Ag Tech Talk Podcast: Tracking the Future of Supply Chain with CropTrak

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The past few years have proven the importance of managing and maintaining supply chains for the ongoing health and success of any business. Fortunately, there are tools available to help procurement officers make critical decisions. CropTrak is one such solution. CropTrak leverages decades of industry, data, science, process improvement program management and geospatial experience to help companies analyze, simplify and digitize their existing supply chains. In this edition of Ag Tech Talk, we talk with Aaron Hutchinson, CEO and founder of CropTrak, to learn how supply chain software solutions can improve the procurement process and help ensure continued supplies.

Podcast Transcript:

AgriBusiness Global: Welcome, Aaron. Thank you for being with us today. Why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

Aaron Hutchinson: I’m a Aaron Hudson. I come from a produce and citrus family out of Florida. I grew up on the farm in the eighties when farming was a little tough, as everybody remembers. So, I went to school to be a computer engineer and electrical engineer spent a little time seeing the world with the navy.

We had our first company then. When we exited that company, we looked back to ag, because two of the three founders, one of them was a woman – so few ag startups actually have woman founders, so we should advertise that.

This is the second business for us as partners, so we must get along pretty well. Our first company, we built 3-D GIS (geographic information system) tools for the military, the world. And the way I like to think about that is, think (video game) Halo, but your life depends on it.

The decisions you’re making, and how you’re going about hat is based on the data you have in hand, and it needs to work every time, and it needs to work in really austere environments.

If you think about it, that’s farming. We need our data. We need it all the time. We can’t lose it. We’re going to use it in an austere environment where there’s no Internet. It’s really dirty. It’s really noisy.

Two of the founders are from farming families. Why did we start our second business? Well, what we figured out was, we hated the idea that our clients in the military could go anywhere in the world and never lose a piece of data. But our parents would go home with their iPad or something like that, plug it in and it first thing would happen is the data for the day would be gone, and so back to using the three-ring binder that was in their shirt pocket, right? That was the only thing that really assured them they had their data.

Because of our background with GIS — think geospatial, think, field boundaries, soil sampling, and things like that. It aligned really well with the way we thought about the world,

We actually made the first soil sampling and scouting apps that were in the Apple App Store on the planet in 2009 – more than a year before there was an iPad.

At the same time, we actually laid out our mission. And I think that really drives the way the company goes forward. Our mission is the same here, today. We didn’t change it in any way, and that is to use data to identify and address systematic supply chain problems that limit the availability of safe, affordable, and sustainable food. That’s just as applicable, today.

When we think about the supply chain issues that we’re having, as it was back in 2009, which tells you that there’s still a lot to be done there that we you know we can have an impact on. The only thing I would change if I was to write that (today) I would add nutritious. People are now really worried about: “Is the food good for me?” Not just:  “Do I have calories.” So, that’s where we come from.

ABG: On your website. It talks about you as a serial entrepreneur. Can you talk a little bit about some of the other ventures and what led you into ag?

AH: A little bit of that is because of our background. Since we’re farm kids, it’s kind of hard to get away from it. You can run away, but you keep coming back. My parents said: “Be anything but a farmer.” And here I am.

When I left the military there was a need for a transition from very specialty hardware – much like ag, right? You think about apps for purposely built soil sampling tools. We were doing things on PCs that were embedded into tanks and airplanes and things like that.

The phones that we were that were available from Apple at the time, even though they were tiny, represented the same sort of technology leap in the marketplace. And so what we wanted to do was take the same sort of embedded military technology that always works and apply it to ag.

Our soil, sampling apps, and our scouting apps way back in 2009 had over 50,000 users right out of the gate. We were really excited about that. But over time, what’s happened is this: The company’s actually evolved.

ABG: Maybe this be the time to talk about what CropTrak is, and what it is you’re offering to manage the supply chain.

AH: First, it’s probably important to say that there’s not one; there’s lots and lots of supply chains. They’re all intertwined with one another. There’re horizontal and vertical ones. The way I think about describing the world is, if you think about the processing plant being the middle of the universe, there are contracts, there’s farming, there’s logistics and monitoring, there’s scales and receiving, there’s payment calculations and settlements. Then you flip them over and you produce the world. Then you have logistics, payments, marketing – all of the things that you think about exist on both sides of that plant.

For our large, vertically integrated customers, and for some of the largest food and beverage companies on the planet, we handle everything from digitally contracting to a grower growing a crop all the way through the settlement for them, and that includes making sure all the compliance paper work’s in place, making sure that that the crop arrives on time, on scale, with great quality, and things that are required for them to turn it into a value-added product for the food company or put really fresh things on your shelf, right? One of our clients is the largest fresh tomato grower around the world,

So, we handle everything from the food safety linkages, the traceability, linkages, and all of the little stamps that we love to find on our food. It’s organic. It’s fair trade. It’s water-sensitive climate-smart eco-smart regenerative. Those are all paper collection problems. And so what we do is we make sure we get all the observations and all the data, so that we can fill out compliance paperwork that goes on your food.

ABG: We’ve been hearing about cloud solutions for a long time. Everything is cloud based. Is that the solution to the lost data problem?

AH: The one that everybody thinks about first is probably the digital transformation part, which is: “Can we turn paper digital? So, the first step is, can we put it in a way that we can handle it consistently.

Second, is the cloud. In and of itself it’s not an answer. It’s what you build your thing on, like choosing the difference between diesel or gas.

But what do you do with that? Technology is what makes it safe … making it back itself up, making it available on multiple machines. So, if one of them goes down, the other ones can fill in the voids. Cloud’s important. It lowered the cost of f startups being able to field new products. And because there was lower costs were up front that meant we had lower cost products to try. So, without a cloud we wouldn’t have had these 4 billion new startups. We were all running around selling something as cheap as ninety-nine cents for an app to $30 to $40 an acre. Those were all taking advantage of the fact that there is an infrastructure already there that handles the computing, the storage, the backup, and the like.

But if they use it smartly, then they also get data safety and data reuse and data sharing. We talk about collaboration and sharing those become potentials because there’s connectivity between all these different vendors.

ABG: When there are new solutions out there, a bunch of people  jump into the fray. Some are going to fall out. There could be some success stories, and obviously some that probably shouldn’t have gotten in there in the first place. They have a technology, but they don’t really know agriculture. How is that going to play out for CropTrak? How do you differentiate yourself so that people know you’re legit versus just you know some other solution on the street?

AH: That’s a great question. First, we’ve been around since 2009. So, if we were spending other people’s money we’d probably be long going by now. Second, is the fact that we’re selling in 70 countries for 70 different kinds of crops in 15 languages, and when you walk into a grocery store you see labels everywhere that have our stickers. The food is there because we played a role in that. I can talk about (one company we work with) because they’ve made it public, Del Monte. So, if it goes in a can., it goes in a bag — then it’s been touched by CropTrak. (It helps that) we grew up with the farmer, worked with ag retailers, worked with suppliers to now working with food companies.

We have this ability to interact in the interest of these large, vertically integrated food companies collecting and filling holes and voids in the process to collect data that that gets them to products they can put on the shelf and marketing that they can rely on. A lot of companies are talking about zero net, zero water, and lower uses the nitrogen.

Now that those DSGs are required to have teeth behind them. Because if you’re a publicly traded company, you have to put them into your filing reports. What does that mean? That means you have to have all of the supporting materials for the story that you’re telling. You can’t just say “I’m going to” do something; you have to approve that you did it,

We play a critical role for some of super large global companies. In the process of doing that we help them baseline. We help them collect the data and we help them to report that data.

ABG: If the last few years have shown us nothing there’s always going be something to disrupt supply chains. We’ve battled COVID for three years. Now we have war in Ukraine. There are always weather issues. How do these types of solutions help manage through those supply chain glitches?

AH: The way to think about it is risk. So, we’re talking about risk management. How do I look at my operations and figure out what’s the best way for it? An example: During COVID, one of our clients – we handle all of their contracts with their growers, their delivery points, and the logistics – we were able to work with that grower to tell them how much they needed to fulfill the contracts that actually continued. (The company) had a bunch of contracts, during that first little window some of them fell as many as 40% or 50%.

How (does the company) get the cheapest ones into those to fulfill those contracts. So, we helped them do that. The other piece was as they played. What if games? What if I take the rest of that and do something with it. What I mean by that: They actually bought a crop that they dehydrated that they ultimately sold to the client – their core product. And what ended up happening was because of the way the world was acting, one of their primary competitors was offshore. Remember, nothing was coming on shore. So, we got to play the “What If” game? How much would it cost for me to ship it to a fresh market. What would I charge for it so that I actually made money instead of lost money moving it from being dehydrated and sitting on a shelf to moving in and selling it as fresh. We were able to work with the client to help them figure that out. They clicked a couple of buttons, and all of a sudden, the truckers went to a different location.

The growers didn’t know anything changed, because they got paid exactly the same amount and we ended up changing the destination of where the crops were going, and that got a different kind of pricing associated with it for the client. They ended up making a lot more money that year than they would have probably made because they filled in an entire fresh gap that was missing because of offshore crops.

Having the data, all in one place, being able to ask “if” questions is one way. The other one is understanding every field – what you have in it. So you understood what it meant when you took it and used it right so you could go and get the cheapest or the highest quality or highest volume at the least number of miles away from the plant. The game that you might want to play involves a lot more dimensions than: “Was it delivered on Tuesday?”

ABG: In addition to supply chain disruptions, we’ve been hearing a lot about sustainability and, in the last couple of years, carbon offsets all these types of things. There are two questions here. Can these solutions accommodate that? Secondly, we weren’t talking about carbon offsets in 2009 when you started. How easy is it to incorporate a new into a solution like this?

AH: Oh, really three questions you asked me. You asked about carbon, sustainability, and new. I think they’re all the same. They’re all the same question with a slightly different slant, and what I mean by that is once there’s a pipeline, moving data – data for food, safety, traceability, or recalls – that pipeline is in place for moving information; it starts at the grower level and kind of goes all the way to the food company.

Lifting it to allow it to collect more information and move more and different information is actually a lot easier than you might think, because you’ve already overcome a lot of the hard hurdles, which is: “How do I get my buyers, my accounting department, my agro, my grower, and everybody to share information in a consistent and seamless way. And how do I store it in and produce it into reports and dashboards. Or in the case of carbon and sustainability (provide) accreditation paperwork so that you can actually get credit for the work that you did. Going through a pipeline with observations and activities. To get an organic sticker is almost the same as going through to get a carbon sticker. You still have to do the same activities. It’s just that instead of, “Did I just drive a tractor over the field,?” it’s “How long did I drive the tractor over the field. It’s a little lift, maybe a 10% lift, but at the end of the day you’re going down the same pipelines. Sustainability at some level is the same. Sustainability is about what were the activities? And did you do activities that give you credit, or did you not – cover crops.

It’s a yes or no kind of question. Did you do it? And when did you do it? Did you use drip tape? The types of questions that kind of fall into that?

We have the ability to go through and see all these different observations from different people. We get IoT (internet of things) straight from the machines, straight from sensors that are on the farm. We get IoP (Internet of people) – people carrying around iPads and all. And we’ve even gone so far as the Internet of Internet. And what I mean by that is for some of our applications to make sure there’s high adoption rate and make sure the data gets into the system, we can get it all the way down to as simple as a series of text messages.

You’re a contract sprayer. He comes on the field. He says, “I did this activity. I started. I stopped. I did this.”

So, no tools to download, No, nothing really to learn other than something like entering data in your bank. And at the same time we now have an activity. We have a real time data collection thing that we can audit that becomes part of the record. The bigger record that allows us to check the box for sustainability, or carbon, or organic, or a myriad of activities.

ABG: Can you provide some examples of this in a real-world situation?

AH: There are about 1,300 labels out there that you can put on food. If each one of them were their own dedicated pathway, nobody would get anything done. We’re looking for commonality, and how we deal with new things. New things appear every day? A great example is FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act). It was signed just a couple of months ago. It’s (was planned to) land on agriculture here in November (according to) what we’ve been told from D.C. What that means is that all crops need to follow the PTI standard (Produce Traceability Initiative Standard) for how food is handled from the farm all the way to the consumer. Those kinds of new initiatives turn out to be, again, lifts. A lot of the data is already collected. It just needs to be formatted in any appropriate way. It needs to be moved in the appropriate way, and it needs to be aggregated in the appropriate way. As a company, we have people who are full-time global-gap sustainability, certified people who help our clients to position their data so that they can do these things.

Some of them are more complex than you might think, and a good example of that is, if we think about food, loss, or we think about carbon – in the U.S. there’s, Field-to-Market, in Europe, there’s Cool Farm Tool, in Asia there’s SAI. For my global clients, it’s not just How do I answer the question on one continent for one vendor? But how do I do it so that I can ship my food anywhere in the world. So part of that standardization is also, finding commonality across all of these different models, as well.

ABG: Okay, there are millions, if not billions of data points that can be collected. Icompare it to Major League baseball stats. Every time I turn around there is a new stat they’re coming out with. It’s just as complicated, or even more so, on the farm. It’s one thing to collect that data. It’s another thing to do something with it.

AH: You know the role we play. We look down on food from the food company and those big, vertically integrated guys. We’re not competing with your ag retailer. We’re taking the data from it. We’re not saying, “this should be your variable rate,” what we’re saying is, “you did a variable rate and what was it that you included in it?” Because that in the end affects things like? “Did I as a bigger food company or a bigger corporation meet my sustainability goal of using less nitrogen?” I need to know how much you use, so I know how much totally I used as an organization.

The other piece is when we think about it, kind of in that level as well. That information has to be connected. And so, what ends up happening is the same challenge that a farmer has on his farm, which is, he ends up with a report from his ag retailer, ends up a report from his tractor, end up with (other reports). That happens at scale as well. When you have millions of farms involved and millions and millions of fields. And so, our job is not just to get it all into a big giant pile, because it would just be a big giant trash pile if we did that. But it is also to connect the dots, to find the finder reasons or find the ways that we can re-associate the data to itself.

A great example is a lot of times we find ourselves in the world where the tractor did in an application. We have to go find the invoice that actually is the thing that got that that actually got applied because it took both of those for us to be able to say, “Are you still kosher?”

Did you blow your contract because you sprayed beyond the 40 chemicals that are that are allowed under the contract. Are you using things in a way that would restrict the resell of the product somewhere else.

That’s when we think about specialty crops in grains – corn, beans, and rice. The future is putting data around it, so that it actually has more than one attribute associated with it. It’s no longer a commodity; it has become specialty itself, because now we know how it was grown. So now we can actually choose specific marketplaces to sell that, which increases its value both for both the farmer and the food company.

ABG: The data comes from a variety of places. Some companies have proprietary systems. This piece of machinery may not talk to that one. How do you bring all that data together so that you’re still able to use it?

AH: What it means is relationships, right? The same challenges that everybody else has is: “Can you build relationships with all of the people who are necessary to supply you with data and because of sometimes because of who we work with, the requirement of the contract is that data needs to be accessible.

So, you can’t win a big giant contract with PepsiCo or something like that contract without being compatible with what there were data requirements at the end of the day. The other way we do this is, we also do a lot of partnerships.

So, there are companies in the world that are becoming really good at bridging proprietary to standardization. We exercise those as much as possible. Also, whenever we can, we exercise open standards. In the worst case we write another plug-in. The truth of the industry right now is lots of little piles of data, and to get all of them together you have to go in, and in a sense negotiate with each and every one of those groups. That’s the long-term challenge for agriculture. But with, FSMA, this idea that we need to be able to tell you where something came from in 24 hours digitally is going to require that we don’t pick up the phone and talk to people. We’re going to have to share data at some level amongst all of the participants, all the stakeholders.

ABG: What are some of the other challenges to getting a solution like this, whether it’s yours or a competitor’s, to adopt a solution like this.

AH: One of the first challenges is just getting people to do it. We worked with uh a multi-state (company). We spent an entire year with their IT department designing the perfect tool for them. with all the support materials. The big day came. They handed out shrink wrapped iPads to all of the people. They were supposed to go out and collect the data.

A year later 10 of them came back still shrink wrapped. So, if you never open the box, then you can never get the advantage of this technology. So, there is a little bit of, can you help them overcome those things? Our lesson from that was Facebook is our friend. No matter how old you are, how great you are if I can get you talking to your kids, your grandkids through Facebook. Then all of a sudden, technology is not a not a hurdle for you.

It becomes a little bit easier. The other one is exposure. One of the adoption problems that we run into a lot of time is because at the top, the cutting edge growers we talk about them a lot because they’re just pushing the envelope as hard as they can, but a lot of places we end up when they see in the desktop that we put in the grading room, or where you know, we hand them a phone for the first time, for the purposes of data collection, for a lot of them, that’s their first touch of technology.

We worked with a really large green chili grower, and went into this plant, and the paper was everywhere. Paper went out. It was harvested. People wrote on the paper. It came to the grading scale. It was written on paper, the paper just kind of followed around. And what was interesting about it was by the time we were done everybody had to have a piece of digital, and several of them said, “I work in this part of green chilis for this time of the year. But I also work in another crop down the street during the other part of the year. And now that I have computer experience…”

They had been introduced to technology. They weren’t afraid of a mouse. They now understood what scrolling means. I mean some of the things we take advantage of at the core of small farms and small corporations is cutting edge for them. Just giving the time to allow them to feel comfortable about it is a huge thing.

But you also have to expose the right type of technology for the right person. Overseas we have small holder farmers. Think about a hectare, an acre and a half, two acres, something like that. There’s a million of them. Think about dealing with passwords with a million people – probably can’t do that. You would have a data center as big as Microsoft, just setting resetting passwords all the time. So, we ended up building social media-based tools for interacting with them because they felt comfortable in social media. The password was part of the social media event, and therefore, moving the data was really easy, because it was something that we were used to and felt friendly to.

The challenge for technologists like us is to find the right interface for them. And the challenges for companies who want to (incorporate) innovation. Change is hard. They have to put the time in to (understand) how people feel, (get them to) understand the value, and feel comfortable with it before they send them off into the world. They’re going to be surprised when you see the smiles on people’s faces that they’re doing something new and cutting edge, because people say the old guys don’t want anything new, and they’re the hard adopters. And I would argue that there are people who love things that change, and there are people who hate change. I don’t care what age you are. We find that we want to deal with less change as we get older.

But if we understand the value of it, then we actually are more inclined to take on that change, and we’ve seen that again and again in multiple countries around the globe, with multiple different crops and multiple levels of education. It isn’t if you’re smarter or dumber. It’s just, do you have the inclination to try? And if you do, the technologies these days between the user experience work that we do, and the UI work that’s done with these technologies are meant to be very approachable. We just have to get (the technology) in their hands and let them try.

ABG: This technology evolves quickly. Where do you see these types of solutions five years from now, 10 years from now, or is that too far a timeframe?

AH: We have to think that far ahead, because it takes us about 36 months sometimes to do a really radical change in technology. So, if we’re not thinking 36, 40, 48 months, then we’re thinking tomorrow, and there’s just not enough time to radically change. Some of the things that are happening right now that are going to have a huge impact on the way we think about these things – 4K cameras and the tractor portion of “smart.” We already see it in See and Spray. We are already starting to see mechanical weeding. We’re starting to see all kinds of things happening in those tractors. But for them to work, they’re actually collecting data on every plant.

There’s lots of data. There used to be, when my dad (farming, there) was there was a field, and you did everything to the field equally, and then we started to think about soil zones, and then we started just variable rate zones. Then we started to think about rows. And now we’re thinking about every plant as having its own project, its own prescription – what chemicals, what fertilizers, what weeding, what needs to happen to it happens on an individual basis. Somewhere that data has to be saved.

Because we have to answer the question: “How much did we spray? How much nitrogen did we use? We’ve gone from three to 10 measurements on a field to a million and a half, if you were thinking about carrots.

So big data is getting ready to get big, and that is going to lead to all kinds of other new types of AI things as well. I expect there’s going to still be the same mix that we have today. We get about half of our data automatically, and we get the rest of it through either interacting with paper in some way that has to be re-entered or through a manual entry.

The tractor got washed between a GMO and a non-GMO field is not going to be automatically reported. It’s going to have to be a manual thing, as will a lot of the maintenance that goes on with that tractor. So, there are aspects that will become totally interesting. There’ll be aspects that won’t. We’re going to see a lot more trust but verify.

(A grower) enters a piece of information. The satellite flies over, and we say, “Yup, you did plant when you said you did for your insurance policy. Yep, it does look like you had flooding in a in the lower right-hand corner.” Or “Yep, it looks like you put some nitrogen down 30 days ago, because your plant growth is a lot higher than it was 30 days ago. So, I think we’re going to see a lot more of that as well, and that might lead to more automated data entry.

But I don’t ever see us sitting in our house on the couch, drinking tea and coffee and the tractors are all fully roaming around automatically just taking care of it for me. And if they’re going to do that.

ABG: What else do we need to know?

AH: Collecting all this data is very doable. We do it every day. I think the challenge is that we’re getting ready to see what FSMA and all of that we will feel like huge mountains to climb, because we’re going to break the traditional process of moving corn from field to elevators to trains to barges without tracking it. The whole world’s getting ready to change because the crops are getting very specific – high nutrients, kind of grains and things.

And I hope that the audience is open for change, because it’s all going get a little bit faster here in the near future.

ABG: Great. And if somebody wants to learn more about CropTrak, where should they go?

AH: They can go to our website CropTrak.com. Or they can send an email to our hello@Crop Track.com and somebody will reach back out to you.

ABG: Perfect. Thank you very much, Aaron, for your time today. We really appreciate your insights and learning more about CropTrak.

AH: Thank you, sir. I appreciate your time.