016 - Farming with Data: How Advanced Analytics are Transforming the Agriculture Industry with Dinu Ajikutra
Today we are joined by Dinu Ajikutira, VP of Product at CiBO Technologies. CiBO Technologies was founded in 2015. It was created to provide an objective, scientifically-driven insights in support of farmland economics. Dinu is currently leading an effort to productize what I found to be some very impressive analytically-driven simulation capabilities to help farmers and agronomists. Specifically, CiBO’s goal is to provide a software service that uses mapping and other data to predictively model a piece of land’s agricultural value –before crops are ever planted. In order to build a product that truly meets his customer needs, Dinu goes the extra mile–in one case, 1000 miles– to literally meet his customers in the field to understand their pain points.
On this episode, Dinu and I discuss how CiBO will help reduce farmers’ risk, optimize crop yields, and the challenges of the agriculture industry from a data standpoint. We also discussed:
- Farmers’ interactions with data analytics products and how to improve their trust with those products
- Where CiBO’s software can be used and who would benefit from it
- Dinu’s “ride-along” experience visiting farmers and agronomists in the midwest to better understand customer needs and interactions with the tool
- What Dinu has learned about farmers’ comfort using technology
- The importance of understanding seasonality
- The challenges of designing the tool for the various users and building user interfaces based on user needs
- The biggest product challenges in the ag tech field and how CiBO handles those challenges
“CiBO was built on a mission of enabling sustainable agriculture, and we built this software platform that brings weather, soil, topography, and agronomic practices in combination with simulation to actually digitally grow the plant, and that allows us to explain to the users why something occurs, what if something different had happened, and predict the outcomes of how plants will perform in different environments.” — Dinu Ajikutira
“The maturity of the agricultural industry [with regards] to technology is in its early stages, and it’s at a time when there is a lot of noise around AI,machine learning and data analytics. That makes it very complicated, because you don’t know if the technology really does what it claims to do, and there is a community of potential users that are not used to using a high-tech technology to solve their problems.” — DInu Ajikutira
“In agriculture, the data is very sparse, but with our software we don’t need all the data. We can supplement data that is missing, using our simulation tools, and be able to predict weather outcomes that you have not experienced in the past.” — Dinu Ajikutira
“To add clarity, you need to add information sometimes, and the issue isn’t always the quantity of the information; it’s how it’s designed.I’ve seen this repeatedly where there are times if you properly add information and design it well, you actually bring a lot more insight.” – Brian O’Neill
“Sometimes the solution is going to be to add information, and if you’re feeling like you have a clutter problem, if your customers are complaining about too much information, or that’s a symptom usually that the design is wrong. It’s not necessarily that that data has no value. It may be the wrong data.” — Brian O’Neill