with considerable technology synergies will hit the ecosystem of venture investment like an asteroid landing on a desert island. According to analyst Kyle Stanford, the specter of price inflation for early-stage investments is already haunting the investment meetings at venture firms. “The fear is all rooted in the 2014, 2015 investment environment, where there were tourist investors and valuations were getting out of control, and when valuations get too high it limits exit opportunities,” Stanford explains. “When you see a fund of $100 billion coming in already making big headliner deals, I think that fear is going to come back.”

Those headliner deals depend on a healthy crop of well-financed growth stage deals, which have been on the decline even as overall investment activity has picked up, with first financing activity falling for seven consecutive quarters.

First financing activity has fallen for seventh consecutive quarters

Source: Pitchbook

The

Source: Pitchbook

Over the short term, competition for top tier deals will heat up startup valuations, but the Vision Fund is also bound to have a profound impact on the kinds of technologies that get to market and their pace of development. $100 B in ambitious capital will drive investors to expand their investment activity to new technologies and markets.

Riding, and driving the food tech wave

Telecom giants like Softbank are diversifying beyond their core industries through acquisitions in areas that lead to synergies. BT launched a sports TV channels venture and Norway’s Telenor opened an e-bank. From its base in Japan and with domain expertise in telecommunications and hardware, Softbank will be looking for technologies that are riding dramatic market trends.

One candidate is precision ag. With its ambition, its vision and it’s unique perspective as a Japanese company, Softbank seems set to play in the next chapter of the telecommunications revolution– beyond the internet, beyond urban networks to address the big challenge of feeding a population of 9 billion.

By 2050, 14 of the world’s 20 biggest metropolises will be in Asia and Africa, including Jakarta, Manila, Karachi, Kinshasa and Lagos as well as Tokyo, Shanghai. and Mumbai, according to a projection by Demographia. It takes about 1 acre to feed the average U.S. consumer. China only has about 0.2 acres of arable land per citizen, and an estimated 20% of that land is contaminated with toxic pollution. As a result, Chinese have been investing aggressively outside of China to produce food for their home market. High profile purchases include Australia’s biggest dairy operation and US-based Smithfield Foods.

Precision agriculture is a “must win” market for IoT leadership

As the world’s population grows, outright purchase of existing food production facilities will not suffice. Technology will be essential to feed burgeoning populations. Precision agriculture will be more than enabling technology, it will be essential for survival; to feed an increasingly crowded planet. This will be a “must win” flagship market for major technology and communications companies, from Intel and Softbank’s ARM to communications companies like Softbank’s Sprint, Verizon, BT and Telstra.

Jun 17 2015

Which solutions can respond in time?

Courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

As California counts its water reserves in months, which “shovel ready” solutions can help it respond?

More than $320M of California’s emergency drought relief funds were left unspent a year after they were approved, according to reports from the California State Finance Department released last week. As the State starts a grim countdown to the limits of its reservoirs, the timeframes on the California water crisis has suddenly shifted from years to months, California’s water system has been built with 25 year capital plans, where even the fast-track water projects take 2 to 6 years to complete.

“We need to get the money out the door now for shovel-ready projects and existing water programs that only need funding to get started. No delay. No red tape.” California Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) stated back in March.

While the State scrambles to keep water running, water tech innovations that are both “shovel ready” but also built for plug and play installation are gaining attention. Laura Shenkar from Artemis joined Frances Spivy-Weber, Vice-Chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, Lance Donny, founder and CEO of OnFarm, Mike Lord, vice president of engineering for Effluent Free Desalination Corp (EFD) and Robin Gilthorpe, CEO of WaterSmart on June 5 to discuss some examples on public radio, the KQED Forum.