Opportunity:
Descartes Labs is a startup founded in New Mexico in 2014 that is building data refinery for satellite imagery to better understand the planet. Currently, even with so much data and imaging of the plant available, it is difficult for companies and government agencies to successfully predict crop yields and potential shortages. This poses a challenge when preparing in advance for the changes year over year and increases the concern for climate change and food scarcity around the globe. Descartes claims that it can accurately predict crop yields, beating out the accuracy of the US Department of Agriculture, which is currently the only alternative for information.
Solution:
Descartes uses the increase in the availability of large data sets accumulated by the increase in shrinking and cheaper sensors, as well as the rise in popularity of nanosatellites to determine how healthy the corn crop is on the planet from space. The company uses spectral information (non visible to the human eye) to measure chlorophyll to make these predictions and analyzes satellite data of every single farm in the US on a daily basis to update its predictions and deliver local estimates.
Effectiveness, Commercial Promise, and Competition:
In terms of effectiveness, Descartes Labs states that it “can predict the yield of America’s 3 million square kilometers of cornfields with 99% accuracy.” Additionally, in 2015, the predictions made by Descartes beat those of the United States Department of Agriculture by 1% and the algorithms of the company continue to improve year over year.
Descartes Labs presents an opportunity for a wide range of groups, including corporations, government leaders, and humanitarian groups. For example, Cargill, an agricultural conglomerate, is a customer of and investor in Descartes Labs. The technology likely helps Cargill understand crop yields for a given year. Descartes Labs also received a grant of $1.5 million from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which uses the technology to anticipate food shortages, and thereby predict areas of sociopolitical conflict, in the Middle East and North Africa.
Another application of the technology is disease forecasting and prevention. The high resolution private and public satellite data can help identify high risk environments such as areas with stagnant water conducive to mosquito proliferation. Those leads can be combined with medical and social media data to predict and backtest the spread of diseases. Such information will be valuable for epidemiologists and local governments.
Several competitors include Orbital Insights, Gro Intelligence, and Tellus Labs. Orbital Insights covers a much wider range of industries – for example, it can help retail companies understand vehicle counts and traffic monitoring.
Suggestions / Improvements:
To improve, Descartes could utilize it current data and connect with various sensors on other devices, to triangulate the information it has and make more accurate predictions. This is a direction that CEO and Co-Founder, Mark Johnson, wants to go, given the vast amount of “potential sensor data we’ll be getting from combines, tractors, cars, boats, barges, trains, ships, grain silo. Everything is going to have sensors on it, so making sense of all that data is the sort of challenge we’re aiming toward” (Mark Johnson in Fast Company).
Descartes can also explore ways in which their data and capabilities can benefit individual farmers in addition to commercial clients such as Cargill. Descartes can partner with NGOs, consultants, and local governments to enable subsistence farmers with its data and technology.
Another potential application is to tackle wildfires. Descartes can combine weather, geo imaging, and historical data from previous wildfires to identify high risk areas and potentially suggest effective ways for wildfire suppression once fires break out.
Sources:
https://www.descarteslabs.com/
https://www.fastcompany.com/40406046/this-startup-is-building-a-fitness-tracker-for-the-planet
https://medium.com/@thephilboyer/announcing-our-investment-in-descartes-labs-9dca8257d0d9
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/02/21/forecasting-diseases-one-image-at-a-time/
https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/4/12369494/descartes-artificial-intelligence-crop-predictions-usda
Clients can integrate their data with the Descartes Platform to create their own solutions, models, and forecasts:
Team Members:
Sam Steiny
Rosie Newman
Gergana Kostadinova
Javier Rodriguez