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Oct 26 2018

Two Visions For On-Demand Farm Insight

Google’s radar-based gesture sensing and data transmission patent

How might innovations from Google and Salesforce bring an ocean of agricultural data to a farmer’s smartphone?

Farming might be the world’s most complex manufacturing environment, working within an intricate interplay between soil, sun, and moisture to produce food. The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to track more of that complexity and boil it down to insights that will drive yield and profitability. But first, farmers must harness the ocean of data.  “We all know weather trumps everything,” notes Climate Corporation’s Chief Science Officer Sam Eathington. However, he estimates that 70% of yield is “a result of decisions made by farmers such as what to plant, how to fertilize the crop and how to protect it.”

Over the last 18 months, some of the giants in agriculture have accelerated their data services offerings. Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of Monsanto, states that it is “on track to hit 50 million acres” with its FieldView product this year. FieldView brings in nine years of yield data on 2000 seed hybrids to provide recommendations for farmers. Today, the combination of more accurate GPS and autonomous vehicle control has made precision farming economical, at least for large farms. According to John Deere, self-guided systems now farm approximately 60 to 70 percent of the crop acreage in North America, 30 to 50 percent in Europe, and more than 90 percent in Australia.

Serving up farm data is emerging decisive opportunity that will define the rural market in North America.  The winners here might be set to engage the millions of farmers worldwide.  As a vibrant crop of young agtech startups strikes out into a North American market long dominated by ag giants, they are increasingly looking beyond the few thousand $1M family farms which have been the mainstay of precision agriculture. Tools that can process massive farm data streams into actionable insights and deliver them to mobile devices will unlock a US market of more than two million additional farms and define rural markets around the world.

Watch for innovations from the broader mobile market. Here are two examples.

Radar-Based Gesture Sensing and Data Transmission

Google is looking to integrate its smart devices into a single platform, spanning all of its devices, notes Rachel Binder from CB Insights. It has filed a patent for “radar-based gesture sensing and data transmission.” (See image above.) The technology would allow users to control a suite of devices using gestures in addition to voice control and handheld devices. Could it be applied to a grower, workers, and equipment- pivots and sprayers in the field?

Data integration on the fly

AI-powered data integration from companies like Datorama (recently acquired by Salesforce (CRM.N)) turns any data reporting source in the form of a feed or file into a continuous data connection that leverages email, FTP or other storage locations to maintain continual updates. Data for marketing professionals, like data for farmers, comes from many sources across devices leading to a data source explosion that can quickly move from dozens to hundreds or more.   In today’s world of social media and real-time logistics, the average marketer uses up to 70 data sources to assess marketing performance.  Systems like Datorama help marketers access more niche channels for data on specific neighborhoods instead of entire cities. These systems take mountains of data and facilitate new advertising and pricing strategies tailored to niche markets.  What if growers could dynamically switch in different irrigation monitoring solutions and remote imaging systems, receiving data insights on their fields and crop status from mobile devices?

Organizing data to mirror the way you farm

An automated data source integration engine like Datorama modified for farm data might provide the ability for small farmers to use data the way big farms with IT staffs do today. AI-driven data integration would process farm data and deliver insights directly to mobile devices.

Agtech has been a sleepy corner of the technology world over the last few decades, both because of the speed of change, but only a tiny fraction of the 2 million US farms have the staff to manage data.  The mounting pressures on smaller farms are forcing farmers to change to survive. With cheaper hardware and the new stretch of advanced communications networks, smaller farmers might have the opportunity to drive their profits with data.

Credit: Datorama

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Agriculture, Big Data, IP Strategy · Tagged: agtech, datorama, Google

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?

Credit: Bayer AgScience

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Agriculture, Big Data, Blockchain

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

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Agriculture, Big Data, Supply Chain

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