Robert Schmidt, agency information officer of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, discussed some of the projects he and the department are working on during a sit-down interview this week with Techwire at CDFA headquarters in Sacramento. Here’s a quick summary of what Schmidt talked about.
1. Schmidt said for the past six months he’s been working on a Salesforce implementation using the Office of Technology Services’ new contract. He’s gathering information on CDFA’s 90,000 constituents — who they are and the industries they work in. Many of those contacts are farmers; there are 70,000 farmers in California with farms of 200 acres or more, Schmidt said. "We want to get information out there, and we want their feedback," Schmidt said. CDFA hasn’t had a formal customer relationship management system before, he said, beyond Listserv.
2. Satellite technology is continuing to advance. With the assistance of image processing, a database can now be generated that shows the variety of trees at each pinpointed spot. The technology will eventually help to generate an automatic, electronic notification when there’s an outbreak of a plant virus. When an outbreak happens today, people have to go door to door and ask homeowners, "Do you have an orange tree?" With this technology, trees can now be identified on a Google map. "We’re looking to do this with all the commodity groups. It’s expensive today, but by 2017 and 2020, satellite technology will be available to help with that," Schmidt said.
3. California Food and Agriculture is developing a new app for plant pest detection called CalTrap. The application will track more than 500,000 plant traps in California. The traps (some of them hang in trees) are currently tracked on paper, but CDFA is looking to create an electronic app that works on a tablet. The application would be used by the 700 plant pest trappers that operate in the state of California. "Rather than the results taking days or weeks, we’ll know almost in real time," Schmidt said.
4. With the drought continuing, farmers and winemakers in California are increasingly investing in highly efficient, sophisticated drip irrigation technology, Schmidt said, and the CDFA is promoting these best practices. Schmidt said it’s not the kind you buy from Lowe’s or Home Depot, either; it’s computer-controlled. Applying just the right amount of fertilizer also is critical, Schmidt said. "There are products now that, as the tractor is driving over the location, can sense how much nitrogen is in the soil and apply just the right amount to that particular plant," Schmidt said.
5. Sensors also are a big focus for Schmidt as he looks into the future. The discussions are wide-ranging, and he said he sees the sensor industry as a growth area for the vendor community. The opportunities extend all the way into the security industry, Schmidt said. On a farm, do you secure a sensor at the device level or in the cloud? "The general consensus is you’re probably going to have some kind of proxy in the middle. There’s going to be some kind of device that’s out in the field nearby that’s collecting the information, validating the devices and controlling the physical security to thwart theft. There are great opportunities working in the area of sensors or software that manages sensors, Schmidt said.
6. Earlier this year CDFA became one of the early adopters of CalCloud — the state’s private cloud — when it moved PiercesDisease.org onto the CalCloud infrastructure. (Pierce’s disease is a bacterial disease that attacks grapevines and eventually kills them.) Schmidt said the CalCloud is functioning well and it hasn’t had an outage. He said he’s looking to CalCloud to help bring another, larger database online. "We want to test this [CalCloud] with other things. Anytime you have new technology — and I don’t care who’s supporting it — you need to test it out," Schmidt said.
