California produces more than half of the fruit vegetables in the US. It is also the country’s largest dairy state and produces two-thirds of all the nuts grown in the US. With California also home to Silicon Valley and almost all of the world’s largest technology companies, farmers in the golden state have a unique advantage in the agricultural technology space.

Californian growers have created an agri tech accelerator hub in the Salinas Valley, which is known as the salad bowl of the world because of all the lettuce grown there. Built by Taylor Farms, this ag-tech hub works as a space for tech companies to meet and talk to farmers and agribusinesses. It is purposely situated just an hour from Silicon Valley.

A lot of farming businesses sponsored the development of the hub. Its director Dennis Donohue was formerly the mayor of Salinas and is also a radicchio (chicory) farmer.

Startup ag-tech companies such as Food Origins and iTradeNetwork have used the hub space to develop their businesses.

Food Origins

Food Origins provides internet of things (IOT) devices and packaging labels to companies that use labour to hand-harvest fruits and produce. Employees can scan barcodes in the field registering the location, package and employee ID. This data is passed via the cloud to provide information regarding the progress of the harvest, the density of the production in the field and the velocity of the harvest. The data allows precision comprehension of the origins of the produce during food safety call-outs.

iTradeNetwork

iTradeNetwork is typically used by retailers and food service to buy perishable goods.

The company’s software records critical tracking events, such as delivery to truck, which would previously have been recorded on paper.

While growers do a lot in terms of traceability, the company has found that buyers don’t always follow through.

iTradeNetwork uses the Western Growers hub as a good place to meet its customers.

Farm focus: Bowles Farming

Danny Royeer is vice-president of technology at Bowles Farming, a 12,000ac cotton, tomato and melon farm.

Danny has a $0.5m annual budget to implement technological solutions on the farm that improve management and save money on the crops.

He is in the process of transitioning from Crop Track software to Ag World, which he hopes will help track the profitability of crops at field level. It allows Danny to split the costs of irrigation to see if a tractor or pipe is more expensive, for example.

Ag World is an Australian software package that costs Bowles Farming around $30,000 per year depending on how many users it has. All employees at Bowles have the latest iPhone and will be expected to enter data to the system.

“Ag World brings together data from our John Deere machines as well as agronomic information,” says Royeer. “One of the big things for us are variable-rate applications. We’re using historical satellite imagery and soil sampling to create management zones. It saves us around $30/acre and when you scale that up to 4,000 acres of cotton it makes a lot of sense.”

Royeer is able to turn on and off the irrigation valves in each field using only his phone. He also uses Drop Control, which provides him with soil moisture data.

A soil sampler at Bowles Farming. \ Odile Evans

“We will have a robotic weeding machine next year [2019], which one of our employees co-built with a German military robotic company. I don’t think we’ll go autonomous with big horsepower tractors. I’d advocate for smaller equipment because they mostly sit there for nine months of the year,” he says.

“Drones don’t scale for us because you are not allowed to fly them out of the line of sight. Drones could replace satellite imagery which tells me the chlorophyll content of cotton for spraying. We could also detect leaks in the irrigation system with drones.”

Royeer accepts that culturally it can be an issue to get people to shift to the new system of using a phone for reporting information from the field and getting people to report a problem.

“We give the guys $100 for putting in information that might show a broken pipe in the field.

“There has to be a level of accountability, but we are re-writing job descriptions to include digital literacy. There is no replacement for boots on the ground but most of what agronomists do is operate a big algorithm with a subjective view. We can just write those algorithms – we need more data scientists in agriculture.”