Regrow Ag: Accelerating the transition to sustainable food and fiber production with data science
About Regrow Ag
Established in 2021 from the merger of precision agriculture and soil science companies, Regrow Ag (Regrow) aims to increase takeup of regenerative agriculture in markets worldwide in order to build a climate-resilient global food production system. With Regrow’s Resilient Agriculture Platform, forward-thinkers across the ag supply chain gain the ability to perpetually ensure profitable supply and protect operational integrity by accelerating the needed scale of greenhouse gas emissions reduction, regenerative practices, and proactive adaptation. The business has grown to 140+ employees and works with customers such as General Mills, Cargill and Kelloggs, as well as the philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Regrow has been named the number one Most Innovative Company in Agriculture in 2023 by publication Fast Company.
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Contact usWith Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine, Regrow Ag is extending its data-driven regenerative agriculture solutions from the United States corn belt to international markets, and working with brands and farmers to reduce emissions from agriculture in the supply chain.
Google Cloud results
- Eliminates the need to recruit up to 5 team members to manage infrastructure
- Supports 60 team members with one DevOps engineer
- Enables the collection of agricultural data at large scale to monitor 1.2B acres of land globally and empower adoption of regenerative and climate-smart agriculture practices
- Enabled rice growers in the Mississippi river basin to reduce emissions by 1,600 tons, equivalent to taking 345 gasoline-powered cars off the road for one year
- Provides expert advice to customers and their supply chain partners around reduction in emissions and developing, delivering and/or investing in regenerative agriculture programs with cloud technology
Reduces regenerative agriculture data collection and product development time from 6 months to less than a month
As the world works towards practicing greener habits for the future generations, it has become increasingly important to practice regenerative agriculture, a conservation and rehabilitation approach to farming. Regenerative agriculture enables food producers to adapt and build resilience to climate change by rebuilding the organic matter in soil and increasing overall soil health, protecting the environment while ensuring food security for the growing global population.
More businesses and their suppliers are looking to regenerative practices to reduce the impact of agriculture on the environment. "Businesses that provide food and fiber products are engaging skilled providers to work with farmers and growers to implement these practices," says John Shriver, Director of Data Science, Regrow Ag (Regrow). "That is where Regrow comes in."
Founded in 2016 as precision agriculture business FluroSat and rebranded in 2021 through a merger with soil science company Dagan, Regrow aims to accelerate the adoption of regenerative agriculture around the world. The business focuses primarily on tracking, modeling and monitoring agricultural practices that sequester carbon into soil, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and increase biodiversity and water quality for agricultural lands. Its mission and approach are driving growth and investment, and from mid-2021 to mid-2022, Regrow achieved its Series A and B funding objectives and grew from 30 to more than 120 employees.
Customers include prominent food companies such as General Mills and Cargill, while the business also works with charitable organization the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on projects such as an exercise to optimize crop placement in sub-Saharan Africa.
"Our ultimate mission is to illuminate and accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable food and fiber production," says Shriver. "We believe advancing regenerative agriculture can bring resilience to business supply chains. Working with data specialists at Google and platforms such as Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine is key to achieving this goal."
As an example, since implementing Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine, Kellogg’s InGrained, a program developed by the Kellogg Company and supported by Regrow, has enabled rice growers in the Mississippi river basin to reduce emissions by 1,600 tons, equivalent to taking 345 gasoline-powered cars off the road for one year. This was done in their first-year as a pilot project, setting the stage for future execution of more efficient projects like this in the future.
Using data science to help clients deliver regenerative agriculture
Data and data science are integral to Regrow’s products and solutions, which help growers monitor crop performance, stress and nutrition. Accurate field-level data helps businesses reduce emissions, monitor the adoption of regenerative practices, and quantify impact. Data also helps brands, project developers, and growers measure the impact of regenerative farming practices. Regrow also provides a range of use case-based solutions for consumer packaged goods companies, project developers, and partners.
However, when starting operations post-merger, Regrow could not scale data products running on its own platform to engage with brands and partners that had global operations. "Infrastructure limitations made it difficult to generate relevant data products at speed to meet the needs of our global customers," says Shriver. "With FluroSat and Dagan merging with the intention of extending operations beyond the United States corn belt to Europe and countries such as Canada, Brazil, and Australia, we needed a fundamentally different solution."
"While we could take six months to generate a data product for the corn belt, we had to be able to generate a data product for most of the grain producing regions in the world in one month."
Understanding data and tools needed to develop products
Regrow reviewed whether to upgrade its existing platform or move to another service that could meet its speed and scalability needs and help optimize spending on resources. This evaluation included Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine, a platform that enables businesses to derive insights from more than 100 petabytes of datasets and growing, comprising satellite imagery and geospatial data covering the Earth’s surface.
"We worked closely with the Google teams to build the data and tools needed for the products we wanted to build, and conducted a thorough evaluation of the Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine products alongside our requirements," says Shriver. "Google Earth Engine allowed us to access a vast range of curated satellite datasets that get updated continuously in near-real time. Combining the data with the computational power and advanced analytics tools of Google Cloud, it became clear that Google Earth Engine would enable us to develop and scale at the level we were looking for."
"Google Earth Engine allowed us to access a vast range of curated satellite datasets that get updated continuously in near-real time. Combining the data with the computational power and advanced analytics tools of Google Cloud, it became clear that Google Earth Engine would enable us to develop and scale at the level we were looking for."
—John Shriver, Director of Data Science, Regrow Ag"The Google brand gave us that sense of trust because of the organization’s track record of delivering and continuously improving innovative, scalable data services," adds Shriver.
Regrow was also interested in leveraging Google Cloud machine learning operations tools such as Vertex AI and the BigQuery data warehouse for geospatial analytics, with BigQuery ML considered to build machine learning models using Google Cloud SQL queries.
The scalability of Google Cloud infrastructure and Google Earth Engine, and the rich potential of Google Cloud’s machine learning and data services to support product development, prompted Regrow to adopt the Google platforms.
Regrow viewed the implementation process through two lenses. The operations performed on the data, including the models built and indices created, and the architecture used to generate and serve data to customers and partners. "Google Cloud and Earth Engine have been extremely valuable in both areas," says Shriver. In its research and development phase, Regrow uses Earth Engine and Vertex AI to undertake local experimentation and start to build, tune and train a model, before deploying it to a platform accessible on the internet. The business then spins up data generation processes with Earth Engine and sends imagery to the deployed model to make predictions.
With those predictions made, derived data is returned to the business for storage in Cloud Storage. "We’ll do that for full geographies for each of our core data products, which include tillage intensity, crop classification and cover crops, and together, this allow us to monitor regenerative practices at the field level," explains Shriver. "We’ll then serve this data by an API, providing a holistic understanding of how the field is managed to our customers. One API provides access to soil carbon estimates, and another access to monitoring data about fields within Regrow-supported geographies."
The business then moves all the data generated into BigQuery or SQL-based stores that reside behind its sustainability insights product, which allows customers to measure emissions generated within areas from which they source commodities. They can then determine where to intervene to reduce carbon intensity.
Regrow also uses Apigee X for API governance and support, and the platform enables the business to confidently expose its APIs as standalone products that external customers can integrate to.
"From research and development, to deployment, to scaling and integration into our product, it all takes place within the Google infrastructure," says Shriver. "We don’t have to manage data volumes and direct flows within our architecture, so Google allows us to operate at scale without worrying about complexity."
"With Google Cloud, we have the interface to direct our data science work. Plus we have been able to take advantage of the experience, knowledge and lessons learned from more than a decade of leading scientists leveraging large geospatial datasets in Google Earth Engine. This level of scientific innovation typically requires massive computation capability, easily achieved with Google Cloud."
"From research and development, to deployment, to scaling and integration into our product, it all takes place within the Google infrastructure. We don’t have to manage data volumes and direct flows within our architecture, so Google allows us to operate at scale without worrying about complexity."
—John Shriver, Director of Data Science, Regrow AgCentralizing to a single platform delivers sustainable growth
The ease of use, automation and centralization to Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine meant until recently, Regrow needed only one DevOps engineer to support 60 team members. "By centralizing into a single location, it is much easier for us to keep track of what we need to do, and run a similar playbook for most activities," says Shriver. "Having that standardized playbook allowed us to grow without growing our headcount at the same rate."
In addition, had Regrow opted to operate on its own infrastructure, John estimates the business would have needed to recruit at least three to five additional team members. In addition, he says, it would have taken twice as long, and required extensive experimentation in a way that would have added considerable friction to the work. "Building our own infrastructure would have affected the velocity with which we can operate, both from a research and development perspective and a go-to-market perspective," says Shriver.
Staying ahead of business requirements for international products
With Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine, Regrow’s data science team is now keeping ahead of business requirements, developing new data products in Europe and Brazil and exploring opportunities in South East Asia and Australia. "Now, we can move quickly to bring new products to market that meet our requirements, without infrastructure slowing us down," says Shriver. The business can now deliver a new product in less than one month, well below the six months required previously.
In addition, with Regrow’s credibility in the marketplace based on its application of science, the benefit of experimenting and validating products with Google Earth Engine is considerable. The business is able to provide expert advice to customers about how to engage with supply chain partners to achieve objectives such as a reduction in emissions, and partner with customers to deliver regenerative agriculture programs able to withstand scrutiny from third-party auditors reviewing sustainability programs.
"One of our significant projects in monitoring has been with General Mills. Together, we are monitoring 175M acres of agricultural land. The data we provide allows General Mills to track the adoption of regenerative agriculture and to assess their opportunities in promoting regenerative agriculture across its supply sheds."
"Using Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine, we've been able to expand our reach to 1.2B acres of land across the globe. This enables us to monitor the adoption of resilient agriculture practices at large scale and estimate the environmental outcomes of those practices, which ultimately makes resilient agriculture more accessible. With Google, we are able to make significant progress in our mission, which is to make resilient agriculture ubiquitous across the globe," concludes Shriver. "When our customers ask us to move with them into their key geographies, we’re able to say yes, rather than 'give us 12 months.' This has enabled us to prove ourselves as we expand into the marketplace and acquire great customers."
"Using Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine, we've been able to expand our reach to 1.2B acres of land across the globe. This enables us to monitor the adoption of resilient agriculture practices at large scale and estimate the environmental outcomes of those practices, which ultimately makes resilient agriculture more accessible. With Google, we are able to make significant progress in our mission, which is to make resilient agriculture ubiquitous across the globe."
—John Shriver, Director of Data Science, Regrow AgTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Regrow Ag
Established in 2021 from the merger of precision agriculture and soil science companies, Regrow Ag (Regrow) aims to increase takeup of regenerative agriculture in markets worldwide in order to build a climate-resilient global food production system. With Regrow’s Resilient Agriculture Platform, forward-thinkers across the ag supply chain gain the ability to perpetually ensure profitable supply and protect operational integrity by accelerating the needed scale of greenhouse gas emissions reduction, regenerative practices, and proactive adaptation. The business has grown to 140+ employees and works with customers such as General Mills, Cargill and Kelloggs, as well as the philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Regrow has been named the number one Most Innovative Company in Agriculture in 2023 by publication Fast Company.