Why Big Ag Likes Big Data – NYTimes.com

Why Big Ag Likes Big Data

By QUENTIN HARDY

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Looking at data like historic rainfall and soil quality to help farmers predict crop yields can create what one Monsanto executive called “the next level of agriculture.”

Big Data’s push to remake the industrial economy took a big step forward Wednesday, when Monsanto announced it had bought the Climate Corporation.

Monsanto said it was paying $930 million in cash for the company, which looks at data like historic rainfall and soil quality to help farmers predict crop yields. Monsanto hopes to apply the Climate Corporation’s data analysis insight across the company, to create what a Monsanto executive called “the next level of agriculture.”

“A farmer should be able to grow on farmland square meter by square meter, for lots more yield, planting seeds at different rates for each meter,” said Kerry Preete, Monsanto’s executive vice president of strategy. “We’re a data company at heart, breeding seeds and helping farmers optimize yields and manage risk.”

To its critics, Monsanto is something worse, producing genetically modified crops that it then sells to farmers on a one-time use basis. In either version of the company, however, Mr. Preete has a point about the importance of data to Monsanto.

Last year Monsanto paid $250 million for Precision Planting , a company that enables farmers to plant seeds in various depths and spaces, almost by the square meter, so different parts of a farm can get different treatment. Mr. Preete said Monsanto saw this as a first step in developing two-way farm machinery systems that took up and receive data, giving farmers better sense of what to plant and how much water and fertilizer to use.

The company also plans to sell Climate Corporation’s crop insurance products to farmers internationally. Climate Corporation writes these policies in the United States based on a wealth of public data on rainfall, temperature and soil types around the country. It is not clear how well or how quickly this can be deployed internationally.

In effect, Monsanto hopes to do for about one billion acres of worldwide farmland what General Electric hopes to do for the electrical grid and the aviation industry: Gain unprecedented insights into the interaction of products as they work in the world, make them work more efficiently and possibly sell new services based on the insights.

For Climate Corporation, which started life as Weatherbill and hoped to insure miniature golf courses against unexpected showers, the purchase was both a payday and a chance to build an even bigger business inside Monsanto.

“Monsanto already has more research data than anyone else in agriculture,” said David Friedberg, the cofounder and chief executive of Climate Corporation. “Data itself is going to be nearly worthless – you have to sell insights from the data and suggestions of what to do.”

That implies working out entirely new businesses, including new kinds of user interfaces for people on tractors, as opposed to researchers and financial analysts. Clearly, the spending isn’t over for Monsanto.

Or for that matter, for its competitors. As I indicated in another article on Wednesday, Oracle is focusing on the global agriculture sector as a place where it can sell Big Data hardware and software. It wants lots of companies to buy this stuff, and everybody is focusing on farmers in India and China as much as the United States.

via Why Big Ag Likes Big Data – NYTimes.com.

Vertical ‘Pinkhouses:’ The Future Of Urban Farming? : The Salt : NPR

by MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF

May 21, 2013 3:16 PM

The idea of vertical farming is all the rage right now. Architects and engineers have come up with spectacular concepts for lofty buildings that could function as urban food centers of the future.

In Sweden, for example, they’re planning a 177-foot skyscraper to farm leafy greens at the edge of each floor. But so far, most vertical gardens that are up and running actually look more like large greenhouses than city towers. And many horticulturists don’t think sky-high farms in cities are practical.

“The idea of taking a skyscraper and turning it into a vertical farming complex is absolutely ridiculous from an energy perspective,” says horticulturist Cary Mitchell of Purdue University, who’s been working on ways to grow plants in space for more than 20 years.

The future of vertical farming, Mitchell thinks, lies not in city skyscrapers, but rather in large warehouses located in the suburbs, where real estate and electricity are cheaper.

And oh, yeah, instead of being traditional greenhouses lit by fluorescent lamps, he says these plant factories will probably be “pinkhouses,” glowing magenta from the mix of blue and red LEDs.

Light is a major problem with vertical farming. When you stack plants on top of each other, the ones at the top shade the ones at the bottom. The only way to get around it is to add artificial light — which is expensive both financially and environmentally.

Vertical farmers can lower the energy bill, Mitchell says, by giving plants only the wavelengths of light they need the most: the blue and red.

“Twenty years ago, research showed that you could grow lettuce in just red light,” Mitchell says. “If you add a little bit of blue, it grows better.”

Plant’s photosynthesis machinery is tuned to absorb red and blue light most efficiently. They have a handful of other pigments in their leaves that catch other wavelengths, but the red and blue wavelengths are the big ones, supplying the majority of the light needed to grow.

Cary Mitchell and Celina Gomez, of Purdue University, harvest tomatoes grown next to a tower of blue and red LEDs.

Courtesy of Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell

So why LEDs? They’re super energy efficient in general, but unlike traditional greenhouse lamps, they can be tuned to specific wavelengths. Why use all of ROYGBIV when just RB will do?

And there’s another advantage to using LEDs in greenhouses and vertical farming, Mitchell says: Because these lights are cooler, you can place them close to the plants — even stacked plants — and lose even less energy.

Recently, Mitchell and his graduate student designed a 9-foot-tall tower of lights and grew tomato plants right up against it. “As the plants get taller, we turn on the [light] panels higher up,” he explains. “It takes about two months before all the panels are on.”

The towers cut energy consumption by about 75 percent, Mitchell and his team reported earlier this year.

Right now, experiments are using these specialized LEDs to supplement natural light, not replace it.

But as LEDs get more and more efficient, could growers forgo the natural light altogether and grow crops completely in enclosed rooms, where they’re protected from temperature changes or damaging pests?

That’s exactly what Barry Holtz, at Caliber Biotherapeutics, is already doing.

His farms have never seen the light of day.

Plants at Caliber Biotherapeutics grow under blue and red LEDs, with wavelengths of light that match those that get absorbed by the photosynthetic machinery.

He and his company have built a 150,000-square-foot “plant factory” in Texas that is completely closed off from the outside world. They grow 2.2 million plants, stacked up 50 feet high, all underneath the magenta glow of blue and red LEDS.

“A photon is a terrible thing to waste,” Holtz tells The Salt. “So we developed these lights to correctly match the photosynthesis needs of our plants. We get almost 20 percent faster growth rate and save a lot energy.”

Holtz is growing a tobacco-like plant to make new drugs and vaccines. The indoor pinkhouse gives him tight control over the expensive crops, so his team can stop diseases and contamination.

Holtz says this type of indoor gardening isn’t going to replace traditional farms anytime soon. It’s still relatively expensive for growing food. “We couldn’t compete with iceberg lettuce farmers,” he says, “but for certain specialty crops, the economics wouldn’t be so bad.”

And, he says, the pinkhouse is actually quite efficient when it comes to water and electricity. “We’ve done some calculations, and we lose less water in one day than a KFC restaurant uses, because we recycle all of it.”

via Vertical ‘Pinkhouses:’ The Future Of Urban Farming? : The Salt : NPR.

Soaring Bee Deaths in 2012 Sound Alarm on Malady – NYTimes.com

Not about food but food related..

By MICHAEL WINES

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

Pig Farmers Face Pressure on the Size of the Sty :NYTimes

I thought it was interesting to hear the perspective on this issue from the farmers side. Also it’s interesting that though we as consumers are always saying we want ‘cage free’ items, the statistics on how many are actually purchased is a bit sad (and not really a good incentive for the farmer).

Gestation crates have come under fire by animal rights groups because they are barely bigger than the pigs themselves.

¶ELDRIDGE, Iowa — Sow 44733 had broken the shoulder of one of her pen mates, rousted another who was huddled in the corner and was chewing on the ear of a third.

Enlarge This Image

Stephen Mally for The New York Times

Tom Dittmer said he initially moved sows from housing pens to gestation crates to ensure their safety.

¶It was that kind of behavior that led hog farmers like Tom Dittmer to isolate sows in individual stalls called gestation crates that are barely bigger than the pigs themselves.

¶“The reason the industry switched to crates wasn’t because we wanted to harm our animals,” Mr. Dittmer said. “We did it because we thought it was what was best for the animals.” The move also kept the price of pork reasonably low for consumers, he said.

¶This year, however, Mr. Dittmer and fellow hog farmers are under increasing pressure from corporate pork buyers and animal rights groups to return to the old way of doing things: putting sows in group housing. In the last week of September alone, three companies — Dunkin’ Donuts, ConAgra Foods and Brinker International, which operates Chili’s — announced that over the next decade, they would no longer buy pork derived from pigs housed in gestation crates.

¶This week, the Bruegger’s bagel chain joined them. That brought the number of fast-food companies and food retailers that have made such commitments this year to 32 — a stunning victory for theHumane Society of the United States, which has worked for years to persuade pork producers to make the change. The National Pork Producers Council said it did not know how much pork these companies bought but estimated it might be about one-fifth of the pork produced.

¶Farmers like Mr. Dittmer resent the tactics, saying they worry that the move will be unsustainably costly for them and result in soaring pork prices for consumers.