Gore: An Interview with USDA California Innovation Director Robert Tse (Part 2)

Last year, 2015, was the fourth year of drought. Pistachio farmers, like their almond farmer cousins, cut back severely on irrigation. Still, the trees looked healthy.

When harvest time came in the fall, there was as much as a 43 percent drop in the pistachio nut crop. Even worse, this was a total surprise. Almond farmers did not have this result. Both nut growers had estimated the crop during the spring in the same traditional way — by examining shell development.

But the pistachios nutshells were hollow.

Agricultural technology can solve this mystery, according to Robert Tse, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) California innovation director and former California Department of Food and Agriculture deputy secretary. We were talking with Robert in the last Ag & Food Tech Blog, as you may recall.

“Surprises are bad in agriculture,” he noted in his usual understated manner.

“We can no longer farm with average data,” Tse concluded. “We need prescriptions — like a blood test for a person — for the individual farms and crops.”

Tse recalled the trees looked healthy. The nut shells formed.  But there was a 43 percent drop in yield. “That was a big drop. Why? Too little water and at the wrong times for pistachios.”

Great precision with the wrong prescription.

A prescription for every “foot” will give us healthy farming and healthy food for the future, he said, including “the elements of that prescription and how it will be … injected into the food system is the future.”

The high rate of pistachio “blanks,” Tse said, illustrates two problems calling for a technology solution:

1. a better method of estimating pistachio production throughout the year.
2. analytics to create the correct dosage (i.e., prescription) of water for pistachio nuts.

Gadgets, not so much. On-farm specific integrated data management, yes. Integrated with the extant devices too.

But notice a nuance, Tse pointed out. The key data are NOT associated with mechanical stuff, like big green tractors, but with the plants and inputs.

Inputs calibrated to the square foot, each square foot, he said. Calibrated by type of crop, variety of plant, soil moisture for that plant, weather and recency of fertilizer and pesticide applications.

“The ag tech market is by no means saturated,” Tse opined, “but it is evolving to more real-time, farm-specific levels.”

Who are the most likely customers? Those permanent crop growers who are most interested in consistent and necessary (for their customers) high-quality production.

And remember this bit of closing advice, “Technology adapts to the crop, not the other way around.”


Editor’s Note: This is Part Two of a two-part conversation with Robert Tse. Read Part One here.)