Part One - Interview Ground Truth Ag founder Kyle Folk
Part one of our series on how Ground Truth Ag's founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kyle Folk, is changing the world.
From a cup on stick to machine learning and vision: Part one on how Kyle Folk is changing the world
“When I was young, one of my first jobs on the farm was driving the grain truck from the field to the yard so my grandma could unload the truck,” Ground Truth Agriculture Inc’s founder and chief executive officer remembers. “While she was unloading the grain, I’d take a cup on the end of a stick and scoop out a bit of grain into a pail and eventually bag up a sample to send away for grading.”
While virtually all grain farming practices have evolved considerably over the decades, how the agricultural industry grades grain has remained the same for the past century.
“Since the beginning of conventional farming, farmers have never had the ability to understand their quality in detail,” Folk explains. “It’s been this blanket approach based on unrepresentative samples where we rely on a system that is fraught with subjectivity. Ground Truth Ag is making grain grading objective and consistent – and something that is available to everybody throughout the entire supply chain.”
While the technologies the company are developing use cutting-edge scientific advancements in machine vision and learning, the idea to develop precision-location, automated grain grading is based on Folk’s formative years working for his dad on the family farm.
“Farming has always been innovative, and farmers are some of the most innovative individuals - yet innovation and agriculture have only become synonymous very recently, which does agriculture a disservice,” Folk says. “What we are building will change agriculture."
“I know it’s going to be invaluable for farmers to have grain quality information immediately off their combine with field maps, Folk explains. “Precision ag decisions will no longer be made just based on yield - but also on grain quality. And with marketing, instead of the guesswork game that farmers have to play with right now, farmers will understand exactly what they are bringing to market.
Folk, like the rest of the team he has built at Ground Truth Ag, sees the technology they are developing as making a real, tangible difference for people. “What we are building will change how agriculture works on a global scale – and that will leave the world in a better place than it is now. I don’t think there are a lot of jobs out there where you can say that.”
Part two of our interview with Kyle Folk will look at what he has learned as a second time agtech founder and his advice for others who have a great idea and want to start a company to realize their vision.