Software Slow to Adapt to Agtech’s Needs, CDFA Expert Says

“We’re seeing a lack of expertise” in certain areas of agricultural technology, says Amrith Gunasekara, Ph.D., the chief science adviser at the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA).

The lack of expertise is in software optimization and ongoing customer support, he said, when we sat down to talk in his Sacramento office last week.

Gunasekara is a UC Davis graduate who joined CDFA Secretary Karen Ross nearly eight years ago from the California Department of Public Health, which deals in food safety.

“We’re not seeing sufficient level of detail” in adapting and adjusting various software products to the specific farmer’s operation, he added.

This includes what-should-be-simple communications among the hardware; i.e., getting the drone to talk to the sensors to diagnose the plant stress and operationalize a solution. (Water? Fertilizer? Where? When? What adjustment?)

Down in the dirt, there must be calibrating of your products to the customer’s products, he noted. Strawberries are not artichokes, and a row of corn is different than a row of carrots. Nuts and fruits do grow in trees, though not the same trees.

There are 400 commodities grown in California, Gunasekara said, and ag tech must be fine-tuned to help the farmer with all of them. 

What can developers do to help? Two things, he said.

1. Real plug and play. Interoperability must arrive soon.
2. Open source code. An agtech “18F” (https://18f.gsa.gov) organization must grow organically to create a library of overarching code for on-farm applications. “We need to build on the public knowledge, not your patents,” he said.

Drones, of course, are the new, new thing, and their imaging could be far more useful daily than satellites. “The resolution is hyper-spectral (I still have no idea what that means, but it sounds cool.) and the viewpoint is unique,” he said, but …

The cameras and lenses are evolving with the drones, and open source code from all three would help developers and farmers adapt and adopt these many combinations to providing the right input to the specific crop in the right place at the right time. Systems integration, anyone?

More from Gunasekara next time — on niche opportunities in ag tech on-farm. We’ll join him on a trip to Israel.

Meanwhile, this insight: Vector your thinking and/or products around climate change. That is, watching closely and responding to the impacts of climate change on ag. For example, did you know winegrape and cherry growers are moving north for chill hours?

Research:

http://phys.org/news/2016-09-climate-global-food-demand.html