Agtech and the Human Spirit

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 recipe for rejuvenation! But for me, it was a cool drink of water.
The day before the meeting, I took a detour to hike in the central Ethiopian Highlands, to the Asheton Maryam Monastery, built around 1150AD, before the larger and more famous Lalibela complex below. On the approach, under an overhanging limestone cliff (left, below), I was taken back to New Mexico when I was a teenager, walking among the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi at Mesa Verde. But whereas the Anasazi persist only as a mystery civilization, extirpated by drought, leaving behind relics and rituals that we can only speculate about, at Asheton Maryam, you are greeted by a priest (right, below) who will show you around. He will point to the curtain, behind which is the tabernacle that commemorates the Ark of the Covenant 2500 years prior; he will show you a bible written on hide, colored in precious pigments, and explain the stories therein.


And look closely at that panorama again: just below the peak is smallholder wheat production. At nearly 4000 meters. The stone-walled terraces no doubt date back to the 12th century when these fields fed the residents of the monastery. Talk about sustainable agriculture!
Coming back into Addis Ababa to attend the Grand Challenges meeting was an opportunity to step back from the “tech startup” part of this endeavor — the shark tanks, the pitch decks, the cash burn, the devops, salesforce.com — and reconnect with some of the core beliefs and inspirations for why I am in agriculture in the first place, and why that eventually landed in a corporation: a boat off to find promised land, not knowing if we’ll get there. Leaving the monastery, I knew I’d just walked through deep time. Now I’m at the UN building asked to imagine (and shape) what the future will hold for us.
Making a dent in agriculture is not especially easy, and to be among the messy complexity of it in the developing world is humbling. It’s as good a chance as any to despair of ever making a difference. We have a cute start up. So what?
Let’s start small. We make a product, which in its most basic use case helps people water crops better. So what? Well, if people water more efficiently, then maybe there will be enough water for everybody. So what? Well, some of my favorite farm towns (Yo, Winters!) might continue to be farm towns, not just surviving but thriving. So what? Well, people will have time to watch their kids play soccer on Saturday, and have money in their pocket to buy meat for the grill on Sunday. So what? Well, when people get time to break bread with their friends and family, they have a generosity of spirit, their cup runneth over. So what? Well, maybe we can stem the tide of anger, misunderstanding, trolling, human smallness that causes so much misery in the world. So what? We might eventually find peace and prosperity.
In Addis, I had a chance to catch up with Marshall Burke, whose work I’d followed for at least a decade but never actually met. In a compact body of work, he showed that misery and suffering is the dividend of a badly managed world. We often experience climate change as a slow and subtle phenomenon. Seas will rise some imperceptible centimeters at the Jersey Shore. A couple summer days will need more AC. But step back to take in a wider view and you can see crop failures and civil wars, riots and vigilante justice. In the case of the Anasazi, whole civilizations disappear. In the case of Tanzania, don’t be a woman with a broom during a heat wave (cite).*
When you read the news now, it’s as though everything you are reading is about food and agriculture. When you read about Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria last month, it is hard to tell whether it is about expelling refugees, or about protecting water claims, given that area has been a point of focus for a century (cite). When you read about the Syrian civil war, you are reading about a water shortage that rendered it impossible to grow crops and feed your family (cite). When you read about Tahrir Square in Egypt, and the subsequent imposition of martial law, you are reading about people’s desperation that the price of wheat skyrocketed and sugar could not be bought at any price (cite). When you read about the Murray-Darling basin in Australia, where water restrictions are creating winners and losers among people who have farmed there for a century, the anguish is hard to stomach (cite). In America we’re fortunate that the Farm Bill spends a dollar for every person on Earth to ensure a consistent and high volume of crop production (cite). We have conflicts but they are not for lack of basic calories. But we absolutely have conflicts over competing priorities on the use of water, between states, between districts sharing a basin, between ag and wildlife sharing a river. And while its true that one side or the other may “win” a policy dispute (cite), it’s a booby prize: we’re all worse off under the “forever war” of resource scarcity.
What is thrilling about agtech is that there are hundreds of emerging companies all over the world that have an infinitude of different visions for how to achieve peace and prosperity. Twiga, Farmerline, and many others are connecting smallholders with reliable markets so they can make a dignified living. WeFarm and Farm.ink are connecting smallholders with each other to share expertise. Mercy Corps and SafariCom are developing mobile advisory services to accompany farm loans, which are viewed as risky due to unpredictable weather. SunCulture is enabling low-cost irrigation for de-risking production from lack of rain. And those are just a small fraction of startups in Africa, let alone the rest of the world. It’s hard for me to imagine another time in history when there was so much home-grown experimentation and innovation in agriculture. It really gives me optimism that we’ll get there, we’ll reach that promised land.

^ And when you are meeting about it in an afrofuturist space-ship, how can it not come true??
* It turns out there is a literature on witch killing and climate disruption:

