Agriculture is one of the world’s largest industries and is fundamental to all our lives. It is one of the oldest industries and has benefitted from literally millennia of technological innovations bringing about greater yield from the same resources. Yet, it is an industry that, by definition, is driven by atoms, not bits, and is measured in food produced, not a digital derivative.

A confluence of secondary technology effects have emerged in recent years that make me excited for how agriculture can benefit from IT leverage to generate increasing efficiency in the future. 

• Farm equipment sold today all have digital logs (albeit in frustrating proprietary data formats) that give farmers an understanding of how their equipment is being used, and, by extension, how their farm is performing.
• Almost two decades of IoT innovation provides increasingly cheap, off-the-shelf sensors that are available to generate real-time data in the field. They can be procured and stitched together at costs low enough that make them no longer price prohibitive to leave in the field exposed to the elements.
• Internet technology companies are increasingly unafraid to expand their focus to offline problems as they seek out the next wave of problems that will be solved through automation and IT leverage.
• Robust and cost-effective cell coverage across the world allow for remote sensors to have internet backhaul anywhere.
• Instantly available, rentable cloud storage allows farms to affordable track and monitor all data generated from their equipment without having to invest any capex into IT.

This list makes me excited about the impact IT will have on the agricultural industry in the future, and yet an important piece of the puzzle is missing. In industries like finance, API-as-a-Service companies are essential to enabling tech innovation. A Cambrian explosion of startups have emerged in finance, enabled by companies like Plaid. API-as-a-Service is a type of product that is a lingua franca for the common mess of proprietary data formats and competing standards that cause user data to stay inert in silos, due to the difficulty of wrangling them. I love companies of this shape and described why they are so exciting to me in great length. Agriculture data suffers from this exact problem. 

Enter Leaf. Leaf is the unified API for food and agriculture data. Leaf is used by companies that represent over 200M+ acres globally. Leaf’s customers are the technology providers and manufacturers in agriculture that want to help farmers work more efficiently. These providers consume their customers’ farming data using Leaf and then provide solutions to improve operations, crop monitoring, benchmarking, weather, insurance, carbon sequestration, and a myriad of other emergent use cases that the next generation of AgTech entrepreneurs will invent.

The cost of using Leaf pays for itself in both lower initial development costs and reduced maintenance costs. APIs are brittle and change often in all industries. Agriculture is no exception. As farm equipment manufacturers improve their APIs with each new version and model release, those changes will break your services if you don’t have a clean layer of abstraction that can handle these changes as they emerge. Leaf handles this better than any single development team can do on their own.

The world is buzzing with excitement over AI and how it will change every major industry. I am sure that agriculture will be a beneficiary of this rising tide. However, the lifeblood of any AI model is clean, consistent groundtruth data. This is where Leaf shines, and it will be an essential vendor to anyone that wants to address agriculture with AI.

The folks at Spero Ventures are delighted to be partnering with Bailey, Joseph, Luiz and the rest of the Leaf team. Spero led their Series A in combination with our friends at S2G Ventures, Radicle Growth, SP Ventures, Trailhead Capital and others.

Techcrunch has a nice interview with Bailey if you’d like to read more. My favorite part of any API-as-a-service company is the bottom-up, emergent use cases that entrepreneurs explore. I can’t wait to see what people build on top of Leaf and I’m wildly optimistic for the impact all of these innovations will collectively have on world agriculture.