The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Krintz: Data will become farmers' most valuable asset over land and water
“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 th…”
The global supply of arable land is fully exhausted
“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”
Agriculture is completely underserved by modern technology and analytics
“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.”
On-farm edge computing must require zero system administration
“If we're going to put some computation on farm, the system that we develop there must be lights out, easy to use. It must be self-managing, must be completely fault tolerant, must be like a TiVo box. You turn it on, it just works. Right? And you don't need a s…”
SmartFarm edge appliance runs AWS and Google Cloud workloads locally
“Anything that runs in Amazon and anything that runs in the Google Cloud platform will run on this appliance.”
Open-source software will be key for widespread agtech adoption
“Open source software is going to be key.”
Krintz: Precision irrigation synchronizes crop maturation to eliminate redundant harvest passes
“A lot of times if you part of the farm has less water than another part Certain trees will be ready for harvest before the others, and that, that, that's costly, because you have to perform two harvests. What you want to do is manipulate both the fertilization…”
California produced $50 billion in agricultural output last year
“The amount of food we produce in California alone is enormous. Fifty billion last year.”
SmartFarm identified crop quality root causes via diffusion analysis
“We took the same data as part of our Smart Farm effort, and we did a diffusion analysis to try to understand not how to control a tractor, but why this differentiation of quality was happening. So we applied this, a diffusion analysis technique to figure out t…”
Spatial analytics allow farmers to target problem areas efficiently
“Once you have this, something like this, you can hand a farmer an iPad, and they can, you know, instead of walking the entire field, they can focus their energy to find where the problem might be.”
Most farms lack reliable, low-cost internet connectivity
“Most of our farms are lucky if they are connected to the internet. And if they are, it's extremely low bandwidth, and it's very expensive.”