Agriculture Legend Howard-Yana Shapiro on Visionary Thinking

At a time when pessimism can prevail, Howard-Yana Shapiro, a visionary scientist and environmentalist, advocates for leveraging technology to make a positive impact. He cites the innovative solutions offered by Agerpoint's cutting-edge technology. 

In an interview for The Point Cloud, Shapiro envisions a future where smartphones are key tools for field agronomy, highlighting the power of technology in driving change. As he puts it, "We don't need as many bad agronomists in the field. We just need good phones." 

The Point Cloud is Agerpoint’s interview series featuring leaders at the intersection of climate, agriculture, nature, and technology. Watch and read highlights from the conversation below. You can also hear to the full interview as an audio podcast on your favorite platforms.

No Longer an Experiment

Shapiro shares his insights on how new technology is transforming the process of observing and analyzing crops. Shapiro describes how cutting-edge technology built into a mobile device can reduce human error in field observations, providing accurate and reliable data for decision making. 

"This is no longer an experiment. This is actually fact-based information, which gives you the decision making," says Shapiro. 

Shapiro highlights how mobile-enabled, precision field observations are revolutionizing agriculture, providing farmers with fact-based insights to optimize plant nutrition, detect diseases, estimate yields, and make carbon assessments.

“The speed with which you can make the analytics or you can make the capture to give you the analytics is unparalleled to anything I've ever seen before,” he says.

We Just Need Good Phones

Shapiro advocates for visionary thinking and leveraging technology to make a positive impact. 

“It's easy to be pessimistic,” he says. “One just has to look around the world and want to crawl in your own hole and pull the cover over. But I don't think that's really what a trained scientist or an ecologist or an environmentalist or an anthropologist, anyone who's involved in the world around them really can do.”

A believer in moving forward with a proactive approach, Shapiro emphasizes the importance of finding innovative solutions, including for the collection of data in the field.  He highlights the potential for data collection through smartphones, allowing experts to help from a distance.

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