107. Decarbonization-as-a-ser

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

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Decarbonization-as-a-service

Many food companies have made commitments to reduce their Scope 1, 2, & 3 emissions. Many of the same food companies have made public commitments to go to net zero in the next couple of decades.

Many countries have made commitments to go to net zero in the next two to five decades.

Image source: Visual Capitalist

According to Holly Jean Buck, there are two main challenges with net zero - measurement challenges and deception.

Holly Jean Buck is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Environment & Sustainability at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York and one of the leading researchers on climate change. (Google Scholar)

Holly Jean Buck wrote about net zero, its challenges, and decarbonization-as-a-service.

As I have written many times before, there are many technical challenges to accurately measure ecosystem outcomes for carbon sequestration, and GHG emissions, whether they are positive or negative.

Measuring negative emissions presents headaches of its own. For example, there are emergent methods for measuring how much carbon is stored in soil that hinge on spectroscopy, satellite-based sensors, and machine learning. But knowing what’s actually going on in the soil is complex, as conditions can vary even across a single farm.

Software will play a key role in solving both the problems. There are some companies out there which promise to help organizations meet their net-zero promises, and deliver decarbonization-as-a-service. Even though there is irrational exuberance in the market, the private sector is racing ahead of law & policy.

Solving net-zero can be potentially profitable for companies, if they can convert carbon into a security which can be traded. It will create more liquidity in the market, by making carbon as a tradable commodity.

Holly Jean Buck poses the question if decarbonization-as-as-service actually does not address climate change? If the software platform’s model is based on transactions on the marketplace to connect buyers and sellers of carbon offsets. If the long term goal is to maintain these transactions, will a drive towards decarbonization make this a time limited project?

Personally, I am less worried about it, as we have a very long road ahead of us. The business models of companies change all the time, companies pivot, and sometimes try out completely different lines of business.

She is worried about the tendency to buy cheaper carbon offsets, if they are available. She posits that a market based system creates incentives to move towards cheaper carbon credits.

I am less worried about this concern, as we already see the notion of quality of carbon credits come into play. For example, if we apply the principle of permanence, many organizations have decided not to consider offsets or credits from natural ecosystems. Many organization’s worry about the quality of the carbon credit, and have started monitoring them more closely with a combination of actual data collection or validation using different 3rd party process models.

Holly Jean Buck is concerned about the inability of platforms to allocate removal capacity to sectors we want to preserve and whose emissions are hard to abate, and that the platforms will become blackboxes.

A final problem with a market-based system is that it turns the platforms themselves into black boxes. As profit-seeking enterprises, they must protect their algorithms and data, as otherwise their competitors might gain an advantage. But this opacity obstructs the learning and experimentation process that’s required to combat climate change. We need a broad-based scientific effort to help figure out what works in terms of curbing emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere. That can’t happen if all the data is locked away on proprietary platforms, hidden from view.

Holly Jean Buck talks about the need for planetary scale computation to comprehend, compose, and enforce a shared future which is more rich, diverse, and viable. Planetary scale computation is an idea proposed by Benjamin Bratton. He argues,

that instead of thinking about all of the different kinds of species or genres of planetary-scale computation, smart grids, cloud computing, smart cities, internet of things, AI, augmented reality, as a bunch of different species all spinning out on their own. We can actually think about them fitting together in a way that is not unlike the network architecture stack of OSI, OSI or TCP as an example, in which there are layers of this composite that are defined by their particular functions.

There are no silver bullets in solving food and agriculture, climate change problems, and no one organization can do it alone. Governments will have a key role here to set regulations, & policies which provide a level playing field, and promote the adoption of sustainable agriculture.

I do believe the private sector will have a huge role to play. Consumers will continue to influence policy, and companies up & down the food and agriculture value chain.

Tying the various threads together, the future of the industry will combine

Intelligent and transparent standards;

Farmer-centric programs with flexibility and scalability at their core;

Blockchain-driven carbon exchanges; and

Leading-edge, AI-driven MRV solutions which are integrated seamlessly into soil carbon schemes.

Image credit: Hummingbird Technologies

Decarbonization-as-a-service will have to provide local expertise, and access to data to the right people. Data hoarding should not create extractive information asymmetries against farmers, or other communities.

Given the fragmented nature of the problem and the need for local expertise, I am less worried that one or two or three corporations will have a monopoly on data, information, and insights around decarbonization.

Holly Jean Buck concludes,

The knowledge problem of net zero is difficult but not insurmountable. Solving it the right way will require a group effort. We must build data infrastructures that embody multiple ways of knowing and understanding our world, and that help us advance both ecological and social ends, before corporations conquer this space for themselves.

Technology Trends

Drones for rice phenotyping

Rice is a major crop, especially in the developing world. Improving rice productivity, and nutrition value has and will have a huge impact in the future.

Phenotyping rice for breeding purposes is a challenge due to the tough operational environment in which rice grows. There is limited access to rice fields, due to frequent flooding of the fields. Drones provide a good option to consistently collect high resolution imagery to build machine learning models to identify key traits and select high performant rice genotypes.

Rice researchers at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center at Beaumont have begun a project that utilizes unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV, data to speed up rice cultivar selection and breeding.

Given rice is one of the most important food crops in the world, this research could have exciting implications in the future to find high yielding, and climate resistant traits of rice.

Some of the key research objective ares:

Quantify key phenotypic traits of rice growth and development.

Capture UAV images of rice genotypes at key rice growth stages.

Develop advanced image processing algorithms to extract key phenological, morphological and architectural traits for key rice growth stages.

Develop a digital rice selection system that screens for best-performing genotypes through data integration and multi-trait decision making.

Drone imagery can also be used to extract traits for critical rice growth stages like seeding, tillering (end of seedling stage), flowering, grain filling, and maturity.

The same method can also be used to monitor plant growth for nitrogen management and disease detection.

Cybersecurity - an increasingly important issue

The proliferation of smart sensors, and increased connectivity, will bring more and more of the agriculture infrastructure online. This change will make digital agriculture infrastructure vulnerable to future cyber attacks.

Latest research shows the rise of internet connectivity and smart low-power devices will facilitate the shift of many food production jobs into the digital domain - precision irrigation, soil, and crop monitoring, use of drones, and aftermarket devices on equipment etc.

This increases the attack surface area for bad actors, as has been seen just in the last 12 months with adverse situations for the US irrigation system, meatpacking plant (JBS), equipment manufacturing et

The research paper provides a potential framework to think about the different layers in the technology stack for digital agriculture, and how different strategies can be used to secure your digital infrastructure.

Source: Research paper

I had covered this topic in more detail in edition 70. A tractorload of vulnerabilities

As the digital infrastructure becomes global, and multi-layered, agribusinesses will have to adopt industry best practices like “Defense in Depth.” Defense in Depth (DiD) is an approach to cybersecurity in which a series of defensive mechanisms are layered in order to protect valuable data and information. If one mechanism fails, another steps up immediately to thwart an attack.

Approaches like defense-in-depth, ensure cybersecurity is not an afterthought, but is baked into your product development and operational processes.

Agribusinesses should conduct internal and independent external audits to measure the progress on cybersecurity, and make changes based on the recommendations.

A secure infrastructure, if done well, can be a differentiator for the company.

A “tractorload of vulnerabilities” can jeopardize the freedom to operate as a business. Do not let it happen!

Alahmadi, A.N.; Rehman, S.U.; Alhazmi, H.S.; Glynn, D.G.; Shoaib, H.; Solé, P. Cyber-Security Threats and Side-Channel Attacks for Digital Agriculture. Sensors 2022, 22, 3520. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22093520

In the News

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced $2.6 million in grants to help farmers plant cover crops across 500,000 acres in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, and Minnesota.

The California Department of Water Resources is using innovative airborne technology to map California’s groundwater basins. The information will help prepare for the future fight for water in the state. Helicopter-based technology scans the subsurface of the ground. It’s been likened to taking an MRI of the earth. The survey data will create an image of the subsurface to a depth of about 1,000 feet below the ground surface. The image provides information about large-scale aquifer structures and geology

India placed second in terms of deal activity, with 257 funding rounds compared to the US’s 1,062 deals; the UK came third with 188 deals (raising $1.3 billion in total) and China fourth with 123 deals.

California produces 80% of the world’s almonds. Almonds are one of the most water intensive orchard crops on the planet, requiring 1.7 gallons of water to produce a single almond, or 629 gallons per pound.

China released the nation's first technology roadmap for intelligent agricultural machinery. The roadmap is based on unmanned agricultural machinery as a final product form and proposes nine frontier and key technologies including integrated operation tools and a new energy system.

The efficiency delivered by intelligent agricultural machinery when operating full-time has continuously increased by 20 percent to 60 percent, while the operation required less manual operation by 50 percent.

Moreover, operating costs have also been reduced, with the application of intelligent agricultural machinery saving 3 to 9.5 percent of fuel and reducing 30 percent use of pesticides, while lowering labor costs by 30 to 60 percent.

Supply chain challenges helped with Benson Hill growth last year. Benson Hill develops crops at the genetic level and then works with farmers to grow them and later distributes them downstream..

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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.

Rhishi Pethe