Look Up And Over the Fence: Technology is Changing Agriculture In Real-Time

Analyst of the ag retail business Shane Thomas joins the podcast to talk about his latest insights including the three reasons why drones are having a second coming in agriculture.
Analyst of the ag retail business Shane Thomas joins the podcast to talk about his latest insights including the three reasons why drones are having a second coming in agriculture.
(The Scoop)

Analyst of the ag retail business Shane Thomas joins The Scoop podcast to talk about his latest in-sights from taking survey of the business landscape and seeing what technologies and trends are on the horizon.

What are some of those top topics that you're encountering in your consulting today?

There's a lot on the e-commerce side of things. And of course, to me e-commerce is only one aspect of having a digital experience for a customer. Having a digital experience for your staff is  having the digital tools to be able to support their day to day conversations with customers, how they track information, how they view data, how they actually engage with cur-rent customers, future customers and how they understand their business. 
Then also, the technologies themselves in terms of the agronomic technologies, tools or technologies that will support how an agronomist supports their farm customer in the future, whether that's a decision based tool, whether that's something precision based, whether that's something drone based for example. I have a lot of conversations with organizations trying to navigate how they can structure their digital strategy, how they can actually engage with some of these organizations and so working with them on a lot of different things. 

Whether it's in Canada, whether you're in the Midwest, US or the Pacific Northwest, it's all different. And so it's all about trying to understand the nuances of the technologies, the customers and the desires of the organization and then just the geography and farmers and customers have been there too. So lots of interesting things within those subjects.


What do you think has been the biggest event or thing that come about in the past year in 2021 that has a direct impact on ag retail?

You have Dicamba. You have supply chain issues. You have fertilizer. I think that we could dive into a lot of different areas of what's going on there and the impacts and not the corporate veil, so don't focus in on that as much day to day. So I'll focus a little bit more on call it the tech side of things and I think there's probably two dynamics there that are the biggest. 

I'll cheat a little bit and have to and, and they're not necessarily something that's going to impact at retail day to day in November of 2021. But it's starting to set up the stage for what November of 2023 or November of 2024 could look like. I see one of these aspects is just the macro trend of carbon and soil health and all that and obviously that was happening before but if you look at the last year and in the last 12 to 14 months has just been an explosion of interest in this space. And I think the announcements around partnerships with different organizations are really going to be instrumental to driving whether that comes to fruition and what that looks like as carbon credits and carbon offsets being created what that looks like when it does come to fruition. 

I focus a lot on the acquisitions that are occurring within the space, and so you look at Semios acquiring AgWorld .They have some really strong business in the special crops that have now entered into the call it more of the row crop and field crop space. You have bushel doing a lot of different unique things that support not only retail, but even some of the down-stream infrastructure which ultimately will impact retail because to me, we're not as much going to be as separated throughout the value chain in the future. We're going to start to see how the decision of an agronomist is very much going to be influenced by the data that's going to be flowing downstream and the demands of some of the things that are happening downstream. 

Is there a technology that at first blush you weren’t sure how it could be applied in agriculture with real impact, but now you see it differently?

One that comes to mind the most is drones in general. There’s a couple of different ways to look at drones, but when I think of drones I go back to my days as an agronomist and being told ‘Yeah, you're going to go out you're going to take this remote control, it's going to take you 45 minutes to fly a field and you're going and be able to make a recommendation off of that.’  I always thought I could just walk it or ride on my quad. So I was pretty negative on drones. 

Look at 2013 when I was hearing a lot more about drones to 2021, and you look at the data processing capabilities that are from a remote perspective, you can process some of that data faster. There's some of the autonomous functionality coming to fruition and again, this might not all be here today, but I'm bullish on that. This might actually make them a little bit more viable and something value add-ed to a lot of the different things an agronomist does or a farmer does. 

And then you have things like spray regulation and potentially spraying different pieces or different active ingredients or fungicides or herbicides. 

And I think that biggest change for me came from the mindset change of it's not all or nothing. I used to think we're not going to put a drone out to spray 800 acres. We're not gonna put a drone up to go find all this all data when we use a satellite, but if you start to look at it in conjunction with satellite imagery or in conjunction with a large spray unit, all of a sudden you start to see where those little holes that they fill and what it can do different than a large sprayer.  I'm pretty excited about the potential of what they can do to support spraying around power lines, spraying in areas that are too wet to get in-to. When you might spray the other 1000 acres of your farm by actually putting the sprayer on or get-ting a custom applied, but you might have 120 acres that gets sprayed by a custom drone that you wouldn't have got that product on on-time. 

What's your big takeaway from all that analysis that you've done on digital acres that agribusinesses are claiming in their footprint? 

I have created a graph called the Upstream Ag Digitized Acres Chart, and it's really just showcasing all the public data that's out there around the acres that large companies or startup companies have claimed to have under management. And what I come to definitely realize is that an acre is not an acre. 

I realized that before, but you really start to see because there's a lot of interesting comments that come in from it. There's numbers of different layers of data you can acquire. So whether the farmer is constantly engaging, whether the trusted advisors are constantly engaging, it increases the value. Not all acres are valuable if you're not making any money off it or you're not making your product better for farmers to utilize it. And so, I've definitely come to the opinion that it's more about what you're actually doing for the farmers on that acre than having 100 million or 200 million or whatever that number of acres is. 

I think that chart is a pretty cool tool as a jumping off point to say, ‘hey, here's the companies that are on a lot of different acres. Let's see how they are using this data.’ 

Is there a topic or an area that you think the ag retail channel hasn't been as warm toward or hasn't received as well that they're really missing the boat on?

There’s always this aspect of just being more focused on taking the time to say, ‘hey, you know what, I'm going to look up and I'm going to look over the fence or I'm going to try and look around the corner for the next couple of days and see what services might be beneficial for my customer.’

Maybe that is diving into some carbon partnerships. Maybe that is diving more on the novel insurance or financing side of things. Maybe that is trying to better support their digital experience. 

There's always an opportunity to pick the head back up and try to look around the corner and get creative for what you can do to support that customer and anticipate their needs moving forward.

What’s one prediction that you will share for 2022?

I'll maybe give you two comments on this. 

This is one pretty general–when I look at the collaboration between large organizations and startups in the tech and traditional incumbent side of things, I think we're gonna see that along with acquisition, ramp up even more in the coming 12 to 14 months. I think we're really at the point where these organizations have acknowledged and understand and have began to really understand that farmers don’t want to have all these different apps and there's a lot of startups out there with doing all the same thing, but let's make sure we pick one and we dive into it. There's the opportunity to build out APIs. We’re see more collaboration and acquisitions on that front. 

And one that’s maybe not as specific, but maybe pushing a little bit more out there is we’ve seen some announcements from Amazon moving into India in the ag space, we have Microsoft that's dab-bling in some of their agriculture related initiatives, you have Google having some different focuses within the ag space. And so they may not come in and try to disrupt, but what I think is that we'll see them have their strategies and their endeavors come more to the forefront. I think we'll see more at-tempts to work with some of the large agribusiness incumbent organizations as well, but I really do think that we'll start to hear more from them moving forward in the next 12, 14 or 18 months.

Thomas talks more about biologicals, automation, precision ag, and more in this episode of the podcast: 

You can subscribe to his Substack here.
 

 

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