Corporate AgTech Unwrapped (sort of)
Jan 27th, 2023 - My 27th Edition of Easy Observations in Agriculture
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Opening Thoughts:
As I promised in my last edition, I’m going to start keeping these a little simpler in terms of what I want to talk about and also the amount of memes I produce. For one, with supply chains in flux getting good memes these days is tougher than anytime before.
To start and highlight briefly my thoughts this week, I wanted to talk a little about some observations as of late with some bigger AgTech news from the Corporate world. Mainly with two groups, Google and John Deere. Now this isn’t really to pick on them per say, but highlight some general truths around how they deal with Ag Technology.
What is the real deal?
To get this off sweet and simple, here are the recent news articles I’m talking about. This also is just a small recent sample so where I plan to dive is much broader.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/03/why-john-deere-is-looking-for-a-satellite-partner.html
https://www.deere.com/en/news/all-news/2023-startup-collaborators/
The Deal with Deere:
Deere dealing with AgTech is neither new or any sort of problem naturally. I’m not an idiot. They literally are the leader in the space pretty much. There are two things I want to unwrap though so let’s start with the first link I picked above.
I saw a lot of people look at that first link especially in the Earth Observation world and say, “Wow, OMG Deere wants a lot of satellite imagery!” Well sure they want some for various reasons, but from what I found out the article that was written was sort of misguided internally. It was really meant to highlight satellite communication, not imagery. It’s pretty obvious they want better machine connectivity in rural areas or areas of the world with poor cell signal like Brazil. Mainly, I just wanted to highlight this isn’t some huge imagery purchase thing for JD. They will dabble for sure, but JD wanting imagery also is nothing new and they could’ve dove in years ago. Anyway, this a communication satellite plan for the most part.
The news around JD and this startup collaborator group sort of intrigued me. For one, it seems all sorts of Ag corporate groups are doing something like this these days. There really isn’t anything wrong with it, but what I want to unwrap here is why these generally exist and what they really are in the grand scheme of things.
They are genuinely interested in working together or even investing/purchasing one of these groups eventually. This is more rare I feel, but it’s a reality at times.
They want to understand your solution better to determine if it’s something they and customers even want. It’s common for startups and small AgTech groups to be in certain niches. JD and other large corps don’t like to do that at first. I think sometimes these collaborations are just so they can understand these niches better and decide if they want to dig deeper or not.
This is the bad one. They want to learn as much about your company, financials, process, cliental, and tech so they can just copy it and also know if that solution is even worth the time in the future to deal with. While one might think this doesn’t happen a lot, I can tell you from experience multiple times that it most certainly does. It’s not always via some “Collaborator” group thing, but many times it’s them just asking to learn more about you and being the large groups they are with a lot of money they usually get what they want. I’ve heard many horror stories here and unfortunately it’s common. Not saying JD is doing this here, but it wouldn’t surprise me to some extent.
The Deal with Mineral (Google, let’s be serious)
I’m not going to call them Alphabet and I also think this whole “We graduated from Google X to be our own company” thing is weird and doesn’t really change peoples minds. This is Google’s play into Agriculture no matter what you think.
I think the thing that bothers me about press like this is it always sounds the same and the basis for it is basically the same.
“We at (Major Non Ag Corporate Group) have an interest in Food and feeding the World through Agriculture. We are using our tech knowledge with (servers and crap) and (machine learning BS) to create (something we call analytics) that will help growers be more productive somehow that we don’t really understand or care but are doing it anyway because our other major competitors are doing it too. We are doing this because by 2050 the world will dive into chaos and we want to control the worlds food supply.”
Now don’t get me wrong either, I’m sure Google and the others that are diving into Ag like Microsoft, Amazon, and what not will do some good to some extent. Where I sort of feel uneasy about them doing anything in Ag is that they will just throw money at it just to see if something sticks and even if something does their uneducated understanding of Ag most likely will just mess up whatever they are trying to do.
What can easily happen and does is that other big Ag corps will naturally connect to these other non Ag corps just for the press to increase their stock price. How you actually make an impact in Ag and AgTech isn’t throwing a bunch of money at it. We’ve seen how well that works (cough)…Granular, Farmers Edge, Climate, Indigo… What you need is knowledge and passion. Big corps rarely have that really with this stuff.
So while they can and will do whatever they want I think they’ll just get in the way of other smaller groups that are doing similar stuff and ones that do a better job of it. It’s one thing where they can be the back end server solution to whatever in Ag, that will always be likely. When they start competing against their own Ag clients is when I questions things.
At the same time, and I know this to be true at times, there are instances where the big corps are infringing against patents of other smaller companies. The thing is they are huge and have the best lawyers in the world so unless you have big money to fight that for years it’s not worth it. In that time then, they change the process just enough to go after the other or the same groups product. It’s annoying to say the least.
Anyway, this isn’t just a Google thing, it’s a non Ag corp getting into Ag things. It won’t stop or go away either. The difference I guess is if people in Ag will just not care and see behind the giant corp wall like they have it seems with the likes of Farmbeats by Microsoft. Don’t get me started there.
In Closing:
I barely scratched the surface in unwrapping Corporate Ag. It’s not always bad overall either, I just wanted to get people thinking and see behind the scenes what has and can happen when you see press releases like these. Like I said, many times it’s just for the press and nothing more than that. It’s sad that corps can spend millions on just whatever to see if it sticks and if and when it doesn’t just write it off. This especially when most smaller companies with millions can do much much more with less.
Overall, it’s not really anyones fault and usually not the fault of any of the employees either. These things just seem to happen when group think with a lot of people get together. I hope non Ag corps and Ag corps alike can be a little better at not treading too deep into stuff they don’t understand well. Even acquiring smaller groups with the right system or expertise doesn’t always work and according to statistics that is true in all industries.
I hope Corporates of all shapes and sizes dealing with Ag just stick to what they are good at and realistically collaborate in a good way with smaller AgTech groups with decent long term contracts that actually help the solutions everyone wants. Your money will go much further and the results will be much better for all. I promise you.
Thanks for reading Easy Observations! Please Share, Subscribe, and Comment if you would be so kind. I’d also be happy to get together and meet if you’d like to talk more in-depth about AgTech or Earth Observation in Ag. Feel free to contact me at my website. All the best!