The “gleaner” is an honorable, even essential, occupation in agriculture and food. Especially if the gleaning is business development insight for YOU.
My results from a week of scanning the event horizon are encapsulated below. Know where your customers are going, not where they are. (I’m paraphrasing hockey player Gordie Howe and his puck metaphor; feel free to ask if you don’t know it.)
Every heard of Zippy Duvall? You should have. We’ll save him for the end of this post.
First, the nation’s nearly 2,000 agriculture bankers loaned 8 percent more money in 2015. Your customers — growers and food processors — have ready access to cash, according to (what else?) the American Bankers Association. That’s $170 billion in loans with a record-low default rate.
There is business reason for this largesse — agribusiness owners’ capital equity continues to increase. Get busy. This truly will not last.
Ag and food businesses have tech needs beyond maximizing inputs, resources and yield. Creating profit is another need, and one way to do that is to decrease expenses — especially the costs of regulatory compliance.
Air quality is seldom addressed. Controlling emissions is a long-pursued goal by regulators and what they call “the regulated community” — i.e., our customers.
Here’s an example of reality for you: The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service announced incentives for nut farmers to buy low-emission harvesters. This means they have money to buy not only low-emission equipment, but tech to measure emissions, to track and to report.
And speaking of clearing the air, sequestering carbon emissions will be monetized within five years. Measuring the captured carbon, and the potential for sequestration, could be huge. It’s driven by the need to mitigate climate change and is not yet fully understood. This area is fertile ground for ag and food techies.
Understanding an essential input ALSO is, well, essential. Fertilizer, which can be chemical or organic, is just that. Managing fertilizer is extremely complex and a topic of concern. The California Department of Food and Agriculture just released new guidelines for applying fertilizer to 18 crops.
Fertilizer is the quintessential precision ag ingredient -- it has to be applied in the right amount at the right time in the right place. Or else, you pollute groundwater and air. Here’s some interesting reading about this topic on CDFA’s Planting Seeds blog.
And you gotta keep track of what your competition is up to. Here’s an incredibly difficult, mundane task: facial recognition for plants. So far, the PlantNet firm has just more than 6,400 separate plant entries in its database, matching a picture you take with hundreds of thousands of individual pictures of leaves, flowers and fruits.
Right now, PlantNet is focused on the wildflowers of Western Europe, Indian Ocean coastlines and parts of South America. Esoteric? You bet, and lucky for you.
Now meet Zippy Duvall, new president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, who is all over the issue of data ownership. There are, as you should know, many data aggregation tools out there. The big guys – Monsanto, Deere, Syngenta, et al – want to mine their customers’ data.
Zippy and many of his colleagues don’t agree, which could accrue to your benefit. “Farmers must retain ownership and control of the private agricultural data that originates from the work they do in their fields,” said Duvall. “Harnessing that proprietary information for field-level efficiency and effectiveness is the key that will unlock more profitability and the greater adoption of precision agriculture. That’s good for business and the environment, too.”
And there are many collaborative tools that are works-in-progress. The question of how to make money has yet to be resolved.
Good luck, and you’re welcome!
