Note: I wrote this fall 2019, but was compelled to post after the latest Oct 2020 McKinsey reports on digital ag here and here. I found myself wishing (as I always do) that the analyses of digital ag’s role went beyond simply pointing at the potential to raise yields or…

Right after Michael Lewis published Moneyball, people started coming out with every possible variation: Moneyball for urban planning, Moneyball for early childhood education, Moneyball for medical treatment, Moneyball for you name it. If you haven’t read the book, it’s about how the manager of the Oakland A’s used statistics to…

Anyone who has spent time in digital agriculture knows the chart I’m talking about. It’s the one that shows that agriculture is the least digitized industry, on par with hunting. Hunting? I suppose there’s camera traps and GPS apps nowadays, but my memories of hunting were all horses, boots, rifle…

I had an unexpectedly rejuvenating week at the Grand Challenges meeting in Addis Ababa, an annual event sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I was up at 6am and in bed by 1am and the flight there was 13 hours and the flight back 17 hours. Not exactly…

A word came to me last year and I haven’t understood what it meant until last week. I am the type of person who can listen to a song for years and not fully know its lyrics, who can think for years that Satisfaction (“can’t you see I’m on a…

ʙʏ Aᴅᴀᴍ Wᴏʟғ I went in to my daughter’s school the other day to teach a class in Rainbow Science, which is to say I was teaching spectroscopy. After rote recitation of the colors of the rainbow, we wondered aloud: What color is white? What color is black? We would…