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Precision agriculture grows up, changes the game

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For ages, farmers held a finger to the wind and called it analytics. Every season, that finger and a lifetime of observation said when to plant, what pests to kill, and when to harvest. Every year, it started all over again.

As you might imagine, the farmer’s finger has been replaced somewhat by data-driven “precision agriculture.” The annual game of planting, killing, and eating now runs more scientifically.

What hasn’t changed much is the timeframe: it’s still primarily a finite, annual game. By the sound of it, mesur.io founder and CTO Mike Prorock — whom I talk to originally at last year’s Qlik Qonnections — may end up changing the ag game more than simply driving it with data.

Prorock and company started out working with farms — Prorock himself farmed — when they took a project with a fundamentally different rhythm: a golf course. Unlike the seasonally-oriented farmers, golf course operators just want to keep things lush all the time.

That suited Prorock just fine. “We took the approach, probably just being naive more than anything else,” he said, “of saying well we want to encourage things to grow.”

Instead of just trying to get crops out of the ground as quickly as possible, he wanted to support a living ecosystem. “We model a living ecosystem,” he said. “That’s our secret sauce.”

“When a certain disease is going to pop up, you know it with a high degree of precision,” he says. “And so when we look at things like fungus in particular, the ideal treatment for a lot of fungal diseases is just to keep it at bay with as close to natural chemical methods as possible until nature dries things out.”

By the time mesur.io took on the first golf course, its system could accommodate the many types of data that would not ordinarily find a home in other systems, Prorock said.

He says that mesur.io has gone further than other precision-ag vendors,, into prediction and even inference of data.

I confess, I know precision ag as well as I know space travel. But whether what Prorock’s doing is unlike his competitors, it still sounds much different from the usual plant-kill-harvest cycle.

The company is interesting for its infinite game, the ongoing cycle. Commercial ag of any kind is in a very long haul, with land, crops, pests, water, weather, chemicals, and whatever else blows your way and no matter how rules and boundaries shift. No one wins or loses for keeps, so play nice.

It’s like what James Carse describes in his book Finite and Infinite Games. As Carse explains, “A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength.”

Qlik is part of his architecture. Prorock speaks at this year’s Qlik Qonnections conference, to be held in May in Dallas, Texas.

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Business analysts tell about Vertica

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Business analysts and their enablers are a fascinating bunch, to generalize extravagantly. In your first two minutes with one, you might recognize the tiny sparks of brilliance on an otherwise ordinary appearance. Keep watching, and you might see those sparks ignite nearby fuel.

Look again, and your analysts again appear ordinary. They want what everyone else wants: to do the work they do best, and without interruption, hassle, or undue tedium. And when they succeed, they really don’t mind recognition. Some might even crave rock star status.

Naturally, such people find their way into highly skilled, well paid crafts like data analysis.

Recently, my posts on business analysts caught the eye of Steve Sarsfield, Vertica director of product marketing. [1] He wanted to revive the Vertica Analytics Platform story — which is sometimes drowned out by that shiny new thing, Hadoop.

We knew the Vertica story would be best told in the stories of current users. So I turned to Vertica users I knew, and he turned to his customers.

Talking to those who go elbow deep into data speak with a gravity that I find satisfying. I heard the hard, up to date facts of brutish data volumes. When a load arrives from a client, where do you put it all? How do you cope with slow processing other than to push the “go” button and say goodnight? When you need a tweak, where’s your DBA? Your work starts and stops, you invent workarounds, and you make do.

The Vertica analytic database users I heard from showed that such a tool has been there all the time — which surprises some people. One story, which I used in the whitepaper, illustrated the exactly that kind of surprise.

The story goes that a Vertica sales rep was presenting an update at a customer site, and he mentioned a built in analytical function. Perhaps it was time series, or geo-spatial, or machine learning. No one quite remembers what. The rep does remember, though, a reaction from the back of the room: Two data analysts, listening intently, turn each other and slapped high fives.

Read the stories. Download the paper here, and let me know what you think. Leave a comment here, or use my “Contact Ted” form.

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Data driven but wabi-sabi driven, too

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The get “smart” these days, city leaders usually beef themselves up with a network of sensors. They become a city of things, wired and tuned. Unfortunately, that alone doesn’t make a city a nice place to be. For that, you also need wabi-sabi.

It’s a Japanese thing, and like so much of Japanese culture that Westerners like, it’s hard to explain.

I picked up a little book, on Seth Godin’s recommendation, that does a pretty good job of explaining. It’s Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi, for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers.

“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” it says on the first page. “It is a beauty of things unconventional.” That begins to describe the kind of place I like.

Skip to the easy part. The quality that’s most applicable to cities is the quality of intimacy. The book explains that things wabi~sabi are usually small and compact, quiet and inward-oriented. They beckon: get close, touch, relate. They inspire a reduction of the psychic distance between one thing and another thing; between people and things.

Places wabi-sabi are small, secluded, and private environments that enhance one’s capacity for metaphysical musings. Wabi-sabi tea rooms, for example, may have fewer than a hundred square feet of floor space. They have low ceilings, small windows, tiny entrances, and very subdued lighting. They are tranquil and calming, enveloping and womb-like. They are a world apart: nowhere, anywhere, every- where. Within the tea room, as within all places wabi-sabi, every single object seems to expand in importance in inverse proportion to its actual size.

I say to the architects of smart, go ahead with the sensors and the AI. But make sure to design in a good dose of wabi-sabi, too.

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