Future of Agriculture

Hello Tractor: https://hellotractor.com/ Jehiel Oliver on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jehiel/ Software is Feeding the World Email Newsletter: https://rpethe.substack.com/  Today’s episode is about how Hello Tractor is bringing tractors to farmers in developing countries. This is a tremendous story of figuring out the logistics of how to maximize the use of farm machinery where it’s needed most, and deploying the technology and processes to make this happen at scale. At a real basic level, Hello Tractor is an agricultural technology company that connects smallholder farmers across the emerging markets with farm equipment owners that have excess capacity through technology.  Jehiel started the company six years ago in Nigeria, and has since moved to Kenya. Hello Tractor is now operating in 13 countries in Africa as well as a few countries in Asia as well as Guatemala and Jamaica.  Today’s episode is worth listening to all the way through, whether or not you think the problems of the developing work apply to you. It’s not only a great story, but there are some fascinating insights here about the power of fleet management technology, and how innovations in this industry can be applied to farms of all sizes.  Jehiel grew up in Cleveland and started his career in investment banking. He started to become really interested in ways to use finance to work with more marginalized communities, and started volunteering his time and expertise in deal structuring to microfinance organizations. After the financial crisis he committed full time to this work, first in Afghanistan. He realized that the global poor work in agriculture, and mechanization is a key missing piece to helping to alleviate poverty. So he’s applying his finance background to pull commercial levers to address this really entrenched problem.

The Nature Conservancy: https://www.nature.org/en-us/  "Building Soil Health Through Innovation" https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/building-soil-health-innovation/  Renée Vassilos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rvassilos/  Today’s guest is Renée Vassilos. Renée manages The Nature Conservancy’s investments in innovative companies that will help scale regenerative agriculture production practices. Prior to joining TNC, she spent nearly a decade at John Deere, followed by leading her consulting firm, Banyan Innovation Group, advising growth-stage agriculture technology startups and investors. That’s where she was when we heard from her in episode 157 in 2019.  If you’ve never heard of The Nature Conservancy before, they are a global environmental nonprofit working to create a world where people and nature can thrive. They have a strong reputation for working with private and public partners, including farmers and agribusinesses, to find practical and sustainable solutions to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends.  Since joining TNC a couple of years ago, Renée has led investments in seven different early stage agricultural companies. Four of which, you’ve actually heard about if you’ve been listening to this show for very long. Those four are: Grower’s Edge (ep 156 & 238), SwarmFarm Robotics (ep 271), Sentera (ep 255 & 264), and Vence (ep 246).   The other three companies will be new to this show, so I’ve asked Renee to tell us a little bit about each of them during today’s show. They are: Kula Bio, Pattern Ag, and Stony Creek Colors.  Renee and I also talk about how they’re measuring and evaluating the impact of their investments related to their ability to get closer to their soil health goals, and the chicken or the egg problem of whether the tools can change a farmers practices or if a mindset has to change first with the farmer to seek out the right tools for those practices. That’s toward the end and Renee and I disagree slightly on which has to come first.  **Join the FoA Community: www.patreon.com/agriculture

Bionutrient Food Association: https://bionutrient.org/ Bionutrient Institute: https://www.bionutrientinstitute.org/  Bionutrient meter: https://bionutrient.org/bionutrientmeter  Over the past few years, the term “nutrient density” has been popping up more and more. There are a lot of claims being made about farming practices like regenerative agriculture producing more nutritious food or more nutrient dense food. But is this true? I mean, if you increase the amount of one nutrient are you really making it more nutrient dense or are you maybe just doing so at the expense of other nutrients? And if there are more of any given nutrient in a product, does that make it necessarily healthier?  The truth is we don’t really know. There is no agreed upon standard for nutrient density. And many people and companies are not letting that stop them latching onto the term and running with it for their own marketing purposes. You’ve heard evidence of that right here on previous episodes of this show. Also, without collecting a large amount of data on the various compounds in agricultural products, we can’t really even say if it matters.   Our guest today is making progress in defining nutrient density with data and has created an open-source consumer-priced handheld bionutrient meter that can provide a real time percentile of nutrient compound levels in eight different crops so far. He has a vision of someday using nutrient density as an important data point to optimize our food system in a variety of ways. But first we need the data to define what the nutrient profile should look like in each crop and the instrumentation to test this in every level of the food system, which he’ll be the first to admit that we still have a long way to go toward that end.  We have on the show Dan Kittredge. Dan is the Founder and Executive Director of the Bionutrient Food Association. Dan was an organic farmer for more than 30 years and founded the Bionutrient Food Association or BFA with the mission of increasing quality in the food supply. Dan’s perspective is healthier food comes from healthier plants which come from healthier environments. So, if we can develop a reliable and accessible measurement of healthy food, we can use that as a critical metric for a better food system.  Dan’s vision is really interesting: once we have clear definitions and the instrumentation to give everyone access to the data, it creates a feedback loop that can optimize our food system for true quality. Dan believes this can nullify the need for a lot of labels about how a food is grown because what will matter is the data - both on quality and environmental impact. He’s going to share the effects this could have on farming practices, genetics, health and consumer choice. Some of this may stretch your thinking here a little bit and you may find yourself wanting to see the evidence. That’s ok - and the story here is what Dan and the BFA are doing to search for the data to inform this very interesting thesis. In order to make sure this was a pre-competitive effort, Dan and the team have made their device open source. Dan says it’s a very early version of what we will need in the future, but it has allowed them to initially start collecting data with consumers at grocery stores and farmers markets and grow into working with 150 farmers as they did last year. Dan starts our conversation off with an overview of the Bionutrient Food Association. 

AgWorld: www.AgWorld.com  John Silvera on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-silvera-02b838175/  Today’s episode is another installment in that series, and it’s a really cool story of how John Silvera, an Independent Crop Consultant in the central valley of California, is using one tool in particular, AgWorld, to offer much more to growers than just agronomic recommendations.  In this episode we’ll talk about the return on investment of farmers hiring independent crop consultants, why John decided to start using AgWorld, and how he estimates he can save an average sized grower around $100,000 per year through his integrated budgeting, agronomic advising, and input purchasing service. We’ll also get into how he’s thinking about the future of agriculture and his crop consulting business.  Today’s show was produced in partnership with AgWorld.    Founded in 2009 with an Australian headquarters in Perth, AgWorld is a global leader in collaborative farm management, enabling farmers, advisors and third parties to work together as one on a single platform. AgWorld’s standardized database makes it quick and easy to create accurate, reportable farm data and serves over 100 million acres across five counties. AgWorld also made headlines recently by announcing it was getting acquired by Semios, and John and I talk about that a little bit in this episode. Learn more about AgWorld at www.AgWorld.com.  The son of a long time farm manager, John Silvera has a degree in Ag Business from Fresno State University. From there he spent about four years working for a large inputs provider before starting his own company in 2016. What I find most striking about John’s story is how he’s leveraging technology to become much more of a trusted business advisor who integrate agronomic decisions with business decisions for his clients.   **JOIN THE FoA COMMUNITY: www.Patreon.com/agriculture.   

See GUSS in action: https://gussag.com/ Almond Journey Podcast: https://www.almonds.com/almond-industry/industry-news  We have on the show today another great example of this in GUSS Automation. GUSS stands for Global Unmanned Spray System, and joining me for today’s episode is COO Gary Thompson. As the name implies, GUSS sells a fully autonomous sprayer for use in orchards and vineyards. Which is really interesting, because there is no piece of equipment that goes through these operations more than a sprayer does, so the savings and efficiencies here are compelling.  Gary is going to share their interesting story of how this technology was developed out of their traditional custom spraying business, how they’ve grown without outside capital to start selling these machines, the value and benefits of these machines for farmers and other custom sprayers, and what these capabilities means for the future of agriculture.  GUSS came up on another podcast that I host called the Almond Journey podcast. For any of you who are interested in almonds as a crop, I highly recommend subscribing to that one as well. It’s a little shorter than this one with a different feel and it’s of course focused specifically on almonds. I was talking to a grower on the podcast about his low dust harvest equipment, but he made the point of talking about how happy he was with his purchase of some GUSS sprayers.  Gary Thompson from GUSS grew up on a dairy farm in Arizona and went to Cal Poly where he met a lot of people in the central valley. It was there that he got connected with GUSS, where he now oversees all daily operations including manufacturing, sales, marketing, finances, dealers, and customer relations. 

Calgren Renewable Fuels https://www.calgren.com/  Maas Energy Works: https://www.maasenergy.com/ California Milk Advisory Board: https://www.realcaliforniamilk.com/  Dairy Sustainability Award: https://www.usdairy.com/media/press-releases/2021-dairy-sustainability-awards-winners-10-year-anniversary  Today’s episode is a great story of collaboration, public-private partnership, innovation, and sustainability. Before I introduce the guests on today’s show, let me set the scene for you a little bit: a group of 15 dairies in the central valley of California are getting paid to turn their cow manure into renewable fuel. Twelve of these dairies are connected via underground pipeline that transports biogas from on-farm digesters to a centralized conditioning facility which processes and markets the fuel. So the dairies not only receive a milk check, they also receive a manure check. All the while they are drastically reducing their own emissions and replacing 3 million gallons of fossil-fuel diesel with near-zero emissions from dairy-sourced renewable compressed natural gas, or CNG.  This project is a collaboration between a lot of people, including the local dairy farmers, Calgren Dairy Fuels which is the renewable energy company, and Maas Energy Works which makes the digesters. Joining me to talk about this innovative project is Lyle Schlyer, president of Calgren Renewable Fuels, and Daryl Maas, CEO of Maas Energy Works. I want to recognize that this project was nominated by the California Milk Advisory Board for a U.S. Dairy Sustainability Award. They won the award for their socially responsible, economically viable, and environmentally sound impacts on their community. The California Milk Advisory Board brought this incredible story to my attention and was willing to partner with me on this episode to share it with you. If you’re not familiar, they are an instrumentality of the California Department of Food and Agriculture with a vision of nourishing the world with the wholesome goodness of Real California Milk. They are very proud of the fact that dairy farm families in the state have made tremendous progress in reducing their environmental footprint while producing nutritious, planet-smart dairy products, an d becoming world leaders in sustainable farming. Thank you very much to the California Milk Advisory Board for bringing this story to my attention and for partnering with me on today’s episode.

OWL GitHub https://github.com/geezacoleman/OpenWeedLocator Weed AI https://weed-ai.sydney.edu.au/about  Guy Coleman Twitter: https://twitter.com/GeezaColeman William Salter Twitter: https://twitter.com/williamtsalter  Video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/guy-coleman_the-openweedlocator-owl-is-now-live-its-ugcPost-6835703385925283840-LdvF  On the show today we have Guy Coleman, and William Salter. Guy is PhD Student at the University of Sydney and Fulbright Future Scholar currently based at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on the interaction between artificial intelligence for weed recognition and plant morphology in large-scale production systems. Guy also has experience in alternative weed control technologies like lasers and targeted tillage. Willam Salter, who you will also hear called by his nickname in this episode, Tam, is a postdoctoral agricultural scientist at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on several important aspects of plant and weed science, ranging from improving crop productivity to killing weeds more effectively. William has a keen interest in developing new low cost tools for use in scientific research and the agricultural industry. The project is called the Open Weed Locator or OWL for short. My two guests today are leading the efforts to develop an open source, low cost weed detection and control device. Essentially, it’s a site-specific spot spraying system that you can make yourself for around $400. Right now, it’s only designed for fallow type weed control scenarios because it sees green and sprays it, so you obviously wouldn’t want it running through a growing crop. However, I think with the open source community that they’re developing, I think it’s only a matter of time before they add the artificial intelligence to identify and spray specific weeds or perhaps even some sort of non-chemical control like electricity or lasers. As you heard Brian talk about last week, the opportunities with low cost hardware in the hands of an innovative community are really incredible.  As if that’s not a cool enough story on its own, we also highlight another project in this episode: Weed AI. It’s a repository of weed imagery in crops. This gets back to something we’ve talked about numerous times on this show: the need for quality data sets for companies to develop artificial intelligence. Weed AI is doing this in a sort of open source way.  These two guys will take us through the evolution of the Open Weed Locator, or OWL, project, the importance of open source technology, the role Weed AI can play in the future of agriculture, and much more.  **Join our upcoming Agtech Investor Roundtable by joining the FoA Community at Patreon.com/agriculture.  

AgOpenGPS: https://github.com/farmerbriantee/AgOpenGPS Autonomous Tractor Skiing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-T-rrny1Vk Brian's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efarmerdot  Brian Tischler is a farmer in Alberta, Canada. He farms with his neighbor who he shares equipment with to cover a combined 2,500 acres of wheat, barley, oats, canola, flax, and peas. He started his career in the medical technology industry, which you’re about to hear more about, but then he bought his family’s farm when his dad was ready to retire in the mid 90s.  Brian is going to share how he started learning how to build software to solve a basic problem, and how that lead to a community of thousands of people around the world who are a part of what is now an open source project called AgOpenGPS. We’ve done a few episodes on open source before, and its really inspiring to see farmers, who have always found ways to hack together solutions to their own problems, do the same with digital technologies as well. Today’s episode will focus on GPS-based technologies including mapping, section control, auto steer and making a tractor autonomous. These technologies exist in the marketplace, but you’re going to hear how our guest and his open source community are finding ways to make them for themselves much cheaper and more tailored to their individual needs.

OGRAIN: https://ograin.cals.wisc.edu/ YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/uwipm/search?query=erin%20silva Today’s episode is all about organic farming. Now, organic may be a concept that you have strong opinions about one way or another, but no matter what your perspective, I really encourage you to listen to what our guest has to say.  I originally invited today’s guest, Dr. Erin Silva onto the show to clear up one specific question I had: are organic standards so restrictive that it makes it difficult to grow organically and build soil health through practices like no-till. But once we started the interview I started thinking of all sorts of perceptions of organic that Erin was able to clear up for me. If you’re open to really examining the myths and realities of organic agriculture, we’ve got a great show for you.  Dr. Erin Silva is an associate professor and state extension specialist in organic and sustainable cropping systems at University of Wisconsin - Madison, a position she’s held for about 15 years. She works in partnership with farmers to conduct research related to organic grain production, with a focus on reducing tillage and incorporating soil health practices.  Erin and I will try to pick apart myth from reality on several assumptions that exist out there about organic agriculture, such as:  Organic is just about marketing Organic is not conducive with building soil health Organic is winding back the clock and moving backwards instead of forwards Organic is only the super small and super big farmers  Organic systems can’t ever be as productive as conventional systems Organic doesn’t embrace technology Of course there is no one perfect system for the future of agriculture, but in my opinion, organic does have an important role to play, and there’s even practices that other growing approaches, even conventional, can learn from the organic principles.  Have a listen and see if you agree. Erin first dove deep into learning about organic agriculture in the early 2000s, but says her real education came when she started working directly with farmers in 2006.

Precision AI: https://www.precision.ai/ Fulcrum Global Capital: https://www.fgcvc.com/ Protein Industries Canada: https://www.proteinindustriescanada.ca/  Today’s episode is another great example of how artificial intelligence and computer vision are impacting the ag industry. Today’s episode will focus on a row crop application. Specifically, we’re talking about new drone spraying technology from Canadian startup Precision AI.  Long time listeners will recall that we’ve talked about drone spraying on the show before, but today’s episode goes even deeper into both the technology and the opportunities that can come from the per plant precision that it offers. Also cool about this episode is our guest, Precision AI founder and CEO Daniel McCann. A three-time startup founder with over 25 years in technology in diverse industries such as artificial intelligence, fintech, security, fast food, and agriculture, Daniel provides a unique perspective on how technology impacts our world.  Daniel was a finalist in the 2013 ABEX Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, personally holds six patents, and his previous company NetSecure was mentioned in Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. Precision AI is a portfolio company of Fulcrum Global Capital, who I’m very happy to be partnering with again on this episode.