Blog

Sometimes you do all the right things and conform to every conventional wisdom and have nothing special to show for it. You study, hire the best minds with whom to consult, buy the very best seed, with the very best pesticides and chemicals, plant at the right time with the right spacing, diligently fight off weeds and gophers, irrigate religiously and harvest a modest or even weak crop.

So you pick up your chin, take your best efforts to market and salvage what you can for this year with the optimism and conviction that next year things will be better. Next year, nature will cooperate.

After all, you can’t control the weather anyway and Mother Nature is fickle and there is always next year when things are due to conspire to produce a bumper crop with record commodity prices.

As a lifelong Cub fan, believe me I know all about belief and optimism and “wait till next year”. Sometimes though, you have to take matters into your own hands and make your own luck.

Sometimes down is up and up is down like the line in the song by the Kinks, “It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world” except not for your own life and livelihood.

Instead of “up periscope,” what if you flipped that to “down periscope”? What if the key to the best yield possible was to look down, deep down into the soil for the key to superior yield?

With thousands of fields now under AquaSpy data service management, we have found a direct correlation to yield by looking at what the roots experience while they forage deep within the soil for nourishment to take up water and nutrients to produce outstanding yield.

The active root zone is of course the plants’ way of reaching out to its’ environment to absorb vital and life nurturing nutrients during its’ short and finite lifespan.

It’s not such a mixed up jumbled up world if down is actually up because if the plant reaches down to absorb nutrients and if those nutrients are actually there when the roots seeks them, the plants grows faster and stronger and bigger. Yield then is up, so maybe sometimes down actually is up.

That of course translates ultimately to yield at harvest time and that’s the name of the game; not “wait till next year”.

Try it and see for yourself.

If you invest tens of thousands of dollars in seed and chemicals and equipment and land, you are serious about your craft and deserve a serious return on that investment. Why would you then leave it to chance that those inputs all just happen to be at the right place at the right depth and at the right time to actually make their way back into the plant?

Maybe Alice had it right in Wonderland after all, there’s a Mad Hatter down there who is in a hurry and he isn’t going to wait until next year.

Among the eternal questions mankind has pondered along with why are we here and to what purpose and how did life itself begin, is a seemingly more “down to Earth” question of how are we similar and how are we different and why?

This is of course the fascinating and endless debate about nature and nurture and causal or correlative relationships between how and why we are the particular and specific individuals we have each become.

There doesn’t appear to be any formula yet for how you get your child to possess a 99 MPH fastball or to progress into a World Class pianist or scientist. There are so many studies relative to twins and triplets where the same traits strongly prevail despite being raised separately by different parents in different locales. However, the opposite condition where two exact replicates raised in the same place by the same parents produces drastically different human beings.

Those countervailing studies are endlessly fascinating, because in part we are all human beings and we are all curious as to how our individuality produces us uniquely yet our conditions and dispositions in many ways make us more alike than dissimilar (even if we don’t want to acquiesce to possessing any of the herd mentality ).

What about studies involving thousands and tens of thousands of exact twin replicas where the genetics are exactly the same while the environment is also precisely the same?

Okay now we have shifted of course away from the human condition making it slightly less intriguing to the average everyday individual but very important and efficient to be understood and conquered by the Farmer. Crops are grown by the hundreds of thousands every year in the exact same fields and often with the exact same genetics (seed and chemicals). Yet one year may produce a bumper crop and another may be a relative or even absolute bust.

The issue at hand is the separation of nature and nurture and controlling all of the variables that contribute to that variation in yield. In Agriculture we hear a cacophony of voices claiming their particular brand of seed or fertilizer or pest control or even type of water is what drives yield upward. It must be very confusing and dispiriting to constantly hear that self-serving refrain of any and every Supplier touting yield improvement.

Frustratingly, even when a side by side comparison is done showing an improved yield from one treatment contrasted to another, there is always the lingering doubt that the superior performance may have been luck or timing or weather or myriad other variables contributing to one outcome or another. This might have been a better year or that may have been the soil or the wind or the evaporation or the seed type or just a good or bad year for growing.

It requires us to separate nature from nurture in order to begin to get a grasp on causal or correlative relationships between all the variables and yield.

It is absolutely true that nature is a big determinant upon the outcome of any particular season’s crop yield. Little pesky things like seed genetics, water, sunshine, wind and weather do play a big role. So let’s set weather aside for a moment while we work toward harnessing technology to control that too (and with the new Global Climate agreements recently concluded in Paris, we can readily see the planet’s weather is almost already within our greedy little grasp).

If nature is for the moment uncontrollable, it is also true that nurture is not uncontrollable and the behaviors we use that are determinant upon human strategies and actions are real, tangible, measurable and controllable. In other words, how we nurture the crop is both within our control and very impactful on whether or not the yield is truly the best it could and should be, within the constraints of as yet un-tamed nature.

The good news is that we now know the most salient impact upon positive yield influence is simply feeding the active root zone. Unlike humans, crops feed by extracting nutrients from the soil by virtue of their roots foraging ever deeper within the soil because they don’t have feet, hands and mouths in search of sustenance as we do.

With literally thousands of fields of experience, our data correlates to the highest yields belonging to those fields who simply had the liquid nutrients (water and nitrates) available to the root when and where (at depth), it was seeking to uptake the sustenance imperative to its’ growth and survival. It was not enough just to put water and nutrients on the top of the soil and hope they migrated down to the exact depth at which the active root zone was foraging (though by pure luck that confluence of nutrient and active root zone do match up serendipitously), but rather that those growers who knew where the active root zone was feeding and put the water and chemicals in that layer of depth more consistently than those who relied upon pure chance for supply to meet demand, got far greater yield consistently.

There are other contributing factors too such as not letting salts build up in the lower depths so as to impede the plants’ ability to uptake those nutrients in the active root zone but by far, the best yields attainable and within the Growers’ own control of how he elects to nurture his crops was simply putting their money where their crops’ mouth is. So not that hard and not that complicated but yield improvements of 20% and higher are routinely achieved this way regardless of which type of seed or chemical was chosen (though as part of the nature component these certainly have their impact as well).

So back to our twins and triplets, the challenge of understanding the nature/nurture components in them are far harder and far more intriguing. If you thought about their lifespan (maybe 80 to 100 years contrasted to maybe 100 days for a crop), and somehow you only put food in their actual hungry mouths by pure chance, you can imagine how stunted or even threatened their health would be. It’s like saying, I always put food on the table but if they don’t eat it, what can I do about it? Well if they had no ability to consume the food other than by it being near enough their mouth that they can partake of it, you would quickly devise methods to make mouth meet food in space and time.

The exact same holds true for crops; don’t just put the food on the table, ensure it is getting into their mouths. Your reward will be consistently and substantially higher yield.

It’s half past sun up; do you know where your roots are???

Want Yield? Put your money where your crops’ mouths’ are.

Like humans, crops have to absorb nutrients to flourish and grow. Unlike us, they must rely upon their roots to forage for liquid sustenance throughout the various depths of soil zones where they eat. Conversely we enjoy the advantage of employing our arms and legs to seek and obtain food to deposit into our mouths.

We may live 80 or more years while most crops may only exist for a little over 100 days or so.

We are made of approximately 2/3rds water while most crops are over 80% to 90% water. So what we have found from having thousands of fields under our control, is that the data supports a strong correlation of 20% and higher yields for those fields where the Grower ensured that he deposited and maintained sufficient liquidified nutrients in the active root zone at the depth at which the root system was currently seeking to absorb that energy for growth on that particular day.

There are many variables and combinations of seed, chemicals, sunlight, and processes which conspire to make a poor, average or excellent yield but by far the strongest correlation we have seen in all of the data we have correlated thus far is as simple as putting your money where your mouth is (well your crops’ mouths’ anyway).

It really is pretty logical and straightforward though. They are comprised almost entirely of water. They actively forage for that nutrient throughout ever deepening soil layers in order to absorb that of which they are mostly made. If it is there for them to take up, they do and it becomes the main part of their make-up. The more they can withdraw from the soil bank, the bigger and healthier they will become.

It’s yield time; do you know where your roots are?

Everyone is quite familiar with and has a FICO score that is essentially a measure of past financial behavior and used as a predictor of future financial behavior in order to price risk into the credit equation.

Similarly, though not as ubiquitous or well known; driving scores begin to reflect how, when and where you drive in order to help insurance Companies more fairly and accurately price the risk they take by insuring you as a driver. Many large fleets are self insured so these measures of past behavior behind the wheel have an added advantage of modifying those tendencies which can ultimately prove to be costly or even fatal.

If you measure something, by its’ very nature the implication is that this something now measured is in fact important and so if it matters, we humans tend to pay attention to it and often our competitive nature engages to make what was once poor become good, then good becomes great and then great may evolve into World Class.

Once several decades ago, a young assembly line supervisor decided he wanted to improve the productivity on his assembly line and noticed that the lighting was rather dim and made the place feel old, dark and neglected. So he arranged to have new and incremental lighting installed and to his delight, productivity did indeed improve. Workers could see more easily and their attitudes brightened and the pace picked up.

Encouraged by this positive reinforcement, he had his industrial engineers tracking the workers’ movements, and processes and ultimate production output. He thought if the first “enlightenment” produced better results, maybe more was better, so he put in yet more new lighting.

Can you believe the output went up yet again?

Now feeling quite confident and proud of his clever initiatives, he decided to press the issue and do it once again, expecting at some point to hit the law of diminishing returns.

Can you guess what happened? It went up again.

Now, however some doubt began to creep into his mind about his cleverness because the factory floor was now obnoxiously bright. The atmosphere was somewhat warm and uncomfortable with all of those bright lights burning away.

So he turned off some of the lights and….you guessed it; production went up once again.

Many of you know this story as The Hawthorne Effect and of course it was never the lighting that increased the production but rather that people were watching and measuring and the workers realized that what they did actually mattered and that someone cared.

So we eventually outsourced all of their jobs overseas and laid them off to begin the decline of our middle class economy but that is a rant for a different day.

We are now starting to bring this measuring methodology into the agricultural space which I view as a factory without a roof that cannot just be outsourced overseas. Agriculture is of course growing things so measures get clouded by nature.

If you were to obtain an exceptionally good yield, you might attribute that to the seed, or the chemicals, or the sunshine producing advantageous growing degree days. There are myriad factors which contribute to a poor, a good or an outstanding yield. As of yet, we cannot control the heat or humidity or wind and despite whatever seed you elect to plant with its’ inherent DNA characteristics, the nature part of the yield equation is still uncontrollable.

However, the nurture part of the yield result is absolutely measurable and controllable. What you elect to do with that seed and soil and sunshine makes a very large contribution to the ultimate yield and whether it turns out average or great or fails altogether.

These behaviors that contribute to achieving the best yield nature will allow include primarily ensuring that the liquid nutrients the crop withdraws from the soil bank are present at the time and at the depth where the active root zone seeks to obtain them in each and every day throughout the growing phase.

Other behaviors such as not allowing salts to build up impeding the roots’ ability to withdraw the nutrients and having sufficient nitrates available in the active root zone also conspire to produce yields which are consistently 20% better than those not nurtured efficiently. Of course weed control and pest control and disease monitoring are all contributing nurturing factors as well.

Unlike, the FICO score which largely inures to the benefit of the bank or the driving score which is a great assist to the insurance industry, the YES! (Yield Efficiency Score) is a tool for and to the benefit of the Farmer solely himself.

The Farmer helps himself immensely by achieving the highest yield nature will allow. The Farmer himself bears the brunt of poor or deficient nurturing that manifests in lower yield when it didn’t have to be that way. By automatically measuring the things are imperative to producing the highest yield possible, the Farmer keeps himself in touch engaged and in check with diligently nurturing his crops.

Now I’m not implying that each plant in his many rows of crops will know that he cares and is measuring progress like the now outsourced workers on that ancient production line, but they will respond affirmatively and in that way, he can see every day how the root system responded to the treatment as that is the way the crops actually whisper to him daily.

This is the only way the crop has to speak to him at this point but feedback is feedback and it greatly pays off at the end.

Maybe someday technology will find a better way for crops to speak to us more directly, but right now we are working on self driving cars and saving the planet. Personally I’d like to get my dog to talk but that’s just me.

Crop whispering works and although the crop doesn’t know it is being watched and measured, it will respond to you the only way it can; higher and healthier growth which is plant speak for yield.

AquaSpy is a soil moisture sensing and data platform that was founded in 1998 in Australia. It started off manufacturing and selling soil moisture probes but now has a data platform providing growers using drip irrigation and center-pivots with data analytics and best-practice irrigation templates. The aim is to help improve yields and reduce costs by ensuring that all inputs and nutrients are available to a crop’s active root zone at the right time.

AquaSpy has raised capital from investors such as agtech VC Cultivian Ventures, UK-based technology growth investor WHEB Partners, Switzerland’s Emerald Technology Ventures, Portugal’s Espirito Santo Ventures, and the state of Indiana. AquaSpy has raised $16.5 million in total, and its Series B round raised $4.8 million in June 2010. The company would be open to bringing on another investment partner, if the fit was right, according to Bruce Moeller, CEO of AquaSpy since February 2009.

Now with technology in the hands of 3,000 subscribing farmers and agribusinesses, across 330,000 pivots, the business is coming into its own, according to Moeller. But it’s been a long road to get here, he tells AgFunderNews.

You said that it’s “been a long slog to get people to adopt the technology.” Why is that?

Growers have been growing and watering their crops or allowing nature to water them for 10,000 years. We say the world is not flat, but then we don’t think vertically. We don’t think about what’s going on underground or under the surface. When we look at some of the technology out there, that’s doing satellite imaging, and so on, people are looking at a pivot area from above to find evidence of drought or nitrate deficiency or too much water. But when you think about roots in a crop, they are to the plants what the mouths are for us, but they don’t have hands and feet like we do. They go underground and dig deep. And it’s activity at that level, where the active roots are, that directly correlates to yield.

Farmers are used to thinking horizontally, but crops grow vertically, so we are having to educate them in a new way of looking at things. AquaSpy evolved to where it is today when we redid the sensors in a vertical column in 2010 and then built a communication tower to tell you where the roots are and what penetration is needed.

From selling sensors directly to farmers, the company has evolved into a B2B model and sells hardware through dealer networks. Farmers can then subscribe to your data analytics platform online. How has that changed the success of the company?

Moving B2B improved things. Typically what we’ve found is that if a local dealer, who has worked with local farmers, says that a technology works, the farmers will trust them and buy the tech. If I’d gone to meet those farmers alone, they wouldn’t trust me. It’s a trust-based business developed over generations.

We’ve seen that dealers selling our product for two years have quadrupled their orders, and those selling for one year have doubled or tripled their orders. We think we should double our sales, or more, each year.

How much revenue are you bringing in today?

It’s under $10 million at this point, but with well over a $1 billion market to address, a market that we’re definitely leading, when we get past single digit penetration, our projections are north of $100 million in revenues.

How does AquaSpy fit in with the growing number of ag big data companies coming to the fore and offering farmers not just one source of information, but several data sets?

There is a big push at the moment for aggregating big data on the farm in a sort of one-stop-shop; one sell plan analyzing lots of different reports from soil moisture, crop health and so on, and putting all these data points together for the farmer.

I personally think this is the wrong answer. I don’t think the farmer can afford to pay for all those different technologies to get all the different signals and data points. The weather says to do this, underground management says to do that. It’s confusing for growers.

I think we will find that the most significant correlation to yield relates to the moisture at the root zone.

Plant growth is vertical, and it’s the application of moisture to the roots that has the direct correlation to yield. Other factors will contribute to it, but other metrics that many of these big data companies are tracking will fall off as farmers fail to see a direct correlation to yield. Everyone means well, but they just don’t know what they don’t know yet.

Agriculture is an industry that’s taken a long time to adopt technology and evolve. What clouds the issue with crops and agriculture is nature versus nurture. Every time someone claims their product improves yields, a farmer will be open to it, and maybe they will get a better yield, but where it falls apart is that the farmer can say it was just a good year that year, the seed was right, the weather was good. So you need to separate both to extract the real value.

We have developed a YES score — a yield efficiency score — which just attacks the nurture part. We can track your behavior and what you do, and how that contributes to a better yield. There are lots of things you can do to stop salts build up underground near the root zone, for example, and we can then give a farmer a score on that. We think this can help separate all the noise in the marketplace.

Weather is one thing that everyone is paying big money to track and the one thing you can’t do anything about.

What advice would you give to agriculture technology startups?

My advice to technology startups is to be prepared to go in for the long haul as nothing is immediate in this market. It takes time to grow, so perseverance is the absolute key to success in this market; IF you truly add value.