Future of Agriculture

Try Acres for free: https://www.acres.co/Agtech - So What? Podcast: https://www.agtechsowhat.com/Tenacious Ventures: https://tenacious.ventures/Today’s episode features a conversation on the future of fertilizer with Sarah Nolet. Both of us have been exploring the future of fertilizer on our respective podcasts, and we thought it would be fun to do a joint episode to talk about what we’ve learned. So you’re going to get not only Sarah and I’s thoughts, but also some highlights from episodes that provide insights into the future of fertilizer.Sarah Nolet is an internationally recognized food systems innovation expert and co-founder of Tenacious Ventures, a high-support, high conviction, sector-specific agrifood tech venture firm. Sarah has been instrumental in building the early stage agtech ecosystem - from advising dozens of startups, designing accelerator programs and consulting to established agribusinesses, to helping industry, universities and government develop and implement forward-looking initiatives in food system innovation. Sarah is also the host of the AgTech...So What? podcast, telling stories of innovators building the food system of the future.Sarah holds a Masters in System Design and Management from MIT, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Human Factors Engineering from Tufts University.

Try Acres: https://www.acres.co/The Ugly Company: https://www.theugly.company/The Business of Food Newsletter: https://jenniferbarney.substack.com/Today's episode features Ben Moore, founder of The Ugly Company, an upcycled dried fruit snack company. Ben is a 4th generation California farmer tackling the complex problem of food waste. Through Ugly Fruit, Ben is on a mission to achieve zero waste at farms by upcycling unmarketable fruit directly from farms to consumers.  Ben had an epiphany while in his tractor plowing culled fruit. Ben reasoned that much of this fruit is perfectly good to eat and a shame being dumped. So, he did some research on ways to bring stone fruit to use as a value-added product. It’s another way for consumers to minimize food waste – some of the listeners may have heard of grocery ecommerce companies like Misfit Market and Imperfect Foods where you can purchase slightly off-spec food. The two main problems with food waste is food insecurity – getting nutritious foods transported to those in need that is shelf stable and able to withstand varying storage conditions, and second, emissions problems – the EPA estimates food that is dumped contributes 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.In order to solve the problem the way Ben envisions he is tackling the challenge of operational scale. We learn that stickers on fruit are an operational nightmare and that current dehydrator operators don’t have the capacity or automation to make the business economically feasible. So Ben is building it himself.  It’s a single ingredient snack with no added sugars or preservatives which is a huge differentiator from a lot of other dried fruit snacks and trail mixes that contain sugar and other additives.

Visit Acres: https://www.acres.co/"How to Grow and Sell Carbon Credits in US Agriculture" https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a1-76.html Dr. Alejandro Plastina is an Associate Professor/Extension Economist in the Department of Economics at Iowa State University (ISU). His area of specialization is agricultural production and technology, with an emphasis on farm business and financial management. His research focuses on the socioeconomic drivers of conservation practices, voluntary pest resistance management, carbon programs, and agricultural productivity.Prior to joining ISU in 2014, Dr. Plastina was Senior Economist at the International Cotton Advisory Committee in Washington, DC. He graduated with a BA in Economics from the University of La Plata (Argentina) in 2000, and an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005 and 2007, respectively.I reached out to Alejandro when I was trying to make heads or tails of the various carbon programs that have been popping up in recent years. I wanted to know what the differences were for these programs and I found his report titled “How to Grow and Sell Carbon Credits in US Agriculture” to be one of the best resources out there. The first thing you ought to know is there are a lot of differences between carbon programs. Alejandro and his colleagues analyzed the terms associated with 13 of these programs, and he joins me today to share from a high level some of their big takeaways. If you want more detailed information to compare programs, I will link to his report in the show notes. Keep in mind that it is more than a year old so some things have changed. Also at the end of today’s interviews I ask directly for Alejandro’s advice for farmers comparing programs and he has some great tips for you there as well. 

Visit our quarterly presenting sponsor, Acres: https://www.acres.co/Mineral website: https://mineral.ai/Dr. Elliott Grant is the CEO of Mineral, which is Alphabet's bet in sustainable agriculture.  Mineral is applying the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) to the existential challenge of sustainably doubling the planet’s crop productivity. Elliott and I really get past the buzzwords here and into the details of what exactly this technology is enabling on a practical level, and how it has the potential to impact agriculture and the way we do business. From my personal perspective, AI and ML have been talked about since way early on in this podcast, but it often felt like marketing to make their tool seem special. But it does feel like we’re hitting this tipping point now, where there are some really impactful technologies emerging, that can only exist because of the explosion in data collection and advancements in AI and ML, and I find that to be one of the most exciting aspects of agtech today. Elliott is a recognized business leader and innovator in food and agritech. He was the founder and CEO of HarvestMark, the world leader in fresh food traceability; the CEO of ShopWell, a pioneering personalized nutrition company; and served as the Vice Chair of the Produce Marketing Association.  Elliott is a manufacturing engineer by training. He earned a PhD and MEng in Engineering from Cambridge University, and is a named inventor on 36 US patents covering topics ranging from cryptography and food traceability, to satellite image analysis and plant phenotyping. 

Try Acres for free: https://www.acres.co/Today we hear from AcreTrader with data science director Dr. Aaron Shew. Aaron is unique in that he has an extensive background in agriculture, economics, remote sensing and GIS and of course, data. In his current capacity, Aaron works with a team of software engineers, data scientists, and land experts to build advanced land analytics tools. He has master’s degrees in geography and agricultural economics and a doctorate in environmental dynamics from the University of Arkansas. He has more than 15 years of experience in the agriculture industry with 10 years of research experience focused on agricultural production and geospatial technologies.Aaron and I talk about the origins of the Acres tool, how it has already been helpful to AcreTrader which has 123 farms under management and ambitious goals to grow that number, why they would want to share this with the world - there’s even a free version that I’ve used - it’s pretty cool, and how this access to better data and insights will impact the farmland market more broadly. 

Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/CropIn: https://www.cropin.com/Software is Feeding the World Newsletter: https://www.rhishipethe.com/newsletterToday’s episode features Krishna Kumar of CropIn. Krishna shared with me CropIn’s 12 year journey in the agtech world, which I think is in some ways representative of agtech’s journey more generally. They started by building applications for farmers and companies with a vested interest in agricultural supply chains. From scaling their digital solutions to now 500 crops and 10k varieties in 92 countries, they realized they were capturing a lot of data and built what they call the Data Hub. They also started to build artificial intelligence models which now exist for 22 commodities in 13 countries. Krishna gives some examples of the wide range of use cases for those AI models.Now, CropIn is entering the next phase of the 12-year old company. A few months ago, the company announced the launch of a cloud platform with integrated apps. Founded in 2010, Cropin’s other products are live in 92 countries, it is partnered with over 250 B2B customers and it has digitized 26 million acres of farmland. It claims the world’s largest crop knowledge graph from the data I mentioned of more than 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties.In short, CropIn wants to help make it easier for companies to build their own AI models by providing the data and infrastructure needed, which Krishna says is roughly 80% of the work. Like many people lately, I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform lately. It has really opened my eyes to what’s coming. The chance to really pull together data sets into optimal answers in a user friendly way. I have no doubt we will see a similar trajectory in agtech, and companies like CropIn are doing interesting work to that end.One interesting aspect to this story is CropIn’s ambition to build a knowledge graph for agriculture. This is a term that I was not familiar with a year ago, but i’ve learned about knowledge graphs this past year from reading Rishi Pethe’s tremendous newsletter Software is Feeding the World. He explains the concept in his 116th edition in September. I’ll link to that in the show notes, I highly recommend it to understand this episode even better. He revisited it again in his 2022 recap edition which is 126, and I thought I’d just read his excerpt that he included in both editions. Here are Rhishi’s words: “How can knowledge graphs work in agriculture?Knowledge graphs can incorporate both structured (for example, coming from a spreadsheet, or precision agriculture equipment) and unstructured data (a twitter feed, images, YouTube video, bulletin board information, books etc.) Knowledge graphs can be successful and valuable if they can uncover new insights by automatically incorporating new data sources, understanding the context, finding new connections, and continuously evolving and learning.Building a data set of crops and varieties is a necessary and an early step to building a valuable knowledge graph in agriculture. It is an extremely hard challenge to go from data, to context, to connections, to new and surprising insights using knowledge graphs. It will take some unknown (aka long) amount of time.” - Rhishi Pethe, Software is Feeding the WorldWith that in mind, here is my conversation with Krishna Kumar, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cropin, an Agtech pioneer building the first global Intelligent Agriculture Cloud. Krishna founded Cropin in 2010, long before the terms “agritech” or “agtech” became fashionable or were widely understood. Over the last 12 years, Krishna has been pioneering the development and adoption of digital technologies and predictive intelligence to transform the agriculture ecosystem through their enterprise customers worldwide.

Visit Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/XtremeAg: https://www.xtremeag.farm/ Farmer innovators featured on this show: Kristjan Hebert Greg Bethard Mike & April Clayton Paul Greive Zack Smith Peter van Wingerden Trey Hill Claire Smith Jesse Pella Patrick Smith Kelly Garrett Mike Evans

Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/California Cotton & Climate Coalition: https://californiacottonandclimatecoalition.com/Bowles Farming Company: https://bfarm.com/FiberShed: https://fibershed.org/Today’s episode is about the work being done by the California Cotton and Climate Coalition or C4. This is an example of a group of people that aren’t interested in the hype and greenwashing that goes on in so many “sustainability” circles. They are doing the hard work of bringing the right people together, collaborating, and collecting the data to find ways to evolve the cotton industry in California. I think this is a model many other ag industries can learn from. Today you’ll hear from Cannon Michael, President and CEO of Bowles Farming Company in Los Banos, California. He is the 6th generation of his family to work in the family farming business, which has farmed in California for over 160 years. After working in commercial real estate, Cannon joined the family farm in 1998, and they have since diversified from three crops to over twenty. Cannon is an advocate for California agriculture, intelligent water policy and environmental stewardship. Joining Cannon and I is Rebecca Burgess. Executive Director of Fibershed, a 501(c)3 focused on regionalizing the textile system and supporting growers to be more economically viable while rebuilding carbon stocks in the soil and providing transparency into the supply chains of textile brands. Rebecca has two decades of experience working at the intersection of ecology, fiber systems, and regional economic development. Her work as a vocationally trained weaver and self-trained natural dyer initially led her into wondering how the industrially made clothes reflected her values of transparency, connection, land stewardship, etc. Started working in wool with using sheep for regenerative grazing then was encouraged to expand into cotton as well. 

Sound Ag: https://www.sound.ag/ Ripe Robotics: https://www.riperobotics.com/ Today’s episode features Hunter Jay, CEO and cofounder of Ripe Robotics, a startup working on autonomous harvesting of fruit. The prototype is in small scale commercial trials, and will be ready to scale up in 2023 & 2024. The company has 2 commercial trial partners and another 30 companies on its waitlist, who spend a combined $85m USD on picking annually.Most of you have probably heard about robotic apple picking startups in the past, some that are still going and others that have failed. But one thing I really appreciate about today’s episode is Ripe’s commitment to keeping costs low and iterating fast. I think this is what it’s going to take to find automation that works for specialty crops like stone fruit. Hunter is a software engineer, and has a particular focus on artificial intelligence. He previously founded a mobile game startup, and whenI asked him about that company is where i’ll drop you into today’s conversation with Hunter Jay of Ripe Robotics.

Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/Neutral Foods: https://www.eatneutral.com/Jennifer Barney's "The Business of Food" newsletter: https://jenniferbarney.substack.com/When I first read about Neutral Foods, I thought “that’s really smart branding”, but can they really back it up? And if so, how? And what’s in it for the farmer to incentivize them to make changes that benefit society, but may or may not benefit them? That’s really what today’s episode is all about. We’re about to bring on Jim Jarman, =vice president of product and commercialization at Neutral, and Ann Radil, head of carbon removal to answer these questions.Neutral Foods was founded by Matt Plitch, whose mission is to build the world’s first carbon neutral food company. He gained early investment from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Ventures and other celebrity investors like Mark Cuban and LeBron James. Matt wanted to start with milk, which has 93% household penetration. The product, Neutral Milk is organic milk that strives to reduce carbon emissions within the whole supply chain, to become carbon neutral. The way they are going about their mission is by working directly with farmers. A typical dairy they work with is ~75 - 250 head, and what they do is provide financial support and subject matter expertise on things like manure management, feed, feed production, waste water management and more. They work with the farmer’s goals, and have 3rd party monitoring and measurement that quantifies the changes being made, and verifies the emissions reductions. Neutral Foods, as a consumer facing brand is already well on their way with nationwide distribution at Spouts, Whole Foods and Target. You can find their products in the organic milk section, and their retail price is in line with the set. They are very clear on their packaging that they are working towards operational carbon neutrality but that they purchase offsets today as a starting point.