Name: How farmers are using AI to help feed the planet
Uploaded: 2024-01-30
Duration: 7 min 3 s
Description: AI is empowering agricultural tech companies like Verdant Robotics, which helps farmers use chemicals sparingly and more precisely to save on cost and decrease health risks.

AI is empowering agricultural tech companies like Verdant Robotics, which helps farmers use chemicals sparingly and more precisely to save on cost and decrease health risks.

How farmers are using AI to help feed the planet

Tech

Much of the innovation in agriculture. It's been how do we replace slow high cost labor with something fundamentally more efficient. We've kind of gotten to the end of what bent metal can accomplish or what chemicals can accomplish if we're going to produce how we need to and, you know, feed the planet. There's no doubt that automation is, is a preordained thing in that space. Agriculture is one of the largest and most important industries. Funder is a Q tech and tech focused DC and we're certainly one of the most prolific investors in the space. We do a lot in a robotics, you know, is a, is a good example here if you just use, you know, first level, maybe second level imagination to imagine what technology could do on a farm. Um You don't have to stretch yourself that far, but you need some of the best technologists in the world, the wiring harness that you've got here. And that sort of underscores like the, just the level of technical talent that we need to uh need to underwrite uh to, to solve some of these people want low cost food. They also want health food um, and so there's a, there's a whole set of constraints around what the consumer wants and what it costs to produce that and deliver that. You know, I think about back when, when we met Dave, you had people who were coming from the driverless car industry, like, and I mean, foundational engineers and we basically made a bet that these guys that you are not ever going to find a better team, very small farm factor, which allows us to put it on all sorts. And if they cannot do this, it's, it's unsolved there, there's just no one better they're using, I wanna say, 99% less chemical than sort of a traditional solution. This is really important because when you go out on field, you, you, you might normally go and broadly spray everything, right. And chemicals are extremely powerful and extremely useful. Um, but you might not want all that chemical concentration all over what may be your food in the future. But chemicals are also really expensive. So if you can find ways to reduce that, just target that exactly to the plants that you're trying to weeds that you're trying to kill without getting any of, of, of those chemicals on the other plants. Um, so this is a sort of, it's like a triple win, win, win when you think about what this can do on the consumer side and on the business side and the health side, um, for, for these companies, we have that we store all the data on what we do is super precise delivery of atoms on target I feed, spraying down to millimeter accuracy, you know, parking and organic herbicide between carrots that are less than an inch apart. So that ultimately we're saving on labor and also those chemical inputs are used much more sparingly labor and chemical inputs are the number one and number two cost and growing. And so we really seek to bring those efficiencies to our growers so that not only does their bottom line uh change and for the positive. Um but you know, we all get healthier food, healthier soil, that's the game we're in. So this is the business end of the sprayer. You've got your camera systems and lights the box that has all of the things around decision making, understanding the computer camera, sensing the actuators to make that decision and then act on that information to get the atoms on target. The whole implement itself is really just a vehicle to move this decision making application unit through the field. Robotics can come in and solve a problem that people are already paying for. So it's, it's much easier to put a value on that than solutions that may propose themselves as some sort of future ro I no, it does this and this is what you already pay for it. Uh So you know how to value it. I mean, it may not be completely obvious to everyone kind of looking at our, our food system, but it actually operates in some very large silos that, you know, don't really have a lot of feedback loops. That was one of the big things about Benson Hill that I found interesting this connectivity to the end customer. Benson Hill is a, a very innovative genetics company with really a focus on how do we rec commoditize or come up with the version two of soybean that crop is really bred to yield when you're feeding it to poultry or, or any of the other end uses, they then supplementing it with a whole range of different things to make up for its deficiencies. And if you step back and say, well, what if we had a higher protein soybean? Um What if that soybean had, you know, less problems with anti nutritionals? Then you have a much more ideal feedstock. You have a much better fit with your own customer and that's what we've done and that's what we're doing. Statistics is somewhat of a backward looking science and it tells you what's happened. Machine learning has this opportunity to tell you what's gonna happen. So then you say, well, can I use these predictive technologies to tell me earlier on in my pipeline, which candidate products are going to succeed? What we learned was we actually could predict fairly early on if you can get it mostly right. That's a massive advantage. And then you can start thinking about, well, why do I have that next testing stage? If I've already predicted two stages ahead, what's gonna happen? You know, there's a desperate need over the next couple of decades to unlock significant more agricultural productivity and efficiency. You know, the other area is, you know, how do you have a lot to touch on the environment? Historically, there are archaeological records of many societies that denied their land and destroyed their ability to produce healthy food or to produce food at all, keeping the nutrients that you need to grow in the soil so that you have the ability to apply less and use less to ultimately grow more. Uh It's important for, you know, the health of the food that you consume. But ultimately, the health of the farm itself in terms of its ability, that land's ability to produce value, um and our ability to do it for the long term. Uh If we're gonna produce 35% more because the population is going through the roof, we, we have to do that. The impact that this industry has on, on basically every single person in the world. Um You know, Facebook disappeared tomorrow. You know, there'd be sure a lot of people would be upset but the world doesn't end. But if, if food disappears tomorrow, uh the the world certainly does end, right. So, you know, our goal is fundamentally better healthier, more sustainable food system.