Technology's Place in Transforming Agriculture

In a 1984 retirement speech delivered to his colleagues at Cargill, my grandfather called for a renewed focus on the people that agriculture serves. “What is good for producers and consumers,” he said, “is good for us.” His intention was to inspire a more efficient commodity business, but his message – that working in the interests of farmers and consumers will benefit the agricultural whole – resonates a quarter century later. As we search for a way to transition on a large scale to a more diverse and vibrant farming and food culture, we must focus on transforming the relationship between farmers and the people they feed.

The distended relationship between farms and individuals is the fundamental problem in the food system we’ve inherited. Supply chains and the corporate cultures that house them keep information isolated. Choices about what to produce and buy are limited to what merchants will trade and processors will sell. The realities of agricultural production bewilder the quarterly projections of Wall Street.

Yet efforts to circumvent the prevailing order abound. As Joanne Wilson rightly points out in this series, farms that traditionally depended on wholesale buyers increasingly turn now to direct markets. Farms do better when they plan crops, set prices, and choose markets based on intelligence from the people who actually eat their harvest. They also claim more of the dollar spent on their food when they sell directly to individuals (though because of inefficiencies in farmers’ markets and CSAs the profit margin on that dollar is not much higher than it is when a farmer sells wholesale). Despite their proliferation in recent years, these alternative models present substantial barriers – namely the cost to farms of finding and reaching a large customer base – that limit their widespread availability and benefits. Technology has the ability to level the barriers and move alternative models beyond the niche.

That technology has not yet turned the food industry on its head indicates how much complexity the food system presents. Reforming how we grow, seek, and consume food has meaning for our culture and our humanity that de-institutionalizing the rental car and hotel industries does not. Agriculture touches seven billion people with as many different palates, preferences, and nutritional needs. While technology has carved into the markets, products, and identities of almost every other sector, farming and food defy easy solutions. Environmental health, human health, economic relationships, market structures, personal histories, and food cultures are colorful and sometimes conflicting strands of the agricultural dilemmas we face.

To make lasting change in the agriculture and food sector, we need to prioritize two things: farms’ profitability and the affordability of food for households. We need to shift the balance of the consumer dollar to the farmer – the participant in the food system that serves the most critical function, takes on the most risk, and makes the choices that have the largest influence on the environmental, nutritional, flavor, and quality profile of the food we eat. The best way to do that is to give farms a way to sell their harvest directly to individuals.

The dual objectives of farms and their customers doing better go hand in hand, and to accomplish both we need to restructure markets. Companies that play in the middle of the agricultural supply chain do best when producers and consumers are separated by time, place, and information. In contrast, by giving producers and consumers a platform that coordinates transactions and the movement of goods from farm to household, Plovgh provides one example of how technology can make widely available the benefits of alternative markets that CSAs and farmers’ markets already provide on a small scale. Applying technology to models that restore the connection between farmers and the people they feed has the potential to make an already disruptive trend a new standard for agriculture.


This piece also appears on Plovgh and Food+Tech Connect.

Open Data in Agriculture and Why It Matters

The farmer usually knows best – for his or her land, crop, livestock, and profitability, among other things. As a girl on a Minnesota farm in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was in awe of my grandfather’s ability to know just what his beef cattle needed – more water, richer pasture, better nutrients – and to have a crop rotation schedule seemingly in his head. It was as though my Granddad could feel his way through the unpredictability of weather, supply and demand, and price fluctuations to make the optimal decisions for his operation.

A couple of years ago I was with him on his farm when the cows were getting checked for pregnancy. He sat in the middle of the cattle yard while cow after cow ran through the chute. After each check, the cowboy gave a signal to indicate the cow’s status, and Granddad jotted down on a spreadsheet the results that would later that evening get saved to someone’s hard drive. What could I build, I thought to myself, that would make this process easier, and link the data that emerged from this days-long affair with other information from the farm itself, the region, and the markets to help my family make even smarter operating choices?

It’s a question that participants from across the food sector have pondered for years, and to which new information technology is beginning to provide answers. With capabilities like social media that offers instantaneous mini-reports, remote sensing that announces field-level conditions, and user-generated mapping that offers an on-the-ground view of production, merchandising, and consumption activity, we are beginning to get the tools at our fingertips to optimize decision-making with connected, real-time information, not just intuition. Farm management software, mobile applications, and web-based tools are increasingly available to farmers around the world and present an opportunity for us to understand and act on the global interconnections among food, agriculture, water, energy, soil, farm profitability, and human nutrition as never before.

I do not want farmers’ wisdom to evaporate in the face of technology. Quite the contrary, I want that specialized knowledge of acre, crop, and herd to be augmented and preserved. Agricultural and food system data is important because it lets us see what we couldn’t see before, and in a world in which the expertise to sustain our food supply lives in the minds and senses of aging farmers, I would like to see a 21st century agricultural revolution that builds on farmers’ talent and perception to capture and interpret newly available signals from the ecosystem.

Imagine, for example, that a farmer needs to decide how much to irrigate during a drought. It's a decision that affects just his farm in the short run, but has systemic costs and benefits. If the farmer could connect historical commodity prices, weather charts, financial and environmental costs, and soil conditions to assess the trade-offs in the choice he makes, he could complement his highly refined intuition with the long-term effects that his decision has on his farm and beyond. The more widely information and tools like this are available, the more optimal decisions participants can make throughout the food system.

Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting. The USDA released its Open Government Plan in April and the possibilities the agency’s data presents for developers and entrepreneurs are many. However, there exists no single platform for coordinating the numerous strands of measurements, probabilities, risks, and fluctuations in real-time. We need to build toward a high level of integration and openness in data in order to truly be stewards of the land and sustainable producers and consumers of agricultural products.

At a time when food is becoming a political issue instead of being discussed as the fundamental need that it is, we must access competing data and analysis to inform the investment, innovation, and policy behind food production and consumption. To transform data into metrics that empower decision-making across the food system, we need to get a broad spectrum of actors in the sector to communicate and collaborate. Let this essay serve as a call for a networked food system that harnesses and applies robust information through data generation, database architecture, open research and collaboration, and agile, relevant metrics, in pursuit of more efficient, more sustainable, more productive food and farming.

Welcome!

Welcome to "Provenance: A conversation about how we eat"! On this site, we will explore the many dimensions of the food and agricultural system upon which billions of people depend for nourishment every day. That system is in a state of transition as we question how to weigh the human and environmental health trade-offs, economic costs, social effects, and nutritional benefits of the food we eat.

Provenance will be a place for a multitude of voices from the global food landscape to come through, for anyone who wants to have a stronger connection to the farmers and producers, food processors, cooks, policy makers, food companies, and hungry people that are a part of this diverse agricultural ecosystem. It will be a place to understand where we are now, consider where we need to go, and generate new ideas about how we can get there. I hope you will join me!