Ag Tech Talk Podcast: How the IoT is Changing the Crop Inputs Industry
2 June 2023 
Rob Tiffany, a leader in the Internet of Things, digital twins, advisor, speaker, author, podcast host, inventor, and veteran talked with us about how IoT is and will be influencing how farms are operated and the products they use to grow crops.
Podcast Transcript:
AgriBusiness Global: Welcome to the podcast, Rob. Let’s start with, maybe just a general definition of Internet of Things and digital twins. They’re not the same thing, are they? Can you explain what they are?
Rob Tiffany: Yeah, sure. The Internet of Things has been around for a long time, and it’s sensing things out in the real world, taking the natural world around us and turning it into digital signals, objects, and things in the world. People can go discover things with their eyes and ears and senses and things like that. And we’ve had the Internet for a long time – the internet of people entering information about what’s going on like out on the farm or what’s going on with it in a factory or things like that. The internet of things is now the things can talk to us over the internet or privately.
The smartphone revolution has really helped us because it drove down the cost of the different components you need to facilitate this internet of things – all the low-cost sensors, wireless connectivity, cellular networks getting pervasive and ubiquitous – things like that. So, instead of people always having to go somewhere and find out what’s going on in my factory, with my car, on my farm, what’s the moisture like? Now, they can just in real time automatically, right?
Digital twins. Think of this as the things that you’re monitoring. Basically, you have a digital twin of a car or a truck or a collection of things like an apple orchard. And so that’s actually the thing.
And so, when you have different technology revolutions, and it’s all exciting when it gets started. It seems magical, but after a while you have to realize, you know what, maybe the digital twins are the thing and IoT is just the plumbing. And so, digital twins are like modeling something. I’m going to have a digital model of physical objects. So, if I have a physical pickup truck with four tires and an engine and a fuel tank, and all that kind of stuff. In fact, I like to explain it if you’re in a relatively new vehicle these days, your dashboard is showing you all kinds of sensor information actually, that maybe you’ve never seen before. And so, it might tell you the pressure and your right front tire and things like that.
So, a digital twin you create a digital model of like that vehicle in every last aspect of it. And then from there you can you could do it. Key performance indicators, KPIs. I’ll give you a simple example. My digital twin of my pickup truck, maybe, says my tires – what do I care about them. I care about air pressure, PSI, right? And then it’s a whole number. That’s the value, and I can create KPIs. The green zone is, I want to be right around between 31 and 33 psi and then yellow as I’m getting farther away from that and red, I’m getting to a flat tire, or maybe exploding tire. So, you can put all that stuff on the digital twin of the car.
And that’s the difference. We’ve been able to make models, and you see 3D models. We’ve designed aircraft and all kinds of machines. We’re using these 3D CAD things. The difference is, it’s alive.
And so now your actual pickup truck driving down the road is sending live telemetry about all of the aspects of its health over IoT, and it’s filling up that digital twin, the digital version of it, and then it’s kind of an event happening, and it’s like okay. We’ll just stick with the tires, for instance, you know. All right. I’m getting real time data telling me the pressure of all your tires. And then, as it’s coming in, your software on your IoT platform with your digital twin. It’s looking at the incoming data, saying, this is the real world. This is what’s going on with your pickup truck. And then my twin of my truck and the KPIs I’ve defined. says, hey, this is what’s good and maybe this is what’s that or getting bad. Or if I make it more agricultural. I’m monitoring soil moisture on a farm or an apple orchard. And my soil moisture, and temperature and humidity are telling me. Hey, you know we’re getting into that yellow zone warning. You know we’re getting a little. And then you brought algorithms, you’re basically saying: Well, this this type of soil and this kind of crop needs that soil moisture at whatever percentage above 80%, but below 90%, because you don’t want too much water.
And so, how you bring the digital twins and IoT altogether is those crops – that plumbing.
And then automation is the last part. What’s the action I’m going to take? Because if I don’t, if I don’t take an action on insights, then what was the point of the whole thing? Right? And so, you can imagine, depending on the sophistication of the farm, I may automatically turn on an irrigation system to start watering that block.
But then I’m keeping track, because, you know, precision, agriculture is key, cause we kind of have a drought. or we kind of don’t have as much fertilizer as we used to, and things like that. And so, as soon as you applied just the right amount of water – you’re getting because you’re getting real-time data, even while you’re irrigating – it’ll go back down to the yellow and the green zone, and then you set it off. And so that automation is that last part, taking actions on insights.
So that’s kind of the whole thing in a nutshell.
ABG: Obviously, we want to continue talking about this regarding the farm. I mean sensors have been around for a very long time. Satellite imagery … we’ve had all that stuff. So, how is IoT part of it, or the digital twin connection different than just having the sensors themselves.
RT: That’s a good question because you’re right. Before we were all about digital twins. Digital twins were something that really kind of came from NASA and manufacturing, and even that was very nascent until the last few years to be honest with you. You’re making a good point. Have we been able to accomplish these same goals without digital twins? Yeah, kind of. I’d say the biggest change now is economics, to be honest with you. There have always been advanced analytics, technologies, and you’re right, we’ve had sensors forever and stuff like that. But a lot of times these technologies were just super expensive. I think about just being in this Internet of Things, space in general and advanced analytics. Governments could afford it. Large corporations could afford that kind of stuff. The military could afford it, but the average person, the average company, the average farmer – it was out of their reach. We’ve had a perfect storm. not into that smartphone revolution push down the cost and increase the pervasiveness of all these kinds of sensors and giving us that network. And now, analytics that you want to run to, to, to drive insights instead of having to pay tens of millions of dollars to get something like that, I can just go to Apache.org and download the stuff for free. I still have to know how to use it. People overuse the term: They say it’s the democratization of whatever. But I really think that’s what it is. It’s now in the hands of everyone. That’s the biggest difference. It’s pervasive and economic.
ABG: Most farmers will tell you, and we’ll get into sustainability and a little bit here, they all agree with the idea. Growers are the original green team. They’ll say, this is a great idea but if it’s not going to make me money, they’re not going to adopt it, whether it’s crop input – whatever it is. So, are we at a point where these tools are low-cost enough, they’ve been democratized enough, to use your term that just about any farmer can use them?
RT: I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. We’ve moved in a big direction that way. The only reason I say that is just personal experience. Deploy lots of proofs of concepts on farms, large farms, things like that – very positive outcomes. The growers are excited about it. But at scale sometimes it can seem to be too expensive. And what I mean by it is, despite this perfect storm of economic benefit of it going down at scale, like, if I just do a 10-acre block. We do a proof of concept, and everything looks great. It’s like, yeah, we want to go live. What’s it going to cost to go to 10,000 acres? All of a sudden, it’s like and let’s just say, I’m going to have one device breaker.
If that device, though, is a couple of hundred dollars or $300, or whatever it happens to be, it’s a device with computer storage networking a battery you might have to solar of the canopy and then has associated sensors connected to it for temperature, humidity – all that kind of stuff – soil moisture. And then everybody’s got their hand up right. Everybody wants to get paid. So, there’s the hardware maker who makes that stuff, there’s the connectivity. If it’s cellular, I’m probably paying for some data plan.
And so depending on the farm — mega-scale farms – a lot of funding can do it, mom and pops still can’t do it, but even larger farms I’ve worked with, still, it feels like blunt-force trauma when you do the quick math on the back of the napkin, and they’re like ‘it’s going to cost me how much to get going with this and how much per month?’ That’s when you actually start up the talking about clever business models.
I love to use the example of 82 Security, because it’s something that’s been around forever, and everybody kind of understands it, and it’s actually a classic IoT use case, even though we didn’t know it when they started. I need security for my house and the deal is ‘I’m paying (name your security company), and they’re going to charge me, whatever it is, about $39.95 per month, or whatever it is, and they’re going to monitor, and if someone breaks in they’re going to call the cops.’
But part of that deal is, hey, you’re either going to pay whatever 1,500 bucks upfront. We’re going to put sensors on your doors and windows, and then you’re going to do your plan, or if you can’t afford that we will roll that cost into your monthly plan, right? And so, then it’ll cost more. But then you always hear about Capex vs. Opex, right? But then you’ve got to be on some kind of minimum required, 36-month (plan), or whatever, to make sure they recoup the money. I think it’ll be something like that to roll the cost of the hardware and connectivity into, maybe a monthly subscription to try and beat that price down so that it’s economically feasible for the grower.
ABG: Okay. There are lots of sensors out there, lots of different kinds of monitors and everything. Do they have to be completely integrated? Can I have a soil sensor from here, and a moisture sensor from over there, and other devices are needed, and sort of incorporate them into a single system. What ties it all together?
RT: That’s a great point. Players in the IoT space outside of farming, or whatever. You’re right. You’ve seen a bunch of them where they build the whole solution end to end. You buy their sensor, their device, their platform, their everything, and it’s their way or the highway as far as the solution.
When we talk about things like an IoT platform or digital twin whatever … in software terms think of it as it’s middleware, it’s what it really is. And so, if you build it such a way – because I’ve built this kind of technology myself, this greenhouse technology, the realization that you have to be flexible and be able to work with lots of different devices is critical. And so, the key thing is, you’re using these protocols over the web, or whatever that can work with anything. Because you’re right. It’s important to not block out any kind of device or say we only work with this. It’s important to say we can find a way to work with anything.
It’s not just me saying that we’ve had, the last several years, all of a sudden, we all woke up to the supply chain problem that came out of nowhere. And because there were people, and I I’ve done proofs-of-concept on farms with one particular kind of device that I was in love with, and it was great. But then the supply chain problem (appeared), because all these components are coming from all over the world all of a sudden you couldn’t find them anymore. What was a two- or three-week lead time. Now it’s a 45-week lead time, which could be unacceptable, or your ability to find it at a certain cost. You know what was $100, now they wanted $300 for it. People are literally going on eBay and anywhere they can to find these devices. So, people are scrambling.
It’s super critical that the platform that you’re using that middleware platform – it’s either running up in a cloud somewhere, or you hear about edge computing. Maybe it’s at the farmhouse, the packing house somewhere nearby on the farm. It’s critical that it can work with anything that uses open standards, open protocols so that you can work with whatever device. Because when things got tough you had to use whatever you could get. And so, you’re using a variety of sensors of the same type, but from different brands and things like that to get what you need. So, it’s a critical element, for sure.
ABG: Let’s go back to digital twins, for a second. You said mega farms are using them. How far away are we from it being run on the mill, practical for small-, medium-, and large-holder farms?
RT: It’s probably five years, I would think. I don’t even know that many mega farms that are using digital twins. I think some of the mega farms are doing some kind of IoT and sensing at large scale. We’ve already seen the whole drone thing doing spectral analysis. And I’ve seen lots of grower’s say: “That’s great stuff. How much does it cost? Oh, wow, that’s a lot of money.” And so, there’s that, too. It’s interesting when you talk about costs, though, all these problems in the world that growers face, the number one problem I here when I asked all of them – it’s still labor. Another way, maybe to grow this space is think about what’s the fully loaded cost of one employee on the farm doing all the tasks they do. What do I pay them – insurance, all that kind of stuff.
Either people going out and discovering these things, looking for the beginning of fire blight coming into my orchard, or something like that. You know people drive around ATVs all the time. It’s probably important to think of those costs when you get afraid of these big IoT/digital twin costs as soon as you start comparing it to the fully loaded cost of people, it’s not so scary. I’m not trying to position this as, “Hey, we’re going to get rid of jobs.”
The problem is, we don’t have enough people to do the jobs already. And so, we have to think of this technology as augmenting operations because we just don’t have enough people to help us.
For large scale farms digital twins are a little newer. I’d say another two-ish years for big, large- scale, but five to six, probably for smaller-, medium-type farms.
ABG: You mentioned precision agriculture earlier. Variable rate applications were some of the first tools that were used, and now they’re pretty much everywhere. What will digital twins look like to Joe Farmer, when he gets up in the morning and turns on a computer. What’s he going to see? How is his farm going to operate?
RT: You would probably get different answers depending on what IoT digital twin guy you talk to. Probably the answers I would have given you maybe two years ago are different than now, and I’ll tell you why. There’s been this notion that growers can open up their laptop and, in the morning, and they’re going to see dashboards that the farms talking to them, and it’s telling you what to do, where to go, where to apply fertilizer, where to do water, all of those things.
And so that’s one view of it. I have to say, I’m not on board with that anymore. I’m on board with IoT, and this technology being invisible and almost autonomous. And so, what I mean by that … I’m not saying I want to take the power out of the hands to the grower, but a lot of these decisions are not rocket science decisions where you need some kind of crazy neural network AI thing to figure it out. And so, just like in a factory, you do things by exception. I’ve got 1 million things going on. I don’t have time to look at a million things. I’m not Homer Simpson, looking at the screen in my nuclear reactor to see what’s going on, right? I want the system because I have a lot of people go: “Rob I paid a lot of money for this technology.
I don’t want it to tell me what to do, I want it to do it,” and that’s a critical different element. And so, for growers, in the near future, that’s what they’re going to expect.
It’s like, “Hey, just let me know if there’s something burning that I really need to do. But what I really want is this technology to automate it into it all itself.” Whether it’s a simple example of turning on and turning off irrigation, to have that precise amount of water applied, or sending a notification to a worker in the field to go turn on a valve and then turn it off that kind of thing.
Growers don’t want to just be staring at a screen all day. And so, it could be simple as text messages or things like that. And so that’s kind of where my heads at. Again, there’ll be people with a different point of view, but the future I’m thinking of a smarter, more autonomous system that’s actually doing the work of people. That’s what they want. We already have a labor shortage. “I’m paying good money for this technology to do the thing for me.”
ABG: One of the other things listed on your LinkedIn resume is sustainability. You’re a big proponent of sustainability. How does the Internet of Things, how do digital twins fit into the sustainability picture when it comes to agriculture?
RT: Absolutely. I’ve probably already gone over when I think about water and fertilizer around a bunch of things like that. Think about this: If I think about things like – we’ll use the word inspection – every time I have to get in a pickup truck and drive somewhere to go inspect something. What’s the state of these crops or go look at monitoring my grain silos – the levels and those kind of things. Just the simple things, a simple inspection. Every time you have to do that, it’s a person, it’s a truck that you pay for, it’s fuel. Every time you’re using energy. There’re emissions, right?
There’s this whole notion of getting to net zero emissions. CO2, methane – things like that. Folks in all kinds of industries look at that. Obviously, the oil and gas industry is really looking at that in a big way now. And so, there’s all kinds of emissions that come from (those tasks). There’s that kind of sustainability, the sustainability of labor, keeping your equipment lasting longer. And so, a fully automated farm or it’s just irrigating as needed. It’s fertilizing, that’s needed. It’s using just the right amount or not as much herbicide and things like that is sustainable. Lots of people forget that the other part of the equation informing is that packing house, the processing that goes on, which looks just like process manufacturing.
There’s so much more talk in IoT around this industry 4.0 thing, and so everybody is talking about smart factories. But what they forget is, we have those same things out on the farms as well. It might be a co-op kind of thing where you see conveyor belts with apples or driers and things like that.
Lots of technology out there, a lot of things that are machines that have up time. A lot of them use a lot of fossil fuels and things like that. So, monitoring that part of the farm is critical, just like monitoring every kind of machine that’s on the farm and the needs of the form itself. You know you want to reduce the amount of time you’re having to visit the location to it automatically to reduce the amount of energy I’m using.
If I don’t have to keep driving places to check out things on the farm, I’m saving energy, I’m reducing the fuel, people, and things like that.
We talk about what happens after harvest in the supply chain going through the distributors cold storage, cold chain throughout. We do a great job on the farm and everything. And then we find out we’ve lost 30% of the food in the supply chain afterwards, and that’s heartbreaking. I think IoT and digital twins have to play that role all the way because the whole thing is the supply chain right from seeds to planting all the way till it arrives at the grocery store.
Digital twins of the thing. The crops follow and track all the way from where what block they are on a farm, where they are at on the shelf of the grocery store or at a restaurant – things like that. And so, we get to use all that technology all throughout, to have a sustainable supply chain to reduce loss, and only reduce waste in every kind of way, loss of food, waste of food, energy, emissions, things like that.
ABG: Yeah, it certainly seems that consumers are much savvier and more concerned about where their food is coming from. So, having the ability to track all that stuff and let them even know what kind of crop inputs were put on is rather important.
RT: The digital twin of the crop in the ground, and it follows, it flows. It follows from harvest to processing tacking to storage to eighteen-wheeler to this distributor, to getting handed off and you’re tracking. And you also remember I talked about having these key performance indicators on the twin. You should have KPIs on that twin that are appropriate for when it’s in the ground to when it’s going through packing when it’s traveling on a truck, and everything that says, “Hey, this type of crop, this type of food, needs these temperatures, or this kind of humidity or these conditions.” And so that travels with it all the way to the end.
Are we doing that today? (not so much). I think we can. You know some people are doing a better job than others. The way I describe digital twins, though this might be more standardized, easier way to do it, because I think lots of people try to do the best they can by hook or by crook. And everybody’s probably doing it differently.
The digital twin way is what great way to follow that thing all the way through the supply chain.
ABG: Okay. Our listeners focus primarily on crop inputs. Can you talk about the big picture. Can you focus a little bit on how digital twins, how IoT might affect the use of crop inputs specifically?
RT: Well, I guess we’re trying to reduce inputs, right, as needed. There’re some things you can’t get away from. If you’re monitoring the soil. Where do I need this input? And where do I not need that input, right? And I don’t want to belabor things like fertilizer. Everybody is over discussing it. Since we’ve had this war in Ukraine, we’ve had a lack of fertilizer. A lot of people don’t understand why that is, or they don’t know anything about the Haber-Bosch Process. That’s the only reason we have the population on the planet that we do today is because we know how to make artificial ammonia and all those kinds of things to create artificial fertilizer.
But all these things kind of play a role in all that. That’s a critical input. The average person doesn’t look at it this way. When I think about sustainability. Those of us in this space, we talk about how much more we’re going to have to produce between now and 2050 with the increasing global population. And that seems like the tallest order of all mankind. It doesn’t get all the headlines. Climate change gets all the headlines, but just beneath it is this whole food thing. Depending on who you talk to, it’s 50% to 70% more food. For oversight we’re going to have to grow more than we’ve been growing since the beginning of farming.
It sounds insane. We’ve got to create more. But unfortunately, we’ve got these headwinds right. We have to do more with less. Depending on where you are, there’s less water, there’s less fertilizer, the cost of energy – natural gas for your dryers when you’re drying food when it’s coming through, processing. All those kinds of things play a big role. If that’s not tough enough, we’ve got half the country on fire every summer.
We’ve got drought everywhere. We’ve got this whole desertification thing that I never heard of until a few years ago going on. And so, in some ways it’s the challenge of our time.
And so, to your point, I’m not doing a great job of answering your question about inputs.
But if I have fewer inputs, and I need to create more than I’ve ever created before. It does feel like it’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of scenario to me, at least.
So, are digital twins and IoT the whole solution, no. But it sure is part of it, and sure is part of it. There’s a lot of other components that go into an address in this challenge for sure.
ABG: Absolutely. What have we not talked about?
RT: I want all this to succeed. I want to help these growers, but I don’t want it to be, these guys get taken care of, but these folks who don’t have enough money, don’t get taken care of because everybody needs to get fixed in this way, because it affects all of us. I don’t know what kinds of things you see; I don’t know if it’s more of a USDA or a governmental thing, because I’m not plugged in. But I don’t know where the money is. Who are the big funders out there?
Often, when I hear about getting the big chunks of money, you need to make something happen instead of it being something that I’m used to in the tech world like. Oh, some PCs in Silicon Valley are going to do it. In agriculture, it’s like, well, no, I need a grant from the USDA to make this happen, and it feels unfair.
I don’t know if you see anything different than I do.
ABG: No, not at this point. I’m thinking how is it going to play out? What would be costs? Farmers aren’t going to pull it out of their pocket and retailers aren’t going (to pay) because it has to be on the farm itself. Right? A retailer can have a drone, and maybe use that on several different farms, you just can’t pick up the sensor, move it to the next farm and do some work. It’s just doesn’t work that way. So, it’ll be interesting to see where we are in five years.
RT: Or is it private equity folks? Obviously, we all talk about private equity scooping up farms and stuff like that. And that’s an interesting thing because there’s always negative positive connotations that go with private equity. Somebody in New York City, buying up all these farms around the country. So, it’s the people I talk to, they’re like. “Oh, gosh!” But other times I’ll talk to those private equity folks and guess what they’re like. I don’t know how to run a farm. I want to run it. I want the data to tell me what to do. or I want to just have a dashboard from my office. People look at Elon Musk, and they look at the (Tesla) Gigafactory. The lights out Gigafactory where you look inside there, and it’s almost nobody there. It’s fully automated, and I know people like, how do I get that from my farm? And I know that seems like crazy talk, and it is crazy talk, but there’s some kind of delta between getting there, and whatever can we move to it? Maybe it is. It’s certainly going to be bigger money sources. I just worry that government will wait till it’s too late, or till the buildings on fire to take those kind of actions.
ABG: We’re just kind of scratching the surface here. But if somebody wants to look and you listen to this and says, “That’s interesting. Where can I find out more about it? Where should they go; what would you suggest they do?”
RT: Certainly, can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I’m trying to do my part building some technology to mostly give away. To be honest with you. When I’m building this greenhouse technology, it’s IoT and digital twins. It’s not like, I’m just some other big company trying to make a bunch of money out for farmers because I get it.
And so, you know, just as important as is the use cases, writing a book that goes along with it that says, for all these different scenarios use these sensors, this device, this wireless, this algorithm whatever to get the outcome. I know a lot of people need handholding or they don’t know where to start or what to do everything. So, I’m always happy to talk to anybody about this, because a lot of this be accomplished with lots of different technology from other vendors? Absolutely it can’t and absolutely can. And so, you know, in my mind, we just need to lift all those. And so certainly, yeah, folks can come. Come, find me or RobTiffany.com is my website. On Twitter @RobTiffany
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