S1E9: SC Ag Tech & Business Forum 2025 - Natural Resources
In this episode of Cultivate Ag, host Hannah Michael introduces a special discussion focused on agricultural technology (Ag Tech) and its real-world impact. The panel explores how cutting-edge innovations—from robotics and sensors to data-driven automation—are reshaping farming in South Carolina and beyond, while also addressing barriers like ROI, broadband access, and information overload.
Date of Event: March 26, 2025
Location: Phillips Market Center, West Columbia, SC
Production Credits:
Introduction: Hannah Mikell
Producer: Kevin Royal
Editor: Kayla Peters
Technical: Trey McAlhany
Music Composer: R.M Davis
Special Thanks:
Transcript:
It's Cultivate Ag, where ideas take root and innovation grows. Hi everyone, I'm Hannah Michael, your host of Cultivate Ag podcast, brought to you by Clemson University's Cooperative Extension Service and CU-CATS. Each episode we dig into what's shaping the future of our farming in South Carolina and beyond. Let's get into it. Today's episode is all about Ag Tech that pushes the boundaries of what's possible. From robotics in the field to data-driven weather tools, our panel explores what's emerging and what's useful. Also, what's holding us back too. If you've ever wondered how to turn innovation into implementation, this one's for you.
The Ag Tech panel, as we were planning who might be this lead-in kickoff speaker, we recognized the importance of talking about existing and currently commercially available technology in the Ag space. We also said it'd be kind of cool to look outside the box on that as well, to look into an adjacent space, to look at technology developers in adjacent spaces and see what intersections and overlaps they might have. We decided to bring an expert in from an adjacent space.
We found this expert in Dale Mashtare. Dale's here. He's with Applied Research Associates.
You guys have a brief bio for him in your program. We cut all the bios down because there just wasn't space for all of them, so I'll tell you a little bit more about Dale. He's worked across a broad range of science and technology areas, ranging from small particle physics, imaging systems, energy and power systems, and now in Department of Defense Systems to include robotic vehicle platforms.
He's the Greenville Group Leader with ARA and a Principal Systems Engineer. At ARA, he leads the Advanced Technology and Product Development Management Teams for the Integrated Products Division. He'll have to tell you exactly what that means, and I suspect he can.
And then he has specialized throughout his career in whatever role he has served in identifying and adapting solutions to fit challenging customer requirements. And we'll give you those in the ag space, Dale, I promise you that. He lives in Landrum with his wife, Penny, and three sons and their families nearby to include six grandkids.
So please join me in offering a warm welcome to Dale. Thank you, Kendall, for first inviting me. I attended this event last year not really knowing what I was going to see or hear.
Mallory put together a super event last year as well. I think it was Catherine Hayes of SCRA that said, hey, you should go talk to these guys, see what they're up to in ag space. So again, thank you and had a great opportunity to meet the panel.
I will credit Kendall with, I've attended a lot of conferences. The time put into the preparation and everything for this is incredibly impressive in my mind. So really appreciate it.
And so a little bit about AERA, and I want to do this pretty quickly. So I apologize if I feel like I'm going through some information really quickly. And Dr.
Joe from SC State earlier to comment made should be doing this role because I'm going heavy into ag technology, just kind of looking at what we do in an adjacent space. And I should say I brought a colleague this year. He was so cool last year.
Reed Jacob sits in the middle of the group here, and he can touch on stuff in biotech space. He's been at BASF, Bayer, other companies. So he's definitely your guy there.
AERA is really kind of unique. I actually joined AERA. You see the South Carolina site just got established in August of 2022.
We're about five minutes from the Clemson I-CAR campus, which we quickly learned, oh, you guys are playing in DOD space as we are. So we started talking to that group, and now we're on contract with some of the work that they do in trying to transition some of that technology forward. The company employee-owned, I mean, I worked for GE Xerox.
I never worked for an employee-owned company. I had no appreciation for it until I got started here. We own the company.
We have the ability to kind of define what we want to go do, what challenges do we want to go address together with our really, really strong team. The company is growing substantially. I mean, they started with two people 45 years ago, you know, going after challenging nuclear weapon problems.
And it's just continually growing, which as an employee stockholder, that's a good thing too. Just south of a billion-dollar company, spread across the country, headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it was started. We are split across divisions, so 17 divisions.
We kind of focus on some really kind of unique areas and very diverse across the company. The other really unique thing about this, I look at the CEO of the company. He's a 40-year engineer, so not a lot of management structure and whatnot that kind of bogs things down, which is kind of cool.
And part of what the DOD likes about us is we're just really kind of nimble and, hey, what's a hard problem? What can we go after and try to address it? So as I said, I'm going to jump into this pretty quickly and just kind of, this is like a snapshot of everything the company does at some level, four broad areas that don't count really good.
It's national security. So as example, weapon design, test, capability, and it doesn't mean ARA is off building missiles by themselves. We partner.
It's the other thing I find really cool. We partner with small companies, universities, consultants, or very large companies where we're either primes on a contract or they could be primes. So it's a great mix and very open to doing that.
So weapons as an example, we'll talk a little bit more about robotic platforms, a lot of work on advanced sensor technology. We actually do have some product space. We are probably 80% DOD, actually 90% federal and state government funded, but we do have a commercial play as well, kind of approaching that 10% number of actually putting products out.
For instance, there's a buried in the ground security sensor, wireless communication, intrusion detection, things like that. So we do things like that. Soldier mounted helmets in that space.
Energy environment, another big area that we address. ARA as a, again, employee owned company, define our own path, use our money wisely, hopefully. So biofuels was something they decided in the early 2000s to go after.
They developed and successfully demonstrated the first biofuel military jet flight, which pretty impressive. Actually very strong play there in commercial now over the last few years, working with some of the big refinery companies. Risk assessments, another area of support.
So see this HER loss, it's called. So hurricane risk assessment, loss assessment. I heard the earlier panel talking about, we're risk based for agriculture.
So that's a type of thing that we do. Talking to David Huizenga about all the wildfires recently. We've got tools that look at fire spread as an example, or network communications.
Infrastructure, so think transportation and airfields. Everything the FAA does in terms of looking at airport security, all that, they usually bring ARA into that. In addition, we've got some technology products in that space.
CPT, cone penetration testers for geology. So you're going to build a bridge there, building, et cetera. You want to know what's under the ground up to 300 feet down kind of thing.
This BEAST, typically we make, in that space, automated pavement testers. So before we go lay hundreds of miles of pavement on 85, they want to know what that formulation is going to do. So that's another area.
And Health Solutions, again, very diverse company, right? So we were asked to study the effects of vaping on the human body. And blast effects on warfighter soldiers.
A kind of unique thing, we hired a PhD out of SMU a couple years ago that was doing his work in microrobotics. So he actually has contracts looking at injecting particles into the body, go after cancer, cancer targeted drugs, or ocular surgery for some kind of unique challenges. So I'm just going to touch on one example of some of those technologies that I have a lot of fun playing with, quite honestly.
But talking to the panel, I started to realize there's a lot of similarities in the challenges of injecting technology into ag space, but we're confronted with those in DOD space as well. So robotics, I mean, ARA's been working in robotics for 30 years. Skid steers, excavators, feller bunchers.
At one point in time, they cleared 1,100 acres up at Fort Drum or something with a robotic feller buncher. And then autonomous vehicles for the soldiers. Really it's about taking the soldier out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs.
The example we show here in this picture is actually a family of robots, if you will. Think track platform. This is at our site in Greenville, about the size of a UTV, side by side.
But then you've got this mini UTV that you can go off and send in for dangerous missions. So what if it blows up? It's only a couple thousand bucks.
UAVs, obviously, they're used pretty extensively in the farms, in the ag space. This particular one, you hear about all the issues in the Ukraine. Think of a mothership that can fly up, fly away, and then drop off a whole bunch of little ones to go blow things up if you want.
As I said, these challenges are return on investment. Typically the DOD is not just handing out money. Sometimes they do, but not for us.
You have to demonstrate what you're going to do. So typically it's an industrial investment to come up with a concept or do an analysis to show it's feasible. But on the other side of that equation, soldier availability.
I heard labor challenges talked about pretty extensively. That's a challenge for the military, right? Less and less people signing up to go be soldiers.
And then, of course, there's soldiers' lives, right? If we can take them out of harm's way, that's part of why I like doing this job. It's got to be easy to use, right?
It's got to be robust. It's got to be easy to use. The nice thing about all these young soldiers coming in, they were playing Xbox the week before.
We designed our controllers to look like an Xbox controller and it needs to function that way. Most importantly, though, is get it into the soldiers' hands early, right? Get a technology.
Please go play with it. Tell us what's wrong with it. What do we need to do to make it better?
So I can imagine the same has to occur for the ag state. Overload. I think Rachel, I heard about data overload.
It's like, yeah, I can sense all day long and collect all kinds of information. How do I use that appropriately? We have to develop tools that help the warfighter use that.
So we have mission planning management tools. You've got these robotic assets. How do I go use that effectively on my mission?
Communication insurance. That's another challenge I heard. Internet's not everywhere in the rural environment.
So we have to deal with that. Cybersecurity. GPS denied, right?
I go through the forest or I go into a tunnel. How's that robot going to function? So those are things we have to work about.
We apply what we call a PACE plan, right? It's primary, alternative, contingent, emergency. So there's, you know, in some sense can be redundant or different forms of communication to help that out.
And then reliable. So we spend a lot of time on modeling, rapid prototyping. Build something kind of crude.
Again, get it into the soldier's hands. So again, a lot of similarities, I think. And kind of wrapping up, as an employee-owned company, the core values, kind of the guardrails for the company are passion, freedom, service, and growth, which are not just corporate speak for ARA.
It's real. And honestly, it's why I'm here. Kendall said I've got three sons, six grandkids.
They all like to eat. I care about what goes on in the egg space. And our company does too.
But we've been heavily focused, DOD, other government, and some ag applications. Reid has stepped in to be our leader for agriculture, kind of corporate initiatives or like gathering information across the company. What technologies do we have?
And then go meet with you folks. What's needed? Where do you need help?
So that's what we're about. And thank you for having me here. I appreciate it.
That was perfect. A good lead off for the ag tech discussion. And I couldn't, Dale, when you were talking there, I couldn't help but think about weapons platforms, ag pest management, directed or targeted pesticide application.
These are the things going through my head. Anyway, I don't want to waste any time introducing these guys. So the experts in the ag tech panel, I think you'll see that we have a ton of experience up here and a ton of diversity as well as we go through.
I'm going to go one by one down the line and add some things about, and I've asked each one to introduce themselves as well. But I'll read a quick thing that's a little different from what you have in your bio on each one. Andrew Brooks, one closest to me here.
And those mics might be off, by the way, if it's coming up to you. Andrew Brooks is a business developer with Cravo Equipment, which specializes in weather-related crop protection technologies. He is a Charleston native with a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of South Carolina.
And we won't hold that against him. Andrew has several years of experience in controlled, so this just came up, controlled environment agriculture, specializing in cost reduction, automation, and innovative agricultural solutions. Andrew, please tell us all more about the work that you do.
Thanks, Kendall. And, you know, it's a privilege to be here. Thank y'all.
Quickly put, so, you know, I specialize in, you know, two questions I ask the growers that are growing, you know, soft fruit, vegetable, things like that. Tell me about your best day, tell me about your worst day. Question for y'all.
What's the number one issue for growing? Weather. Tell me about your best day, okay, it was weather-related.
Tell me about your worst day, weather-related. How do I max out your good day? Weather.
How do I max out the weather on a bad day and make it better? There's a grower here that I haven't seen him yet, but I just was at his farm yesterday. He's a friend of mine, Eric McClamp, City Roots.
He has a structure from our company that he uses to grow his brassicas. Any rate, so, over the last several years, you know, I kicked off my career when I was in Chicago. I worked with multi-state operating cannabis companies in Florida, California, Canada.
For, you know, since 2021, I've worked with teams in the Netherlands, formerly of Priva. So, you know, now my world is, you know, I specialize working with vegetable, soft fruit, and vegetable growers, you know, in the tropics that are looking to max out optimal growing conditions, but retract the roof when necessary in adverse weather events. So, I humbly learned a lot from, you know, folks from Turkey, Australia, the Middle East, northern Morocco specifically, Mexico, where we have our demo center, and here in Plateau.
And now, you know, I get to work in my home state, which is nice, and honored to be here. So, thank you. Thank you, Andrew.
Next to Andrew, we have Dr. Ed Barnes. Ed is the Senior Director of Agricultural and Environmental Research with Cotton Incorporated.
If you're not familiar with Cotton Incorporated, it's funded by U. S. cotton grower dollars, and it coordinates the research and marketing efforts to support the U.
S. cotton industry. Ed has spent 22 years there managing agricultural engineering projects with a focus on precision farming, irrigation, conservation tillage, harvest systems, ginning, and advancing automation in cotton production.
Ed, there's a lot you've done over the years. We were talking earlier. Ed has been a huge advocate of technology adoption in cotton.
Would you like to add to any of that? Just add a few things. I am an agricultural engineer, so in the agricultural space, we are definitely the ones that are technology biased.
So, that means you kind of got to keep us under control. We might try to make it a little more complicated than it needs to be, but overall, we do try to make technology more available to farmers. In Cotton Incorporated, we do have board members from South Carolina.
We work with universities like Clemson across the U. S. to try to figure out what are the best technology innovations that will fit on the farm.
So, I've been privileged to work with engineers across the country like Dr. Kirk. You've heard from Dr.
Maraha already. You see, and I'm not supposed to use the R word because that scares farmers, but the robots. You saw Joe's robots running around the field.
It made me a little bit jealous to think of the new students. We've got students here today that you're going to be able to be working with that technology. But then I'm reminded that I started in agriculture engineering in the 1980s.
So, that was after slide rules and we had computers. So, one of the first things I remember working on was a computer model for peanuts. Back then, we talked about expert systems.
So, it wasn't quite AI, but it was trying to encode an expert's knowledge into a computer program. We've really come a long way since that. What keeps me up to speed are working with these different universities and students and looking at all the exciting technology on the horizon.
Very good. To Ed's left, we've got Rachel. Fun fact about Rachel, it's her birthday today.
She can think of, yeah, let's give her a happy birthday. Y'all want to sing? No, we're not going to sing.
But she can think of no better place to celebrate her birthday than right here with all of you guys. So, thank you, Rachel, for joining us. Rachel's a third-generation row crop farmer and partner at Sharp and Sharp Certified Seed in Allendale, South Carolina.
Rachel combines her background in law with her passion for agriculture, growing multiple crops and serving in leadership roles with the South Carolina Soybean Board, South Carolina Seedsmen's Association, and the Allendale County Farm Bureau. Rachel, please tell us more about yourself and your operation, if you'd like. Like Kendall said, my name is Rachel Sharp.
I'm from Allendale. I am a row crop farmer. I farm down there with my dad.
And we farm soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton, peanuts, oats, and rye. I think that's all of them. Sharp and Sharp was started in 1947 by my grandfather.
My dad came in in 1970. He's a Clemson grad. Both my grandfather and my dad.
And then I came in in 2016, I guess. Anyways, we also have a certified seed business. So, we have a seed cleaner, like a conditioning plant there, where we harvest the seeds and store it.
And then we're able to clean it, process it, bag it. I'm excited to be here and couldn't think of a better thing to do on my birthday. Thanks, Kendall.
Last, but certainly not least, to Rachel's left, is Josh Minor. Josh is a precision ag technology specialist. Not his birthday today, I don't believe.
He has nearly eight years of experience at John Deere. He currently serves as the cotton and high value crop test lead, working with dealers to implement and analyze agronomic and economic field trials that demonstrate the value of John Deere equipment and technology. Josh, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do in that role, in your background?
Yeah, thanks, Kendall. Pretty typical to John Deere, job titles, they don't really mean anything, right? They say, you know, that's what we do.
There was a question earlier, how do we ensure that the equipment that's being shipped out of the Midwest is relevant, fits our market? And that's essentially my job. So, we work with cotton production systems, I work within the cotton production system.
And our job is to really work with the plant or factory, tractors, tillage, sprayers, and of course, cotton harvesting, and ensure that the products that we're releasing, the tech stack that we're developing, really looking for how do we best fit that into the cotton market, where's the highest value that we can place that equipment in. So, my role is really twofold in that. I work with our dealer channel to take equipment that we have in the market today and really gather agronomic data that's locally relevant to you.
So, when you go and you look at a new planter, you see data that is performing in the agronomic value in fields like yours. Second piece of that is we do internal trials. We're evaluating new products as they come to market, trying to better understand what's the agronomic value or economic value as it relates to cotton around future products.
There's a ton that goes into kind of the R&D side before that product or system or technology ever makes it to market. It's a long journey, longer than the marketing people like myself would want. Well, and that's a good lead in.
A lot of these technologies, they're not cheap. So, it's a good lead in. Ed, I'm going to come to you with this question.
Ed gave me a subtitle for this question. And largely, Ronnie, I'm going to steal from your notes and probably do the same thing. We'll go down, get each one of you all a question.
Feel free to chime in on each other's questions as you want. And then we'll open it up and see what we've got out here. But Ed said the subtitle for this question should be, how can technology keep me in business?
So, specifically, the question is, Ed, what are the biggest barriers to adoption of agricultural technologies and how can farmers evaluate the return on investment of new technologies, particularly in tough economic years? Thanks, Kendall. You know, obviously, we've heard a lot about the challenges, especially this year.
It is historic. And I'm sure Rachel can tell us from personal experience the challenges all the farmers are facing everywhere. And so I think, you know, sometimes we do, like I said, engineers, we get too excited about technology and we say, look how cool this is, but what's it going to pay?
And so, you know, like this year, I do believe if you're not using the yield map on your farm, you're losing, you're missing some opportunities to save money or to even increase yields. But this does not be the year. If you haven't done it before, I wouldn't take on a yield bumper because you have to learn how to benefit from that data and there's a learning curve.
And so, but we need to be looking at what technology could you employ this year that will save you money or that will improve your yields. And so I'm not going to steal too much of Josh's thunder, but on, you know, that John Deere, for example, has the seed and spray product and they have a pretty clear economic analysis you can go through. It's probably not going to be for everybody.
Sorry, Josh, but I think he'd tell you the same thing. But you can pretty quickly figure out, is that going to, am I going to save money from that technology this year? And, you know, as we look at these new technologies, a lot of them are, you know, heavily based on processing power for computers.
We need really short return on investment times, right? It can't, because by the time that technology has been around for two years, it may not be relevant. So that's a challenge we're facing.
But I do want to emphasize, I do believe that technology can be part of the solution to the challenges we're facing in farm profitability right now. And that's one of the things that we're going to keep working on. And this might be one some other panelists want to weigh in on.
I guess I can speak to the barriers that I've faced as a farmer with ag technology. So before we even get to the tech part, I struggle with broadband Internet access. A lot of places in South Carolina, you know, I think that people assume that, oh, you know, you have, your cell phone works one place, it's going to work another.
You know, bars might go up and down. But in Allendale, especially out of the farm, it is, you might have a bar or two, but that's not enough to do much. And so I have been through quite a lot trying to get broadband Internet access.
I started off, when I first came back to the farm, my dad had HughesNet. And do y'all know what HughesNet is? It's Internet beamed in from outer space and it doesn't work when it's cloudy out.
They throttle your usage if you are, it's just, it is really, really bad. Equivalent to kind of like dialogue is what I think. But we got rid of that, thank goodness.
And this company that I've talked to, not going to call any names, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but they contacted me and they said, oh, yeah, we can put fiber in for you. This will be great. And I said, all right, you know, when are you coming?
And I didn't get any response. And so I began to call this company. I would call the farm on my phone at 9 o'clock in the morning and every morning for almost a year, I would call these people.
And I'd say, when are you going to put fiber in? I can't run my business without it. Oh, we're coming, we're coming, we're coming.
Finally, it worked. And they shot a bore missile under Highway 301 to get me fiber there. About two weeks later, somebody cut the line somewhere.
It never worked since. It hasn't worked since. So I contacted someone else who ended up running another line.
Long story short is we now use Starlink. I have four Starlink systems. And it's not a good thing to do.
I wouldn't recommend it. But it's better than driving a tractor. And farmers out there, I know you all can relate.
When you're driving and you know there's a little dip in the land and you know you're going to lose service there. And so nothing is worse than having to drive all the way back around to get GPS service or signal again and try to switch from one Starlink thing to the other. So it's something we struggle with.
I don't know if everybody has that, like that big of a problem. But we can't wait until we get some decent form of internet service. Because without that, we're behind.
I mean, we can't even run any of the great, or we have trouble running a lot of the ag tech that we want to run. We're just limited by broadband connectivity. So if anybody out there wants to come run another line to Allendale, I would be all for it.
But it's aggravating too because right next door, the county next door, doesn't face the same problem. So you kind of feel left behind. Jim, I'm going to pass you the mic in a minute.
Or at some point, I'd like you to kind of tell us what you guys are working on. You've got some things in place. Jim's with the state broadband office.
But you're on standby if you don't mind in a minute. Thank you. And Jim was up here last year to address rural connectivity and broadband.
But Josh, I think you can probably weigh in on this one too. These ag tech tools that we have, they're only as good as the connectivity that supports them. And Rachel currently has to go to the highest hilltop to shut down her center pivot, that type of thing.
So tell us more about what you guys are doing or solutions. We have a few. We actually just released a call, JDLink Boost.
So JDLink has always been our telematics technology. It was no more than a cell phone. We embedded the cab that allows you to connect to the cloud.
What Rachel just said, that doesn't work everywhere. So we actually did just release JDLink Boost, which is Starlink-enabled on our equipment. So we ruggedized Starlink a little bit and added into the cab.
So we do have more reliable connectivity. The big part of that is as we go to automation, as we go to these jobs that do require that connection, that Starlink gives a path to be a lot more stable with that. And kind of back to Ed's point, right, about adopting technology and that ROI.
And the analogy I would use, and it's probably a terrible one, right, is, but like, if you're going to start a diet, what's the first thing you should do? Probably step on the scale and see how much you weigh, right? You always need that baseline.
We've talked about we have so much data that comes in. We have so much data that we're sitting on. And really my first rule of thumb, we sit down and meet with growers, is it's not feasible to adopt every new technology you're going to.
Right? Leverage that data you have and step on the scale, right? What's an area you want to save some money or you think there's opportunity to drive a yield at?
And let's start talking about features or start talking about technology. Right? The other neat thing that we're getting into in the ag industry, and it's not just around here, there's a ton of other companies that are really focusing on like retrofit kits.
Right? We don't have to go out and buy a brand new planter. We can ship you just the row units.
Right? We can rebuild your existing toolbar for, I'm always scared to say a fraction of the cost, right? But a lower cost.
Right? Where you can get that new technology without getting that whole good planter that comes at a premium. Right?
So we can retrofit that on planters. We can retrofit on sprayers. Once you really identify what is that area that I want to address on my farm, usually through data, then it's kind of starting that progression.
Right? What's the technology that could potentially address that concern and help solve it? You can continually kind of build off of that.
Fractions can be above or below one as well. That's right. Andrew, on these two questions, do you have anything to add on the ROI or otherwise connectivity challenges?
Just quickly in the room, is anyone here in the state growing vegetables, soft fruit? Raise your hands. Maybe a bit separate from the cash crop, row crop side.
I specialize in fixing climate problems for people growing food, food production. Right? Back in November, I was in Aruba working for the Dutch, Kingdom of Netherlands for an embassy mission.
A lot of similarities with ROI, scarcity, resources, decision making, these big fears people have when they go to bed at night. What I noticed in Aruba, if you go to Denmark, South Carolina, it might as well be an island because if the trucks stop coming in, they've got problems. Aruba, if the ships stop coming in, they've got problems.
Right? We're going back to the coronavirus, for example. I exist because my job is to increase local food production, specifically for the tropics.
We're here in South Carolina. I want to boost local food production. We're talking about return on investment.
I come from the education of the Netherlands, the Swedes, Canadians. They're in cold climates, it's dark. You have to have supplemental lighting.
You have to have blackout curtains. You have to have a controlled environment. You have to recreate nature.
Down here, I have to cool things. I have to be able to design hectares of production around row crop equipment. It's 16 foot wide.
Motor vehicles got to go between beds. When it comes to ROI, these are the things we talk about. When we're discussing technology, I come from the high tech world.
Priva is basically the largest automation company on the planet. I've worked with the biggest and the baddest vertical farm greenhouse companies in the world. My colleagues here, Andy Montgomery and Brian Harris, we all work very closely together.
We have overlapping clientele. They can attest to the same thing as well. When we talk about ROI, we have to get down to the bean count.
A 10% increase on cost for technology can eat up 50% of the bottom line. That's just not going to work. Especially in our world, we have to go to the offtake agreement first.
We have to work our way to the sales market and work our way backwards. You have your upstream, you have your downstream. Production inputs go to your upstream, your downstream, your distribution, your consumption.
In food production in South Carolina, I've got to quickly think about, say, a grower here in Columbia or down in outside Charleston. I have to figure out a way to get them in the supply chain quickly. I have to do it within two years.
I can't sit on an asset for 10 years and wait for it to pay itself. These are the things we think about. When it comes to technology, if I have too much technology, it gets in the way of growing.
I can grow strawberries and get enough heat sink in the soil. I don't need necessarily a ton of mechanical heating and cooling. I just need to make sure that I'm getting adequate plant transpiration and plant temperature.
Keep it simple. Ag tech is necessary when it's necessary. At the end of the day, what's first?
Josh had made a great point in discussions earlier, saying, max out your current utility on technology, and then we go forward. Let's get growing right, and then we go into technology and automation. There's a lot of tech bros out there, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, wherever.
They sell tech for tech's sake. It's important to get into these operations as long as we can directly tie it to revenue. If I can't put that on an ROI model and Excel spreadsheet, I've got to think about that.
Step one is, let's understand what our first and biggest challenge is. That's weather. How do we stop crop loss?
Is technology going to increase our yield, kilos per hectare, or however you're measuring your yield? Then we move into our unit economics, and so on and so forth. Yes, ag technology is important, but let's make sure that we're dealing with adequate growing systems first, and then we step our way into these features, God willing, increase profitability and local food production.
Something that I appreciate you mentioning was, some of these companies that are selling tech for tech's sake, a term I've heard is digital snake oil. That's one of the things that people talk about. It becomes all the more important for third-party, neutral, non-biased tests and studies to be done.
That's the importance of the land-grant system, is that we can do tests to validate that these new technologies, whatever they may be, in the same way that we've evaluated new pesticides, and new planting strategies, cropping strategies, that type of thing. The other thing, Andrew, you mentioned, and Josh, I'm going to come to you on this one, and if you would pass it to Rachel or Ed, maybe after that, too much technology is what Andrew mentioned. Farmers often struggle with too much data, and lots of data to a guy like me, or to a guy like Ed, is awesome.
We love it, but the farmers get buried in it, and it's great until you do get buried in it. So, how can AI and automation help turn all this information into actionable decisions, instead of just more screen time? Or is that the direction we need to be going with?
Yeah, good question. I always struggle with AI, because it's a buzzword right now. There's tons of different forms of AI.
So, I'll say that. China doesn't have any commercially available, we would call our seed and spray technology, AI. It's a CVML that's running identifying weeds and spraying them.
We don't have any commercially available ones on, per data, today. But, the two big opportunities I see, it's really through talking to growers like Rachel, and others who are using the chat GPT, and commercially available ones. It really does two things, right?
It breaks down a lot of the data silos that we've struggled with in the past. Where before, you could upload to one system, you couldn't upload to the other, and it was impossible to get all your data in one area. The benefit we've seen is being able to upload a map, from a PDF, right?
And, the general AI technology can take it, and actually draw inferences off a PDF map. So, it's starting to break down some silos. The other part, that I think is really critical, is it's changing the way that we interact with data.
Today, to go in, in our system, I'll speak for John here, first of all, the hardest part is remembering your login, and your password. That trips up about 75% of the people we meet with. If you make it through that game, now you've got to remember the 20 different tools we have in operations, how you get to your data, how you get it side by side, how you get any insights out of it.
And for the younger generation, and more tech savvy, they get a hold of it, they can do it pretty quickly, and they get good at it, right? For the older generation, they don't want to start. And what this AI technology can do, and I'll let Rachel talk a lot more on it, but, chat GPT, you can talk to it.
You don't have to sit down and type at all, you can ask it questions. You can feed it the data you want, and you can ask questions to it, just like you're talking to another human. So I think those are really the two big ways that it will change how we interact with data.
It will break down silos, but finally, it will make it more approachable for really anybody, to leverage it, and get value out of it. He says he wants to hear about chat GPT. I have been, I would call it a victim of data overload.
I know that with our irrigation systems, I get so much, literally every time I turn it on, it shoots me all this information on where, not just the location, but for every degree it moves, I get all this new data about soil type, soil moisture, I get, and it comes in probably each tick of a degree, I might get 14 or 15 pages of Excel spreadsheet data, and I finally went, oh my gosh, I'm just going to turn it off, I'm not going to use it, because it was so much information. So then I realized that chat GPT existed. And the first few ticks, I've downloaded, I just downloaded the Excel spreadsheets, and I've uploaded it into chat GPT, thinking there's no way that this is actually going to work.
And y'all, out pops a map. I wonder if it will do this for every tick, and every tick of the degree mark, and after about the fifth one, it said, you have to purchase the chat GPT, because you've exceeded your blah blah blah, and I said, alright, click, 19991, if this continues to work, I'm going to be amazed. And it did.
And so I continued to use it, not just for irrigation, but for like variable rate fertilizer, you know, not every part of the field needs the same amount of fertilizer. And so, as we did samples, I logged it in a map, you can use Google Maps, you can use whatever you want, and I figured it worked for that too. And so it would put out these maps, and it made it so much easier, I wasn't plotting things, I wasn't, so I formed with my dad, this is kind of a side note, and he does stuff a little more old school than I do, he doesn't want to mess with the computer, and when I introduced him to chat GPT, he said, well I don't want to type onto it, and I said, you don't, I'm just going to hit this button and you can talk to it.
And he sat there and had literally, I don't know, it was a long conversation with chat GPT about some farming issues, and he was amazed that, you know, he would cover the microphone like he was, you know, didn't want it to hear anything, and I'd be like, yeah, I know. But it made it a lot easier for us. I'm not sure if he's going to continue to, I don't know if he used chat GPT on his own phone, even though I've downloaded it on his own phone, but he really likes it and he likes what it does, so it's been a huge help to us.
And it's $19. 99 a month. I mean, you can't go wrong with it.
I love hearing that story. So that encourages me that, you know, we are going to see this technology adoption happen. One of the things, I look at the space, the thing, the other thing I think where we mentioned AI, when I think of machine vision tools, I think it's going to really revolutionize a lot of things we can do, because now you don't need the math, right?
And we're going to get to where we can trust the machine to make that decision. We have had academic people evaluate the seed and spray system, Jason Northworthy, University of Arkansas, and some others, and you know, that machine is traveling 12 to 15 miles an hour, it's seeing a cotyledon pigweed seed and spraying that cotyledon accurately. So that's amazing to me, to think that's commercially available.
That's not in 10 years or 20 years, that's today. And you can imagine if you're putting cameras, I already got 30 cameras on boom, and a spot in weeds, it can eventually be trained to look for insect damage, to look for pathogens, to start looking at differences in growth rates in the field, and that can all happen, so we can get to where we can get a lot of real-time control, and you don't have to even go back and talk to CHAT GP, alright, you'll just let the tracker figure it out for you as you go, so that excites me. And I think that's largely where a lot of it needs to go.
I talked to a farmer one time that, you know, talked about automated or autonomous harvesters, and I said, well isn't your favorite time of the year at harvest, where you're riding up there in the cab and you can see all that you did? He said, yeah, we love doing that, but you know what's the other thing we love doing? I said, what's that?
This guy's 75, 80 years old. He says, we like making money. So there are things they're willing to give up.
This is probably a good time to flip. We've got about 15 minutes left in this discussion. Jerry, would you go to Jim, and he can give us a quick update, and then after that, on the broadband, the connectivity stuff, I think it's great that he's here, and we might as well leverage that.
But Jim, you only get like two minutes, that's it, that's all I can give you. And then some of the rest of you, Jerry will have the mic, and they can, he'll come around to you if you've got questions for the group. Thanks so much, Kendall, and it's great to be back here again, and Rachel, happy birthday.
But I am the state broadband director, so my job and my team's job is to make sure that we get internet service out into, like I say, all the nooks and crannies around the state. We've been doing extremely well. In fact, we only have 28,720 locations remaining in the whole state that are lacking in investment, so it's an extraordinary time in South Carolina, and I will say, fairness, the job of the broadband office, we don't hook up any homes or farms, we make investments in internet service providers, so like Rachel, what you were talking about, we have funded a couple of companies to bring fiber, so we'll have a sidebar on this, but that's what we do, and we've had incredible progress in South Carolina, but picking up on this discussion, you know, where do we go next once we have all the homes connected?
The communities that have access to high speed, I mean, extremely high speed, reliable, redundant fiber, varied, because we had a whole county in South Carolina that lost a thousand telephone poles in an hour, and if all your fiber is sitting on telephone poles, the whole county goes out, that's not reliable and resilient, so as you start thinking about building your farm and relying upon AI technology, it can't go down, right? If you engineer your whole production, so I hear you, we're thinking about it, and we'll do some follow-up conversations with you. Thank you, Jim, and I'd love to connect you and Rachel in terms of demo opportunities to look at, you know, how can having that connectivity, how can it be utilized?
Use you as a poster child, Rachel, for other farmers to see the opportunities. What questions do you guys have? I have a whole sheet of them, so don't worry, but I think y'alls are, like Ronnie said, I'd rather hear yours than mine.
Alright, so as Andrew said, we're in the controlled environment ag space. Part of the reason I'm here is to understand how controlled environment ag can improve everybody else's ag. So, other areas you see that technologies, maybe propagation and transplanting, things like that, to accelerate crops that controlled environment ag can play a part in, or transitioning out of the field into controlled environment for soft roots and things like that, but it doesn't seem like that's the big group here.
We think about this a lot, Brian and I, and our funky bunch. There's a research paper that came out, I think, 2016, it was sponsored by Hugh Weathers, and my mentor Jan Vestra, who's in Priva, or at Priva in the Netherlands, and it was another guy named Ian Kansky, who's with Fort County, Pennsylvania, where I've been involved in an ag accelerator. If you go to the Netherlands, you find a research group called, or this commercialization research, next, it's called Why does it exist?
The job in mind is so, when you guys go to the publics here, Columbia, or CASE, or whatever, you see sunset, or you see red sun, this is all being imported here. You wouldn't know that unless you look at the back of it. It's coming from Leamington, Ontario, or Mexico.
We ask the question when it comes to protected ag and controlled environment agriculture, that research document in Southbound specifically, Ronnie's got this, and so if you want to know more, definitely connect with him. He's educated me quite well over the years. We don't quite yet know where conventional ag brings on propagation where it makes sense commercially.
I think there's some application, there's a guy, I think he's here, David Plum, Amplified Ag, using shipping containers for commercialization, but we beg the question, can we use seed genomics, genetics, things like that for conventional farms? There's a professor in Oklahoma State, Dr. Brian, I forget his last name, he's currently doing wheat trials using greenhouse technology.
We're kind of, we have climactic challenges, we have commercialization challenges, and I'm kind of the oddball in this discussion, but at the same time, we all have to eat. I wonder, especially with very profitable crop types such as strawberries, you know, fall's creep 132 blueberries, not the rapid eye of variety, but can we boost that? Can we get better yields out of that?
Can propagation be used? That's currently being discussed at Black and Indian Diversity in the Netherlands. Translated that here to some trade missions I've been a part of, British Columbia.
Dr. Cherica Bowden at Ohio State is a resource, she's been working with us for years, so I'm going to depend on Rachel here in the coming years to help me understand better. You know, because again, these two should not be in separate camps.
We're literally growing things that people consume. We're going to continue to focus on for research, R&D, tissue culture, things like that, can this be applied to propagation? How can CEA be better value-added for conventional farming?
CUCAT's going to have a helping hand in that, which is why I asked a question to Matt about collaboration with our land grants. That's kind of a piece of where our focus is at. Got time for a couple more.
Or I've got more. There's one. There's one here from Landrum and then Chase in the back.
We talk a lot about growing, the first step of growing. Is any of this moving towards or is there discussion in anybody's long-range plans to extend this tech to the next step of processing or value-adding or anything post-field from harvesting to end-consumer? At least in the food production world, you're seeing more automation in packhouse and production.
You're seeing less automation in the growing side, at least in the tropical climate. So I'm talking 40 degrees north latitude down to 30 degrees south latitude. The investment curve right now is more excited about packhouse and harvest.
Here in South Carolina, if you go to Anderson, you see Silway Organic. You see a lot of automation in their process. To answer your question, yes.
In my opinion, that's what has investors excited right now is demonstrating 5, 10-year offtake agreements because of the packhouse. Maybe not necessarily so much on the growing. Growing is behind the packhouse side.
There is a heavy involvement. Ed, would you like to talk about the genning operations? I'll just add, on the post-harvest side, there's a lot going on on the cotton gin.
15 people operate a cotton gin. A lot of those people will be standing around the bale press. It's people putting on wires for the bale.
There will be people pulling samples. Now, if you go to a gin, there can be nobody at the bale press. There's already an automatic strapper.
There's an automatic system to pull the sample. Usually, there's just someone standing there to make sure the equipment works. I would say, really, on the post-processing, areas I'm not as familiar with on fruit sorting, on detecting blemishes, that stuff is already being implemented.
It's really something coming. Another thing that's going to be coming is more automated materials handling, especially warehouses. There's a lot going on in that area.
I can just make one more plug from a traceability side. On cotton, we do tag every large roll as RFID chips, which gins can integrate into their software. While it's getting more automated at the gin site, they can have more information coming from that field about that block of cotton that they're bringing in or that module of cotton.
Automated gin systems, as well as trace that data back to their fields throughout the process. Large opportunity for traceability through RFID technology. The cool thing there is while we've had yield maps for decades, really, now, that gives you the ability to make a quality map.
You take the data from the gin and put it back in those fields, right? Yep, that's right. Landrum, you got one for us, right?
Quick question. One of y'all have mentioned it about technology's great, but sometimes you kind of feel like maybe chasing technology when you don't really need to. Just speaking from a grower's perspective here for a second, every year, it seems like something new comes out.
We've got to figure out something new. Or how does this what's the value? ROI, right?
That's all that really matters when you get right down to it. Josh, I ain't tell you, I'm about to pick on John Deere here for a minute. I got a lot of green equipment.
I actually prepared this. I showed it to Mike just now. I prepared this for another meeting.
It just happened to be in this folder. Since March 14th of 2020, John Deere's stock price has increased by 210%. I just share that fact.
Are we I'm not picking on John Deere. I want everybody to make money. I want everybody in this room to make money.
Are we chasing something that doesn't necessarily need to be chased? I guess that's my question. We're pretty good at what we do.
That's growing what we grow. We may not always need the tools that you're trying to develop that we're paying for and it's costing our businesses money. That's my point.
100% of fair comment. I won't comment on our stock price because I don't know enough to comment on it. What you just said is exactly what my role is supposed to be.
We have sold technology in the market. We sold it because it worked in the Midwest. We didn't have a ton of data to really back up why it matters in South Carolina, why it matters in Georgia, why it matters through the Delta.
Part of our intention here is to collect data to help the dealer sell new equipment, but it's also to help better qualify which equipment fits best in our area. I know that doesn't address your main concern. I understand what you're saying.
New features coming out that are being added on to the true quality features that you purchase the equipment for. Sorry, just to follow up. Sometimes as an operator or as a foreign laborer has been talking about a lot here.
We need some pretty not smart equipment. I'm not talking about but I think everybody sees what I'm talking about here. We need some basic functionality.
We don't need all these fancy buttons sometimes. We like the options, but we need some basic functionality to get the job done. We also don't need to fund the entire program at the same time to take it off our bottom line.
That was one of the related. . .
Ed, did you have something to add to that? You're 100% right. One thing to keep in mind though, technology is making us more efficient.
Think back, you never know you needed a smart phone until you got a smart phone. I do think again, we need to look at is it improving the balance sheet? If it's not, forget it.
We also got to look at, we are competing with countries with very low cost of labor and subsidized input. Unfortunately, you're under a greater burden to be even more efficient so you can compete in that global market. I think technology, the right technology is going to help us do that.
I did want to comment on the labor issues. We're seeing, there's actually an agricultural robotics meeting in California called FERA where all the vegetable people are very heavily investing and looking at complete automation. We're taking the operator out of the picture.
I think that's another area where technology is going to help us is as we achieve real automation where you are reducing labor requirements. I know US farmers are already highly efficient and we've minimized labor but I think as we move towards automation, it opens up new opportunities too. Maybe you don't need a 120 foot spray boom that doesn't fit in half the fields.
Maybe you have an automated sprayer that's much smaller and you can customize the number of sprayers that go to that field. I think it's going to open up new opportunities that will make us more efficient and profitable. At least that's my goal.
That's really, Ed, probably a good closing point. We've got about a minute left so I think that does a good job of wrapping up. I'd like to extend, regardless of whether or not it was your birthday today, I'd like to extend a big thanks to all you guys and to Dale for joining us.
Please, folks, this is the end of this panel but please don't let it be the end of this conversation. Some of these guys hopefully will be hanging around. If not, I will throw them under the bus and give you their email addresses if you would like to reach out to them.
Seriously, continue these conversations in the weeks and months to come and let's grow these relationships we're building today. Thank y'all. What's one piece of technology you've been hesitant to try but could probably help revolutionize your farm?
Something to think about. Until then, think forward, farm smarter, and never stop innovating.