“Software is Feeding the World” is a weekly newsletter for Food/AgTech leaders about technology trends.

Programming note: Starting from this week, all newsletter content can be accessed from the newsletter page. It includes links to the entire archives, as well as the latest edition of the newsletter.

Job-board

In the spirit of experimentation, I plan to launch a job-board for jobs in Food and AgTech. I will offer this service for free to newsletter subscribers. As a first step, I want to gauge interest, if there are enough jobs posted through this form. If I get a reasonable number of job postings, I will include my top 3 postings in the newsletter, and post a spreadsheet with all submitted jobs.

What the “Infrastructure”?

Infrastructure is often not considered exciting. Infrastructure does serve as the foundation, to make other activities easier. For example, the presence of good quality and safe roads, makes for easy movement of people, and goods. Presence of good quality and reliable internet, makes for easy movement of information and ideas.

But infrastructure is not limited to roads and internet connectivity. There are many other examples of infrastructure. For example,

1. Y combinator provides infrastructure for entrepreneurs.

2. Stripe provides infrastructure for online commerce.

3. Amazon fulfillment providers infrastructure for physical movement of goods.

Building infrastructure is extremely hard, expensive, and time consuming, and at the same time, the right infrastructure can have an outsized impact over the long term.

For example, the USDA plays a leadership role (at least in the US) for data collection, utilization, sharing, and research. Many researchers and companies rely on USDA data for building their applications. Obviously, USDA is not perfect (and it is a government entity), when it comes to farm and agriculture data management.

A recent report from The Data Foundation, talks about modernization of agriculture data collection, storage, and analysis to better equip farmers with tools, and the challenges the USDA faces.

Lack of consensus and open data standards, and absence of consistent system interoperability are listed as some of the key challenges.

(I won’t be talk about are misaligned incentives, gaps in leadership and governance, and inconsistent legal authority and interpretation)

What are some of the strategic benefits of data innovation, standards, and interoperability?

Lack of Consensus, Open Data Standards, and Interoperability

Lack of open data standards has plagued and continues to plague the agriculture industry, though there is a silver lining. Depending on which tool you use, the representation of data is different and makes interoperability harder.

​Image source: XKCD​

Figure 1 represents the data one farmer reports to different USDA agencies. As depicted, the farmer must report identical data points, such as crops and the date planted, four separate times.

In edition 45 of the newsletter, I had said

In edition 86. Babel Fish of Agriculture, I had covered interoperability extensively,

​Megan Shahan writes,

So who’s stepping up to the challenge of building infrastructure?

Grain management digital infrastructure in Australia​

Agridigital has raised AUS$ 25 million. They have become the largest digital grain management platform in Australia with 15% of all grain being transacted at the sale, delivery, or storage point.

The simple messaging and approach taken by Agridigital is refreshing. (It passes the basic test of telling you what they do when you go to their website!).

Based on the solutions page, Agridigital looks at the entire grain management workflow of contracts, deliveries, prices, orders, inventory, consignments, payments and invoices.

Image source: Agridigital Product Page​

I am personally a fan of workflow solutions. Agridigital spans the entire value chain, and potentially can stitch the grain management workflow from. Agridigital does not talk about creating a grain marketplace, connecting buyers and sellers, but focuses on the nuts and bolts of multi-party transaction and contract management.

I guess we could call it grain management infrastructure!

Farm of the future

One of the key challenges to bring agriculture solutions to market is the time required to test solutions in different conditions. Given the seasonal nature of farming, there are limited shots on goal to test your solution in a given year. Most input companies run their own test plots, trials for testing different products. Given the recent proliferation of sensors, different types of farm data, it is really important to use these tools to understand the context of the farm during the testing process.

Different organizations have set up testing infrastructure to provide dedicated resources to test out new technology. The Grand Farm in North Dakota is one such example.

Grand Farm, led by Emerging Prairie, (whose mission is connecting and celebrating the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem) aims to capitalize on the region’s potential in the agriculture and technology industries.

Seed and chemicals input company Syngenta has set up a 152 acre farm called “Farm of the Future” in central Illinois. Syngenta uses it to test the latest agricultural technologies and methods, including algorithms, to help determine seed selection by soil type, sensors for disease detection and prediction, and drones for more precise weed control.

Bill McDonnell of Syngenta was recently interviewed to talk about the Farm of the Future. The interview is worth a read, as it gives insights into how input companies think about testing products, technologies, and solutions, before bringing them to market.

Bill talks about the idea of farming being very romantic, and idyllic, especially to people living in a busy cosmopolitan context. This is probably a very uniquely American view, as was very eloquently stated by Sarah K Mock in edition 50. Sarah K Mock: US agriculture needs a narrative shift. In developing countries, especially with a socialist bent (like pre-1990s India), farmers were considered as heroes living a hard life for the benefit of the country. (Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan - Hail the soldier, hail the farmer).

Bill talks about it being an “incredible time to get into agriculture”, especially given the advances in robotics, engineering, data science, etc. and their application to food production. I tend to agree with Bill, though partially. Given the nature and history of land ownership in the United States, it is very difficult to enter or exit being a farmer. Dairy farmer Carl Lippert had captured this sentiment quite well in edition 48. No Sacred Cows for dairy farmer Carl Lippert.

Bill mentions how agriculture has modernized over the last few years, especially around precision to utilize inputs like seed, fertilizer, chemicals. Given that Syngenta is a seed & chemical company, it is not surprising to see them as precision inputs. I was surprised (maybe not) by the exclusion of water. As I have said many times before, water will be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. Even as I type this, California is facing an unprecedented drought, and the water situation is not great in many other parts of the world.

Overall, I am quite excited about infrastructure like The Grand Farm or the Farm of the Future. I hope these facilities, not only help test different technologies, but also can simulate and test some of the real world conditions faced by farmers, and new technologies will have to perform within the constraints of real world conditions.

In The News

​Can high quality carbon save the market from green washing?

AgFunder published a carbon market map, which aligns more with a carbon workflow. I will have some more reflections on it next week.

Image credit: Hummingbird Technologies

What will dinner look like? Bon Appetit did a story on plates of the future, looking at potential menus 10 (cell cultured meat), 20 (personalized nutrition), and 100 years (plankton from the Mariana Trench - ugh - can we leave the deepest part of the ocean untouched??) in the future.

​BASF ventures and Orbia ventures invest in Israeli biotech company FortePhest

​Tule Vision provides real-time ET numbers of plant water user​

Instead of crop coefficients and mathematical equations that estimate ET rates from fixed weather reporting stations, the patented technology provides actual ET rates, which can differ among the same crop across different microclimates and soil types. Access to water will be a defining issue of the 21st century.

​4 ways to talk unlock carbon finance in agriculture to drive climate action​

New index measures the human impacts on Amazon waters​

​Unicorns, Soonicorns (??), and Minicorns (????)​

The Crop Tech has over 9.5K+ startups that comprise companies that are engaged in providing tech-enabled solutions and services for enabling and optimizing field crops and horticulture crops farming. This includes companies that develop hybrid and GMO seeds, biopesticides, biofertilizers, bio-stimulants, use indoor farming methods to produce, automate and electrify farm equipment.

What about short-corn, sweet-corn, and just plain old corn???

​Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability launches with a $ 1.1 billion gift from John and Ann Doerr, the largest in the university’s history! This is a serious commitment for sustainability and climate action over the long term. I hope and am sure it will create a new generation of leaders wanting to take climate action.

​Mechanization infrastructure in Ghanaian agriculture​

So, what do you think?

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About me

My name is Rhishi Pethe. I lead the product management team at Project Mineral (focused on sustainable agriculture). The views expressed in this newsletter are my personal opinions.