Crop texts farmer: Snd wtr pls

For years, some people have talked to their houseplants in the belief that it will help them grow healthier and happier. But now, a company in Colorado is intent on helping entire fields of plants talk back.

Agrihouse of Berthoud, CO, is preparing to market a sensor-based technology to farmers that allows plants to send a text message to a mobile device with a request for water...or a message that 'we're fine, thank you'. Unlike other remote sensing applications in production agriculture that measure soil moisture, the Agrihouse solution actually purports to measure the internal moisture content of the plant by placing low cost sensors on plant leaves to measure turgidity.

Image from Agrihouse. More information, including video, here.

According to Agrihouse, this unprecendented level of precision takes out much of the guesswork in irrigation decisions and could save a typical 130-acre center-pivot implementation "enough water to supply 40 households for a year" in addition to significant savings in pumping costs (i.e., energy).

So What?

Interesting you say...if you are a farmer. But what does that mean to marketers? Three things:

1. Always-on, mobile technology (see here and here for a couple of related priors) is an opportunity in every industry. Marketers who look to remove cost, time and place as obstacles to the customer's experience can find the tools in ever-less-expensive technology. Any marketing effort that doesn't look to lower costs, reduce time, or enable efficiency in an implementation of technology is missing opportunity.

 

2. Sustainability is an opportunity in every industry. Marketers who consider ways to help their customers do more--with less--for longer--will find an increasingly receptive audience in the post-disposable world view. Technology can provide the means when the end goal is to be there for the duration.

3. People are strange...when you are the stranger. No matter what the person's occupation, stereotypes get in the way of good marketing. Good marketers, on the other hand, try to put themselves in the shoes of others (one of our five themes!)...recognizing that it is not the same as being someone else. Just as farming might be a surprisingly high-tech business (prior) to those outside of it, we all have surprisingly rich and varied qualities that technology can serve. Smart marketers look to engage us where we are different...not rely on least common denominator stereotypes.

Speaking of strange, here's a look through one of musical history's stranger Doors:

 

ePocrates: Having a doctor in the palm of your hand

ok, I'm not a doctor and I've never played one...on TV anyway. So I'm not really the target for ePocrates, a company that is developing electronic tools targetting real healthcare professionals (also known as doctors + nurses). But I have been playing with one of their mobile applications, ePocrates Essentials, for the last week and it matters...and not just to real healthcare professionals.

What does it do?

The (currently) free version I have on my Windows Mobile device (yes, there is a version for the iPhone, Palm and Blackberry devices) is an amazing collection of useful information in a usable form factor.

As a consumer (or healthcare professional), I can:

1. Look up any drug and see if it's covered under healthcare plans targetted to my geography, including generic programs like Target and others...see manufacturer's pricing...and alternatives.
   
2. Create and manage custom formulary information sets.
   
3. Discern indications, dosing, adverse reactions and all-important interaction warnings for thousands of drugs.
   
4. Calculate conversions and values for a multitude of measures and data associated with treatment and monitoring (e.g., Body-Mass Index to Osmotic Gaps to Transtubular K gradients)
5. View and complete Continuing Education Medical units
   

All of these features and other, subscription-based modules--like symptom assessment, disease reference, lab diagnostic and infectious disease treatment--are available in automatically updated form on my mobile device: anytime, anywhere.

So What?

As one presenter discussed at the healthcare strategists' forum (here), the quality of healthcare service delivery is the marketing. And that's why ePocrates matters to marketers. Healthcare is, afterall, a knowledge industry.

As in other knowledge industries, control has been shifting to consumers because of the availability of knowledge beyond once-restricted walls of various professional priesthoods. As the information becomes widely available, the expectations and definitions of exceptional service delivery are being redefined on the consumer's terms...ePocrates further deploys knowledge to everyone with a stake in effective, efficient healthcare delivery.

Consistent with one of our marketing themes for 2009--Time as a Risk to Manage (here)--ePocrates anytime, anywhere approach goes one step beyond existing web-based services. It allows patients and their advocates to ask more specific, directed questions of providers--on their schedule. And it provides a source of reference to providers that reflects the always-on world of the healthcare professional...including the time outside the healthcare facility's walls.

ePocrates would appear to appeal to both the healthcare professional AND their customers...healthcare marketers--in both human and animal health domains--may be seeing the immediate future of service delivery improvements from the customer's view--its all right there in the palm of their hand.

If I had a farm in Africa...

...it might just take advantage of Web 2.0.

It's sometimes easy to let stereotypes dictate beleifs about the use of technology in farming. Nowhere moreso than on the African continent. In fact, when it comes to Internet penetration, a mere 5.3% of Africans have internet access according to InternetWorldStats.com.

(Click to enlarge)

What lies below this number is an explosive growth rate of adoption: Internet growth rates in Africa exceed 1000% over the last 5 years. Part of the reason for the growth includes the availability of increasingly powerful, low cost devices and networks. 

But a bigger part of the reason is the actions of people to make it happen. One such organization is BROSDI.  The group is focussed on sharing knowledge to the benefit of civil society, especially as it enables a livelihood. One major focus of the group is among farmers in Uganda. They have adopted blog, podcasting, and mobile messaging approaches to knowledge sharing. 

An overview news report is available here.

Blog postings and other agricultural web resources from the CELAC (Collecting and Exchange of Local Agricultural Content) project can be found here here and here.

While small in scale now, it certainly calls to mind the William Gibson quote: "The Future is here now...it's just unevenly distributed."

In the case of BROSDI and efforts like it, one can only imagine the possibilities when the intellectual capital of the second most populous region of the world is unleashed in a collaborative, interconnected and always on world.