One-line solution summary:
Cloud Agronomics is enabling the digital revolution toward sustainable food production.
Pitch your solution.
Aerial imagery today lacks the features necessary to extract insights beyond what the human eye can see. The result is inordinate amounts of food waste, use of inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides), soil degradation, and an increase in carbon and methane emissions.
We are unlocking the potential of soil as solution. Like a CT scan for crops, we are performing in depth nutrient analysis, predicting yields and monitoring carbon from our advanced imaging cameras on aircraft.
With our analytics, we can prove to the agriculture industry the efficacy of using their land as a carbon sink, and incentivize carbon farming with regular carbon monitoring in a carbon marketplace.
As our platform reduces harmful impacts of farming, we will make farming more profitable, regenerative and more efficient in order to accommodate for the needs of the growing global population.
This is the path forward: sustainable food systems powered by proactive analytics.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Problem: There is a data gap in agriculture that prevents farmers from making informed decisions, forcing them to farm reactively, instead of proactively. The agriculture industry is responsible for 24% of global GHG emissions. Those emissions come from different stages of food production: food waste, overuse of inputs, and industrial agriculture practices. Growers are left guessing when making decisions because there is no verifiable system to analyze crop and soil nutrients, predict yields, or monitor carbon sequestration in soil at scale. At present, this is an expensive and inefficient process. The industry has to take physical crop and soil samples across a field and bring them to a lab for individual testing. The alternative is aerial imagery, but offerings are limited in diagnostics because they only utilize 3-30 bands of light, which can only tell growers if their plants are stressed, but not why the plants are stressed, or what to do about it. Over the next 40 years, we need to produce more food than in the last 8,000 years combined...using less land. Behind the scenes, a radical shift is needed to retool our food systems and optimize food production for a growing population.
What is your solution?
Solution: Cloud Agronomics is remotely analyzing nutrients, predicting yields, and monitoring carbon levels in soil at scale. We use our custom remote sensing apparatuses to scan crops and soil -- collecting 300x more data than satellites, with a finer resolution. Our proprietary algorithms, ML expertise, and spectral scientists work together to take the raw data we collect and transform it into actionable findings for growers and stakeholders. We are enabling agriculture to become a solution to climate change, instead of a large GHG emitter. Accurate, real-time carbon monitoring will give carbon credit marketplaces the data to provide growers a financial incentive to transition to carbon farming. After surveying sequestration potentials in topsoil in 20 regions of the world, researchers have estimated that we can sequester enough carbon in the soil to offset 20 to 35% of anthropogenic GHG emissions. With the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices, we could sequester carbon in topsoil, bring nutrients back to the soil and crops, and reduce use of environmentally harmful inputs (pesticides, fertilizers, and insecticides). This, in turn, would improve crop resilience because land farmed with regenerative practices is more productive, drought and flood resistant, and decreases crop vulnerability to disease and pest infestation.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution directly serves farmers and agribusiness companies. However, we are not selling directly to farmers, so we direct our energy on understanding what crop insurers, ag consultants and other agribusiness companies need from our product. Our technology will empower growers with proactive analytics to improve nutrient management, increase yields, and track carbon sequestration on their land. We are fortunate to have Mark Tracy as CEO of Cloud Agronomics, who most recently came from Indigo Ag and brings with him more than twenty years of experience at Cargill in commodities trading. His experience in the agriculture industry helps us understand the nuances of the industry. In addition, he has a rich network of industry professionals who are helping us develop our product. We conduct user interviews with agribusiness companies who service growers, some of whom are our clients this year for our nutrient analysis solution. For our carbon monitoring solution, we are working with existing carbon marketplaces to collaboratively develop a user-friendly carbon monitoring product. The solution will address their needs because we aggregate our insights into a single platform with several analytics layers, like a Bloomberg for agriculture.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Scale practices and incentives for larger farmers and ranchers to decrease carbon emissions, land-use change, nutrient runoff, or water pollutionExplain how the problem, your solution, and your solution’s target population relate to the Challenge and your selected dimension.
The data gap in agriculture connects to the challenge and Sustainable Food Systems because it calls for advanced technology innovation enables verification for carbon credits. This problem serves farmers, who are underserved by technology and whose livelihoods have been threatened by farm consolidation. Cloud Agronomics’ analytics platform is an AI-based solution to food waste, nutrient-weak crops and disease-prone crops. We put the power of AI into the hands of the grower, allowing them to grow low-carbon, resilient, and nutritious food. Our target population, farmers and agribusiness companies provide jobs, but are also integral to the success of sustainable food systems.
Who is the primary delegate for your solution?
Jack Roswell
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Pilot: An organization deploying a tested product, service, or business model in at least one communityIn what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Boulder, CO, USAWhich of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new technologyDescribe what makes your solution innovative.
We are the only civilian company in the U.S. capable of collecting and analyzing feature rich hyperspectral data at scale. There are aerial imaging companies that use 3-30 binds of light to collect their data, but this amount of the light spectra limits them from collecting the same depth of information that hyperspectral collects. This is because hyperspectral imagery can see 300x more of the light spectra, which enables us to collect indexes on carbon, nutrients, protein, and even disease. These agricultural applications of hyperspectal imagery are cutting-edge; our closest competitor is a Swiss company, Gamaya. However, their imaging does not come near to the caliber of Cloud Agronomics' capabilities. They have improved upon the industry standard, NDVI / satellite imagery (3-30 bands); however, their technology is still fundamentally limited because they collect 20-40 bands of the light spectrum, whereas we collect 900+ bands of the light spectrum. In addition, their patents and technology limits them to small farm UAV applications and direct to farmer sales. We have designed our technology specifically for aircraft and overcome the scientific barriers of package development, firmware, georeferencing, atmospheric calibration, and analytics over the past 2.5 years. With the work that we have done, we are the only company in the world with the power to scale hyperspectral to global agriculture.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
In order to identify crop nutrients, predict yields, and monitor carbon with our hyperspectral imagery technology, we leverage deep learning and large volumes of proprietary spectral data that we have collected from the air. Fundamentally, linking spectra with on-the-ground measurements is guided by deterministic first principles developed under controlled conditions in laboratories. These controlled studies show that there are consistent, repeatable features of vegetation spectra that are predictive of leaf nutrient status, water content, and condition. Adapting these methods to airborne remote sensing is challenging, because of atmospheric interferences. We overcome these challenges using a proprietary data set of on-the-ground, lab measurements of plant condition, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium at known locations from sampled leaves. We associate these measurements with coinciding airborne hyperspectral data using deep learning. In essence, we validate our models by linking their performance with first-principles understanding of the spectral response of the model's target property.
Provide evidence that this technology works.
The academic articles below detail the use and efficacy of hyperspectral remote-sensing for some of Cloud Agronomics' use cases, like nutrient analysis and carbon monitoring.
"Detection of Phosphorus and Nitrogen Deficiencies in Corn Using Spectral Radiance Measurements" https://acsess.onlinelibrary.w...
"New spectral indicator assessing the efficiency of crop nitrogen treatment in corn and wheat" https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
"Remote Sensing Techniques for Soil Organic Carbon Estimation: A Review" https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292...
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
What is your theory of change?
Our theory of change is bolstered by the assumptions we have made as an organization: collaboration leads to innovation, recruitment and retention of highly qualified staff will result in improved products, and public-private partnerships are valuable. The context of our organization is first, agriculture. We know from research and 30+ years of agriculture experience on our team that farmers lack access to accurate, real-time insights on their crops and soil. Cloud Agronomics is in the startup phase of our business and our purpose is to give growers the data analytics they need to grow low-carbon, resilient, nutritious food for our growing global population. The problems we see are manifold: the inadequate options farmers have to diagnose their crop and soil health, production-side food waste, overuse of inputs, which produce nitrous oxide and contaminate runoff, nutrient weak and vulnerable crops, and low soil organic carbon (SOC) levels in topsoil. Our strategy of impact is to built the world's richest dataset on agriculture. In order to do so, we will continue to establish client relationships in agribusiness to build our dataset and as a source of revenue, building a product on the R&D operations we have conducted for carbon monitoring, research and prototype our applications to detecting wheat protein levels and disease detection, and connect with public and private stakeholders who could become future partners for our carbon monitoring solution. The primary target constituency are US farmers, the secondary constituency is US agribusiness companies and the US agriculture industry at large, and the ultimate constituency is the global food system. Short-term, we will increase yields, sequester carbon, improve crop nutrient profiles, resilience and disease detection. Ultimately, we will impact the world by aiding the production of plentiful, nutritious, low-carbon food and prove the efficacy of public-private engagements, especially in the sphere of climate action.
Select the key characteristics of your target population.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
In which countries do you currently operate?
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
How many people does your solution currently serve? How many will it serve in one year? In five years?
Quantifying the number of people we currently serve is difficult because food production inadvertently impacts a lot more people than we initially interface with, farmers. However, for estimation, we can approximate that our impacts is in the thousands this year. In one year, we believe we will impact hundreds of thousands of people. In five years, we project the number of those impacted by our technology to near a billion people.
What are your goals within the next year and within the next five years?
Within the next year, we plan to generate revenue from our commercialized product, NP&K (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) in the agriculture sector and extend our sales channel to risk insurers and commodities traders. In addition, it is our goal to have our carbon monitoring solution live within the year. We already have agriculture customers for our NP&K product and our sales team with 30+ years of agriculture experience will build our client base more in the next year. Our R&D carbon operation this year with Indigo Ag and Microsoft AI for Earth is the base of our carbon monitoring solution. Cloud Agronomic's Head of Product is engaging in conversations with carbon marketplaces and government representatives in order to design the carbon monitoring product with maximum impact. We will take this to market and engage in conversations with government stakeholders to pursue a public-private partnership. In the next five years, we plan to launch and establish our disease detection, yield prediction and operability in existing farm management software. To do this, our Chief Scientist, agronomic consultant, Product and Engineering teams will work together to coalesce research with our collected data and the needs of farmers.
What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year and in the next five years?
The barriers that could prevent Cloud Agronomics from accomplishing our goals in the next year and in the next five years are largely technological and financial. Our technology is proven for nutrient analysis and is nearly proven for carbon monitoring, but the applications to protein levels in wheat and disease detection are still in the research stages. Securing financial resources in the near future is important for Cloud Agronomics so that we can develop our product and go-to-market with it. We are still finishing up our Series A round of funding because the Corona Virus pandemic delayed some decision making from VC relationships. We are confident that we will close the round by the end of May 2020.
How do you plan to overcome these barriers?
In order to address our technical barriers, we will collaborate with remote-sensing experts who have experience with hyperspectral imagery. They can consult, offer their experience, or even join the team to innovate for the future of food.
Our Series A funding round is progressing well and we are continuing to receive engagement from investors. To expedite our close, we are working with our lead investor, SineWave for connections to VC firms around the globe. In addition to our VC sources of funding,
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar modelsHow many people work on your solution team?
- Full-time staff: 15
- Independent contractors: 4
- Sanjay: Full-Stack Engineer
- Pooja: Product Design
- Trent: Agronomic Consultant
- Harris: Computer Vision Architect
- Yones: Carbon R&D Advisor
How many years have you worked on your solution?
3
Why are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
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Mark Tracy spent 20+ years at Cargill in positions ranging from grain origination merchant to Director of Cargill’s Risk Management Division. Most recently, Mark was a Senior VP at Indigo Ag before joining Cloud Agronomics full time.
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Jaymin Patel was previously the youngest CFO of a NYSE Company and reported to SoftBank as the former CEO at Brightstar and IGT. Jaymin has experience operating and growing global operations.
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David Schurman is a data scientist, information designer, and project manager specializing in earth and planetary science applications. He has previously worked at NOAA, NCAR, and NASA on research ranging from geo-engineering to analysis of spectroscopy data.
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Jack Roswell performed independent remote sensing and spectroscopy research at Brown University. Jack has electrical engineering experience in Cusco for the UN. He was also nominated to the FCC Precision Ag Task Force.
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Oleksiy Zhuk performed independent optical research at Brown University. He previously was a founder of a successful robotic gimbal company.
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James Kellner, PhD is the PI at Kellner Remote Sensing Lab, and is a world-renowned plant biology and remote sensing specialist. Jim has also served as an Ambassador for Planet Labs.
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Benjamin Leff is an experienced Python and cloud engineer and has a background in founding and scaling venture backed SaaS companies.
Alex Nickel, PhD is an accomplished chemist and principal data scientist who specializes in leveraging statistics, machine learning, and deep learning to solve scientific research problems (esp. in chemical spectroscopy).
What organizations do you currently partner with, if any? How are you working with them?
Cloud Agronomics has two groups of partners this growing season:
- Paid proof of concepts with Microsoft AI for Earth and Indigo Ag for our carbon monitoring solution.
- Data provider and customer relationship with Ag Consulting Group (ACG) for our Corn nutrient analysis solution and developing our Soy nutrient analysis solution.
What is your business model?
We fuse our data with IoT, weather, markets and agronomy to deliver new analytics to our key customers in a single core platform. This year, we are impacting the way that growers in Nebraska make decisions for their corn fields and increasing their revenue by giving them real-time insights on the nutrients in their corn. As our customer and partner, Ag Consulting Group (ACG) sells our solution to the growers that they consult. We provide each grower with a weekly digital report of their fields. Each report shows nutrient levels for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium with categories "high," "normal," "low," and "deficient." The viewer can toggle the nutrient maps to view entire fields, or zoom in to view a a specific area of their fields. Instead of routinely dressing their fields with fertilizer, corn growers know where their crop needs fertilizer, reducing their cost of inputs and improving yields because their corn will have adequate nutrients.
Our carbon monitoring partners, Indigo Ag and Microsoft AI for Earth, receive similar digital reports, but of carbon topsoil levels instead of nutrient levels. We provide them with reports that quantify the amount of soil organic carbon (SOC) levels in the topsoil. They want this information with this level of detail and customization so that we can use the data to eventually incentivize carbon farming as a countermeasure to climate change.
In the future, we are excited about how we can develop our data to predict yields for commodity traders and risk insurers.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, or to other organizations?
Organizations (B2B)Why are you applying to Solve?
We are applying to solve because we believe that the supportive community of peer innovators and experts in a variety of fields can help advance our technology and its impact. Connecting with MIT networks through Solve at MIT will give us additional access to technical expertise, conference exposure, and capital. The personalized support that MIT Solve offers is incredibly valuable because this growth stage that Cloud Agronomics is in will determine our future impact.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Please explain in more detail here.
We are interested in connecting with individuals who work with remote sensing technology, AI for agriculture, and big data engineering. Whether those individuals are consulting connection, or recruited talent, these specifics areas of expertise are the lynchpin of our technology.
As we build out our board of advisors, we welcome connections to experienced individuals who are passionate about the problem we are trying to solve.
Cloud Agronomics is a start-up in our early growth stage, so any media and exposure of our technology, especially to our B2B market is important to us.
What organizations would you like to partner with, and how would you like to partner with them?
We are interested in the following partners:
- MIT faculty who focus on carbon sequestration, remote sensing, agriculture, cutting edge machine learning algorithms
- Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Australia)
- Omidyar Network
These partners will advance our solution by contributing to the development of our technology and our revenue channel development.
Solution Team
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Jack Roswell Cloud Agronomics
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David Schurman Co-Founder & CTO, Cloud Agronomics
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Petra Sikorski Director of Special Projects, Cloud Agronomics Inc.
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Solution Name:
Cloud Agronomics Inc.