As many of you know, I enjoy connecting with farmers from diverse corners of the globe, walking around in crops, and learning something new.
During these walks, you sometimes learn things you never considered.
For example, during one walk, I learned that some farmers wait up to 2.5 months to receive soil sample results from the closest lab. That is a far cry from Salinas and Yuma, where we sometimes get results on the same day.
Excitingly, new technologies are on the horizon that could significantly reduce waiting periods for everyone from days to minutes and cut costs from tens of dollars per sample to nearly a dollar per sample. This has the potential to reshape many organizations' Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), offering a promising future for the industry.
The other impact is that we know from the last few years that machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) need much more data than we have from traditional data collection. Lower costs and faster collection allow for more data without changing the costs.
It's clear that to harness the full potential of these advancements, we need to be more spatially and temporally granular in our data collection. We should aim to gather data every time we visit the field, be it soil, leaf, or fruit data, to provide more sample points along a season's temporal timeline. Giving new models and remote monitoring systems more control data to validate assumptions and for training.
Aaron Magenhiem took a whole basket of technology to Peru and Chile on this trip, and we are excited to see how our customers will adopt and leverage these technologies to make better decisions without breaking the bank.
We eagerly anticipate more updates as our first crop season in LATAM continues and we prepare to assist our North American operators for the 2025 season. Stay tuned for more exciting developments! As the season slows down, we will write deeper topics about what we learned this past season.
Hashtags: Aaron Magenheim Tal Moar Lighthouse.Ag
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