"welcome to the a 16z podcast I'm Michael Copeland and this is sort of our holiday special we're going to talk about food and technology and to help us do this we have three people who are perfectly su..."

"firm that software is eating the world and this is where puns could start coming fast and thick which people try not to make but in agriculture I want to talk about how technology is making inroads an..."

"than it might otherwise sure that's great great question so we believe that agriculture is tremendously underserved by technology it's been left behind and both software and hardware although hardware..."

"where sensors very low cost sensors have been developed they are connected via radio and cellular networks on the farms to get to collect information to collect data turns out that these sensors howev..."

"freely available and open source that start to bring data together from different vendors aggregate it put it into a form that growers can control and access it and that interoperates with all the gre..."

"needs and plant needs up front for different crops so there is a lot of work that then needs to be done once you have a uniform eyes access to all those crop parameters or land parameters or other ele..."

"both that and also sort of up to date and and utilizing the best of technology yeah but I think what's interesting in this transformation is that a lot of people assume that farmers are just kind of w..."

"different things have worked both on the hardware side and on the analytics and software side and I think granulars particular focus is on making farms better run businesses we think it's critical tha..."

"were talking about the right plant for the right job sort of yeah but how does that get that kind of precision and insite helped change what farms do and how they act and at the end of the day what we..."

"deficit so it exacerbates a little bit your ability to tease apart what the plant really needs and what the farmer really need to adjust in order to maximize the the crop performance so that's just on..."

"excitement around using the analytics like tebow has been talking about to actually control a lot of the operations on the farm like the irrigation scheduling can be done automatically based on histor..."

"end-to-end solution that can be applied in lots of different ways no and so just just to be clear because I've never been to an almond farm but I like the one shake is because like it's that precise m..."

"back and do it again said from from your perspective win-win farms whether it's small-scale large-scale sort of adopt these kinds of technologies to run more efficiently as businesses how do they chan..."

"sure Tibo you guys started in the wine industry is that because it's just such a high value like why were they willing to do it and it you know said you said that and I agree that farmers are these ha..."

"beachhead to start developing this approach that the plant is very good at resisting drought the plant is very the divine plant is very good at performing even when there is not so much fertilizer or ..."

"their lives I have a really funny story though I was trying to help a farmer actually a grape grower identified leeks using a combination of electricity sensors and water sensors on the irrigation sys..."

"that is also these are money incentives regardless of the psychological or societal predisposition and and like you know in the software world you can a/b test but you can't a B test a vineyard or an ..."

"flier on some some with a shiny software package who said this can help I can try in my business I can try Salesforce and if it doesn't work I'll turn it off a month later and yes no harm no foul but ..."

"from the agricultural adoption of technology or what you guys have learned in terms of like building things that could help other areas and other parts of other industries and and adopt technology wel..."

"experimental farms that have similar crops and similar soil types and that that we can do these experiments on show that they work and farmers can then take you know how to take confidence in that so ..."

"extensions and so there's I think we're at a really important crossroads where the extension Proc you know university system needs to evolve and keep pace and support firming for the next hundred year..."

"sense to grow one specific value at all or sometimes just grow period right so but it's only by using analytics and and an raw number that we'll be able to select the places and situations where it ma..."

"happen in America you need farmers to really understand their economics and be able to say a gallon of water is worth exactly this much to me and I would rather leave my field fallow and sell it yeah ..."

"and secondly I do believe that there'll be a lot of automation it will be hand-in-hand with you know the domain experts that farmers themselves but they will be probably requiring much less manpower b..."

"really good job of is lowering the cost of things does what you talked about change the scale of farming or does it enable you know small scale farms to even do a much much better job I think it's jus..."

"you know product into the system so I think I think to some extent we get a little distracted by we love big firm or we love small farms but don't like big farms and really what we should be focused o..."

"meaningful which depends upon how do we deal with viability that's right again I think there's a lot that we can learn from agriculture as these questions start to get answered and as technology seeps..."