I don't usually blog Pacifica's investments, but I'm going to make an exception this time. Earlier this week we were part of a round closed by Integrinautics. While a lot of Silicon Valley investment has the taste of the virtual and ephemeral, these guys do something very tangible: They make GPS based automatic steering and navigation systems, for big honking farm tractors, and soon earthmovers and enormous mining shovels as well. Since our Japan-side partner, Yukio Okamoto was in town for meetings (hence the light blogging this week), we decided to end the week with a site visit to see the company's AutoFarm product in action.

We all piled into cars and headed south down 101 to Salinas, where an Integrinautics rep met us and led us down to Chualar where we were kindly hosted by Israel Morales, manager of American Farms' 2,000 acre spread of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower.

While I've driven through the Salinas Valley many times, I've never before been onto the farms, and it's truly amazing. I grew up in corn and soybean country in the Midwest, where you get one crop a year, in a season fixed by the winter cold. Out here, an aggressive operation like American Farms can bring in three a year, rotating the crops on each plot and staggering the plant and harvest dates, so there's always something happening. As you stand on the flat valley floor, in every direction there's machinery in motion in the distance, plowing, planting, and spraying. Lines of farm workers' cars make islands of color along the dirt lanes, with the workers themselves dots on the moving harvesting and packing equipment. Trailers of boxed veggies - cauliflower seemed to be the flavor of the day - go whizzing up the narrow roads to the Salinas depots.

After meeting up at farm headquarters, we headed out to the fields to watch an automated tractor in operation. Being short of seats in the pickups, my own Maxima was pressed into service as well - our other choice was a rented Jaguar. (I can't recommend the Maxima as farm equipment: it collected so much mud in the undercarriage that it gummed up the A/C.) We caught up with one of John Deere's finest plowing out the rows for a new 40 acre planting of lettuce. (That's a stock photo. I forgot to check the batteries on my digicam and the inevitable occured. We also had a conventional camera along, but it's on its way to Tokyo now. There will be a slight delay for a real image.)

As the tractor came trundling towards us, we could see the three Frisbee-like antennas of the GPS system on the cab. We could also see a driver on board, but he wasn't holding the steering wheel, and the thing was making perfectly straight rows, centered right on those for the last crop. When it reached the end of the row near us, he took over control, turned it around to point back onto the next swath, poked a touch screen and off it went again, self-guiding. So where's the savings if you need a driver on board anyway? Because the equipment is much more precise, more rows can be squeezed into an acreage, and the repeatability of the rows allows the use of minimum till farming systems. In fact, American Farms has custom designed their own plow and tilling implements that exploit the autofarming system better than stock machinery. (I'm sure there are aggies out there who will understand this better than I.) Because of the automatic control, the machinery can even be run in the dark when there's a crunch, and still keep right in the rows.

We were able to crawl around on the equipment and examine the GPS system, the touchscreen controls, and the connections to the tractor's control systems. Farm machinery has come quite a ways since the beat up, clutch banging Farm-All tractors we played with in shop when I was in high school: A/C, a nice stereo, dust tight cabin, and now they steer themselves. The driver still has a job as a safety device, and can give attention to things like spray application that get shorted if he's stressed out with fine driving.

Since Yukio had come the farthest, he got the ride, up the field and back with the Autofarm in control and the plows working, and the rest of us learned some things about the farming operation. Part of the plantings at American Farms are certified organic, and the GPS system was originally bought for them, exploiting the reduced till concept for weed control and making it safe to leave irrigation piping in place while tilling, due to the greater precision. If your image of organic veggies involves aging hippies working their few acre truck farm, think again. What I saw was industrialized organic farming, 40 acres of raised bed lettuce 'garden' at a go, plowed and planted automatically under the control of Silicon Valley gadgetry, guided by Defense Department GPS satellites.

Update: Richard Bennett adds some informative details on minimal till. An unnamed Bostonian finds it all 'brutally efficient.' Actually, the drivers seem to enjoy going home without their shoulders in knots from steering fine. And I enjoy the idea of using the existing farmland more efficiently, rather than putting more under the plow. I also don't mind making money off the process.
7:57:01 PM