“In the face of increasingly volatile weather, the global $3 trillion agriculture industry depends on the company’s unique technologies to help stabilize and improve profits and, ultimately, help feed the world.”
This statement from crops company Monsanto underscores how data and technology are starting to underpin the latest economic sector’s transformation from product to service.
Monsanto has projected in a Wall Street Journal article that data-science tools could help farmers raise an additional $20bn worth of crops and helps explain efforts it and peers have been making to add technology tools to expand the range of services they sell to farmers, ranging from seed selection to fertilizer use and even choosing the best time to harvest crops.
In November, Monsanto acquired weather service Climate for $930m from its venture consortium that had included corporate venturing unit Google Ventures. Last month, Monsanto’s Climate bought soil testing service Solum, leaving behind a software service provider, Granular, as a separate company funded by a consortium including Google Ventures.
Rather than rely on (s)praying more, farmers and their suppliers are looking to be more effective through the allocation of data and technology. In a CleantechIQ profile in 2012, Nick Koshnick, former CEO and now vice-president of measurements at Solum under Climate, said as well as most farm vehicles having GPS systems: “If you include weather and satellite imagery and meter-by-meter yield data, there’s a huge amount of data available, and there’s a huge opportunity.”
Other crops companies, such as Cargill and Syngenta, have been active in the same space – with Syngenta Ventures backing Illumitex last year, while Cargill’s Black River investment team manages $6.5bn. This month, chemicals company DuPont has struck a three-year, exclusive partnership with the University of Missouri and the US Department of Agriculture to combine the regulator’s soil- mapping functions with the university’s soil-science expertise and DuPont’s crop-modeling technology to produce a “higher resolution” view of soil conditions for farmers, according to Joe Foresman, director of services for DuPont’s seed division, to the WSJ.
In a world of population growth to an expected nine billion people later this century, most dependent on the top six inches of topsoil and subject to sporadic access to clean water, there are good reasons why the sector is important to people and investors.
The Global Corporate Venturing Symposium on 20-21 May will hold an agriculture-tech roundtable sponsored by Canada-based BioEnterprise.