AgSmarts has set out to make big irrigation systems work better.
Co-founders Brett Norman and Clayton Plymill have recently gone all-in on their local start-up, which automates existing agricultural irrigation systems.
AgSmarts’ system is a virtual win-win for farmers: It minimizes water use and increases crop yield.
The product line consists of sensors and software. The sensors are strategically located throughout the land, and can recognize different microclimates, soil texture variations and topography changes between fields.
The sensors gather the data over the course of the growing season and wirelessly transmit the data back to a controller unit. A processor runs the data through an algorithm, which makes recommendations on irrigation.
“As it learns, the algorithm gets refined,” Norman said. “The system knows what the optimal outcome is. If it doesn’t achieve that, it will know that.”
Norman said the technology AgSmarts uses has existed for decades in the oil and gas, industrial manufacturing and business automation industries. There are competitors but none that offer the embedded, holistic intelligence that AgSmarts does.
“I think we have a really good opportunity if we can continue to execute like we have so far,” he said.
Launching AgSmarts in Memphis made sense for Norman and Plymill. The business partners met here, but grew up 20 miles from each other in middle Tennessee, Norman on a produce farm and Plymill in a rural area.
The AgSmarts team also includes systems engineer George Young, who grew up on a farm in South Australia and has a background in mechanical engineering and robotics.
AgSmarts is searching for venture capital to drive business growth. Strategic investors have come in early and enabled the start-up to launch, but Norman has traveled to Boston, New York, Singapore and California to meet with potential investors.
And while Memphis may not be the epicenter of VC funding, it is a great location for AgSmarts, mainly because of its proximity to large farms and agriculture retailers.
“Despite its fall from being the epicenter of cotton, Memphis still has amazing agricultural roots and I wish the community realized that,” Norman said. “It’s a real asset here. You can take a short drive from Downtown Memphis and be in the middle of a 10,000-acre farm. It’s hard to find that in other communities.”
Agricultural irrigation is a growth industry, especially as the human population swells and nontraditional weather patterns become the norm.
“Farmers, a lot of them anyway, don’t talk in terms of climate change but they will tell you that it doesn’t rain in June like it used to,” Norman said.
As far as marketing, AgSmarts won’t sell directly to producers. The company is working through retailer networks – “the John Deeres of the world,” Norman said – to get the word out. Most irrigation technology has been sold through the irrigation manufacturer supply chain, so AgSmarts is selling itself as an extension of a producer’s overall agronomic strategy.
AgSmarts offers three different service levels to its customers. Producers can purchase the company’s sensors and monitor the data themselves. For the next step up, they can use the sensors and receive irrigation recommendations to execute themselves. And the third and final level operates on a subscription basis and takes them to full-blown automation.
The sensor unit alone will retail between $1,000 to $2,000, depending on configuration and auxiliary points. Each sensor can cover about 160 acres. Subscription services will cost anywhere from $15 to $35 per acre, depending on the system’s scale and number of sensors monitored.
Don’t paint Farmer Brown as the type who might not be hip to new technology, Norman said.
“The men and women running these operations are very astute and savvy business people,” he said.
Data is inundating the modern farm, Norman said, and AgSmarts seeks to ease that big data burden. The difference with industrial control technology is the data is gathered and interpreted for a user.
“That’s the beauty that industrial control technology offers,” he said. “Computers interpret and feed that data to a human. There’s a decision-making ability at that moment in time as opposed to having to digest all that information at one time.”
And Norman can’t talk about the products without a nod to sustainability. Precision irrigation can dramatically reduce the amount of water pulled from aquifers, as well as mitigate energy outputs and prevent water run-off.
“It’s an environmental win-win, and that’s certainly something that drives both my partner and me.”
By Jane A. Donahoe