Facebook and Google’s surprising, rising prospects along Agriculture’s Revolutionary Road

March 21, 2018 |

If you haven’t been to Ankeny, Iowa in recent years — situated between Des Moines and Ames, which is to say between the political and financial capital of the state and Iowa State University and its ag-intellectual engine — you’ll find that it has become one of the fastest growing smaller towns in the nation.

According to Mayor Gary Lorenz, it’s in a couple of Top 5s in the national rankings for growth, and that may surprise many who are accustomed to our fastest-growing cities being invariably located in California, Texas or the Desert Southwest — where the fossil fuel, defense and software industries have been spewing job growth and urban sprawl for two generations.

What you are seeing in Ankeny of late is something that will be repeated elsewhere in the US and around the world for the next two generations — an eruption of value in the corridors where sustainable agricultural assets and intelligence meet. There, you find a combination of low rents, infrastructure, the rapidly converging technologies of biology and information science, regions hungry for growth and jobs, experienced bankers, a skilled workforce and a series of land assets which give all of those glittering attributes their relevance.

Case in point this past week was the Iowa Biotechnology Association’s annual Partnering for Growth meeting, which is held each year at the Future Farmers Association Enrichment Center in Ankeny. Increasingly that meeting is one of the most interesting places in the world to see real-world application of artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics, big data, imaging technology, advanced mobility in search of advanced solutions in fuels, specialty chemicals, advanced diagnostics and therapeutics for animals and people, waste remediation, complex biomaterials, precision agriculture, and advanced nutrition.

SynderBio’s triumph

There’s a competitive element to the company presentations, and a young cancer screening technology company named SynderBio took home the main prize, having wowed almost every one of the judges into placing it among their top three. Having had the distinct pleasure to spend a day as one of those judges, I can attest to the enthusiasm in the jury room, after presentations were done, for a a company that has discovered and patented a biomechanical technology and incorporated into a cost-effective instrument that has the ability to enable rapid, accurate cancer diagnosis. SynderBio is bio at its best.

SynderBio co-founder Sarah Vigmostad (center), picks up the Partnering for Innovations challenge prize from Iowa Biotechnology Association executive director Joe Hrdlicka and assistant director Melissa Moyer

The character and speed of growth in and around Ankeny is one of the reasons that I have occasionally wished on conference stages that the world would be a better place if it were a little more like Iowa. Especially when it comes to fostering a nexus between technology, jobs and agriculture and deploying stable and consensus-driven policies that foster value-creation.

High-flying TeselaGen, SciBac, Pollen Power, Plastomics

SynderBio beat out some formidable competition for the top prize, including the highly-regarded TeselaGen which we profiled here in “Engage the Hyper-Drive” and Plastomics, which was the subject of a Digest Top Story last month, here.  And both those companies showed incredible progress on stage this week.

Former Cobalt Technologies’er and now CEO at SciBac, Jeanette Mucha, wowed the audience with a non-GMO technology aimed at optimizing the microorganisms of the human microbiome. SCiBac’s technology, we learned, can quickly, naturally, and safely transfer useful genetic traits and is doing contract strain development for Novozymes, among others.

Pollen Power’s technology for a robust, long-lasting pollen that is proven to add as much as 20 percent to corn yields was among the most admired of the early-stagers. And those familiar with Aker would be astonished at the company’s progress on imaging technology in just two years. It’s AkerScout is the already the market leading crop scouting mobile app used to help identify and prioritize crop damage to address in-season problems. It’s TrueCause is a patented 3-foot ‘probe’ equipped with smart electronic sensors that can look inside the canopy of the crops — automating the costly yet essential science of crop scouting which is typically conducted by agronomists walking the fields. When Aker delivers on its plans to add pest detection in 2019 — man, watch out.

DecisionPx and the world of Google, Facebook

Two student companies presented at the Partnering for Growth event and were out of the formal competition — they were on hand to develop visibility, gain feedback and some on-stage pitch experience. I have a distinct feeling that I really put off DecisionPx CEO Nigel Lee, who was presenting a very early-stage technology that would use a technology as ubiquitous as an iPhone to address the 30 percent of annual agricultural productivity lost to disease. (Think potato blight, coffee leaf rust, and so forth).

It wasn’t that the idea is meritless — quite the opposite. The world could really use a low-cost, cloud-based, artificial intelligence-based technology that would read crop imagery with the same facility that Facebook or Apple currently reads your uploaded or desktop-based images to suggest who is in the photo. (Lots about Decision Px, here)

Why not, reasoned Lee, a company that would adapt technologies like this to the early detection of pest infestation or disease, with a massively lower cost basis than existing technologies or the laborious though proven process of field walking.

In regions more accustomed to the costs and throughputs that companies like Aker and PrecisionHawk are bringing forward through mobile imaging and drone technology. who knows if DecisionPx would find a market. But when we consider the increasingly ubiquitous distribution of mobile phones equipped with cameras throughout the developing world — you can begin to see where a service like DecisionPx could really find some traction.

In the remarks we gave to the student CEOs. I mentioned in all seriousness that he should jettison his business model, give the service away, and aim ultimately for an acquirer such as Google or Facebook .

It wasn’t a popular remark, and DecisionPx’s CEO didn’t enjoy the suggestion because I think he took it as a flip dismissal of the technology’s value and potential.

Value creation through imaging technology

I’ve been around the entrepreneurial world of media value-creation for a generation now and , the remarks could not have been less flip. You might well recall that Google purchased Instagram for a valuation on $1 billion just a few years ago when the company, according to the reports we heard at the time, had 13 employees.

Which is to say, there’s not only value in images, there is rich value in sharing them, and there is even richer value in establishing a robust, high-speed brand-building and messaging pipeline between growers and media companies.

A media, grower and crop company nexus: The Andy Williams story

Those of you with a sense for history may well recall that the singer Andy Williams got his start in the music business as the youngest of the four Williams Brothers, and in turn they got their start in the 1940s via live radio appearances on Midwestern radio stations that were content-hungry and had immensely powerful AM signal range — precisely because AM radio was an incredibly effective medium for reaching and influencing growers of the era, and two of the most important stations of the era were based in Iowa because seed companies were immensely successful in translating radio exposure into high sales.

Shenandoah, Iowa’s legendary KMA 960 was founded by a seed salesman, Earl May, and my grandmother used to listen to him eagerly in the 1920s when she was a young nurse at the local hospital. As Wikipedia recalls:

Between music sets, May would pitch his seeds and tell nostalgic stories. In 1926 May won the third annual Radio Digest Gold Cup Award, after being voted the “World’s Most Popular Radio Announcer” by over 452,000 people throughout the United States…According to KMA’s website more than a million people traveled to small town Shenandoah to hear the music.”

Then as now, radio was a free over-the-air medium; you give away the content and the service in order to gain a much more massive audience than you can establish via a free-based service. Seed companies, then as now, depend on their ability to reach, convince, and retain their grower customers — and if you haven’t noticed that the seed and crop protection business is big business, visit the combinations and valuations around the mergers of Syngenta and ChemChina, Dow and DuPont, or Bayer and Monsanto.

AgTech benefits all sectors by releasing resources from food production

The stakes are high because advanced seeds and crop protection are the power behind enhanced yield — and if you are reading this right now it is probably because someone else is growing the food, fiber and fuels so that you don’t have to. The whole of society benefits from agricultural productivity, even at the most basic level of not each of us having to grow our own food.

If you have somehow formed the impression that Facebook and Google have little interest in the media opportunities that occur in the “flyover states” of the Midwest that feature low populations, on the theory that cows don’t access search engines and soybeans don’t build Facebook pages, you’d be dead wrong, although you’re right about the cows and the soybeans.

Media and Deep Analytics, why it’s controversial, why there’s value

Media companies are deriving more and more of their actual growth not from adding more people to their ranks but by engaging in deeper and deeper analytics in search of value-creation through intelligence, and using their media as a delivery platform for the messages that can be tuned according to the lessons offered by such analytics. When all is said and done, historians will likely conclude that the 2016 US Presidential election was decided not through Russian interventions into the political system, but upon the advanced if occasionally nefarious use of deep analytics by a series of political players and would-be influencers, which will almost certainly turn out to include the pro-Russian forces but will also include campaign advisers, campaigns, surrogates, and individual citizens expressing themselves using social media.

That the election went to those who best understood the Midwest will probably not be a conclusion that startles anyone, but the role of deep analytics in developing that understanding — and the messaging that was ultimately delivered to the public — that’s a role which is just beginning to come to public light and is making investors nervous enough about the clash between privacy and cloud-based analytics of private lives that some $60 billion has reportedly been wiped off Facebook’s market cap in recent days as its deep analytics strategy and customers have come under new scrutiny.

If the Presidency of the United States is on offer to the groups that have the most robust pipeline for studying mass populations with precise targeting, and offering messages back to them based on insights gathered from that study — there are plenty of uses for such a technology that are not nefarious but rather offer substantial benefit to society, so long as there is transparency in the data gathering (so that objectors can opt-out) and responsible use of the insights. One doesn’t have to be an advocate for the applications of sophisticated media technology in order to understand the value of them to influencers and recognize that they are used on a wider basis now than in the past.

A focal point for advanced media in AgTech

Agriculture offers, just as in the 1940s, a perfectly good focal point for advanced media companies. Farms are growing in size and are even more decentralized than ever, and growers spend more and more money and place more attention on high technology, the companies serving them under new ownership that expects robust growth, and commodity prices aren’t so high that farmers are in a mood to throw their money around. So, free imaging and crop inspection technologies that establish deep links between media companies and growers in developing nations that will find it hard to deploy high-cost imaging systems for crop protection – they might be welcomed as a means to improve grower yield, and at the same time establish the kind of one-stop shopping media pipeline between seed and crop protection companies and these growers.

After all, a grower that uses an image to determine the nature of a disease will need solutions for any ills that are discovered. And may well become a customer for other offerings that a solution provider has developed for prevention — as well as enhanced varietals that are pest- or disease-resistant.

The amber radio waves of gain

And there’s a lot at stake for everyone in the bioeconomy. Though commodity prices are not at historic highs, energy prices are low and the world could use not only lower-cost advanced biotechnologies but also more opportunities to address feedstock cost and reduction of loss due to disease and pest are always an attractive target for that.

Hence the suggestion that the ultimate owner of advanced imaging technologies for early-detection of pests and disease not only might be media companies, they probably ought to be media companies. There. you find the expertise, the independence, a proven business model, and the ready equity and cash to acquire and build these emerging companies as they pop up in Ankeny, Iowa  – or elsewhere along the agriculture’s revolutionary road.

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