GroGuru

GroGuru measures soil. Sensors go several feet down, communicate to a unit above ground, and stream data to machine learning models that tell a grower how much water to apply and when. The deep-rooted row crops that cover most American farmland have been the hardest to instrument, because the sensor has to survive being buried beneath a field that gets plowed.

Yield is uncertain because the things that drive it are underground and unmeasured, so growers irrigate and fertilize on schedule and intuition, which means applying more than necessary to be safe. Excess water is a resource, and excess nitrogen is a greenhouse gas considerably worse than CO2, plus the runoff that kills the water downstream. Only about a tenth of growers use soil sensors, and cost is why. Cheap enough to deploy densely is the difference between a pilot and an industry.