Wading into the Weeds with AgTech - Part 1 in a Two Part Series

It’s been a while since posting, but thinking has indeed happened. Let’s get into it.

Towards the end of November, I did a dive into climate solutions related to farming and agriculture. Agriculture and land use accounts for up to 25% of greenhouse gasses annually (depending on how you count them). So moving the needle in agtech has potential for big emissions reductions at a fundamental level. There are lots of articles on this, so I’ll refrain from explaining.

A farm is an ecosystem that thrives on agronomic processes. By definition, agronomic systems live and die by the interconnected success or failure of both naturally occurring events and human interventions. At any given point, farmers have to consider all the events in this ecosystem, so while cost is a big risk factor, it’s not the whole picture. In order to successfully transition any farm to sustainable, carbon-negative practices, we need to consider both the financial AND operational risks and benefits to foster adoption. This operational behavior change challenge makes it a GREAT UX problem!

I’ve only just scratched the surface of agriculture. And it’s the surface of the tip of an iceberg. But I find it absolutely fascinating, and I think I’ve found a thread where agtech might be at the forefront of UX paradigms in the climate crisis. In Part 1, I’ll talk about some of the context and draw attention to the clear-eyed pragmatism that makes agtech adoption a wickedly challenging space to tackle. But I think it’s a worthy cause, because in Part 2, I think there’s a way to think about some of these agronomic climate solutions from a UX perspective. 

So here’s what I’ve heard from voices in the farming climate solutions community

People are offering up some really innovative solutions! Companies like Climate Robotics are looking to bring millenia-old indigenous practices to 21st Century row-crop scale. Others like Lithos Carbon and Eion Carbon are talking about replacing staple soil amendments like lime that are widely used all over the world. And there are companies like CODA Farm Technologies that are laying the groundwork for farmers to easily adopt new systems to conserve water. All these companies are doing important work, and everyone in this industry is staring down the pipeline for how agriculture is going to change drastically, in the coming decades. Whether it’s navigating water scarcity, managing labor fluctuations, or combating top-soil degradation, there’s a multitude of concerns knocking at farmers’ doors, and LOUDLY. If you forgive my pun, it feels like an industry that’s ripe for innovation.

But even so, the challenge that many of these new ventures face is customer adoption. Convincing farmers to take the risk to adopt novel practices today, is an immediate, and persistent struggle. Reportedly, farmers want to see the technology “working first”, exacerbating the chicken-and-egg face-off that is early tech adoption. In an industry that is fairly traditional, pressed for labor, and only as predictable as the weather (read: somewhat unpredictable), these factors raise the bar for early adopters to step into the ring, let alone become promoters. As I heard these comments, I couldn’t help but think, this sounds a lot like another industry that I’ve seen up close: construction!

A quick detour for a construction parallel
Construction has long been held as one of the last industries to innovate. Profit margins in construction are staggeringly small, hovering around 6% (project dependent), and profits and losses can come from anywhere in the construction schedule. Every step of the construction process is tightly managed, risk intolerant, and highly volatile. After all, when have you seen a construction project finish under-budget and ahead-of-schedule? It’s not that people don’t want innovation - there just isn’t much time for it.

Naturally, being in construction robotics for five years, I can attest that for all the enthusiasm people have for the future, finding early adoption is a poorly-defined and moving target. For all the yes’s we got from executives, ultimately people don’t plan the bulk of their business operations around coming-soon technologies.

Big deals with flagship stakeholders, enterprise partnerships, and owners of companies are important, but they don’t necessarily mean adoption on immediate timelines. High-level stakeholders are rarely the direct users, and executive conversations don’t necessarily bring the trades’ voices into consideration. I’ve frequently seen that while suits are supportive, boots are abortive. And it’s not really because people don’t want to see change. Rather, the people who would put a new product into action are driven by an incisive pragmatism that obliterates overhead, excises confusion, and distills complexity into flow and execution. Unfortunately, new products tend to carry a little experimental baggage.

How does this perspective apply to climate change?

Ultimately, I notice the same thread of clear-eyed pragmatism in each agtech conversation I encountered. Bill Brady, CEO of Kula Bio, a microbial nitrogen fixing startup, says farmers likely won’t take incremental gain from carbon credits or crop yield and savings for environmental benefit. And to paraphrase Josh Svaty, the former Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Kansas, at the end of the day, farmers are pretty explicit that climate action is not the reason why they would adopt a piece of technology. David Wallace, CEO of CODA Farm Technologies shares that sometimes regional legislation around pumping water is so archaic and inane, that farmers are actually incentivized to pump MORE water, rather than conserve it. We’re left with a situation where a startup’s core mission is not inherently appealing to its primary consumer. As such, startups and agtech initiatives are scrambling to find ways that they can help farmers mitigate other immediate risks, obviate steps in their current process, or make existing activities seamless, reliable, and efficient.

In other words, founders have new technology and are desperately looking for ways to make it useful for people. This feels like the classic tech situation that makes me bristle - trying to sell new technology that we have created because we personally think it’s cool, regardless of what the users may think. The main difference is that this time we don’t have a choice. I’m okay if the robo-barber ultimately doesn’t succeed in giving haircuts to the masses, but in the case of climate tech, we need these initiatives to succeed. 

So where do we go from here?

We need to understand the behavior change process when it comes to agronomics. We can paint the picture all we want, but unless we curate the experience of muddling through the messy middle, it will be hard for farmers to join us on the journey to employ new technologies quickly. Luckily, this is something that UX is particularly good at. This is why UX exists. And I think UX Research in particular can play a key role in helping all of us navigate these transitions. Part Two coming soon!


Entering the Wild wonderful world of Climate as a UX Researcher!

In recent months I have been making my journey from robotics and construction into the wonderful world of Climate Action! Cue the rainbows, sunshine, and a slow pan across green valleys and blue skies. For more Ken Burns to the experience, throw in a babbling brook and cut to drone footage of a row of windmills standing in golden fields. You get the picture. Climate.

But, given the very large umbrella that is climate and sustainability, I set out to get a better grasp on just what it means to work in “Climate.” And more specifically, what it means to work in Climate as a User Experience Research (UXR). I just switched into the field of UXR formally and fell in love with the discipline and approach, and I really want to move that game-piece forward.

I had read in a number of places by now that, “whatever I’m good at, there’s a place for that in Climate!” Naturally, when starting the job search, the advice is to “Find cool companies that you like!” and within that, I started searching for roles in UXR. I talked to a number of startup teams, looked on job boards, visited the hiring pages of countless companies. And what I discovered is… not reflective of a robust and growing job market for UX Researchers, but interesting nonetheless. Here’s what I found:

UXR roles are heavily concentrated in FAANG companies.

The first thing I discovered is that most posted UXR roles are heavily consolidated in the large established companies, like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, and even some other “non-tech” companies like Capital One and other fintech businesses. When looking for hardware-specific UXR roles, it’s mainly just the FAANGs and the occasional automotive company. And there’s cool stuff there for sure! But there are so many Climate startups forming, growing, expanding all around the world, and yet, no word out for UX Researchers. In two months of searching I only found two that are explicitly looking! Shoutout to Aurora Solar, and Brightdrop from GM!

UXR feels very much like a late stage hire

Maybe there’s a reason why UXR roles are so often posted in these mega tech companies. A lot of small companies and startups will probably have one product or service to introduce to the market. Startups are trying to identify their product market fit, have limited resources, and even more limited time, and all of that is devoted to getting things made, launched, and into the world. In many of my conversations with startups, people tell me, “UXR sounds really important. That kind of information will be critical moving forward. But I don’t know when we will need it… In the meantime we’re looking for engineers. Or. Do you do Business Development??” The few, explicitly UXR roles have been at late stage startups, like Aurora which is in its pre-IPO Series D era, or small offshoots of large multinational companies like Brightdrop rolling out of GM. It seems that the introduction of a UXR role comes when a company feels like it has the stability to support a product roadmap with a pipeline of opportunities to evaluate.

In the meantime, job boards for early to mid-stage companies are filled with job descriptions looking for developers, whether they are software engineers, mechanical engineers (people are always looking for mechanical engineers!) or industrial systems process engineers. This reflects the general trend that I’ve found, that there is tremendous focus on building the cake, and infusing the process with user-centered design research is more like icing. Even large and rapidly growing companies like Form Energy don’t have a design research position on the hiring board. The problem I see with this, though, is that the cake is always a given - How often have we said that the icing is what made a particular cake great?

I don’t think that the stage of company reflects the value that UXR brings to any company and its processes. So unless we want to wait until these smaller companies have had the opportunity to IPO before we start looking for jobs, as a UX Researcher, I need to start thinking about my opportunities a bit differently.

There’s a split between Industrial and Consumer offerings.

The need to decarbonize is massive, and especially when it comes to existing, large-scale carbon-emitting systems, heavy industry gets a lot of attention! A lot of the success in decarbonization depends on the impact and scope that any method can achieve, as well as overhauling existing mega-scale processes. Naturally, even smaller startups are tackling ambitious goals of decarbonizing at industrial scale, whether it’s Heirloom, that wants to mineralize carbon out of ambient air, or the previously mentioned Form Energy, that is revolutionizing energy storage. For any of these solutions to make a dent in the climate problem at hand, everyone has it’s eyes set on the Gigaton benchmark that feels very much popularized by Bill Gates and his Breakthrough Energy Ventures - to paraphrase, he says “We will only consider startups with the potential for gigaton removal or avoidance of atmospheric carbon.” What a stick to stake in the sand, and I love how it’s pushing the industry!

For so long, UXR has lived in the consumer products and web space, and I think many people still consider UXR from the perspective of honing the look and feel of an electronic interface or website. Sure, if UXR is boxed into this context, then it’s hard to imagine how UXR can relate to novel industrial processes. Maybe this is why I see UXR positions for products like a web app, that happens to be for selling solar contracts, or understanding the ridership experience of an electric driverless car like ZOOX. For the time being, the impression of UXR is that it lives within the context of a consumer experience, whether I believe this to be true or not.

But I’m convinced that UXR is still important.

UXR is so important, that everyone does some of it!

Some questions can only be answered by users, and everyone has this type of question. UXR is about improving the quality of answers to any user question. People in the land of product, such as designers and product managers are well aware of the need for user answers. Designers need to understand how users think and feel along their journey in order to build exquisite experiences. Product Managers need to “talk to their customers.”

But you see UXR questions in all parts of a company. Business Development teams may be interested in how clients’ willingness to pay will change in response to certain features. Marketing may need to know what kind of terminology is common in a given industry to communicate with credibility. Engineers will want to know what features deserve focus, and whether their products are working as intended. User questions are timeless and abundant, and they come in every scope and flavor.

The tricky thing is that, due to the way the human mind works, you often can’t just ask people what they want. The discipline around how you ask questions and discover answers can go a long way in getting accurate and impactful answers. Teams might not know that there is an entire occupation behind getting the clearest answers to user questions, but because there is a need, they will try their best to find answers anyway. Which leads me to my next point:

UXR is not well understood

I have come to realize that people may not fully realize the value of UXR, because the role itself is not well known or understood. Many of the people I talked to have a preconceived notion of what UXR is, but despite people’s use of the words, I rarely get the sense that people really understand the meaning. It seems that words might just make sense if only people say them a little louder. Or faster. Or both.

I have heard some say that UXR is simply related to apps or websites. I have heard that UXR’s work with a lot of surveys. Or that research is like focus groups (the dreaded form of user input gathering, subject to groupthink and extroversion bias). There are many preconceived ideas around research methods, when in reality, the researcher is more likely to be driven by the questions. The methods for unearthing answers depend on the questions at hand.

But regardless of whether people understand the discipline of UXR, I totally get that people are hesitant to adopt a researcher into their process if they don’t understand how that person will conduct their work. I get it.

So where does this put me in My Climate Journey?

As always, it’s our job as researchers to communicate our value. Perhaps the way we can best get involved is to do a little bit of that needfinding for ourselves. And maybe applying some of the research techniques that I have under my belt, I can carry my structured inquisitive approach into my conversations, and find the questions that these amazing climate companies are trying to solve. And I’m excited for this journey. I’ll keep you all posted!