Ag-Tech’s Passionate Pragmatist

Robert Saik has been using technology to get more out of agriculture for decades—as a robotics entrepreneur, agronomy coach, carbon credit pioneer, agrologist, book author, TED speaker, and consultant to  leaders ranging from Nigeria’s agriculture minister to Bill Gates.

But it’s the next few decades that really count, Saik believes, if we are to transform our approach to agriculture in ways that will allow us to sustain the human population to the point where it peaks—and beyond. Science and technology must help create versions of agriculture that not only can feed the future but also do it more sustainably.

“Only sustainable intensification of agriculture will feed the planet, and the pressures on farmers already are acute,” says Saik. “At the same time, there’s quite a large disconnect between what’s happening on the farm and what consumers actually perceive. That’s another challenge.”

From growing up on a farm in Alberta, Canada, to founding more than 15 companies to becoming a renowned agricultural futurist, Saik has long been advancing a modern agenda for agriculture. His career path included a stint as CEO of an agricultural robotics firm, and he currently serves on company and university boards and is a partner in an ag-tech venture capital company.

Most recently, Saik established a new digital technology platform called AGvisorPRO to connect farmers and agriculture experts. He’s also been at work finishing his third book, tentatively titled PrAGmatic, which outlines his practically oriented, science-based approach to agriculture.

Saik spoke with Food Technology Contributing Editor Dale Buss about the future of agriculture and how we should be thinking about it.

You believe agriculture must literally save the world. What are the severe pressures on agriculture that are making this difficult?

Society is asking farmers to produce like never before. They’re also being asked to reduce their environmental footprint, and they’re [even] supposed to restore the environment to some kind of nirvana. These pressures are all jamming together at the farm.

But what needs to be done must be rooted in pragmatism. It’s not alchemy: You can’t just create the 1.5 pounds of nitrogen that it takes to grow a bushel of corn; that has to come from somewhere. So, magically waving the wand of ideological solutions is very dangerous.

You’ve warned against “food as a religion.” What do you mean by that?

At a tech conference last year, people were talking about cultured meat. The demographic in support of it is against factory farming, against finishing cattle in feedlots, against corn-fed cattle, against GMOs—against, against, against.

So when I got the mic, I noted that, when cells divide, they need energy and food. “Where does that food come from that feeds the cells in your lab?” [he asked]. There was a lot of shifting and body language after I said that. We feed them sugar. That makes sense. Where does sugar come from? From corn.

The same people who are against finishing cattle in feedlots with corn are OK with feeding sugar from corn to create cultured meat in a factory. Explain that. They also argue against killing animals. If you want to eat meat from a lab and not cows, fair enough. But don’t tell me that it’s necessarily a lower environmental footprint.

Earlier in your career, you headed DOT, an agricultural robotics company. What is your current assessment of the value of robotic tending of fields?

Classic technology adoption is to overestimate what can happen in a year and underestimate what can happen in five years, and that is what has happened with robotic agriculture.

The likes of John Deere and others are pushing and moving toward autonomous equipment. That makes sense when you think about setting up a tractor to do some operation in a field, where there are very few human beings. GPS guidance today is down to one or two centimeters, so guiding equipment today can get done, and challenges around sensing and perception are being tackled.

But a challenge that faces robotics and autonomy on the farm isn’t so much what happens in the field as in moving between fields. If you’re a farmer in the Midwest, farming 5,000 acres, you might have 50 to 80 small fields and have to move equipment among them. The full-autonomy models being worked on now drive tractors between fields.

There also are technologies being used in California for orchards and perennial crops for spraying fungicide that make the farm operator suddenly a robotics-deployment expert.

As problems get solved with autonomous technology on farms, what are some of the big challenges that remain?

Connectivity is a huge one. A lot of farms operate their business with really sketchy Internet service: 75% of rural Brazil doesn’t have Internet, and 25% of rural America doesn’t. Deere recently signed a deal with Starlink to connect their equipment to help address that.

Running sophisticated equipment that needs constant connectivity, you’re going to need good Internet service. When people talk about food production and all the possibilities for improving it, connectivity is the one thing they forget. It’s like building a road or bridge or railway. Today, with the technology we have in place on the farm, we can’t do what we need to do without the infrastructure in place.

Take See & Spray technology, where you can fly a drone across a field or retrofit a sprayer, and it’ll see “green on green” and spray the weed out. It uses really sophisticated detection and algorithmic technology to determine, “That’s a weed.” That can reduce the rate of herbicide usage in a field by 80% or 90%. As you go through the season, there also is pheromone-sensing and other insect-monitoring technology and even spore technology, where you can pick up spores of diseases and determine the intensity of infestation.

Farmers also can use variable-rate technology to put more nitrogen or potash in one place than another in their fields. There are sectional shutoffs so that, in the “V’s” of the field, sections of equipment can be shut down so the applications aren’t overlapping. And you can do turn compensation, so that the inside of a boom puts out less stuff there than on the outside of a turn.

How much help can artificial intelligence (AI) provide in optimizing technology on the farm, including generative AI that has everyone all excited?

I do not see AI playing a huge role in agronomic decision-making because there are still too many variables. We have been testing AI as an “agri-bot” in the background of our AGvisorPRO platform and the result is—“meh.” Not that great and certainly not something that I, as a farmer, would depend on.

Where I do see an opportunity for AI to impact agriculture is in the technical area. We have been experimenting with the extraction of answers from operator and service manuals. This is a pain point in the industry, and AI may be able to alleviate some of the stress at service and technical desks.

What other factors are pressing on agriculture as it tries to come through against this massive need?

Labor is a real issue in all parts of agriculture and particularly pronounced in areas where you have a lot of picking going on and harvesting, like around Yuma, Ariz. There’s also the problem of not enough kids staying on American farms, and not enough new ones being [born].

The challenge of growing food to feed the population isn’t as much of an issue as the one that is offset against it: food waste. The No. 1 cause of food waste on the planet is mycotoxins and other diseases that affect crops. And mycotoxins in food are the No. 1 cause of liver cancer. No one talks about it. This is where pragmatism needs to come in.

Some people believe climate change could become the ultimate determinant of success for global agriculture. How does that translate to what happens on the farm?

I started one of the first carbon-credit companies, for trading offsets through reduced tillage, in 2007 in Alberta. Now, there are three factors. Can farmers prove they’re accumulating carbon in the soil? Is it permanent? And what are the contingent liabilities of selling a piece of land you’ve been paid a carbon credit on?

Second, it’s about reduction: If farmers can reduce the nitrous oxide coming out of their operations, it’ll be a real opportunity for them. Change your practices; make them better.

And the third consideration is transparency to the consumer, which may or may not have anything to do with carbon credits or carbon reduction or removal. It may just be about sustainability, and do we have a sustainability index? Most important, would the consumer pay for it?

In fact, you believe a lot of the necessary pragmatism also must come specifically from the consumer. What sorts of things do you have in mind?

Well, let’s say you’ve got a loaf of bread with a sustainability index of 89, and one with 50. Will you pay more for the 89? Consumers say one thing [about climate change] in a tribe, but you put them alone in a grocery aisle, and a lot of that rah-rah goes away.

Also, the objections to genetic engineering at the consumer level continue to be pervasive. They are being fostered by those who are selling fear. We can’t provide ample, safe, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable food without employing genetic engineering. The technology has advanced so far. Most people don’t understand the implications of CRISPR or messenger RNA technology.

I’m also a big believer in letting “food be thy medicine.” I’ve had my genome sequenced, and I believe nutrigenomics—where we’re matching food for each individual to our genetics—is really interesting science. These are things we should think about pragmatically.ft