Agriculture Platforms- What are we Really Building?

In late May I presented at the Sustainable Agriculture Summit in Toowoomba, Hosted by Agriculture Minister Murray Watt and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen Queensland. The presentation was on possible futures for agriculture in a net zero carbon future. Following the presentation, I facilitated a room of 140 people on future scenarios and strategies.

I had very limited time on the day, so I am going to write a series of posts expanding on the issues.

You can see the previous post here:

(Changing Consumer Buying Decision Points and its Effects on Agriculture Supply Chains | LinkedIn

and

The Scenario They Didn't Want | LinkedIn

Today it is about agriculture platforms and how we are building systems that will be adapted for other uses.

Agriculture is becoming more and more technologically advanced. We are moving on from the days of precision agriculture where combinations of satellite technology and sensors on tractors allowed us to vary seed, fertiliser and herbicides at varying amounts to a much more granular view. We are moving into a world with smart ear tags for livestock, data sensors in soil, the use of computer vision systems for facial recognition of animals and in sensors or signaling systems in plants that can detect stress.

These systems are basically aimed at better productivity, better management, and a more detailed look at sustainability. The bets models are those that pay for themselves in the real world right now rather than on a promise for the future.

Examples I gave included:

Green Atlas who use a system that can strap on to the back of a quad bike to be driven up and down rows of trees in orchards to take high quality vision to inform orchard management.

Swarm Farm Robotics who are building small autonomous platforms for seeding, weed killing and other agricultural tasks.

Goterra who are building industrialised container systems for utilising soldier flies to process waste.

What is common between these systems is that they are data driven and highly technologically dependent. What they are also finding is that it is the add on capabilities and business models that are derived from the original platform that are in some cases adding more value than the management systems.

Green Atlas has found that the data they collect is more valuable to the rest of the supply chain for planning and forecasting than the money they make out of selling services to farmers. Swarm Farm Robotics is building an ecosystem on top of their autonomous machines to allow people to create tools and solutions way beyond the scope of one company.

What they all have in common is that they are building information systems that can be used to communicate with the customer on what is happening in the supply chains of the products they buy. The point I put to the conference was that it was not a huge leap for this to include what was happening in terms of climate change, both around emissions measurement but also on actions on farm. In a more distant future, I also imagined the customer not being the consumer of products but consumers of data to make other decisions. For example if every tree in an orchard or every cow on a dairy farm is individualised it is theoretically possible to build a model on top of that where I could be a walnut farmer with 800 trees on 17 different farms in 8 countries on three continents. This could also encompass virtual markets where trees or cows were traded. Or Where young share farmers who outperformed other farm managers could accrue capital by offering to manage cows or trees on a new site with multiple virtual owners. A possible solution to the problems that young people have in accessing capital to start in farming.

When I focused back on Net Zero, I argued once information was available to the customer from these sorts of platforms that the best consumers (who were prepared to pay higher prices for high quality goods) would be hungrier and hungrier for more information, providing a positive flywheel effect. So, farmers who had these systems in place and where active on reducing climate change emissions would benefit.