Ep #02: Revolutionizing Agriculture through Technology and Data with Craig Rupp
Farming and tech might not seem like an obvious match, but Craig Rupp saw an opportunity to bridge the gap. With an electrical engineering degree, he's now a farmer and the founder of Sabanto and 640 Labs. In this episode, Craig shares how he’s revolutionizing farming and agriculture, as well as the many opportunities he sees in the industry.
Tune in to hear why he left the tech world to dive back into farming—and how he’s now connecting the two. You’ll learn about his journey, from working with Monsanto to getting into autonomous planting, and how he’s addressing tech and data collection needs in agriculture.
Listen to the Full Episode:
What You’ll Hear About in This Episode:
How agriculture has contributed to technology and innovation.
Why Craig decided to take his electrical engineering degree into the agricultural field.
His first autonomous planting experiences.
Where farmers are implementing and using autonomous systems.
What has surprised Craig about how people have used his tech and systems.
The benefits of moving into autonomous farming.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“Agriculture is kind of an interesting industry in that it doesn't get a lot of credit for the innovations that came from agriculture.” - Craig Rupp
“I thought, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to go out and autonomously plant in 2019.’ I wanted to send a message to the industry that I think this is going to completely change the equipment industry.” - Craig Rupp
“Back when I started … I got a lot of people [saying], ‘You're going to take away the farmer's job,’ or whatever, right? Farmers are a lot more than a person who sits on a tractor.” - Craig Rupp
Resources:
Craig Rupp: LinkedIn
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Read the Transcript:
Craig Rupp: I went and bought an 18-row, 20-inch planter, and I was going to plant soybeans because farmers love their corn and they'll let some idiot like myself plant their soybeans.
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Brian Kearney: Thank you for listening to another episode of Land Ledger. Today on the show I have Craig Rupp. He is most importantly a farmer, but also has experience stemming from Texas Instruments to Motorola. He's the co-founder of 640 Labs and the co-founder of Sabanto. Craig, thank you for jumping on the show today.
Craig Rupp: And thank you for having me, Brian.
Brian Kearney: I am excited to dive into your background. It's pretty unique for the farming industry. At least that is what the audience might think, but I think there's a little bit more overlap than most people imagine. So where I want to dive into first is a little bit about when you first realized you enjoyed tech in building systems.
Craig Rupp: I guess it all started when I was in, you know, I graduated high school. I'll be honest with you. I didn't really want to become a farmer. I wanted to become an electrical engineer and it was kind of odd. I have this background and I used to work around a lot of electrical engineers and it seemed like I was the odd person in the room because I had this agriculture background growing up on a farm and we're talking engineering, electrical engineering, radios primarily. As my career went on, it kind of dawned on me that it's kind of a valuable asset to have a background in agriculture.
And I really didn't have any intent on working in agriculture with my electrical engineering degree, but then as soon as GPS receivers became a thing on tractors, then it kind of–I saw my talents as something that I could take in agriculture, and then I could leverage my background more effectively.
And the first time I got pulled back into agriculture was when I was, I took a job with John Deere and worked on their Starfire receiver and the green star display. And I thought agriculture is kind of an interesting industry. I had spent the majority of my career in the cellular industry, and then I kind of got thrown into the ag industry, and I thought, there's a lot of opportunities in agriculture, and for you, the financials.
For me, it's technology. It's an industry that has a very, very diverse set of skills amongst the people in that industry. You go into the silo industry that I came from, they're all electrical engineers for the most part. Yeah, you have some designers and mechanicals, but it's mostly electrical engineers.
You go to agriculture, it's just a very diverse set of skills from top to bottom. And the other thing, so I'm going to get a little philosophical is you work on radios, after a while you've seen it all. It's just a minor tweaks or improvements to the technology. And in agriculture, there's quite a lot of breakthroughs that happen, you know, every decade, there's a major breakthrough and the industry adapts a heck of a lot quicker than what the wireless world does.
Brian Kearney: Interesting. So that's probably the opposite of what a lot of people that are not familiar with the industry would think. They would think ag is much slower to bring in new technologies. So do you have an example of how ag recently has really accepted something new? And then maybe a counterexample where the wireless industry hasn't had something. When was the last major breakthrough there?
Craig Rupp: All right, so, well, let me start off, I've said this before. Agriculture is kind of an interesting industry in that it doesn't get a lot of credit for the innovations that came from agriculture. I mean, in the early 2000, in the 2000 timeframe, we were strapping on GPS receivers onto tractors and they were being auto-steered, right?
And meanwhile, this was happening in agriculture and I tell you, it didn't take long for every tractor to be, you know, the majority, good size 200 plus tractors that 200 horsepower plus tractors to all have auto steer. Whereas, we're barely, we're starting to see auto steer on cars, right?
And so this has been going on 20 years before consumers got a hold of it. And if you look at just historically, the example I give you, that I'll give is Henry Ford, known for his manufacturing, right? Where did he get that idea? He was obsessed with farmers, the belts that they used to move grain from point A to point B.
And he was inspired by, he made the assembly plant inspired by Swift who was doing disassembly on the Swift packing plan. So it's this guy, they put him on a throne and that's like Swift doing disassembly for years. It's true.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. That's fascinating.
Craig Rupp: Yeah, but you know, if you look at the wireless and like the cellular industry, I mean, you go through 2G to 3G to 4G, you used GSM had Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying, and then UMTS had Code Domain Spread, Spread Spectrum, and then LTE's got OFDM, but it's really, they've improved the modulation.
And now they're going diversity and it's just incremental. But if you look at agriculture, there's–agriculture goes through revolutions. I mean, going from horses to machines, going–the hybridization. I mean, if you look at the average yield of corn, I mean, it's remarkable since the 60s. How in the hell do they do that?
I mean, that's Moore's law. No, that's more, well, first of all, Moore's law is over, right? There's my example. Moore's law is done, right? But if you look at the increase in bushels per acre of corn average across the U.S. I mean, it's been increasing since when? I don't know. I've seen it once. I've got, I don't want to misquote it, but 60s, maybe 50s.
Brian Kearney: I think that's what I've heard as well. I was with a farmer two weeks ago who was harvesting his last field of corn and he was hitting 290 corn on this farm that it was, it's good dirt, Central Illinois farm, but it's not the absolute best dirt in Illinois.
And it was crazy that he was getting that. And he's like, “Yeah, this past couple of years is about what it's been pushing.” Like it is insane to think about.
Craig Rupp: It's absolutely insane too, and you know what I'm thinking about, back in the 70s and 80s when, I graduated, I left the farm in 1984, but you know, I think my dad was getting, I don't know, somewhere around 60 bushel an acre, something like that.
I could not imagine what the hell he would do if he had 290 bushel corn. I mean, first of all, it was all picked, right? For the most part. And I don't know. God, I'd be shelling corn every day of the week over the summer.
Brian Kearney: My father-in-law still picks some of his corn because he has some pasture-raised hogs. But, man, shelling corn. That is a job. That is a job. Yeah. It's funny.
Craig Rupp: Yeah, I used to do that in over the summer. I was either bell and hay or shell and corn. Yep. Those were my two experiences. I was really good at throwing a bell and shoveling.
Brian Kearney: Oh, yeah. Yep. Well, interesting. So, what, from John Deere, what brought you to 640 labs and kind of seeing some of that need?
Craig Rupp: I left John Deere, I kid you not, I left John Deere, went back to the cellular industry, right?
Brian Kearney: Uh-huh.
Craig Rupp: I was working out in Cupertino on the iPad. And I had just, if you realize, I was working on the Green Star display at Deere. We shipped that, and I mean, it was neat, but then I saw this iPad, and I couldn't help but think, “This is what the Green Star Display should have been,” and I was just looking at this iPad and I thought it was the coolest thing and it, first of all, it had a cellular radio on it, so it's considered, you know, you can look at it like it's just another cellular phone with a bigger screen.
I was working on that. And I just couldn't get that out of my mind, and I carried it around in my head for about two years, and then a friend of mine, Corbett Kuhl, and we used to go snowmobiling up in the Upper Peninsula of–it was snowmobiling and sitting at the bars up there in Upper Peninsula. It took me two years. We started starting companies. We started a data company down in Oklahoma, but then we were like, “What's next?” And I tried to convince him that I think we should do something in agriculture and he thought it was crazy. And then I just said, you know, about using an iPad in the cab of a tractor.
And my brother happened to get, he bought an 8R and I saw that little ISO connector and I thought, “If I made a little device, which took data from that and got it into the iPad and then iPad would take up into the cloud and that's how 640 Labs, you know, that was over some beers up in the Upper Peninsula.
Brian Kearney: That's funny. That's a similar story to how my co-founder and I started this company, except it was a few beers in Clinton, Illinois at a cabin. So, that's funny.
Craig Rupp: It's one thing to think about it. And then you decide to do it over some beers, but then you kind of stir it up and you're like, “Oh my God, what did I, what did we say?”
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's for sure. Well, tell me about 640. What was the journey with that? ‘Cause I don't imagine it was that simple as just get this here and send it to the cloud and then we've got a successful company. Dive into that a little bit more.
Craig Rupp: When we decided we're going to do this, then on Saturdays, see, I still had a full-time job. On Saturdays and Sundays, I would run up to my brothers and with can sniffing, ‘cause we were trying to figure out all the messages and these OEMs, they kind of hide the information. They're not JN39 compliant to the T, or ISO 11787, 783. So I was going through debugging, trying to reverse engineer whatever they had, and then we started building this little device that plugs in, the FieldV Drive, that plugs into the tractor.
So we designed that and then wrote some embedded software on that. And what we did was we hired a bunch of people we knew and they would help developing it. And then what we were doing is just working with farmers. And the first five farmers that we worked with were either–I come from a very, very large extended family.
If you get up near Cherokee, Iowa, there's a saying that you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Rupp. Yeah, we're good at multiplying. So we installed it on a bunch of my cousins and my brother's tractors and whatnot. And the very first year, that was 2012 or no, yeah, no, pardon me, 2013.
We started in 2012 in the fall and winter, and then we started getting on tractors and started collecting data. And then we wrote an Android application and the data starting to go up into the cloud. And it was, I mean, it worked, but we were starting to evaluate the data, trying to make it useful, meaningful for the farmers and give them just information on how their spring or their fall harvest, how it went. It was difficult for us getting started, convincing farmers that they wanted to do this because at the time we didn't have all the analytics.
I mean, we were looking at it when we started. So initially we started, I wanted to replace the 2630 with an iPad. That was my goal. Replace that with an iPad. And then what happened then is we started looking at just, it was the flavor of the month, data analytics.
And we started looking at, “God, we're collecting a lot of data off of these machines.” And so we started looking at, “Hey, why don't we let the world know that we're collecting data and we're a data analytics company.” And then what happened was, Monsanto bought, acquired Precision Planting, and then, I don't know, months later, then they went and spent quite a lot of money for the Climate Corporation.
And I think they realized that we can do data analytics, but it's really hard for them to collect data. And then meanwhile, here's this ragtag group of engineers. Most of us were from Motorola. They're mostly Motorola friends. We went out and started, or they came to us and said, “Hey, would you be interested in getting acquired and working with the climate people collecting data?”
It worked out fairly well. So I spent, then I spent 4 years working for Monsanto slash climate, their data collection group. And it was our job to get data up into the cloud, whatever it takes. And so I got a lot of experience and what was neat was I got to work around a lot of neat farmers and that's what I really enjoyed.
Brian Kearney: Wow. And then from there, what did it look like working for a large corporation again? Did you get a taste of a small company and you liked it and that's why you moved on and are where you're at now, or what did that look like at the time?
Craig Rupp: Yeah, sometimes, the large company, you get the bureaucracy and whatnot. I will say, I mean, it was kind of fun because we were kind of left on our own in Chicago. We had office downtown Chicago. And it was kind of fun in that aspect, in that we really didn't get a lot of direction from the overlords because–it's kind of funny because Monsanto and even Monsanto is a strange company.
It was strange for me. For the longest time, Monsanto would talk about manufacturing. And it took me a long time to figure out when they say manufacturing, what the hell are they manufacturing? Until it finally dawned on me that they manufacture a bag of seed.
And that was, I mean, that was totally foreign to me at the time, what the hell they meant. But then I worked, and then the climate people, they were a bunch of propeller head, data analytics types out of California. And I’m just getting the data to the cloud. And you guys can have at it, whatever you want to do with them, knock yourself out.
So we were a hardware group, an embedded software group that was part of Monsanto and Eva Climate. And so our skillset was completely different and they really didn't, they pretty much l let us run our own. So it was fun in that aspect.
And we met with a lot of growers and that's what I met a lot of growers in your neck of the woods that are personal friends, actually.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense with Precision. Not being too far from me. So that makes sense. All kind of ties together.
Craig Rupp: Oh, yeah, we got to work with the Precision guys, too.
They were great. A great group of people. Amazing little company. I'll shout out to Precision, but you know, if you look over the last 10, 20 years, it's probably one of the most biggest innovation that has happened in agriculture, I think.
Brian Kearney: That's interesting. Then tell me about what you're doing now and how that started.
Craig Rupp: Bear buys Monsanto and my time was up. I'm the type of guy who I like doing new things and as soon as the new thing's over and I built up, I don't like leaving the barn empty. All the people, we're at Climate. I taught them everything I know, which wasn't a lot. Anywho, I decided that, believe it or not, I said I was going to go keep chipping away at a PhD.
So I went back to college and then after about three months being a full-time student, I thought, maybe academia's not–I had this vision of being a professor and not much is asked out of me. So I went back and continued with my PhD and then I just realized that I don't think academia–I don't think I could handle being in academia.
And so then I couldn't help getting autonomy out of my mind. And you know what, this was 2018, the fall of 2018, and at the October timeframe, I decided that here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go out and I'm going to autonomously plant in 2019, and I did it kind of, I wanted to send a message to the industry that I think this is going to completely change the equipment industry. And I did it kind of as a PR stunt, to be honest with you. And when, got a lot of press coverage and whatnot, and then I thought, “God, I wonder if I could get this funded.” And then sure enough, I got a term sheet and it turned into a real thing.
And then I went back to Chicago and I went and I hired 5 people that I knew that could help me pull this off. And then we started going out looking at just the implements, the tractors and developing the technology. And now, we have just shy of a hundred systems out there in the wild, actually with farming operations.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Craig Rupp: They're even running today, I saw. And we're doing quite a lot of acres a month. So we're everywhere from Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, I guess you could say Texas to Wisconsin, New York to California right now.
Brian Kearney: Wow. Were you, as far as you know, the first person to autonomously plant a farm?
Craig Rupp: I believe I was. For a farmer. For a farmer. This is actually going to a farmer's field. And what I did was I went, when I started, so I'll fill that in a little bit more. And I maybe brushed over it, but I went and bought a JCB, or leased a JCB 4220 and I went and bought an 18-row 20-inch planter and I was going to plant soybeans because farmers love their corn and they'll let some idiot like myself plant their soybeans.
And I got a JCB 4220 and the only reason was it was 102 inches wide and I could put it on a drop deck trailer without a wide load. And then I went and got a CDL because I wanted to hire someone to drive the truck and then, obviously, I mean I knew this, but you know, I thought, well, let me try.
It's damn hard to find someone with a CDL. A it was, my brother was a trucker and I said, “Hey, I need a truck driver for I don't know, a month or two months.” And he said, “Good luck. You're not going to find one.”
Brian Kearney: Especially during that time.
Craig Rupp: Yeah, so I went and got my own CDL, and I used some shady outfit in Des Moines, or it was called 24-Hour CDL. It took me 48 hours.
Brian Kearney: It's pretty quick. Pretty quick still.
Craig Rupp: I failed the first time. Oh, well, yeah. Yeah, I failed because I was a nuisance to traffic because I didn't know you have to drive them like your head's up you know what. ‘Cause you gotta drive them fast. If you go, if you put three cars behind you, you fail. I didn't know that. Oh yeah, you gotta drive like your head's up you know what. You gotta drive fast.
Brian Kearney: I didn't know that. That’s hilarious.
Craig Rupp: She called me a noosehouse to traffic, and I'm like, oh my god, and then I took it again. So that's what, 48 hours.
Brian Kearney: That's funny.
Craig Rupp: Now you gotta go to school. Yeah, that was probably, yeah, I guess, but a month later, I'm on the south side of Chicago on I80 with a semi, I don't know, six, five thousand pounds on it. At that point, Brian, I thought, “This is probably the stupidest thing you've ever done.” But here I am.
Brian Kearney: Wow. And then how did you get from there to having, you said over a hundred?
Craig Rupp: Yeah. Just shy of a hundred.
Brian Kearney: Okay. How did you get from point A to point B?
Craig Rupp: Well, we were developing the technology, the mission control, the front end, the back end, the embedded controller, the hardware, the equipment, and we were testing them, working, doing proof of concepts with just a variety of companies.
In 2023, yeah, last year, we offered an autonomous tractor for sale and lo and behold, a farmer in Kansas bought one. It was for the sod and turf industry. And I got to, I've driven by these sod and turf farms and it's kind of interesting if you ever step foot on one. It's a fairly high margin crop, but they're out in the field every day.
And let me give you an example of, we have a particularly large grower in Georgia, they have 15,000 acres. They mow every square inch every two days all year long. That's over a million acres. Now do the math. If I wanted to, I want to cover that many acres, let's say doing row crop tillage, how many farmers I would have to get on farming operations, I would have to be on to get that many acres and hours.
So I looked at this is a great beachhead market. I'm still a corn and soybeans person. And that's what I grew up around and I will, we still are actively working in that market or in that segment, but we started working with a lot of solitaire farms throughout the U.S.. And what's kind of interesting, I'm starting to see it now, is a lot of these sod and turf farmers, they rotate soybeans. Some of them, a lot of them grow hay.
Brian Kearney: Okay.
Craig Rupp: And a lot of them, they'll do corn production as well. And what's kind of interesting is I start to see, you know, what happens is even though we have a lot of systems in the sod turf industry, what happens is these farmers are actually very progressive in terms of they're intuitive, they'll try anything.
They won't wait for someone to do it. They'll try to do it themselves. So we have farmers out there that are using them for seeding cover crops. We have out there that are using them for strip tillage. We have farmers out there that are using them for hay production, mowing, and windrowing, and tending, and just various types of field operation.
What's kind of funny is it's almost like think of a piece of paper that's just white, and taking a magic marker, and pressing it down, what happens is people are taking these systems and what they're doing is they're adapting them and putting them to use in things that we really didn't–I'd like to say we plan for it, but that's half the fun of being in a startup is I have no idea what. And you know that, right?
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Craig Rupp: I mean, what you originally thought that you're sitting in the cabin and in—
Brian Kearney: We're very different. It's only been a year. So
Craig Rupp: Just wait ‘til you get your next year and you're going, “Oh my God, this is so interesting how you go down this path and then,” yeah, there's an old saying, I forget what it was. It's one thing to go down the right path, but it's another thing to go down the path and make it right. And that's what happens a lot of times is you get on a path and it's like well,we developed all this and then look at this market that I had no idea sod and turf would be a market that we would plan, but we do pretty good job in it.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's interesting. And just the reps you would get, like you said, the number of farms you'd have to be on to get the same amount of data to make the tractor itself more efficient. It reminds me a little bit of this kind of, I don't know how my mind jumped to this kind of connection, but it's like if you look at the early days of the Beatles before they were the Beatles, they put in so many reps.
They play four or five shows a day. And that's what got them to where they were, the great, arguably, depending who you ask, the greatest band that we've had in the past few generations because of all those reps. So that's interesting. It's cool that you found kind of that market where you can get those reps.
Craig Rupp: Yeah, it's actually, that was that Malcolm Gladwell book?
Brian Kearney: Yes. Yep.
Craig Rupp: That's good.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that was exactly where that came from. You're right.
Craig Rupp: Blink? It wasn't Blink, was it?
Brian Kearney: No. Tipping Point, maybe?
Craig Rupp: Tipping Point. Yeah.
Brian Kearney: I think it might have been Tipping Point. Yeah.
Craig Rupp: He's a really good author.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, he is. Yeah, he is. And then, what would you say the benefit to this is for the farmer's operation and for the industry as a whole to be moving into the autonomous side of farming because there will maybe not actually in the industry, but outside of the industry, there's going to be a lot of people who might not like that idea. So inside with the actual farmers you talk to, how does it actually improve their operation or are there aspects that does not improve?
Craig Rupp: The naysayers back when I started, you know, I got a lot of people, “You're going to take away the farmer's job,” or whatever, right? Farmers have a lot more than a person who sits on a tractor and drives a tractor.
Anyway, obviously labor is, I mean, it's a big problem. But what's interesting that I'm starting to see is a lot of farming operations are trying to optimize their capital and fewer systems running longer hours. And it's the same OpEx, but what they're doing is they're going to smaller equipment.
They're starting to run them, instead of running 8 hours they're running them 12 to 16. So the other thing we're doing that I want to mention too is, working with farming operations, and I tell you, it's not, I mean, we're almost to an extent, we're walking side by side with them, deploying this technology because they're going to have to change the way they operate their farms.
And it's not just a product that we deliver, and all of a sudden they just adopt it overnight. It’s just things that we're both learning and one thing in particular is we have what's called a virtual field operator. I don't know if I've told you about that.
Brian Kearney: No.
Craig Rupp: Like it's this one farming operation, this one farmer we're working with. I'll just pick on this one farmer. He wants to run on 12, 16 hours a day. And he was complaining. He's like, “I can only run about six hours a day.” And I'm like, “Well, why is that?” And he's like, “Oh, it's just a bunch of, a variety of things and whatnot.”
And then I started saying, “All right. Give me a day. I'm going to check on your numbers.” Well, come to find out like for instance, the system would get done with a field and it would take him two hours to respond, to get out there and move it to the next.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Craig Rupp: And I'm like, “Well, right there, you're only getting six hours a day because you're not reacting fast enough.” And he's like, “Hey, I'm running around with my head cut off. I'm harvesting, my harvesters broke down. I can't babysit this thing.” And then the other thing too, I noticed too is after hours, after about two weeks, the honeymoon's over and they're not running them at night or after hours, and his biggest problem is he goes home at night, he's got a family, and he's got to focus on his family and not on monitoring it or moving this system.
So I just said, it was on a Friday, I called him, I said, listen, I gave him the two reasons why he wasn't getting the hours out and I said, “You know what, the hell with it, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hire some person. We're going to train him on Monday. Tuesday, this person's, you're going to tell him what needs to be done that day. This person's going to do it and work after hours too.” And I hired person on Friday and then Monday, they started trained them and then this person monitored every morning.
They have a call with the farmer. Farmer says, all right, we're going to do fields A, B and C and then this virtual field operator basically does their complete field operation. So right now I have a virtual field operator, number of them sitting in cubes and they're sitting in Iowa right now, and there are monitoring systems in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Carolinas, and Indiana as well.
Brian Kearney: Wow, that's interesting. That makes a lot of sense when you explain it. That makes a lot of sense. Takes away the part that the farmer doesn't really want to do anyways.
Craig Rupp: No, they don't want to do that. They want to, they're always on the go, and they, yeah, they like to be moving, and they don't like to sit. Funny you should mention that. I don't know what–you see, even when they're sitting on a track, they're bouncing around like hell, right?
Brian Kearney: They're making calls or half my calls right now are with farmers on combines.
Craig Rupp: That's right. Yeah. We call them virtual field operators. And this person watches 12 systems spread across four or five operations right now.
Brian Kearney: Okay. Interesting. Well, this has been great diving into some of this. What would you say is next for Sabanto? What's next?
Craig Rupp: It's going to be the Haymarket. I want to, I think there's quite a lot of hay operations that are having labor issues.
Brian Kearney: Oh, yeah.
Craig Rupp: Yeah. We're going after that. And then it's continually, continual improvement, adding features. We have field to field navigation, and we're working on other features that will increase the productivity and optimize things in the markets that we're already in right now.
Brian Kearney: Okay. And is that field to field? Would that take away the issue you were talking about a couple minutes ago with having to move the system in between? It would be able to autonomously do that?
Craig Rupp: Yes.
Brian Kearney: Interesting. With that kind of potential, is your goal to get to really 24-hour operations on these or close to it? Is that something that's feasible down the road?
Craig Rupp: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Brian Kearney: That would make harvest much less stressful for a lot of farmers. I know that much.
Craig Rupp: That's my goal.
Brian Kearney: Fascinating. Perfect. So this has been a great conversation. I have one last question that is purely a selfish question. It's just for me. I'm very, very curious if you were starting again in building businesses in ag, and you weren't able to work on the autonomous issue you're working on right now, what areas would you be going into and what would you be looking at?
Craig Rupp: Oh, I'll tell you. You know what, I'll even put this out there because I'm not going to do it. Have you, you've heard these little machines that use lasers to kill weeds?
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Craig Rupp: Okay. I was just out in California and I saw a couple of them, right? I'm not going to name names, but here's what I don't understand. Why aren't they using high pressure water?
Brian Kearney: That makes a lot of sense.
Craig Rupp: You know how much energy it takes to creat, to power those lasers?
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Craig Rupp: I mean, it's insane. And you have to have a 350-plus horsepower tractor to run these things.
Brian Kearney: Oh, really? I didn't know that. Wow.
Craig Rupp: And it doesn't take that much energy to generate, I don't know, 5,000 PSI water.
Brian Kearney: Right.
Craig Rupp: So why don't they do that?
Brian Kearney: And then you have the benefit and certain areas where you have to irrigate anyways, you might be able to do two birds with one stone. There might be enough left over. That's interesting.
Craig Rupp: ‘Cause I was, it's funny things come just, I don't know, things get connected. I was at a conference one time. There was this, it was cool as hell. There's this company, they made ceramic motors and the ceramic pumps for pumping acid, what not. And it was really cool. In their booth, what they had was this thing was accurate enough it could pump out like a little drop, right? And what they had was they had a strobe light timed, and these little drops were hanging in the air. It was the coolest thing ever. I don't know why, I don't know why instead of lasers, why aren't they using water? Just high pressure water and obliterate, I think you could obliterate the plant just as easy with that.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's fascinating. Well, hopefully we see that. That would be cool. You'll have to make sure you get your, your licensing fee or whatever it is for that idea.
Craig Rupp: No, I want someone to—I mean, I tell you what, the lasers, you get the cool factor, but that's what I would do.
Brian Kearney: Well, thank you. Thanks for jumping on the show today. It has been a great conversation. I think the audience is really going to gain a lot from it. Do you have any final words you want to say to the audience or final take away?
Craig Rupp: If you're interested in autonomy, go to our website and sign up for our newsletter and then you can send us a message and I would like to know your thoughts on the technology. I would like to, you know, if there's anything you can help me out with.
Brian Kearney: Perfect. Perfect. I will add that to the show notes so they can go there directly.
Craig Rupp: All right. Thanks a lot, Brian.
Brian Kearney: Thank you.
And that’s a wrap on this episode of The Land Ledger.
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