With some sadness I recently received a Notice of Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors signaling the demise of PureSense Environmental, Inc. PureSense was real green – not green paint.
It’s ironic that PureSense was so little known. Environmental charlatans and quacks continue to get venture capital and government grants for businesses built around absurd “green” products debunkable by anyone with knowledge of high school physics. PureSense was nothing like that. Their down-to-earth (literally) concept provides real-time irrigation and agricultural field management with inexpensive hardware and sophisticated software. Their matrix of sensors record soil moisture, salinity, soil temperature and climate data from crop fields every 15 minutes. Doing this eliminates guesswork, optimizing use of electricity, water, and pesticides. Avoiding over- and under-watering maximizes crop yield while minimizing use of resources. It’s a win-win.
But innovation and farming are strange bedfellows. Apparently, farmers didn’t all jump at the opportunity. I did some crop disease modelling work for PureSense a few years back. Their employees told me that a common response to showing farmers that their neighbors had substantially increased yield using PureSense was along the lines of, “we’re doing ok with what we’ve got…” Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Not too long ago, farmers who experimented too wildly left no progeny.
The ever fascinating Jethro Tull, inventor of the modern seed drill and many other revolutionary farming gadgets in the early 1700s, was flabbergasted at the reluctance of farmers to adopt his tools and methods. Tull wrote on Soil and Civilization, predicting that future people would have easier lives, since “the Produce of Land Will be Increased, and the Usual Expence Lessened” through a scientific (though that word is an anachronism) approach to agriculture.
The editor of his 2nd edition of his Horse-hoeing Husbandry, Or, An Essay on the Principles of Vegetation and Tillage echoed Tull’s astonishment at farmers’ behavior.
How it has happened that a Method of Culture which proposes such advantages to those who shall duly prosecute it, hath been so long neglected in this Country, may be matter of Surprize to such as are not acquainted with the Characters of the Men on whom the Practice thereof depends; but to those who know them thoroughly it can be done. For it is certain that very few of them can be prevailed on to alter their usual Methods upon any consideration; though they are convinced that their continuing therein disables them from paying their Rents, and maintaining their Families.
And, what is still more to be lamented, these People are so much attached to their old Customs, that they are not only averse to alter them themselves, but are moreover industrious to prevent others from succeeding, who attempt to introduce anything new; and indeed have it too generally in their Power, to defeat any Scheme which is not agreeable to their own Notions; seeing it must be executed by the same sort of Hands.
Tull could have predicted PureSense’s demise. I think its employees could have as well. GlassDoor comments suggested that PureSense needed “a more devoted sales staff.” That is likely an understatement given the market. A more creative sales model might be more on the mark. Knowing that farmers, even while wincing at ever-shrinking margins, will cling to their established methods for better or worse, PureSense should perhaps have gotten closer to the culture of farming.
PureSense’s possible failure to tap into farmers’ psyche aside, America’s vulnerability to futuristic technobabble is no doubt a major funding hurdle. You’d think that USDA REAP loan providers and NRCS Conservation Innovation Grants programs would be lining up at their door. But I suspect crop efficiency pales in wow factor compared to a cylindrical tower of solar cells that somehow magically increases the area of sun-facing photovoltaics (hint: Solyndra’s actual efficiency was about 8.5%, a far cry from their claims that got them half a billion from the Obama administration).
Ozzie Zehner nailed this problem in Green Illusions. In his chapter on the alternative-energy fetish, he discusses energy pornographers, the enviro-techno-enthusiasts who jump to spend billions on dubious green tech that yields less benefit than home insulation and proper tire inflation would. Insulation, light rail, and LED lighting isn’t sexy; biofuels, advanced solar, and stratospheric wind turbines are. Jethro Tull would not have been surprised that modern farmers are as resistant to change as those of 17th century Berkshire. But I think he’d be appalled to learn the extent to which modern tech press, business and government line up for physics-defying snake oil while ignoring something as fundamental as agriculture.
As I finished writing this I learned that Jain Irrigation has just acquired the assets of PureSense and has pledged a long-term commitment to the PureSense platform.
Jethro Tull smiles.
The Multidisciplinarian 