Smart Agriculture

That was a long gap. More than 7 months since my last post. Several excuses that i can waste your time on but will not do so. I plan to be blogging more regularly going forward.

Lots has happened since the last article. I am now focused completely on making smart agriculture happen along with my colleagues who are in this journey together.

At the same time we are more optimistic about the returns for a company that can solve the problem of smart agriculture. So lets embark on this journey. A journey where we will discuss the problem in more detail, look at the impact we can have in this world if we can solve the problem effectively and learn various nuggets related to food, plants, trees, landscapes etc.

For example, did you know that we have about a million acres of vineyard all over the US? And that each acre under production results in 7.8 tons of grapes on the average. And the cost of each ton of grape varies based on the variety and can range from $1000-$7000 per ton. And yet vineyards are not the largest value crop that are grown in the US.

Leaving the last fact aside, let’s drill down more into the promise of smart agriculture by using a vineyard as an example. For example this article about big data and farming points out that data analytics have reduced input costs by 15% and increased yields by 13%.

Just using these numbers and focusing on yields alone indicates that using smart agriculture techniques would increase the expected revenue from a $1000-$7000 per acre. For a 100 acre vineyard that would translate to approximately $100,000 to $700,000. Serious money indeed. And yet smart agriculture has not really taken off to deliver on this promise.

For example from the same article, we see “ Agriculture has been slower and more cautious to adopt big data than other industries, but Silicon Valley is taking notice.” So why is this? Of course one aspect to this is related to ownership of data as pointed out in that article.

However, there is also another bigger aspect that is equally hard. This is related to the technologies themselves. The current solutions are very costly making them uneconomical in nearly all situations. The current solutions are not easy to use and require the growers to be technically savvy. And the current solutions are not reliable at all. No wonder that the growers are not falling head over heels to benefit from smart agriculture.

I will get into more details of all this in future articles.