YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Menker

lines on the record: 122
first: 2019-08-28
most recent: 2019-08-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's essentially the minute China stops buying soybeans from the US. I mean, the trade war is not about soybeans, but it impacts the soybean market in the US, and the U.S. exports $12.5 billion of soybeans a year.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It's not this fancy sliced avocados. But anyway, that means that people actually buy tons of avocados, like all the retailers buy them and store them in advance in anticipation because your avocado sales are kind of cyclical. And so when you have something happen like that just before Cinco de Mayo, what happens? Everybody rushes to buy. And that's what drives prices up, right? Again, we have US-China trade war. That's much more about soybeans. And in that case, you know,”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People only ate avocados on particular occasions, and there's like five holidays. We're actually still about a third of avocados are consumed in the US, which is 4th of July, Cinco de Mayo.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Markets go crazy. I got that. Avocados, as I mentioned earlier, you know, last time there was talk of shutting down a border 24 hours avocado prices were up 35%, 48 hours they were up 60%.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. You need contextual data So it adds to the next level of stone soup, right? Because you get that too, right? Because then you get there too. So when these trade wars happen, and a lot of them are about farming and there's lots of goods or about lots of goods, but it focuses on farming a lot of the time. When you see that what happens when you have those situations?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need good data. And business AI cannot function in an agriculture with just the data that each business has of its own businesses. You need contextual data. And so where that contextual data layer that becomes necessary for kind of that second wave of these businesses to kind of move forward. And so to me, that's in some ways that's what's exciting about it is that organizations have their own data. We don't take any company data. But what we do do is we go into the companies and give them this data and data science and machine learning infrastructure that they merge with their data to kind of take things to the next level like Stone Soup, right? Because you get that too.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And data science infrastructure. You know, I was listening to one of your interviews with Kaifuli. And he was talking about the second wave of AI being business AI. Right. Well, to get any of that to work.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we're building that right. And so if you think of consumer apps, the way that they get the data is that they're taking data from their users and then they're getting constant inputs. They're commercializing that. In our case, in some ways, we were lucky because a ton of the data is already out there and we're just organizing it. So we're not taking anyone's data, but we are generating new forms of data using old forms of data. Right.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decisions which they're making almost anecdotally in many cases. So talk about where we're going with this. What needs to happen to bring this industry, which is so critical to survival of human rights, into a more, you know, we do, probably, I'm guessing Tinder is more has more information than we have about farming, right? About people's behavior.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know why avocados are expensive, right? Because 90% of them come from Mexico. So every time there's potential shutdown of a border or a trade war. Avocado prices”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's harder to, even if you count them, like worst case scenario of a price of some product that is commoditized is too low, you put it in storage and then you take it out of storage and sell it when prices are high enough. There's no doing that in lettuce You sell it or you sell it. Right, right, right. And so as a result, just the volatility in fresh produce markets is just significantly higher.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why are fruits and vegetables a nightmare, Sarah? They are a nightmare. Highly perishable, not commoditized. So therefore, there aren't formal marketplaces and exchanges where you can basically transfer risk. So, yeah, like corn is traded on CME. So at the end of the day, you get a price and it's a big market and everything else. All of these are super niche markets where there are tons and tons of private transactions. And they're all produced at much smaller scale. And because you can't store them, Just inherently so much more volatility”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In different ways. And then it's not just meat. Do you need to get information on cuts of meat? And then when you start to get cuts of meat, you know complete elasticity in terms of demand. For different cuts depending on different times, and you'll see that even in places like the US during bad economic times. It's not people eat less meat, they just eat cheaper cuts of meat. Right, right. You know, so you're like, oh gosh, looking at a metric that just says this is total beef demand is not even useful to my life, right? So much more nuanced. So you start getting into the weeds of the details and ultimately, you know, you start to get into varieties and size. I mean, fruits and vegetables are another nightmare to work on.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, our challenge is always how So Nobody's ever done it, and nobody's ever done it for a reason. Sometimes I feel like we're completely nuts, butchers in Japan or wherever, however people, because people do get. Buy in different ways.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supermarkets have some data, but supermarkets are not representative of a global. So our challenge is always, how do you do this at global scale? And that's where it starts, it's fun and exciting, and nobody's ever done it. And nobody's ever done it for a reason. Sometimes I feel like we're completely nuts.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't enough, and so you're kind of taking everything and then trying to extract what could be something that you haven't. So no one's keeping.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we started building our first beef demand model. I think we put in 350 features to try and find something, anything that works. We ended up with about 35. But that's still”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard because, again, it's tied to data that is harder to come across. So the macroeconomic data or demand data tends to be almost too macro. And you're trying to model things at a micro level, right? So it's just there's a lot of missing data. So you're then taking, when you're modeling this out, instead of saying, so when we're modeling supply, let me give you a supply problem versus a demand problem. When we're modeling the supply of corn. The number of features we use in a model, meaning how many variables we use, is quite limited on a relative basis and how many we test is also relatively limited because plant science has already told us so much about how corn grows. They were somewhat constrained to it.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's not necessarily true everywhere in the world. It's not true in India because they just don't eat that much bread. So when you get wealthier in India, you drink more milk. You know, like, so what are kind of these underlying metrics that you use for modeling demand? So we've had to be, I think, the most creative when it comes to understanding behavior demand.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the hardest data to understand is actually data related to demand. Demand data is really complicated and demand modeling is really complicated because modeling human behavior. You're modeling human behavior. You're modeling culture, societal trends, things that are so much more kind of nuanced, right? So something you always hear is like, oh, as the world gets richer, people are going to eat more meat. Yeah.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. You don't want to know where the camera is moving. And How many cows there are? Right, got it. It gives you some piece of information. Right. I mean, we're We'll take anything and everything. What's missing? What do you need more data on when it relates to farming?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe we don't even use any of the data that the sensors are capturing, but just moving. And then we can do counts of how many cows there are. Right, got it. And that like you gives you some piece of information. Right. I mean, we're constantly, we're kind of like data freaks in the sense that we'll take anything and everything. What's missing?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cow's body, essentially. And so think of that as the precision farming equivalent for the cow for managing each cow one cow at a time. Can you optimize your milk output and minimize your cost of inputs, right? That's, I mean, dairy farmers are constantly struggling. So if you can solve that problem, that's pretty big. And think of it as”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, with cow, it's a lot about feeding and health and location, but it's also, I mean, it is also just about maintaining like.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's just another input, and depending on what those sensors capture, I mean, that's no different from weather stations, which are graviton of different sensors. It's no different than satellites that are instrumented in particular ways. And so our science team, our geospatial team, for example, knows every satellite in orbit and what instruments it has to know what variables we can capture and translate from that, right? So not every satellite can give you temperature. How would that be used?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With soil, and One of the things I heard, weirdly enough, I heard it last night about someone putting a sensor on a cow, like putting sensors on everything. Is that data that you would be putting? You know, I know GE was talking about putting sensors on engines that they make for tractors or tractor companies. They kind of tout that idea of constant streams of data about everything. How would you use that?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the science has gotten quite good at being able to optimize because that becomes like a physiology problem with soil and that's why it's called precision agriculture because you're really taking very specific information at a super micro level and optimizing for that. And that is a science problem that we have figured out. So it's how do you deploy that at scale?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is what you should plant, and that's called precision farming. So that's a very specific set of decisions that tend to be think of them as like hyperlocalized, right? Because you're a farmer, you're thinking of every half acre plot you're dealing with. What we're thinking of is how does the system as a whole work? And how does that tiny plot relate to the rest of the world in that system? But there's tons of products out there that are owned both by Lando Lakes has a version of that. All the seed companies have some products. The equipment companies have products. And so then there's independent companies that have emerged that most of them get acquired. But, you know,”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have lots of help. And there's tons of kind of technologies that have emerged. And particularly, I think all the... Companies selling products to farmers right now, frankly, have tools that are telling them.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, talking about how it helps that system, because I want to, I want people to understand on a basic level why it's important to have this, because it gives data, you're not helping farmers figure out what to plant”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can have like 10 sources that report that number. Your challenge then becomes which number is the best number, right? So if you think of what Google did, which is like you can do a search and it will give you a bunch of search results, but they're not ranked by quality of information. We've developed a ranking methodology that actually ranks based off quality of source. And the way that we get to the quality of source is we triangulate all the other data that could exist that's related to that to get to what seems objectively closest to the truth. And so there's so many kind of layers of complexity. I mean, at this point, our dictionary is classifying over 55 million agricultural terms around the world. We're translating from about 15 different languages, and we're processing north of 700 trillion points a day.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's like one example. The other is you're also, you know, when you have one measure, so say the supply of wheat in India.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“US government at the end of every season releases maps that show where every crop across the US was grown. Argentina does not. Russia does not. I mean, most places in the world don't, basically. We can then build an algorithm that says, Oh, we want to classify where all the cornfields are and all the soybean fields are in the US. We can ground truth at using the data that gets released at the end of a season. We train the models off of that. And then essentially when we start to apply, I mean, corn looks the same everywhere in the world. Soybeans look the same everywhere in the world. We start to build these masks at a 30 meter resolution in South America. So you take picky region. We're taking pictures that come from the European Space Agency and classifying it 30 meters at a time for the world. And there you're literally generating new forms of data. But that data...”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm on a like. Exactly. So in our case, we care a lot about getting and having the data well organized and having very high quality data. And so how we generate it is that, let me give you a real life example.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, as something really important. Crap in, crap out, I guess. The first is policing data, for example. I'm on a like a, I just am like, why are you using this data at all? It's so bad. It's such a bad, like, what's the point?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, well, this is, I mean, where quality of data comes in as something really important. Crap and crap out, I guess. Exactly. Right. Like, would you rather have the world's most complex algorithm with crappy data or the dumbest algorithm with really good data? The first is policing data, for example.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like I said, every government. I mean, and this is for us, it's when you're in the business of A, you know, trying to get to a truth, which is what we're trying to, and then B, when you're in that process discovering where there are gaps and you are generating a new truth, transparency becomes your own. So what are the impetus?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that we've been pushing in the industry is transparency. There's a huge lack of transparency even amongst government agencies in terms of how data is collected and how they generate the final numbers. And one of the things that we've set out to do in challenging this is actually we've built predictive models that actually are forecasting those same numbers that these agencies are reporting. And these are very kind of complex machine learning models that we have completely opened. And so we basically publish all the methodology. We've provided all the inputs into the models and gone out to the world and say, hey, if a private company can go out and essentially start to provide some of this stuff as a public good, I think we need to start having conversations with governments about how they are coming up with their estimates because we need to be able to reproduce results. And right now we can't reproduce results.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They could be asked. So there's one thing called, for example, the objective yield survey, which is like they basically go out and ask a bunch of farmers, like, what's the yield on your farm this season? And somehow all of that gets mixed in and then bundled into a final number that they release. But nobody actually knows what the inputs are. And this has actually been one of our biggest.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gosh, it could be surveys. So they're constantly surveying farmers. And then you getting these survey results that you're having to interpret. What are they data? What are they?”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who does it well? No one. No one. Look in the Norwegians. I was thinking maybe the Norwegians Denmark. US, in terms of standards, I mean, USDA is the gold standard.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“U.S. Department of Agriculture, but U.S. Department of Agriculture we think of as a department, but it's not a department within the USDA. And then the number of agencies that also, because the USDA is not our only source of data in the US, we're also collecting it from all the industry associations that specialize in a particular crop. Exactly. You have the avocado associations and the strawberry associations.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't classify it the same way, even within the same government, you have different classification systems, you have different definitions. So give me”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. We're looking at everything from Earth, which is climate, environment, soil, et cetera, to markets, which has to do with, you know, commodity exchanges and demographics and kind of more socioeconomic data. And you're merging all of that together. And a lot of that too, like a lot of the socioeconomic data at a global scale has been collected, at least going back to the 1950s.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The earliest, I think, data point that we have in our platform today is in the 1860s. Weather station Early weather stations. Actually, technically, the very, very first one is 1701, but we don't have the actual data point. But that's a station in Berlin.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's data filled, but there's two things to keep in mind. A ton of the data does sit in the public domain. So most of the data is collected by public institutions that collect it for one reason or another have no incentive to organize it. So, I mean, some of the worst data we deal with is, you know, if you look at data that comes out of India, it's in PDF files. They've scanned images on top of them, and they have handwriting plus typed up text and they move the tables around for month to month. And you do this month after month, year after year, and you're trying to understand 30, 40, 50 years of history. It becomes really kind of messy process. And so it's that the industry as a whole doesn't exist as an industry. And there is not a single body that collects that data.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It used to be half, right? Or something like that, or more, perhaps. Is that because it does, it's a data filled industry, like it's full of data, including weather, including everything. Every aspect of it is data filled.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah Might I want to get more detail of all these kind of details, but why is that? Here is a An industry that's critical to the survival of the human race, which has gotten smaller and smaller in a lot of ways, fewer and fewer people are doing it, even if it's 60-some percent in Africa. I forget the number. I remember the number in the US.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're driving in your car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's just all sorts of types of switching that can occur either to other crops. There can be new trade deals that occur with other regions that might need that crop. You know, there's all sorts of options, but you need to know what these options are.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Switching. Yeah, so you can switch crops. You can also switch. The use of the crop, right? So not, you know, again, most people don't realize 40% of corn produced in the US is not consumed by humans. It's ethanol.”
2019-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT