Welcome to another edition of SFTW. SFTW is the free version of “Software is Feeding the World” and includes previews only.
Happenings
- AgTech Alchemy is going to Seattle! Join the AgTech Alchemy crew of Sachi Desai, Walt Duflock, and I in partnership with the Gates Foundation at the Gates Foundation Discovery center on May 19th. You can register for the free event here.
- SFTW will move from Substack to a new hosting platform and newsletter service managed by Ghost. The move will happen over the next two weeks. I will try my best to reduce interruption. Emails will come from sftw@ghost.io or rhishi@rhishipethe.com. Ghost is an open-source product. I like their open source ethos and with the difference in take rate, Ghost is a more economical option.
- Over the last few weeks, I have started offering corporate subscriptions to different organizations. A corporate subscription comes with a significant discount, full access to SFTW Plus and is paid for by your organization, typically through their training and education budgets. If you would like to sign up your organization for a corporate subscription program, just reply to this email.
Build Less, Scale Faster: The Rise of White-Label Platforms
Ag leaders aren’t asking “Can we build it?”—they’re asking “Should we?” White-labeled platforms are helping agribusinesses move faster and deliver on strategy while staying focused. From carbon tracking to digital agronomy, e-commerce, and lab insights, leaders are choosing to scale through their brand, not by building new tech stacks. Customers don’t care who built it—they care that it works. With white-labeled tech, you can go to market fast with your logo, your workflows, and our managed infrastructure behind the scenes.
Labor or cost or productivity problem?
We were in a sweet potato packing house in Merced county in California. I was with the sweet potato farm owner and operator observing the sorting and packing operations, before sweet potatoes got shipped out to their fresh market customers.
The owner was talking with the packing house operations manager about hiring. They were looking to hire 2 new people for the upcoming season, but they had received 120 applications! The owner told the operations manager to stop taking applications, as they could not handle so many applicants.
One of my friends who works for an AgTech company was looking to hire a junior level product manager. She got more than 250 applications for one role. It was not straightforward to handle so many applications.
The unemployment rate in the US is at 4.2% and so it is not very high. I understand these are just two data points, but if we look at these data points, is there really a labor problem in California agriculture?
All of you have read about the many stories about the problem of labor in California. But the real problem is often with the cost of labor and the productivity of labor. Due to policy changes, and other factors, the cost of labor has gone up significantly.
It is important to understand this difference.
This is an important distinction to remember, especially for startups who are building robotics or automation solutions. This is true whether this is happening in California, the mid-west or any other part of the world.
If you think the problem to solve is the availability of labor, then you would think about building automation and autonomy solutions which strictly eliminate labor from the operation. Oftentimes, eliminating labor is not a good solution, if you are not having a positive impact on productivity, or reduction in operational risk, or quality of the product.
How can this difference show up in your solution?
Let us continue with the example of sweet potatoes. The cost of harvest using human labor is close to 50% of the total production cost for sweet potatoes. So if you were thinking about just eliminating human labor, an automated sweet potato harvester should work.
Automated Sweet Potato Harvester, Merced County, California (Photo by Rhishi Pethe)
But the problem is a bit more nuanced. The first question to ask is what is the market destination for your sweet potatoes. The requirements for the quality of sweet potato are different if you are selling the product to a fresh market vs. for processing.
Fresh market demand requires no to limited damage to skin and the right size to command a reasonable price. Fresh markets demand selectivity, gentle handling, and cosmetic perfection. Processing demand can accept sweet potatoes with damaged skin, odd shapes etc.