Like much of the American heartland, the summertime landscape in Iowa's Webster County is dominated by several immutable features: hot sun and lots of it; a ruler-straight grid of byways that bend only at old property boundaries and upon encountering water; shining grain silos towering above the plains; and farmhouses surrounded by fields of soybeans, alfalfa, and hay.
And, of course, corn. Hundreds of thousands of acres of it, a sweeping, shimmering sea of green, towering well over even a tall man's hat by July in a good year. In 2013, just over 200,000 acres, fully 50 percent of Webster County's farm acreage, was given over to Zea mays.
Brent Larson is part of this economy, farming around 400 acres along with his father and brother. They run their farms primarily in the evenings and on weekends, their workday filled with assisting the hundred or so clients they serve through Sunderman Farm Management, their consulting and brokerage firm. Farming alone is a difficult way to make a living.
So technology that promises to improve a farm's yields while lowering costs appeals deeply to Larson. Large amounts of capital are tied up in seed, fertilizers, water costs, and equipment, and predicting the impacts of weather and market timing is an annual wrangle if he hopes to make some green of the spendable type.
"People are interested in net income," Larson said. "The easiest way to make money is to avoid spending it in the first place. If more technology helps avoid additional expenses, that ties in, too."
He, his family, and his agricultural peers are no strangers to technology. GPS-guided tractors are the norm, helping farmers navigate perfectly straight rows and plot optimal routes over uneven terrain to maximize rows planted per acre. Larson can call upon several drone companies to do periodic imagery of a field. And along with 100,000 other farming operations on 92 million acres of fields, Larson uses FieldView, a subscription-based data analysis platform created by Monsanto subsidiary Climate Corporation. Connected to data-gathering equipment on their planters and tractors, farmers can view real-time weather data, see historic field and yield data, and capture crop and soil information from a tractor as it passes through a field.
Larson said he is intrigued by what the recent proliferation of agriculture-targeted Internet- and cloud-connected sensors might be able to do for him, as well as farming as a whole. But whatever he invests in has to work reliably. The optimal windows for tilling, weeding, seeding, fertilizing, and harvest are all incredibly small, whether for row crops such as corn and soy, vegetables such as lettuce, or perennial crops such as grapes, nuts, and fruit.
Precision Hawk's scanning tools include a variety of vegetation algorithms. (photo: Precision Hawk)
"One of the hardest things to figure out is where to spend your time, energy and effort," Larson said. "Some of these technologies are great, but to learn them, and keep them up to date, and then throw them away when the next best widget comes out in three years—I don't want to buy another $5,000 device that will just be a paperweight in a couple of years."
He envisions a time when his farm and others like it, as well as the huge Big Ag plantations, can all harness the promise of Big Data for highly targeted plant management: applying fertilizer only where the soil is starved, watering only where plants are thirsty, and spraying for pests and diseases before they become a plague. But as it has been for as long as we've farmed, many of those decisions made today are are heavily dependent upon an expert eye and the many layers of intuition of accumulated seasons. The idea of getting the right mix of hardware and software deployed in his fields to assist with those goals still smacks of sci-fi for Larson.
But it's not as far away as he might imagine.
Gadgets in the Field
In 2015, nearly 500 ag-tech companies drew $4.6 billion in investments, double the previous year's figure, according to agriculture investment platform AgFunder. This year has been slower—only $1.75 billion went to ag tech in the first half of 2016, a 20 percent reduction over the same time last year. AgFunder CEO Rob Leclerc said that's probably because companies now are putting prior investments to good use.
Still, the ways in which companies and start-ups are getting into the ag space vary wildly.
Precision Hawk's scanning tools analyze how vigorous and robust plants are. (photo: Precision Hawk)
Hardware abounds, as you might expect. Startup Cowlar is helping dairy farmers optimize milk production by outfitting their herds with smart collars—essentially activity trackers that send alerts when cows are "exhibiting abnormal behavior or unusual temperature levels are detected" or when they wander off the farm. Other companies are making Wi-Fi–enabled ear tags and embedded chips that send data on an animal's movement, temperature, and gestation cycle.
Sensors for grain elevators track humidity and temperature gradients throughout a silo, feeding into automated climate control systems to keep grain from fermenting. SWIIM worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a complete sensor-software system for monitoring precipitation and water usage, so a farmer can not only conserve more water but could also profit from leasing out any leftover portions of his or her water rights.
And there are plenty of DIY tinkerers in the field, working to make devices for their own farming operations. One such community, known collectively as Farm Hack, has been concerned with the potential for tech to enable data gathering and automation from its very inception.
Dorn Cox, a co-founder of Farm Hack, runs the 300-acre Tuckaway Farm in Lee, NH. The farm raises organic specialty crops primarily for restaurant clients, including blueberries, mushrooms, vegetables, maple syrup, sunflower oil, and baked goods made from farm-grown grains. In 2011, when the open-source FarmHack community first started, one of the very first problems members discussed was how to remotely detect dangerously high temperatures in greenhouses. Using a basic Arduino system, a modified GSM cellular signal, and a cell phone, the project created a temperature sensor that sends text alerts when temps got too high in the operator's greenhouse.
More and better-quality off-the-shelf devices are available now for members to use or tweak for their own purposes. Cox himself has developed a dashboard dubbed FarmOS that lets users collect, centralize, and manage their remotely collected data. He also has a number of sensors deployed around his farm—primarily in the greenhouses—that help him and his small staff prioritize their tasks. He predicted he won't be able to grow economically without the help of a larger sensor and data-collecting scheme.
"Our mushroom operation, for instance, is really sensitive to environmental conditions," he explained. "The risk is so high when things get out of range that we won't be able to expand without adding those kinds of alerts. I think we're all heading toward being dependent on that kind of capability."
Cox is concerned by the sheer abundance of devices on the market, though, and said that there's little assurance for any interested party that the hardware is collecting robust data. He and other Farm Hack collaborators worked recently at a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture air quality and climate station in Maine to install, calibrate, and run comparisons of the performance of low-cost sensors alongside their powerful—and much more expensive—science-grade counterparts.
"As we add more and more sensors to our fields, they're important not only for farm management and environmental compliance but also to a research audience," Cox said. "These are people building models about how carbon, water, and nitrogen cycle through an agricultural system, and those models are used to project the effect of agriculture on climate change. That feedback from agriculture systems is so important to validate. Policy is made based on that."
Stitching Things Together
As it affects their crop yields, farmers are primarily concerned with two things: climate and chemicals. How much water is available? How fertile is the soil? How much will I need to allot for insect and disease sprays? Sensors and data-gathering devices can provide actionable information on each of these concerns. But what if you wanted data streams on all of them, all at once, every day? Or more specialized information based on your particular crop or location?
Break out your password keeper: For the most part, it's very much a disjointed jumble of objects, ideas, and processes. There is hope, though: "Integration" is the new buzzword in the IoAg. Think platforms.
"Our average subscriber has 160 data streams, but we have some farms with over 1,000," said Lance Donny, founder and CEO of OnFarm. "That's a lot of data for a grower to manage, especially if it's reporting to you all the time."
OnFarm provides a central nervous system, accessed via smartphone, tablet, or computer, through which farmers can route all or some of their sensor data for analysis. On the tech side, hardware and software developers can add their services to the OnFarm network to reach the company's subscribers. Though OnFarm boasts partnerships with big-name companies such as John Deere, Davis Instruments, and Campbell Scientific, Donny asserted he's agnostic about who joins the ecosystem.
"We're supporting any data, coming out of any device," Donny said. "There have been so many IoT-based solutions giving growers so much information about lots of different things, but all that information was siloed, and there were no data standards for interoperability amid all that data. So it was hard for growers to make a determination of what to use, how to use it, and how to get the best return on that investment."
Chris Fastie, left, of the open-source testing community Public Lab, and Dorn Cox, Farm Hack co-founder (photo: Dorn Cox)
Focused primarily on growers of specialty crops—nuts, fruits, berries, and vegetables—Donny said OnFarm receives 70 million readings per month from 71,000 sensors spread over half a million acres in 32 U.S. states and Canada.
"Data management systems have almost become a requirement in order to quantify it and boil it down," he said. "You just can't juggle that information in your head."
Climate Corporation, also primarily concerned with vending data-analysis services, is working toward integrating more types of high-resolution data layers from more sources for its FieldView products. It aims to accomplish this in large part by partnering with numerous third-party providers, such as Kansas-based Veris Technologies, which has developed a series of tractor-mounted sensors to map individual fields' organic matter content, pH, electrical conductivity, and soil texture.
Climate Corporation's chief innovation officer, Mark Young, said that by stirring up conversations with other innovators of all sizes, Climate Corporation hopes do for farming what Google did for Web search or Amazon for the digital marketplace: Make it simple and make it bulletproof.
"When your ag software is down and it's stopping you from planting or harvesting, that's not an option," Young said. "It's a little more rigorous than what most Silicon Valley tech companies are used to focusing on. These are multimillion dollar operations, and it cannot go wrong. If the code running your pacemaker has a bug, that's a bad day for everyone, and where we're getting to, the software has to have that same level of redundancy."
Princeton, NJ–based Arable is taking a somewhat more global approach to integration. Subscription-based data management and analysis is also key to its process, but instead of solely cobbling together a network of thousands of third-party providers, founder Adam Wolf decided that packaging several dozen commonly used sensors into an attractive, easy-to-deploy design would be most beneficial to a broader array of growers.
Strawberries ripen in one of Driscoll's commercial growing fields in Monterey County, Calif. (Photo: Driscoll's)
Wolf was first spurred to the idea as an agronomy grad student lugging around hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of weather-monitoring equipment for research in Kazakhstan. In his experience, growers everywhere want the same basic abilities: soil moisture and fertility tracking, intensity and hours of sunlight available, correlation of crop yields with weather trends, and the ability to quickly assess foliage for problems.
"You shouldn't have to send a grad student with a pickup truck to wire this stuff up," Wolf laughed. He worked with Nest and GoPro designer Fred Bould to package an array of sensors into a compact disc-shaped housing. The Pulsepod contains, among other things, net radiometers for measuring absorption of shortwave and longwave solar radiation; tilt and orientation sensors; spectrometers to reveal foliage in different wavelengths for measuring plant stress, growth rate, and chlorophyll content; and cameras. The pod can be mounted on a pole at any height and customized with additional hardware on external ports.
"The big opportunity that has never really existed in ag IoT is measuring and connecting the predictors with their outcomes," Wolf said. "It's supply chain optimization. If you look at what's valuable, 30 percent of all food is lost before it reaches the consumer. That's money left on the table, and all the irrigation, fuel, people hours, land value—all that was wasted. In the larger context, there are bigger fish to fry than just irrigation or applying pesticides."
For large international companies such as berry producer Driscoll's, which partners with around 700 strawberry growers around the world, IoT technology like Arable's also represents the ability to make sensor data more detailed. Where previously growers might deploy one sensor per 100-acre field, smaller, more affordable units that provide more information from a single data stream makes it easier to justify 10 to 20 times the number of sensors per field. Driscoll's is currently beta-testing Pulsepods in two fields in California.
"You get this closed feedback loop where you really trust that the sensor data are representative of what's happening in the field, and that provides the grower with information to make better decisions," said Michael Christensen, Driscoll's director of forecasting for the Americas. "And in the future, if growers can act on individual plants instead of spraying an entire 100-acre field, there are big ramifications for pesticide, fertilizer, and water use. If someone can unlock the ability not only to sense but also to act on that data, there's a lot of value in that."
Growers of another high-value crop, wine grapes, are eager to employ forecasting methods based on tightly knitted datasets: multifunction platforms or devices give them the ability to tie microclimate variances to yield predictions by responding to real-time conditions in the field as they unfold.
"Being able to pinpoint what past seasons have done to predict your current season before you get there really can help turn things around," said Will Drayton, director of technical viticulture and research winemaking for Australia-based Treasury Wine Estates. "As soon as I have an inkling there may be some shatter in the merlot, I can start speaking to growers across the state to pick up additional contracts and buy early while we still have a good price. But it also goes to the level of ordering corks, casks, employee hours, harvest interns, everything."
A Washington State orchard manager checks data-overlay images of his fields. (Photo:Precision Hawk)
Feeding the Future
In the United States, the ability for growers to collect more data essentially amounts to better profits, and perhaps more consistent prices for consumers at the grocery. But in places in the rest of the world where one daily meal, let alone three, are far from assured, more data from IoT devices may mean the difference between subsistence and success.
Assume that the ongoing problem of cellular access, wireless or other internet connectivity is solved in developing nations. The question companies like Arable and Climate Corporation are asking becomes , how can we make farmers in countries like Zambia, Brazil and India as productive as American farmers, with enough surplus to feed not only themselves but also their community and even country?
"The issues that affect the smallholder are different from those that affect the guy in Iowa," Climate's Young said. "They're light on agronomic advice, commodity prices, and microcredit to run their operation. A lot of them are planting the same seeds as we are and getting only 60 or 70 bushels per acre, while we're getting 100 bushels per acre. How we get them to be better farmers, and put them in better touch with neighbor farmers?"
Climate Corporation is working to answer this question by adapting its large-scale grower platform for use by smallholders as well. It has already signed up 3.5 million users in India to receive text messages with market and agronomy information based on their regional crops and conditions.
Arable's Wolf added that giving farmers in developing nations—as well as government entities such as the U.S. Agency for International Development—a better understanding of what big data can do can help give farmers more confidence in their assessment of seasonal risks and yields.
"How do you feed the future?" Wolf mused. "One meme is 'climate smart agriculture,' measuring conditions that allow you to predict whether the conditions that support [disease development] are happening, as well as the conditions of a particular microclimate in order to give periodic advice to farmers. Having a system or device that's able to measure that gives basic value around taking action in response."
In Iowa, Brent Larson considered the plethora of offerings on tap to help farmers make more by growing more. His wish list of all the connected things that would help him personally: a tractor that could tell him when a bearing was about to fail; customized spot-fertilization schemes; a planter with the ability to match different hybrid corn varieties to patches in the field where they'd grow best. He gave a verbal shrug.
"Ultimately, everyone uses what is appropriate for their operation," he concluded. "I think you'd be hard pressed to find an organization that uses all of the available technology—farming is so localized. The technology used here is different from 500 miles west or south. But necessity is the mother of invention, and there will be different inventions for every need."