Homespun hackers are people that agriculture and fresh food tech developers need to find, understand and, yes, cultivate.
Homespun opinion leaders — ditto, perhaps more so.
Farmers are turning into tech tinkerers, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal (!) on April 18, thereby potentially imperiling the billions of dollars invested by Monsanto (Remember when the company bought the weather — Climate Corp. — for $1 billion, starting this whole thing?), Syngenta, Deere and others.
The Journal estimates the annual ag tech market size at $2 billion, which is good to know.
It's ironic to read that a homespun hacker converted a standard Deere tractor into an autonomous machine for $8,000. He saved that much in year one by avoiding driver’s wages.
Then there’s the Iowa farmer, a retired programmer, who spent the winter and $750 designing and building a planter sensor system that adjusts the rate at which corn seeds are planted, according to soil variables. He saved $1,000 in seeds, year one.
Here's Your Takeaway
Farmers throughout the U.S. are now benchmarking your products based on the numbers in this article. Gotta know that.
As for the opinion leaders, meet my friend Don Cameron, an innovative grower who sits on the California Board of Food and Agriculture and also on our AgTech Roundtable.
Don is a leader in water management best practices at his Terranova Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley. When others said it would not work — and worse, it would kill his orchards — Don experimented with flooding his grounds with stormwater and letting it percolate into groundwater storage.
It worked. Courage created a new and vital best water management practice.
Now he’s preparing to participate in the One Nation: Climate Change Forum in Rancho Mirage, produced by The Desert Sun newspaper and the USA Today Network. Don will be talking about climate change.
Climate change, on the ground in California farmland, is an urgent ag tech challenge and opportunity. Chill days are diminishing, permanent crops are pushing north, invasive pests are multiplying, there is more sun and there are more sudden cloudbursts.
Adaptability is key. Adaptability is analytics, sensors and hardware — integrated. What you do, in other words.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture shared the Desert Sun story about Don in its blog here.
Read and lead.
