Farmers Need Tech That Offers Full Solutions
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
The problem with a lot of agtech tools, is they are only partial solutions. Many digital tools want to bolt on to other equipment or hardware in order to perform a very narrow task. Lumo co-founder and CEO Devon Wright learned this quickly when starting his precision irrigation company.
Wright… “I was like, oh, we'll do another controller. And he's like, if you do another controller, we're all dead. Like, we're not doing that. Like we have to have the courage to go look at what's not working and build the entire thing that's not working to work. And that's gonna require like saying to farmers, these valves that you have in the field, don't do what you need them to do. And if you want, get the human out of it. You're not gonna do that by bandaid, bolting a bunch of stuff onto the existing infrastructure that was never designed for technology in the first place. We're gonna have to be willing to do what Nest was willing to do, which was look at a Honeywell thermostat and say, this wasn't designed to do what? What the future expects of Honeywell or of thermostats. The future expects different of thermostats. It has to be IOT first, software first. It has to have better sensors and better reactivity and, and better interfacing and, um, better design and better, you know, look, if you ever read the book Build, it's just such a great journey through that. Like, you know, what it takes to have the courage to make that statement. And my co-founder, Henry, made that statement and made us stick to that. And that was a really smart idea.”
Started in 2022, Lumo is already gaining traction with winegrape growers.
