Future of Agriculture

Conservation Technology Information Center: https://www.ctic.org/

Regrow Ag: https://www.regrow.ag/

The Nature Conservancy: https://www.nature.org/en-us/

FoA 248: Regrow Merges Agronomic Insights with Sustainability Metrics

Today’s episode is made possible thanks to the support of the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC). Formed in 1982 to support the widespread use of economically and environmentally beneficial agricultural systems, CTIC’s mission is to champion, promote and provide information on climate-smart technologies and sustainable agricultural systems that conserve and enhance soil, water, air and wildlife resources and are productive and profitable.

Members of this non-profit organization include farmers, policy makers, regulators, academic researchers, agribusiness leaders, conservation group personnel, farm media, and others. It is supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and other public entities. 

Thank you very much to the Conservation Technology Information Center for supporting agricultural innovation and the Future of Agriculture podcast. 

All right, now let’s dive into today’s episode. I’m excited for this, because while the content of today’s show are right in our wheelhouse at the data-driven intersection of technology and sustainability, I don’t think I’ve ever had an episode quite like this. We’re not featuring an individual or company, but a collaboration. A group of people who saw a problem in the lack of important information, and came together to make that happen. 

To tell this story, I’m very pleased to have on the show three guests: Bill Salas who is the chief strategy officer at Regrow, Dave Gustafson, project director at the Conservation Technology Information Center, and Kris Johnson, director of agriculture at The Nature Conservancy. 

Some brief context here: 

CTIC, Regrow, and The Nature Conservancy are all partners is bringing together the Observational Tillage Information System, or OpTIS. This is an automated system to map tillage, residue cover, winter cover, and soil health practices using remote sensing data. 

And before anyone Tweets me concerned about using remote sensing to track on-farm practices, you should know: while OpTIS calculations are performed at the farm-field scale using publicly available data, the privacy of individual producers is fully protected by reporting only spatially-aggregated results at regional and watershed scales.

This collaboration has been happening for over 14 years, long before just about anyone was talking about carbon sequestration or climate smart agriculture, so in a lot of ways, this effort was ahead of its time. And it’s a good thing it was, because these data are needed now more than ever. So, I highly recommend you stick around through all of today’s episode, as we talk about the past, present and future of OpTIS, highlight some of the use cases it enables, and talk about the importance of efforts like this for the future of agriculture. 

And this isn’t just answering the simple question of are farmers doing x practice at not. This data can inform much more nuanced questions, like: 

• Why do farmers employ conservation practice in certain areas vs others?  
• Does this correlate with investments made in those areas? 
• What is the relationship between crop insurance and conservation practices? 
• What is the impact of cover crops and conservation tillage on nutrient runoff or prevent plant acres? 
• How does historic tillage influence current land values? 

The questions are endless and the more robust and reliable the data gets, the more accurately we can answer them. So I think this stuff is really cool, and extremely important. 

Kubota North America Corporation Acquires US-based AgTech Startup

FOA 228: Solving the Rural Connectivity Problem with Dr. Sara Spangelo of Swarm

Quick note: I am still looking for a couple of brands to partner with in 2025. If your company might be interested in positioning yourself as an innovator in the ag industry, I would love to talk with you about my quarterly presenting sponsorship package. This is an exclusive, I only work with a maximum of four companies per year, and I’m hoping to have all of them locked in by the end of the first quarter of 2025. So if your company is doing innovative work and you’d like to share that with thousands of leaders in the ag industry, please reach out to me at [email protected] or via LinkedIn or Twitter. I’m happy to share details. 

Ok, now back to today’s conversation with Mark DeSantis. As I mentioned, Mark was first on the show about four years ago on episode 228 in October of 2020. Since that time, Mark and team grew Bloomfield AI, a company that helps specialty crop growers improve the health and performance of their crop on a per-plant basis using computer vision and artificial intelligence. Then this past September, it was announced that Kubota had acquired the company. 

I wanted to invite Mark back on the show to talk about the experience and his views on where autonomy, robotics and digital ag go from here.   

Mark led Bloomfield through the acquisition and is now a consultant to Kubota. Prior to joining Bloomfield in 2019, he was previously cofounder and CEO of RoadBotics (acquired by Michelin), a company that assessed roadway infrastructure using AI. So he’s been in this space of robotics for real world applications for a long time. He is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University.

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley

Prime Future Newsletter by Janette Barnard

The Great Beef Bonanza and the Fall of the Cattle Kingdom

"Our ancestors learned to control fire before modern humans even evolved. But our ability to command cold at will dates back a little more than 150 years. Mechanical cooling refrigeration produced by human artifice as opposed to the natural chill offered by weather dependent snow and ice wasn't achieved until the mid 1700s and wasn't commercialized until the late 1800s, and it wasn't domesticated until the 1920s."

That is a quote from the book that we're gonna be talking about here today, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley. I'm very excited to dive into this book. There's so much here on the history of refrigeration and we take for granted how much refrigeration has changed our food system and our world in a number of profound ways.

But I'm also excited to not be tackling this massive project by myself. Coming back for another episode is my good friend, animal agtech venture capitalist, and creator of the Prime Future newsletter, Janette Barnard.

Also from Twilley's book: "It's impossible to make sense of our global food system until you understand the mysterious logic of the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. We overcame not just rot, but seasonality and geography as well."

Listen as Janette and Tim unpack their takeaways from this incredible book about the history of refrigeration.

Tenacious Ventures: https://tenacious.ventures/

Farmhand Ventures: https://www.farmhandventures.com/

“Navigating a future of cross sectional forces” (AgriFutures Australia Report): https://agrifutures.com.au/product/navigating-a-future-of-cross-sectoral-forces/

Ag’s Scifi (and Non-Fiction) Future: Horizon Scanning… so what? with Shane Thomas: https://tenacious.ventures/insights/ags-scifi-and-non-fiction-future-horizon-scanning-so-what-with-shane-thomas

Citrus Moves North with Farmer and Orangepreneur Lindy Savelle: https://tenacious.ventures/insights/citrus-moves-north-with-farmer-and-orangepreneur-lindy-savelle

FoA 348: Investing in the Future of Fertilizer with Sarah Nolet of Tenacious Ventures: https://futureofagriculture.com/episode/foa-348-investing-in-the-future-of-fertilizer-with-sarah-nolet-of-tenacious-ventures-agtech-so-what-crossover

FoA 112: Accelerating AgTech with Sarah Nolet of AgThentic: https://futureofagriculture.com/episode/future-of-agriculture-112-accelerating-agtech-with-sarah-nolet-of-agthentic

FoA 127: Expanding the Global AgTech Ecosystem with Connie Bowen of The Yield Lab: https://futureofagriculture.com/episode/future-of-agriculture-127-expanding-the-global-agtech-ecosystem-with-connie-bowen-of-the-yield-lab

FOA 220: Agricultural Solutions for Hunger and Poverty with Paul Winters of IFAD: https://futureofagriculture.com/episode/foa-220-agricultural-solutions-for-hunger-and-poverty-with-paul-winters-of-ifad

FoA 260: The Lentil Underground with Dave Oien of Timeless Seeds: https://futureofagriculture.com/episode/foa-260-the-lentil-underground-with-dave-oien-of-timeless-seeds

There are few topics that seem to get people more riled up than climate change. Most of the episodes I’ve done that focus on climate as a theme receive comments from people that seem to think I’m being an alarmist and others thinking that I am drastically underestimating its impacts. I could take this as a sign to avoid the topic altogether, but that’s not really how I roll. I instead take it as a sign that we need to ask more questions and gather more data and context to understand what has everyone so fired up. 

And the concept for this episode came to my mind while I was listening to the Agtech, So what? podcast with Sarah Nolet. Specifically, their August episodes which are titled: “Citrus Moves North with Farmer and Orangepreneur Lindy Savelle” and “Ag’s Scifi (and Non-Fiction) Future: Horizon Scanning… so what?” with Shane Thomas. I’ll leave links to both episodes in the show notes. 

But both describe this concept of a climate refugee, which put simply is people leaving their home for reasons that could be the result of changes in climate. So citrus producers leaving the state of Florida as one potential example. 

In that second episode about Ag’s Scifi Future, Sarah and guests are breaking down a report commissioned by AgriFutures Australia called “Navigating a future of cross-sectoral forces” that you can download for free via a link I’ll leave in the show notes. One of the 10 forces outlined in that report is the emergence of climate refugees, which created an interesting discussion on that episode. 

I’ve heard talk about climate refugees before, in fact it’s been mentioned a couple times on this podcast. Episodes 220 and 260 come to mind. But I always thought of it as something that could happen in a worst case scenario in the future, not as something that is happening today. I also found myself wondering if we are attributing to climate change what would be explained by other forces, like regulations and economics. We have a lot of dairies that moved out of California for those reasons, but we don’t call them regulatory refugees. So is this term intentionally dramatic to fit a climate agenda? 

I consider Sarah a friend and someone who is very well researched and intellectually honest, so I wanted to invite her back on the show to address some of these questions with her. And in the meantime, I was interviewing Connie Bowen of Farmhand Ventures for an episode about labor and she made the interesting connection between labor challenges and climate change, which I thought fit well in this episode, so you’re getting a bit of a two-for-one episode today with two extremely sharp ag investors. 

Niqo Robotics: https://niqorobotics.com/

Five Questions About The Ag Robotics Revolution (FIRA USA Takeaways)

Today’s episode was recorded live at FIRA USA in Woodland, California. If you’re not familiar with FIRA it is the premier event for agricultural robotics and autonomous solutions in action. If you’d like more of my reflections and takeaways from the event go back and listen to episode 439.

But I wanted to feature this interview with Jaisimha Rao as a standalone episode for a few reasons: first, I think his story is interesting as a finance guy turned farmer turned agtech founder. He also uncovers some very real insights about agtech that he’s learned over the past 10 years or so in this industry. And they are a great example of an ag robotics company that is making real impact on farms, not just doing demos and talking about what the future might hold. Because what I’ve been most excited about lately is the commercialization of ag robotics and automation. 

Walking around FIRA last month, my first reaction was, this all looks really familiar. Most of the technology has either been around a while or it looks a lot like machines that have. So at first glance you might wonder, are we just stagnating? But then you talk to these companies about what they’re doing with the technology. How many farms their working with and how many hours they have under their belt. In Niqo's case it’s over 50 autonomous sprayers running in India that have operated on over 120,000 acres and worked with over 2000 farmers. That is what has me so excited about what’s happening; what’s new - or relatively new, and what’s changing. 

NIQO is now not only expanding in India, but also bringing their technology to the North American specialty crop market with their Niqo Robo Thinner which they had on display at FIRA.