Unlocking Economic Benefits of Sustainability

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

There is increasing interest amongst consumers and food companies to incentives sustainable agricultural practices. Defining exactly what that means can be difficult, but there’s an even greater challenge in validating these practices at the farm level. Will Wells says his company Hummingbird Technologies has a remote sensing platform that measures regenerative agriculture.

Wells… “For the last five or six years, we've been using remote sensing data to try and solve some of the more complex problems in food production. But we focused our energy on things like monitoring land use change - super important in Southeast Asia and geographies like Brazil. And in the US most of our customers are deeply concerned with providing evidence that soil structures are being preserved, soil health is being preserved - that you can measure it. And that there's biodiversity and sensible sustainable practices.”

Wells says sometimes this validation is important for carbon credits, other times its for food companies to gain visibility into their supply chains.

Wells… “Our job is to try and unlock an economic benefit for a farmer so that they get paid for being sustainable.”