Data is critical to organizations today – and this is as true in the financial services industry as it is in agriculture and in the agtech space. When Mark Young joined CO2 GRO as its Data Manager, he brought a host of skills and capabilities to the organization, but more importantly, he brought us the ability and bandwidth to acquire, assimilate, and analyze data from our growers and partners.
Having been in the role for a couple of months, Young now has a super-power: access to a private research facility where CO2 GRO’s aqueous CO2 technology has been deployed. Here, he’s able to collect environmental data and see, in real-time, how our technology performs when slight changes are made to the various factors in play such as light intensity, temperature, and relative humidity.
“Our objective is to collect environmental data and tie it into dry times for the CO2 microfilm formed over the leaves by our technology so that we’re able to optimize for more efficiency,” said Young.
In a recent experiment, for example, Young concluded that dry times are longer when relative humidity is higher. Studying the correlation between the two is something that will benefit CO2 GRO’s growers immensely and immediately – allowing them to make further tweaks to their deployment as the climate in their part of the world changes.
CO2 GRO has been collecting environmental data from growers, whether they’re running a technology trial or have purchased and deployed the technology wholesale.
However, this data is not usually collected at the frequency that would allow us to make scientific observations that can be extrapolated to other growers. In most cases, growers collect and send over data periodically – fortnightly, weekly, or sometimes daily – which only enables us to make optimizations for their specific use case.
“The challenge with this data is that it is blurry because it is averaged out over longer periods of time. Our data from the research facility, on the other hand, is collected every second, in real-time, and hence, will help us deliver optimized recommendations and protocols to growers across the globe.”
Young is excited about the research facility he now has access to because it will allow him to test the results for a number of crops and environmental conditions, which will ultimately allow CO2 GRO to realize its mission to scale faster and deliver results to growers more quickly.
“With more data, we’ll be able to make recommendations with more certainty – even without a technology trial. Further, collecting data by the second means we have precise information to track relationships between factors more closely, identifying any inflection points, reversals, or anything else of statistical significance.”
CO2 GRO’s new research facility is an exciting development and is sure to help deliver great results, delighting existing growers and winning the trust and confidence of growers looking to deploy CO2 GRO’s aqueous CO2 solution at their facilities. To stay tuned about progress, subscribe to CO2 GRO’s newsletter and follow us on social media now.
