Accelerating Regenerative Agriculture with Marie Coffin from CIBO Technologies

Marie Coffin is the Vice President of Science and Modeling at CIBO Technologies, and she is with me today to discuss regenerative agriculture. Join us as we explore CIBO’s work to influence company carbon footprints across industries, and how machine learning supports this process through remote sensing. Delving deeper, Marie unpacks how satellite imagery integrates with their computer vision system for a more scalable solution. Next, we discuss obtaining and categorizing data in the US, exploring some of the obstacles that stem from privacy and data protection concerns. We touch on data quality and discuss the reason behind the geographical parameters they have applied to the work before Marie shares her approach to collaborating with external experts and agronomists. She offers her advice for startups in the tech space, emphasizing creating value for your clients over keeping up with trends, predicts the future endeavors that CIBO will focus on, and more. Thanks for listening! 

Key Points:

• Introducing Marie Coffin and her background leading up to her role at CIBO Technologies.
• CIBO’s work to influence company carbon footprints to improve agricultural sustainability.
• The role of machine learning in this process: remote sensing.
• What remote sensing is used for at CIBO.
• How satellite imagery interacts with their computer vision system. 
• Gathering, labeling, and annotating data with a focus on the boundary of the field. 
• Obtaining this information through a farmer’s recording process. 
• Why their work is largely limited to the US at the moment. 
• Challenges related to privacy and data protection while working with training models.
• Managing data quality issues.
• Validating models within a geographical context. 
• Collaborating with domain experts and external agronomists to understand and validate thier approaches.
• How the seasonal nature of agriculture impacts the timing of reports and outputs. 
• Advice for tech startups; addressing trends, who to hire, and more.
• Qualities Marie seeks in new hires. 
• Her prediction for CIBO’s growing impact in the next three to five years. 

Quotes:

“It’s pretty straightforward to estimate the carbon footprint of a single farmer’s field or even the carbon footprint of a whole farm, but, to make an impact, we need to be able to scale that across the landscape.” — Marie Coffin

“That is really the biggest challenge; it’s just getting enough data.” — Marie Coffin

“When you’re working in a really cutting-edge area, it’s tempting to sort of get caught up in the buzz of the new technology and lose sight of what the customer needs.” — Marie Coffin

“We need to not always be following the latest, greatest advance. We need to be going in a direction that’s going to really provide value.” — Marie Coffin

Links:

CIBO Technologies

Marie Coffin on LinkedIn

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