Century City-based company Opti-Harvest Inc. is growing within the increasingly desirable agriculture technology sector.
Agriculture technology, commonly referred to as AgTech, is the implementation of technology in agriculture in order to improve yield, efficiency and profitability for farmers.
Opti-Harvest’s latest advancement within the sector is the Opti-Filter, a patented light-filtration technology that converts natural sunlight into red-enriched light.
Because chlorophyll absorbs red light, it is known to stimulate photosynthesis. According to the company, the Opti-Filter gives plants more of what they need to thrive, resulting in a shorter growth and maturation period, improved fruit quality and increased marketable yield.
Opti-Harvest seeks to help farmers and commercial growers better use sunlight to increase marketable yield, improve water-use efficiency, reduce labor costs and diminish harmful environmental practices.
As of last year, the agriculture technology market was estimated at $18 billion, according to global market research company Precedence Research, and it is expected to reach $43 billion by 2030.
Investors are taking note of the industry’s promise.
Last year, AgTech startup companies received funding of about $4.9 billion, an increase from about $3.4 billion in the previous year, according to Statista.
AgTech encompasses products like software analysis for pest and disease prediction and soil management, automated irrigation and digital management platforms. This includes drones, robots and crop-monitoring solutions.
Product lines
Opti-Harvest utilizes several products designed to enhance conventional farming practices.
“Our technology is tactile, which means it’s equipment that is installed in the field,” Jeremy Basich, vice president of sales at Opti-Harvest, said. “We have patented light transmission and light-reflection red-induced light technology. What we’re doing is we’re taking the (agriculture) science that’s been around for 50, 60 years; that science says that red light, or the sun’s red-spectrum light, is the most beneficial color on the light spectrum for plants, and we’re helping to harness that light onto plants for a load of benefits, from accelerated growth to improved overall plant health.”
Two of the company’s products, the Opti-Gro and Opti-Shield, are designed for newly planted vines, trees and other crops. According to the company, the two products can shorten production time by one to three years.
“The (Opti-Shield) is installed behind the tree, and then the sunlight will hit the shield and then bounce the red enriched light onto the side of the tree that is shaded,” Basich said. “And so, the tree or the plant will get that benefit of red light where it normally wouldn’t. That helps with the accelerated growth, with the thicker trunk, with a healthier root system.”
The company’s Opti-Panel and Opti-Skylight, on the other hand, are designed for mature vineyards and orchards. The Opti-Panel is a canopy and fruit management system that provides an optimized light environment, rain protection and self-training for table grapes and other trellised fruit crops. It is also designed to protect from bad weather and help prevent fruit decay.
“After the tree is grown to a certain age, between two to four years, then you insert the optic skylight into the center of the tree and it starts to collect light and then send it into the canopy,” Basich said. “They’re very productive as a natural system in its ecology, but when you start getting light into the center of the tree, it’s just a much more positive way to grow for the tree itself.”
These products are sold to commercial farmers looking to enhance their growing practices. Basich said he treats sales calls like a classroom and makes sure he and the buyer fully understand one another and the farmer’s goals.
“We’ll talk about what their goals are, how many acres are they going to redevelop, how many units they’ll need,” Basich said. “Generally, verbally and in person, somebody from the company will go out and walk them through the technology from A to Z, from start to finish. And then we do to help checkups per year, somebody from the science team will go out and make sure that the devices are collecting the measurements appropriately, and then summarize some of the data back to the farmer.”
Basich could not disclose specific price points because the cost of the products varies from farmer to farmer, depending on how many units are purchased, what time of year they are installed and the down payment. The company is only selling to individual farmers, not large stores.
“I don’t know your operation. I don’t know where you’re located. I don’t know your soil type,” Basich continued. “I know all of your goals and I have a little bit of an intimate understanding of your farm operation. It’s very difficult to give an overall cost. There’s just so many factors.”
Everyone wants in
Barath Raghavan, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, said the AgTech being developed varies depending on what part of the world you are in because of the types of crops being planted.
California is home to orchard crops, like fruit or nut trees, for example, or row crops, such as strawberries.
“We don’t really grow a lot of grains here, so you can put a lot more money into the technology,” Raghavan said. “Corn makes very, very little money per acre, so you’ve got to grow a thousand acres as a farmer to make it worth your while. (In California), a 10-acre orchard growing almonds can actually make a good amount of money, and also you’re talking about something that grows for 20 years to 40 years, so it’s worth it to actually invest a little bit more (in) higher technology.”
Raghavan explained that there is a lot of buzz surrounding “fancy” technology, like drones or indoor farming; however, he believes those solutions are costly and difficult for farmers to maintain. Products such as those Opti-Harvest has built are more promising, he said.
“You put the (product) on there and it just does what it’s supposed to do,” Raghavan said. “Those are better because those are going to be more maintainable over the long run. It’s going to be easier; it’s going to be cheaper. Really innovative technologies are ones where they are not simply using technology to do whatever people were doing just a tiny bit better, but they’re actually changing the way that the farming is done.”
For example, an AgTech company may use artificial intelligence to improve irrigation, fertilization or pest removal by 10%, and the AI engine will tell the farmer where to irrigate or fertilize. Raghavan said, “That’s fine, but that’s a very small incremental improvement and it doesn’t change the fundamental practice, which may not have been sustainable in the first place, so now you further entrenched an unsustainable practice by making it 10% better, which is actually, in the long run, worse, versus something where it says we came up with a better way for the farmer to do their farming, which is different than what they’re doing today. And in the long run, that’s going to have bigger rewards.”
He said there are two driving motivations for the agriculture industry to adopt technological practices: need and society. Some farms are dependent on herbicides to get rid of weeds, but over time, weeds are evolving and developing resistance to these chemicals.
“They have now run out of new types of herbicides,” Raghavan explained. “And so … within five or 10 years, weeds will evolve resistance to the last mechanism, and then we won’t have any. And we have to completely change the way we farm, so we might as well do it anyway. We might as well start thinking about, ‘how do we move past the unsustainable practices we’ve got now?’ because nature is going to force it on us anyway.”
The second driving force behind AgTech, according to Raghavan, is that society is changing and becoming more digital, “so, it’s sort of a natural thing that as tech just sort of becomes part of everything in society.”
As technology makes its footing in agriculture, Opti-Harvest’s Basich said he is optimistic about the industry’s future.
“I’m personally excited because I think what the future holds for farming is the merging of kind of old-world cultural practices, the evolving technology and its existence in this space,” Basich said. “It may be the only way forward for some farmers with the rising cost of labor, labor shortages and also, with all the inflationary pressures. I think technology is addressing that or will address that.”
