Smart Yields was featured in the January 2017 issue of Hawaii Business magazine, which covered “The Future of Farming in Hawaii.” Smart Yields CEO Vincent Kimura was asked about monitoring farm health:
Co-founder and CEO Vince Kimura describes Smart Yields as “Fitbit for farms.” The Honolulu-based company provides mobile and desktop apps that analyze data obtained by water, air and soil sensors, predict outcomes based on patterns, and alert farmers to potential issues. In other words, Smart Yields can, like Fitbit can for humans, monitor how healthy a farm is. Also like Fitbit, Smart Yields can be used to achieve better alignment between current status and long-term goals.
“Farmers don’t know what they don’t know. There are a lot of decisions made on tradition and using gut instincts,” says Kimura. “But when you look at other industries, be it automotive, logistics or finance, we make decisions based on data science. Agriculture has been the last to adopt that approach.”
Kimura points to Kona’s coffee belt as an area that could use deeper data analysis. The conditions of the lower levels appear to be changing, possibly due to climate change. For farmers invested in coffee, the question becomes should they invest more in operations, such as water, to make up for the change? Or do they switch to a different crop better suited to the new conditions?
“I want to help these smaller farms take the guesswork out of growing,” Kimura says.
Kimura also told the magazine that “Hawaii should be the agriculture technology capital of the world.”
Read the full article here: http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/the-future-of-farming/
