Right now, agriculture is in the hands of multiple individuals, making it disorganized. It has not been rolled up under big corporations and there are still a lot of independent business people in some respects. What is happening now with ag tech startups is there are tremendous amounts of venture capital going into ag technology as more people realize that data is going to start to consolidate agriculture.

There are a number of technological advancements coming up that are going to change the agriculture business. I used to talk about the future being 15-20 years out. Then I started to talk about it being 5-10 years out. Now I’m talking about it being a few years out. These technological advancements are already out there, working in another industry or they are being developed right now.

Neural Networks

At Ohio State, my PhD student Chris Weigman has been working on the latest in artificial intelligence, particularly in neural network classifiers. Neural networks are essentially a computer representation of what is going on in the human brain. What Chris is working on is training these neural network classifiers to recognize issues in crops like nitrogen deficiency.