How do farmers and growers deal with our changing climates and extreme weather? How do they become aware of, and measure, weather risk and crop health?
While long-term predictions and models providing general patterns have been available for decades, they did not necessarily offer local, field-specific data and conditions. It was impossible, using the regional maps, to provide all the essential information and guidance for local agricultural enterprises.
At Princeton University, Dr. Adam Wolf, colleague Kelly Caylor, and then-student Ben Siegfried, frustrated with the too-broad, too general modeling available, put their minds together to combine regional modeling with real-time data in order to provide better guidance. In 2014, they founded Arable Labs to provide “site specific” agricultural data. Since then, it has grown to a staff of 25 in offices in Princeton and Oakland California, and it has gained clients on six continents. These clients include the full range of farming enterprises, but also large, corporate food producers, insurers and even governments. Arable Labs’ mission is to provide real-time, global data to those who grow or provide food and flavors.
How do they develop and pass on this information? Arable Labs invented and has had produced a solar-powered device, the Arable Mark, an integrated, analytics platform, which when placed on a pole in a crop field can measure and transmit weather and plant conditions, as well as continuous visibility, to the cloud for retrieval anytime, anywhere.
The mark allows continuous monitoring of not only temperature and moisture levels but also plant conditions resulting from stress from pests, weather conditions and disease.
Because farming expenses come primarily from obtaining seeds, and then from harvesting, it is obviously crucial for farmers to be aware of conditions in the fields, before they commit to either activity. Farms in New Jersey typically run from between 20 to 500 acres. But in California, farms more typically range around 50,000 acres.
And they can operate year-round. Purchasing seeds and scheduling harvests, at those scales, and frequencies, become large investments of time and money. Awareness of field and crop conditions becomes correspondingly important.
But even on smaller scales, say for propagating “specialty crops,” such as herbs, fruits, and some vegetables, it is crucial for growers to be aware of conditions. This is additionally important as, for instance, some trees need time to chill or pause in their growing cycles. Other trees can dry out without any visible clues, before they die. As the physiologies of different plants are different, their responses to new or different conditions are different. For this reason, and the other above-mentioned reasons, growers need predictability, along with current data, particularly in face of increasing weather variability. (Locally this last summer was unusually hot and wet. – Will that become the new normal?)
Arable Labs provides, therefore, a means of “smart farming” for the challenging, changing and often locally unique conditions popping up around the globe. The Arable Labs staff is open to working with local farmers and companies, asking them what they need, and then providing the data necessary to help them with their businesses of growing, harvesting and producing food-related products.