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

Greetings from the San Francisco Bay Area. The newsletter is coming back after a long break.

I came back from India last week after attending my undergraduate college reunion. Even though I write a lot about tech in this newsletter, the reunion reinforced how human connection, camaraderie, and friendship are so valuable and important in our lives.

Well, up to a point…

I was on a 16 hour direct flight from New Delhi to San Francisco. Around hour 9 or 10 of the flight, I was stretching my legs by the restrooms, when a tech-bro came and started a conversation. He aggressively pushed ideas around blockchain for food traceability, how blockchain could solve the e-book problem, the five-why framework from Toyota, problem with the news etc. I didn’t tell him I had worked at Amazon Kindle, studied and worked on manufacturing systems, and supply chains, and actually had worked at a company focused on produce traceability. When I asked him, what problems does the tech solve, he didn’t have an answer. He fell back to all the tech features and how cool they were.

I want to say two things:

1. Don’t do this. Don’t be a tech bro at 39000 ft up in the year, on a 16 hour flight, when you literally have a captive audience.
2. Tech for the sake of tech is not interesting/useful, unless it solves some user problem.

Let us try not to push tech for the sake of tech, and let us start from problems.

John Deere is a leader in their space, who follows this principle very well. Deere obviously made a big splash at CES, and continues to roll out interesting solutions to real customer problems.

Deere moves with startup, ag retailers, and agronomy solutions

One way to infer future plans of any company is to look at their job postings, and what kind of roles they are looking to hire. With the economic downturn, this signal might be weak. For large corporations like Deere, we can look at their investments, and the startups they support. The startups represent multiple bets the company is making about the future, and can find a cheaper/faster/less risky path to product market fit for the solutions offered by the startup.

I want to highlight a few startups announced by Deere in the startup acceleration class for 2023.

​The Startup Collaborator, now in its fifth year and includes notable alumni such as Bear Flag Robotics, and Hello Tractor. In 2021, Bear Flag Robotics was acquired by John Deere to support the company's autonomous tractor solutions. In 2022, John Deere also invested in Hello Tractor, a company that connects tractor owners with smallholder farmers through a farm-equipment sharing app.

1. Albedo

Albedo is a very low earth orbit satellite imagery provider. They have raised $ 58 million in venture funding so far.

​Albedo, an Austin and Denver-based startup, is developing satellites that fly in very-low-Earth-orbit — less than 450 kilometers above the Earth’s surface — to co-collect 10-centimeter optical imagery and 2-meter thermal infrared imagery, which the company said is “unprecedented” in the commercial market.

The free satellite imagery available from Sentinel-2 is 10m resolution, whereas Planet has some expensive imagery at 3m resolution. 10 centimeter resolution optical imagery and 2-meter thermal infrared imagery could be a huge boost to any remote sensing based models. The key question is what is the cost of this imagery, and will the costs justify its usage in agriculture, especially for commodity row crops like corn, and soy.

If their technology works, Deere can make use of this imagery to provide better analysis and service to their customers.

​2. Anello Photonics​

​Anello's first generation sensor is targeted at safety-critical navigation applications for Autonomous Vehicles and Aerospace. It provides the proven low-noise and low-drift qualities of traditional optical gyroscopes at a production-friendly size, cost, and power needed for a variety of applications. This breakthrough sensor technology has applications across a range of markets including Automotive, Trucking, Construction, Drone, Aerospace, Defense and Consumer Electronics.

One of the key challenges for collecting plant level data (typically for phenotyping purposes) is geolocation accuracy. Annelo’s tight coupling design with survey grade GNSS provides robust Centimeter accuracy on-site. This allows a sensor to go back to the same plant again and again throughout the season, and get a sense of the growth of the plant with high fidelity and accuracy. It can be very useful for breeding applications, trial plots etc.

Based on the website, some the products from Anello could be incorporated into Deere equipment to make them smarter and provide high accuracy for automation, confidence in data collection etc.

​3. IntellliCulture​

IntelliCulture’s website says “We believe precision agriculture should be accessible to all. We have designed our farm management software to solve three critical challenges: labor availability, pest prevention & machine safety.”

IntelliCulture is focused on farm robotics automation, fleet management, and equipment monitoring. If the tech from IntelliCulture works, some elements of it could be incorporated into OEM solutions. Here are some of the products offered today by IntelliCulture (image from IntelliCulture website)

4. Precision AI​

Precision AI is a provider of AI-powered agricultural drones for plant-level herbicide applications at a broad-acre scale.

According to their website, the key elements of their technology are:

• Stable drift-free precision spraying for broad acre farms
• Differentiate weeds instantly with computer vision and on board edge processing
• Full precision weed control for maximum savings with customized spray tips and application components
• Long lasting flight times for more acres per day with speeds above 45 miles per hour

Deere has made significant investments in its See & Spray products. See & Spray products are agriculture equipment mounted, and go along with the sprayer. See & Spray can address many situations of herbicide spraying, but there is still space for drone based spraying to get to hard to reach areas, respond in a targeted fashion, or work in the developing world, where mechanization rates might be low. This is a savvy move by Deere to support this startup, as a combination of See & Spray and Drone Based spraying can provide a more comprehensive solution for weed management.

Deere pushes an OpenTable type model with OpsCenter and Ag Retailers

OpenTable, the restaurant reservation app, started off by selling backend systems to restaurants to help them manage their operations around staff, reservations etc. They ultimately rolled it out to consumers, to provide a seamless experience to restaurants, and an easy reservation experience to consumers. Deere has been following the same model (even before OpenTable) and they continue to push the envelope to provide a seamless experience to service providers and ag retailers.

Deere has a big footprint among row crop farmers, especially in North America. Deere offers OpsCenter for free to all its growers, and has continued to make investments in it. Deere is now enhancing a similar experience for ag retailers and service providers who require specialized fleet and logistics management capabilities by extending the capabilities of OpsCenter.

​Deere has continued to release capabilities to address different parts of its value chain, including ag retailers. Deere released Operations Center PRO, an all-new level of the John Deere Operations Center™ built specifically for ag service providers requiring specialized fleet and logistics management capabilities beyond what is currently provided with Operations Center.

Operations Center PRO Dispatch integrates with most leading retailer back-office systems providing a seamless flow of work orders and prescriptions between the equipment and the back-office system for billing. Fleet managers can also view equipment and tender location and status in real time, analyze machine productivity, and easily manage agronomic data for customers.

Deere and Nutrien Ag Solutions

Deere has done a tighter integration with Nutrien, one of the largest agriculture retailers in North America.

Nutrien Ag Solutions Inc., a subsidiary of Nutrien Ltd., and John Deere jointly have announced the release of advanced digital connectivity between the John Deere Operations Center and Nutrien Ag Solutions’ Digital Hub. This connectivity enables both companies to better serve growers by optimizing logistics and enabling variable rate agronomic recommendations to be seamlessly transferred to their equipment for execution.

Nutrien Ag Solutions’ Digital Hub allows growers to digitally collaborate with their Nutrien Crop Consultant, view agronomic plans, as well as make easier purchases and payments of crop inputs online.

The tight integration allows for a more seamless experience to Nutrien grower, who is serviced using Deere equipment or operates Deere equipment.

Deere continues to push the envelope on the holistic end-to-end brand experience brand continuously.

New Agriculture newsletter - Topsoil​

My colleague at Mineral, Ariel Patton launched a fantastic newsletter last year called Topsoil. Ariel is an experienced operator in AgTech and agriculture and one of the smartest people I know. The premise of the newsletter is perfect for attracting new people to the field.

...with the increasing role that agriculture plays in addressing climate change, the industry is going to need many more people to roll up their sleeves and contribute their time, skills and energy.

The good news is that over the past few years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with enthusiastic, talented people who want to work in agriculture and AgTech. One of the biggest challenges that I hear over and over is “I wasn’t a farm kid. Where do I begin?”

That’s where Topsoil comes in. Frameworks to help you make sense of agriculture, at just the right depth.

You should definitely subscribe to it, if you want to get a fresh and interesting perspective on the industry.

I have to admit Mineral might be one of the few companies in AgTech, with TWO newsletters written by its employees!!

Stay away from the carb(on)s?

Whatever happened to the exuberance around carbon markets in agriculture? I have heard less news about carbon and agriculture in the last six months of 2022 compared to the first six months of 2022. What might be happening? The tough geopolitical situation in Ukraine with Russia’s unprovoked and cruel war on Ukraine, and the difficult macroeconomic conditions have definitely not helped.

One of the key aspects of GHG reporting and carbon credits is the notion of MRV - Measurement, Reporting, and Verification.

​According to the World Bank,

Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) refers to the multi-step process to measure the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduced by a specific mitigation activity, such as reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, over a period of time and report these findings to an accredited third party. The third party then verifies the report so that the results can be certified and carbon credits can be issued.

Within the context of forestry and agriculture, I have continuously highlighted the issues with measurement and reporting of carbon, and GHG, especially around additionality and permanence. The third party verifiers play a key role to verify the carbon and GHG measurements and reports. Based on a latest investigation reported in the Guardian, the verified rainforest carbon credits from Verra, one of the leading verifiers in the space, might not represent real emission reductions.

A 9 month investigation by Guardian and other journalists found that 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate. The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects.

Image source (From Guardian)​

Vera has strongly repudiated the study and investigation by Guardian and others, but as an outsider it is difficult to understand what is really happening. The bottom line is that carbon markets are fraught with significant challenges - both technical and business model, especially in the area of forestry and agriculture, and one should treat them with a high degree of caution.

What do you think?

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About me

My name is Rhishi Pethe. I lead the product management team at Mineral, an Alphabet company. The views expressed in this newsletter are my personal opinions.