Krintz: Data will become farmers' most valuable asset over land and water
Chandra Krintz · a16z Podcast | Data Down on the Farm · Jan 2, 2019 · at 23:43
Chandra Krintz, computer science professor at UC Santa Barbara, discusses the future of agricultural technology on the a16z Podcast.
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“I think the biggest change is that instead of thinking about some of the things we've been talking about here, water resources, amount of land, soil quality, the resources that we'll all be talking about that are going to be the most valuable to the growers themselves is their own data. We're going to have to develop the markets and the controls and the ways of sharing data that benefit farmers because, in my opinion, data is their most valuable resource.”
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More from Chandra Krintz
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“There's, the amount of arable land in the world is done. We're, we've used it all.”
Tech companies take valuable farmer data for free
“All the value of what farmers own is in their data. And that's why companies love to take it for free.”
Krintz: Agriculture Is Tremendously Underserved By Technology
“We believe that agriculture is tremendously underserved by technology. It's been left behind in both software and hardware, although hardware has done a little bit better than software.”
Krintz: AgTech Sensor Market Is Fragmented and Proprietary
“Turns out that these sensors, however, are proprietary, and they all do a little bit something different, and have different interfaces, and so it's really hard to go between vendors if you wanted to try lots of different sensors on your farm”
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“If you think about the ag industry today, it is completely underserved by technology, let alone analytics.”
Precision agriculture needs Amazon, Google, and Tinder-style analytics
“So in terms of analytics then, we need to make Amazon recommendations to farmers for things like irrigation scheduling or the application of inputs, fertilizers, pesticides, water. We need Google search for crop disease. We need Tinder for pests.”