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

Greetings from the San Francisco Bay Area.

I will be attending the World Agritech Event on March 14-15th in San Francisco. If you are going to be there, I would love to connect with you.

This week’s edition includes the following topics.

Analysis

FBN and Greeneye technology announce strategic collaboration and investment. What is included in the collaboration and what does it mean for the industry?

Technology Trends

Verge Ag takes equipment path planning and provides an equipment dealer solution. Is this a good example of finding additional use cases and value through existing technology?

In the News

1. Agtech & Agronomy: Deere’s right to repair case, world’s first agriculture focused satellite, growers can breed new potato varieties, farmers and input brand loyalty, Conti Ventures leads Earth Optics investment

2. Robotics & Automation: Sabanto releases autonomy kit

3. Sustainability: Living Carbon investment, midwest farmers small yield hit with sustainability practices

4. Smallholder: Research collaboration to increase yields by 50% in Kenya

What to expect in next week’s edition (number 129 on Feb 5, 2023)? Large Language Models (part 1) in agriculture (ChatGPT is an example of a large language model), ML/AI as a service in agriculture based on J. Matthew Pryor’s (Tenacious Ventures) smile curve, and many other topics!

FBN and Greeneye Technology announce strategic collaboration and investment

See & Spray has been a hot topic within commodity row crops for quite some time. Deere has made announcements about a see & spray system during CES, with field trials.

There are many startups operating in this space. Greeneye recently announced a strategic collaboration with and an investment from FBN to roll out a see & spray solution in 2024. Based on publicly available data, Greeneye has snagged investments and partnerships with some key agriculture companies like Syngenta, FBN, and NuWay-K&H cooperative.

Greeneye’s aftermarket unit integrates with most brands or sizes of sprayer, has cutting-edge AI technology along with some off-shame mane. It works for both pre- and post-emergence. Similar to the Deere’s See and Spray Ultimate unit, Greeneye system uses a dual line/tank configuration to enable precision and broadcast at the same time, which leads to higher productivity and efficiency.

What is the cost of the system?

Farmer’s can access the Greeneye Precision Spraying system through its partnership with FBN which includes the following. A participant who wants to test the Greeneye system has to do the following

1. Purchase the Greeneye system for the 2024 planting season

2. Enroll in two seasons of FBN’s Precision Spraying Pack crop protection and nutrition program

3. Committing to running on-farm trials to showcase product efficacy and sharing performance data

FBN and Greeneye will partner to provide comprehensive installation, machine service, and agronomic support throughout the growing season. FBN will provide competitive financing for both the Greeneye system as well as the FBN Precision Spraying Pack.”

FBN is creating a Precision Spraying Acre Pack, to ensure agronomic soundness of using the Greeneye Technology and require the purchase of the following over 2 growing seasons.

Image source: FBN website​

Unfortunately, no pricing information has been provided by FBN or Greeneye, though this line on the FBN website caught my attention.

Let us see if we can use it to get a ball-park estimate of the cost of the Greeneye system. The table below provides revenue and cost structure for corn and soy in Central Illinois. Pesticides costs are about $ 66 per acre for corn

Source: FarmDoc Daily​

According to AgWeb Daily, a robust weed control program

As indicated above, the Greeneye system resulted in 60% cost savings in field trials.

If we assume the average cost per acre of crop protection to be about $ 60 per acre, the crop protection cost for 4000 acres over 2 years will be $ 60 x 4000 x 2 = $ 480K.

The Greeneye system creates a savings of 60%, and so the savings over two years is 0.6 x $ 480K = $ 288K. So depending on your assumptions of regular input costs per acre for crop protection, and the % savings in input costs due to the see & spray system, you can get a sense of the cost of the see & spray system.

Whichever way you look at it, these systems look expensive (unless I have completely messed up the calculations!) and my guess is companies will have to look at different pricing options, instead of a straight buy from the customers. Given that crop protection products are typically applied in a service model, it will naturally create other options like subscription, lease to own with a service component etc.

The FBN partnership is interesting compared to a traditional input company, as FBN is practically a co-operative/ag retailer with some sophisticated digital capabilities. A traditional input company has to worry about the cannibalization of volume sales by the see & spray technology. Technology like see & spray is less of a conflict for an FBN as they can continue to sell generic or private label inputs, and take additional margins on the service component as they own the customer relationship to the grower.

I would love to understand this better, and so if you have additional ideas on different business models, I would love to hear from you!

Verge Ag launches equipment explorer solution for dealers

In edition 88. Technology is people, (Jan 9, 2022) I had written about Deere’s announcement of their fully autonomous tractor during CES 2022. Deere’s autonomous tractor was based on real time on-the-edge computing with a multiple camera sensor package to make real time driving decisions automatically.

I had mentioned how planning could reduce the complexity, reliability, and the cost of an autonomous equipment. The planning could be done by using drone imagery and/or path planning software from someone like Verge Ag.

What is path planning? (from Verge Ag’s website) A path plan is an optimal way for a machine to completely cover a field while avoiding all obstacles.

About a year ago, Verge Ag's ambition was to provide farmers the capability to path plan to execute their operations in the field perfectly. In order to do so, Verge Ag has to understand the relationship between field, terrain, environmental factors, equipment, and best practices, with path planning being the building block. The understanding of this relationship impacts your operational windows, and has the potential to provide new insights to provide more value.

Verge Ag has recently announced a new solution (Equipment Explorer) and is addressing the needs of a new customer type - equipment dealers, while using the same building block of path plans.

Equipment Explorer uses path planning data at the field level, and aggregates the data so that the equipment dealer can compare one piece of equipment to another piece of equipment on an actual field.

Image source: Verge Ag Website

Equipment Explorer allows for scenario planning, with parameters like headland management, track direction, slope, coverage, and overlap, and operational time and distance. It allows the equipment dealer to understand the comparative value of any machine. It has the potential to better match the size and function of equipment to complex operations.

Verge Ag’s path plan can be sent down to most major equipment brand models for execution, which seems like a simple thing, but is an important part of providing a seamless planning to execution workflow.

Today, given the large size of most agriculture equipment in commodity row crop farming in U.S., Canada, South America, the allocation of the right equipment to the right field based on the needs of the field, crop, and operation type. If the overall equipment size reduces due to autonomy, path planning and aggregate analysis will be extremely useful, across a swarm of operating agriculture machinery on a given farm.

It remains to be seen if this go-to-market approach is successful or not, but it is a great example of taking an existing piece of tech, and applying it to a different use case, and a different customer. It requires a deep understanding of your customers and their user personas, their pain points and problems, and how your solution can apply to your customers’ situation.

In the News

AgTech and Agronomy

Deere asks the court to dismiss the right-to-repair case. “The future of a right-to-repair class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 16 farms against John Deere is in the hands of a federal judge, who is considering a motion by the company that could lead to dismissal of the case.”

World’s first agriculture focused satellite launched. EOS SAT-1 will deliver valuable information for harvest monitoring, application mapping, seasonal planning and assessments to analyze information such as soil moisture, yield prediction and biomass levels. This data is to support growers with reducing carbon dioxide emissions and help them to develop sustainable agricultural methods.

“Through the use of TPS (True Potato Seed), growers can breed new potato varieties for any traits that they might desire such as heat tolerance, disease resistance and long-term storability. But selections can also be made for color, size and shape.”

Farmers are more loyal to seed brands compared to fertilizer and crop protection brands. Is it because farmers buy their own seed, while crop protection is delivered by a service provider? (Image from article)

​Conti Ventures leads $ 27 million investment in Earth Optics, hyper accurate soil insight platform. “Conti Ventures believes that below-ground precision and innovation has lagged. Since its launch, the company explained that its ultimate goal has been to deliver point-of-care soil health insights – related to physical, chemical, and biological attributes of soil – in real time.”

Robotics and Automation

​Sabanto releases the first autonomy kit for Kubota M5 tractors. “Sabanto’s technology allows farmers to use smaller, lighter equipment, resulting in less compaction and lower equipment costs. Automation will allow the industry to continue moving forward by doing more with less.”

Sustainability

Living Carbon, working to balance the planet’s carbon cycle using the power of plants – more specifically, photosynthesis-enhanced trees – has closed on a $21 million Series A led by Temasek. “The team integrated a photosynthesis enhancement trait in hybrid poplar trees. This initial enhanced hybrid poplar demonstrated that it grows faster than control seedlings and is resilient in high temperatures. In its white paper, Living Carbon outlined the efficacy of a photosynthesis enhancement genetic trait to improve biomass accumulation in trees by up to 53%. This breakthrough revealed for the first time, the potential to capture approximately 27% more carbon, and reinforced the role of biotechnology in stabilizing the climate.”

​Midwest farmers using cover crops take a small yield hit. “Planting cover crops has been found to protect soil, improve soil carbon sequestration, reduce nitrogen and phosphorous runoff, and reduce the need for chemical weed control. But the practice has hindered yields of primary cash crops, a recent study has found. The study, led by NASA Harvest researchers, analyzed the productivity of farm fields across the U.S. Midwest and found cover crop adoption was associated with an average yield hit of 5.5% for corn fields and 3.5% for soybean fields.”

“Agriculture is a very tricky business to get right, and things typically don’t work out as planned,” said David Lobell, who is a co-author of the study and leads crop yield studies for NASA Harvest. Lobell added: “The combination of satellite data and powerful machine learning methods can help us make better informed decisions about conservation practices and any policies needed to support their adoption.”

​Image source​

Smallholder

​Improving crop production in Kenya by 50% “A collaboration to develop a smart irrigation system using solar and wind energy to provide year-round watering of land to improve crop production in Kenya.”

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About me

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