The geospatial sector in St. Louis is helping to speed up development of seed and other crop products for farmers. Experts say that could be even more critical as growers continue to see shifts in weather and climate.
"Agriculture has that one big difference that we are geospatial," explains Carlos Hirsch, Chief Revenue Officer for St. Louis based AgTech company Eiwa (pronounced ay-wah), "different weather, different soils, different ecosystem, so that is key information."
Like many other sectors, agriculture has seen dramatic growth in connected devices and technologies the last decade, which generates a lot of data. "The problem folks started realizing is, I have all this information from my machinery on this database or on this drive. I have all this information from my agronomist in an another place."
Hirsch tells KMOX's Total Information AM that for Eiwa, organizing data from multiple sources is first -- geospatial. "All the information coming into the... ...platform... ...is either a boundary in a map, or maybe its a plot within a grid of a research field, for example." Layered on top of that, notes taken in the field through an Eiwa app, weather information, soil information, yield information, as well as costs related to those operations.
"Now more than ever you have imagery data, so drones,' adds Hirsch. "We use a lot of drone imagery for our clients. You apply analytics on top of those images to understand what each one of those pixels means. It could mean plant count, gaps in a row, plant height, coverage of the vegetation index, maturity date for soybeans, all of that can be done with imagery." The SpaceSense Geospatial AI tool allows them to also tap into satellite imagery and make it meaningful. "Some of our companies we work with they're global businesses that have millions of plots."
This time of year, when research fields are being harvested, is when data is also being brought in, "it's time to organize all that, run statistics, make decisions of which products you're going to advance next year, which products you're not going to advance and all of those decisions have to happen in the next couple of months before the next season starts, and we can accelerate that and give these guys bigger bandwidth to check more fields with more quality data."
Hirsch says ultimately this technology can help agribusiness companies make faster decisions and hopefully drive the best seeds and products back to farmers in less time than in the past. He says that has become even more important with changes in climate. "Who heard of soybeans being planted in Canada 15 years ago? Now Canada is growing soybeans so you have to develop varieties that can be planted there and that's because the weather's changed."
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