Replicating the Farmer’s Eye w/ Kia Behnia & Mason Earles, Scout

Having met at the UC Davis Wine Executive Program, Kia Behnia, CEO, and Mason Earles, CTO, founded Scout to replicate the best sensor in the vineyard, “the farmer’s eye.” Leveraging off-the-shelf hardware, Scout uses AI to process images taken from a tractor to automate vineyard mapping, vine counting, yield forecasting, virus identification, and more. From managing vineyard assets to implementing precision agriculture to improve quality, Scout is harnessing the power of AI to optimize vineyard management.Detailed Show Notes: Mason’s background - UC Davis Professor, Apple, AI & agricultureKia’s background for Scout - owns the Neotempo wine brand, worked at Splunk, the “data for everything” companyThe official company name is Agricultural Scout, dba Scout, the website is agscout.ai, so it can be called any of those namesFounded in 2022, initially more hardware-based, but pivoted to an intelligence company using off-the-shelf hardwareThe goal is to “replicate the farmer’s eye” with an AI-based solution using cameras, tractors, and Scout cloud and mobile app (which can be used offline); the brain is centered around a phoneUS only today (~50-100 clients, 300 blocks, 2M vines, processed 56M photos), going international in 20264 main use cases currently: Automate vine count, inventory, and mapping of vines - 4x faster than people could doEstimate crop performance - both vigor and fruitYield forecasting - can use every step in the growing season to forecast yield with historical performance and weather forecastsHealth performance and vine mapping - leveraging AI for virus detection3 types of clientsEstate wineriesVineyard management companies (“VMC”)Real estate investors or owners to track vineyardsBenefits include: $400-1,200 savings/acreProductivity gains through managing more acres with fewer people, identifying low-performing vines, and the program tells farmers where to sampleRemote monitoring of faraway vineyardsEarly season yield forecastingDisease management - virus can cause $170k/acre damage over 3-5 years, costs $40/PCR test, the goal is to keep virus <15% not to lose the whole block, has a 7,000 photo database on vine diseaseBench Vineyards discovered 1 acre of missing vines out of 24 acres and filled them inPricing is a subscription model, $150-180/acre per scanVolume discounts >50 acresNeighborhood and AVA discountsStarter - 2 scan package (for inventory and virus)Professional - 6 scan packageTypical customer starts w/ 2 and upgrades to 6Monarch promotion, customers get 1 free scanUp front hardware costs ~$3,000New product in beta in July 2025 - ChatGPT Scout for vineyardsMarketing mostly through word of mouth, industry trade shows, and webinars have been effective, as has partnership with Monarch (already tech enthusiasts)Barriers to purchase are often due to farming budgets built around labor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.