(Photo credit @markusspiske)
One of the great things about living in upstate NY is how easy it is to access nature & parks. When I live in cities, I was always within walking distance of a park or a body of water (Central Park, Sabino Canyon, Brooklyn Promenade, Fresh Pond, etc). Last weekend, I took my dog for a drive to a nearby lake. Along the way, I noticed that (in my electric car) I passed 2 Teslas, an Amish farming family in a horse & buggy, and countless farms. Growing up on a dairy farm seemed like a normal thing to do as a kid in this area, until I got to Princeton and classmates behaved like I had arrived from another planet. I wanted to focus on agriculture tech (or agtech) this week to highlight what tech evolutions are happening to help you and millions of others eat.
#techtopic
Agriculture as an industry has been around since humans have existed, and agtech refers to the use of tech in agriculture, horticulture and aquaculture with the aim of improving yield, efficiency and profitability. And while some early inventions like the wheel and stone milling helped individual farmers do more, it was the Industrial Revolution that brought tractors and other large machines to make huge changes in how farming was done. Now, the tech industry is bringing its collective brainpower to solve these critical challenges.
Drones are an obvious way to help bring more efficiency in crop production and fertilization, and monitoring of crops and herds. (Drones also take great aerial photos/videos of my cousins’ farm’s corn maze!). It’s incredibly hard for farmers to keep up with constantly changing weather patterns or to assimilate & analyze all the data so there are tech companies designing software tools to help with herd management and health tracking, crop rotation planning, and checking for weeds. There are even robots working on farms to do weeding as covid19 makes it more difficult to have concentrated amounts of people together in one place. IOT sensors could work in combination with drones to help set up a monitoring network for crops or herds but only if the rural connectivity challenge is also addressed (see last week’s newsletter for more).
In urban areas there has been a sharp rise in the vertical farming market to ensure that fresh produce isn’t shipped long distances and spoiled along the way; it’s grown right within city limits. More agfunds have begun to appear, investing in companies like Gro Intelligence who use AI to analyze unstructured data sets from the UN and the World Food Programme and help companies predict large-scale agricultural trends/impacts.
