This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 13, 2012 - The link between the Israeli missile defense system and improving agriculture production, including in the United States, might seem tenuous. But Daniel Gold and Rich Kottmeyer are working to see if they can make it happen.
Iron Dome
In March 2010, militants from the Gaza Strip fired a rocket over the border into Israel and hit a greenhouse, blasting potted plants and shrapnel into the air and killing a migrant worker. Manee Singmueangpho, a 33-year-old from Thailand, had come to Israel in 2006 seeking better wages than in his home country, where his wife and child were.
Around the time of the attack, Daniel Gold, director of research and development for the Israel Defense Forces, was overseeing the final stages of testing Iron Dome, a defense system whose name and capabilities sound as though they were pulled from a James Bond movie.
It monitors for rockets entering Israeli air space and fires missiles to intercept them if the rocket would likely damage property or kill people.
A brigadier general who faced opposition when he initially pushed for investment in Iron Dome, Gold will be among the recipients of the 2012 Israel Defense Prize for his efforts in developing the technology, which had its big coming out party this spring when 166 rockets entered Israeli air space but caused no deaths.
Today Gold is working on a project that has more in common with the greenhouse than the rocket that struck it. He has left his post at the IDF and, with the help of Accenture, a worldwide company with offices in St. Louis, is trying to commercialize military technology for farming purposes. He is betting that the future of the country's agricultural industry will come not just from crops such as the Jaffa orange but from the services and products that Israel develops to grow such a fruit efficiently.
"Israel (is) a very small country (with) all the different climates for testing technology: the green in the (Golan Heights), the center of Israel which is mostly desert, and then of course you have the coasts and all the seas," Gold said. "In defense technology we are top of the world regarding sensors and communications, and we have the capability to integrate everything into a solution for agriculture."
Cultivating the desert, which covers about 60 percent of the country, has been central to Israel's economy since its founding. On almost any corner in Tel Aviv, there is a colorful display of citrus fruits and a merchant squeezing fresh juice from produce usually grown in Israel.
The country conquered its arid landscape, at least in part, by developing drip irrigation, a system in which water trickles through plastic tubing directly onto the roots of plants or surrounding soil. The irrigation allowed farmers to precisely use water and grow cherry tomatoes where there was once only cacti.
Seventy percent of the country’s fresh water is consumed by farmers. The desert blooms. In fact, fish now swim in it. But water scarcity remains an ever-present threat.
St. Louis connection
Richard Kottmeyer, then an IBM employee, traveled to Israel from St. Louis in May for the Agrivest Summit, a conference on agricultural investment sponsored by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor.
He said he moved into mathematics and agricultural analytics because he saw the field as a way to improve the lives of the poor in developing countries. In his predictions about the role Israel could play in global food security, Kottmeyer is bold:
"Israel's agricultural technology may do more to create a middle class in emerging markets than almost any technology you can think of."
While at the conference, Kottmeyer met with Gold, who was there on behalf of Israel’s National Economic Council.
IBM has its largest research laboratory outside the U.S. in Haifa, but until the meeting with Gold, the company had not considered partnering with a company, such as Israeli Aerospace Industries, to commercialize military technology for agriculture, Kottmeyer said.
Israel spends more than 6 percent of its GDP annually on defense.
"No country wants to have to spend as much of its budget as Israel on defense, but the fact that Israel has spent so much on security really empowers their agriculture technology sector,” Kottmeyer said.
The technologies that Gold and Kottmeyer are most focused on are drones and other surveillance equipment. Their aim is to adapt the machines so they can be used to spy on unsuspecting rows of corn rather than terrorists.
The monitoring of crops from afar is not a new idea. Farmers raising bees and honey, for example, use remote control sensors to measure and regulate temperature and humidity. But the military technology will allow the farmers to collect data in greater depth.
Hyperspectral imaging, taken from drones floating in the sky, dissects a plant into many more colors than the human eye can naturally see. It can provide farmers with information about the health of a plant or its moisture content, for example. Sensors on the ground, used by the IDF for border security, can tell a farmer about the biology of the vegetation, or if it might carry a disease.
The technology is already in use, with some farmers using ground sensors, others airborne equipment. Gold wants to pair the different layers -- ground, air and thousands of feet above the earth in space -- and have them communicate with one another to collect data.
"We want to have multilayer integration," Gold said. "This is the idea that Rich (and I) brainstormed. This is something that hasn't been done in the world."
Kottmeyer, now an Accenture employee in St. Louis, said third party firms generally own the technology in whichever industry Accenture is involved, and then Accenture collects and analyzes the data, and provides conclusions to the customer. He describes Accenture as “technology agnostic,” and says the company simply pursues the best available technology. In the agricultural field, that’s Israel.
“We know how to analyze the data, store the data, create insights from that data and then we can get back to a farmer to whom we can say, ‘Here’s what you can do next.’ It all starts and is made possible by Israeli technology,” Kottmeyer said.
Drones, which would survey one level of the multilayer integration, can cost between $30,000 for a smaller vehicle up to $60 million. (In November 2011, Israel sold 14 unmanned aerial vehicles for $350 million to Brazil, which planned to use them for law enforcement.)
The high cost of the equipment does not deter Kottmeyer.
“More than likely the cost will be free to farmers,” Kottmeyer wrote in an email. “In emerging countries, it is cheaper to use this technology and text messages versus people going into villages.”