Growing, Sustainable Tech Companies

One of the great things about being in career transition is the having the opportunity to engage your curiosity and follow your interests. All the windows and doors are open again, let the sun shine where it may.

Curiosity will take you everywhere and teach all kinds of new skills. In the last 10 months, my curiosity has led me to pick up the basics of AI, Tableau, Blockchain and even Airtable. Looking for a bit of fulfillment in my next step, curiosity has also led me to explore tech companies in my San Francisco Bay Area neighborhood working for a more sustainable world.

Here are just a few companies working to improve food production, food availability and measured use of our resources. There are many more players in this space worth mentioning, but I’d like to get this out to feed conversation at tonight’s SF Holiday Meetup with PAPOR and the Insights Association’s Northwest Chapter.

Help me keep the conversation going by in the comments! I'll gladly provide references, if interested. What other companies are helping us use our resources more efficiently?

Cool, Cool Water

The frightening five-year drought in California has brought fresh government oversight for our entire water supply and these new objectives require better measurement and reporting systems.

Enter  WaterSmart.  WaterSmart works with utility companies to identify leaks and heavy use areas. Identifying leaks early significantly reduces the risk of damage from free flowing water. Utility subscribers can directly monitor their water use via apps complete with comparisons to others in their community. The system can serves as the Utility's billing and subscriber notification systems. WaterSmart reports that their utility companies on average see a decrease in water use by up to 5% in the first year.

AgTech to the Rescue!

Feeding the world more efficiently, because we kind of have to

The UN tells us that we need to increase food production by 70% if we hope to support the world’s population in 2050. That’s sobering, but there is actually some low-hanging fruit (sorry, not sorry) and promising AI applications to help us get there.

You might expect the Bay Area to be a hotbed for GreenTech, but AgTech?  You betcha. The fertile Central Valley, the “supermarket to the world” is our neighbor and produce of most of our the fruits, vegetables and nuts in the US. A small change in efficiency here can have a big impact and the new AI-powered tech is everywhere already.

Farms have come a long way from the fruit-in-boxes days. Today’s farmers are constantly innovating in response to changes in environmental, economic and political climates. They are utilizing drip irrigation, installing more sensors, investing in custom machinery, and constantly upgrading their practices for efficiency.

What a Waste

Let’s start with what’s that low-hanging fruit; what's wasted in the process. According to the EPA, 20 billion pounds of produce goes to waste each year in the US due to surplus or some cosmetic reason. Worldwide, 30% of the food grown does not make it from farm to fork. Food waste is also responsible for 8% of global emissions as it breaks down and generates greenhouse gas.  

All those carrots that look like three-rooted mutants, tomatoes with yellow-shoulder or oddly-shaped heads of lettuce; where do they go at harvest? Mostly back into the ground. Not if these two San Francisco companies have anything to do with it.

Full Harvest provides a B2B farmers’ market for businesses to save money by buying the produce that won’t win beauty awards. Full Harvest customers include food producers that need produce in bulk for fresh juice, canned soup and way more, I’m sure.

Imperfect Produce delivers fresh, organic ugly fruits and veggies direct to your door like that co-op you’ve heard about, but with a wider distribution range.

Stations, Sensors and Networking

Power and Internet are still challenges to overcome on a ranch that's looking to modernize. Fields on a farm are not usually wired for power. Many fields are in the “last mile” of cell coverage, too. High speed internet is not available for the few homes out in the farmland. But don’t fear, better tech is arriving here here, too.

Affordable solar technology now helps farms of all sizes deploy soil and weather sensors in more locations than ever. A small solar panel with battery can power soil sensors, a weather station and a radio that transmits data every few minutes for on-demand reporting. There’s also reason to hope that the arrival of 5-G will throttle the sector in the next couple of years.

Central Valley farmers will tell you that there are no fewer than 50 sensor companies competing for their business this year, each with their own advantage. AI solutions are already being fed new volumes of data focused on increasing yield, protecting crops safely, and preserving resources.  

Here are just a few of the sensor companies in the field today with disruptive, pioneering technology and practices.

Arable’s “The Mark" sensors are solar-powered and collect data on irrigation, weather and even solar radiation. The sensor is deployed high enough in the air to be above the crop’s leaf canopy and captures 40 different data streams including rain, hail, canopy leaf area, crop water demand, environmental stresses, micro climate, and even air pollution. A leader in this standalone sensor technology, Arable has also been actively involved with helping rural communities in off the grid locations squeeze the most out of the resources around them.  

Teralytic addresses the lack of network issue by providing its own LoRa tech which will reach 10 miles. Their wireless soil sensor measures at three different depths, and measures aeration, respiration, air temperature, light, and humidity.

Rain Wise’s MK-III  is a durable stand alone weather station can be fitted with its own cell radio for always live data on precipitation, temp, humidity, leaf wetness, wind speed/direction and solar radiation. The solar array and battery combo can keep the data flowing for up to 60 days without sun. Rain Wise is not a Bay Area company, but they make a good, reliable product.

Newly Digital Farmers are Now Drowning in Data

This deluge of data is why I joined and helped build a prototype for foris.io earlier this year. The foris.io system collects information about what happens to a crop as its grown (treatments, watering, soil test results, etc) and brings in sensor data from via API to help growers manage, track and improve production at the field level. Once you have this data available at the agricultural field level, you can put AI to work.

Foris.io is currently seeking seed funding to make this work a reality. I would be glad to introduce you.