Software-Defined Agriculture

6 min readSep 22, 2021

McKinsey Global Institute Industry Digitization Index

Plowing a Path for Future Ag Tech Investments, FruitScout Secures $4M in Seed Funding to Expand Ease and Access to AI-powered and Mobile-First Precision Crop Load Management Platform

Bits, Bytes, and Boots

TFX, where I serve as an Advisor and Venture Partner, recently invested alongside Bowery Capital and others in FruitScout as they embark on their mission to democratize Precision Crop Load Management (PCLM) and bring software-based Ag Tech solutions and workflows into the 21st century. I say bring it into the 21st century because the Agriculture industry is consistently ranked at the bottom of every other industry in terms of digitization and technology usage. To be clear, there are tremendous examples where Ag Tech has made in-roads and has profound impacts, but there are still many parts of the typical operation that have not been digitized. In many respects, I would argue that we’ve ignored or failed at introducing digital innovation in the most important industries that we depend upon (Agriculture, Healthcare, Government, Infrastructure / Construction to name a few). Instead, we see investment dollars, innovation focus, solutions, and hiring flow into the lowest common denominator (and highly saturated) sectors such as Advertising, Media, and Finance. These industries have become digitally native and, as a consequence, have reaped the benefits of multiple iterations of exponential returns, innovations, and pricing efficiencies because of this. The exponential benefits have not been applied in Ag Tech writ large, a problem that is even more acute at a time when feeding our population amidst significant challenges to maintaining the agriculture work-force, climate change, and macro geopolitical tensions confront the industry.

Rowan Moore Gerety discusses this in his thoughtful piece from last December in MIT Tech Review. As he highlights, digitization in the fields is being done often with a “phone and a suite of bespoke templates and plug-ins” written for Microsoft Access and Excel and with what is referred to as “Close-Enough GPS.” More importantly, he calls out two key highlights:

“The tech industry would probably laugh at it, but the thing that the tech industry doesn’t understand is the people you’re working with”.
“You can get my attention real fast if you solve a problem for me, but what happens nine times out of 10 is the tech companies come to me and they solve a problem that wasn’t a problem.”

Let’s face it, agriculture and similar old school industries aren’t sexy and that’s not where the “central casting” entrepreneurs have been going or, if they do, they often come in with a solution that solves a problem “that wasn’t a problem”. What is so often lacking is what I refer to as this intersection of “bits, bytes, and boots”. It’s classic customer development. To succeed in agriculture, technologists need to spend time in the dirt, side by side with growers, to truly understand the customer in this space. The team at FruitScout has achieved this in spades. They have spent more time in the dirt, in their boots, understanding the problems their customers are facing.

“We’ve embraced precision crop load management because it is transforming the apple business. FruitScout listens to us and gives us information in the way we think about it without requiring us to change our existing practices. They instead allow us to scale those practices, and the benefits they provide, to a whole new level. We can collect more data faster with FruitScout with no capital outlays,” said Dan Plath, President of Washington Fruit and Produce, one of the world’s top growers of apples.

So what is PCLM to the lay person and what is FruitScout doing?

As written by researchers from Cornell University “Crop load management is the single most important yet difficult management strategy that determines the annual profitability of apple orchards. The number of fruit that remain on a tree directly affects yield, fruit size and the quality of fruit that are harvested, which largely determine crop value.” And importantly “The economic impacts of achieving the proper crop load each year are large (often $5,000- $10,000 per acre) and justify a more intense effort to manage crop load to achieve the optimum fruit number each year.”

This is where FruitScout comes in. They’ve met the customers where they are combining software, computer-vision, and mobile devices that allow orchardists to determine their crop loads and manage to yield targets via what they already have in their pocket without needing to create a new workflow. Instead of a farm worker walking a row with a clipboard and manually counting and sizing, FruitScout clients use their phone (which is often their primary computing device and often the latest iPhone) to do the work for them. FruitScout employs computer vision on images orchardists take of trees to automatically analyze behind the scenes, including measuring the tree’s trunk cross-sectional area to predict the optimum crop load, count buds, flowers and fruitlets, and create management recommendations for optimizing the growth of their trees.

In a word, and as Rowan Moore Gerety called out in his earlier piece, FruitScout is providing their customers with “what everyone wants…foresight”. There is a lot that goes into making this happen and getting it right including understanding the usability nuances of how to deal with pictures in various lighting conditions or the spacing of trees of different varieties and in geographies. But the promise here is finally seeing the power of what “mobile first” — and I’m not talking about the manual clipboard — has done in many of the digitally native industries and combining that with intelligent automation to improve and optimize much of the analog processes that are critical to our food supply’s value-chain.

Software-Defined Agriculture (SDA)

What is most exciting and most interesting, however, is not simply Crop Load Management. FruitScout has an opportunity to open a new category of what I refer to as “Software-Defined Agriculture (SDA)”. We’ve seen this play out time and again in other spaces, where the exponential economic gains and accompanying simplifications in workflows open up all kinds of new opportunities that, in many cases, we can’t imagine. Marc Andreessen wrote about this in 2011 in his piece titled: Why Software is Eating the World and even called out Agriculture. However, we have not yet seen software permeate throughout the Ag industry in a way that provides an accessible platform on which other solutions and insights can be delivered or seen.

That is the opportunity and that is the challenge…applying the exponential returns of software and computer vision as an economically scalable worker in messy environments and perhaps most importantly, solving the problems that actually are the problems to be solved.

TFX Capital, as a co-investor alongside Bowery Capital, saw this vision. FruitScout solved a real problem that needed to be solved — and investment focus can enable its next phase of growth. Growers will not only reap the benefits through increased profitability and predictability while reducing labor costs, but society benefits with lower carbon and chemical footprints, and the promise of scalable, software that will open up new opportunities for agriculture.

Software-Defined Agriculture

Bits, Bytes, and Boots

So what is PCLM to the lay person and what is FruitScout doing?

Software-Defined Agriculture (SDA)

Further Reading

Written by Matt Abrams