Agtech data company Innov8.ag says it has acquired 2nd Sight Bioscience, an agricultural labor tracking and inventory systems provider.
Kevin Oldenburg, 2nd Sight founder and CEO, will step down from his day-to-day role but will join Innov8.ag as its board chair, according to a news release.
“At 2nd Sight, we’ve always wanted to not just save growers money, but make them money. Combining our expertise in labor and inventory tracking with the work Innov8.ag has already put in to make data actionable for growers at the agronomic, yield and production practices level unveils a whole new level of insights that can quickly be turned into daily gains,” Oldenberg said in the release.
Innov8.ag founder and CEO Steve Mantle says an immediate goal of Innov8.ag is to address growers’ pain points with technology. With the addition of 2nd Sight Bioscience’s all-in-one labor, yield tracking and produce traceability capabilities with Innov8.ag’s platform, the tech suite now tracks everything from soil health to labor, with the intention of creating better operational outcomes and a crop with differentiated quality to increase profitably, he adds
Mantle says a critical element of ag technology for specialty crop produce growers is understanding and integrating data generated to make better decisions, set benchmarks and identify areas to optimize.
“It comes down to the actionability of the data. We’re at a stage in America where the near-term immediacy and ROI of investments in anything that generates data has to be the same year,” he said. “And the data has to have some level of trustworthiness, around accuracy and usability.”
2nd Sight’s FairPick and FairTrak systems automate harvest tracking by weight, by hour and by piece rates, using employee-assigned RFID cards and a rugged, tamper-proof, legal-for-trade harvest scale system to capture weighed crops, such as blueberries, or scan per-unit or per-task data, such as a bushel of tomatoes or a row of apple trees pruned, according to the company. Both systems generate receipts for farm laborers and automatically upload records at the end of the day for real-time daily harvest and task management.
The 2nd Sight technology platform also includes automated inventory management systems for counting and tracking nursery stock, tissue cultures and produce, using RFIDs, bar codes and a handheld scanning device to count and track inventory.
Mantle says the data generated by 2nd Sight can help a grower track its piece rate pay and can track packing operations and align orders from retailers from farm to grocery store. Coupled with Innov8.ag’s other offerings, a grower can also track soil health and its influence on fruit quality and then traceability.
Mantle says a chief financial officer with a produce business recently told him, “I just want to be able to move from 80% efficiency in terms of our operations to 85%, and if you can help me do that, then that’s a win. And using that data in terms of modernizing our workforce and being differentiated versus our competitors, too.”
