Spatial on Saturdays No. 5
A quick trip into geospatial and agriculture, why agtech is growing, and cranberries.
By the numbers
$18,200,000,000
Amount of external capital invested in AgTech in 2021
60%
Percentage of cranberries grown in the US that are grown in Wisconsin
A quick look at AgTech and geospatial
Agriculture has always been a core vertical for GIS, but in recent years it is growing do to an abundance of high-quality geospatial data, machine learning growth, and climate change factors impacting agriculture. The Mapscapping website does a great job detailing the range of use cases for the ag industry in this post.
The space is established and growing. There are 78 companies operating in the geospatial and agriculture accounting for ~$500 million in funding (far more if you include Trimble).
Descartes Labs (🇺🇸 - New Mexico): Platform that allows scalable spatial analytics on imagery data (ex. sugar market forecasting)
TerraManga (🇧🇷): Fintech company focusing on risk mitigation and credit for farmers using imagery monitoring
Hydrosat (🇺🇸 - DC): Thermal imagery and embedded analytics for agriculture
AtlasAI (🇺🇸 - Bay Area): analytics tool with geospatial data to guide investment and resource allocation in emerging markets
Agerpoint (🇺🇸 - North Carolina): Measures plant and vegetation with point cloud data collected from mobile phones and other sources
Oceanfarmr (🇦🇺): Ocean farm operations management system
Latitudo40 (🇮🇹): Unified analytics platform to extract data from imagery and IOT data
SoilOptix (🇨🇦): Digital soil mapping service for farmers
Jane’s Weather (🇦🇺): Actionable weather insights for farmers
Semantic (🇮🇳): Imagery and weather analytics for agriculture
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Increased focus due to climate change. The changing patterns in weather conditions, catastrophic events, and temperature is showing up in many of the strategies of these companies. South Carolina recently announced a partnership to address these core issues with government agencies and advocacy groups to understand how farmland is at risk from climate change and population growth.
American Farmland Trust, in partnership with several South Carolina governmental and advocacy groups, is launching a tool that does precisely this to preserve vital farmland at risk of development. Palmetto 2040: Visioning Alternative Futures, Launching Solutions is a geospatial modeling and policy analysis tool designed to identify and model future outcomes, areas at highest risk of development and threats to South Carolina’s farmland, jobs and quality of life, according to a news release.
It looks to accomplish this using a geospatial solution in one county, then expand to the entire state.
Climate and vertical farming are key drivers in the broader ag-tech space. Climate factors are front and center in many companies in the ag-tech space. This article from TechCrunch explains how investors are shaping their investment strategies around solutions that grapple with climate change. The title, “If it’s agtech, it’s climate change: How the crisis is shaping investors’ strategies” really says it all.
Undoubtedly, this has some deal-makers in tech salivating. As startups look for ways to adapt the global food system to the chaos of today, we reached out to seven agtech investors to get a better understanding of how the climate crisis has informed their strategies to date.
“Climate challenges are not new to anybody operating in the broader food and agriculture space, so our approach is to invest in solutions that can help mitigate and adapt to climate change,” Yield Lab partner Camila Petignat told TechCrunch.
Themes the firm looks at “include soil and water conservation, improved use of crop inputs, the shift from chemical to biological crop protection solutions and reduction of food waste,” Petignat said.
The other trend that is popping up is vertical farming, as you can see by many of the articles in the AgTech tag on TechCrunch. The impact for geospatial? Route-to-market optimization, site selection, and logistics are a few that come to mind.
Yes, but. Farmers still have to use the technology. For many of the upstream analytical tools, they rely on data from the farmer to develop the analytics (the remote sensing use cases are sheltered from this). An article by McKinsey points out the farmer adoption problem in clearer detail. This chart provides a good synopsis of the adoption problem.
The bottom line. Climate change is changing agriculture and geospatial analytics plays a key role in understanding and fixing these problems. There is a ton of capital going into the space, but many companies are still in early stages. This is however a great opportunity for job seekers as climate change and food scarcity are not going away.
St. Louis is an emerging ag-tech and geospatial hub (again)
In Spatial on Saturdays No.3, I took a look at how St. Louis is becoming a geospatial center of the US and beyond, and here again, we see that geospatial agriculture is also a core industry in the region. This article talks about this in more detail:
In 2021, the US National Geospatial Agency (NGA) announced a $1.75bn new west headquarters in St. Louis. Then, something curious started happening – agtech companies began moving to the city.
“We woke up one day and realised we have a new industry sector in St. Louis,” says Elliott Kellner, who heads the Center for AgTech and Location Science Technologies (CATALST) programme. This new industry sits at the nexus of agriculture and geospatial technologies.
Cultivation Capital is headquartered in St. Louis and focuses its investments on early-stage companies, with an emphasis on agriculture, technology, and geospatial. Way to go St. Louis.
And, cranberries.
This is one of my favorite use cases using imagery data and that has to do with agriculture: detecting cranberry bogs. Check it out here.
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