#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Devon Wright, CEO, Lumo
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Improving Crop Quality and Reducing Costs With Smart Irrigation Valves
After experiencing California’s water crisis firsthand, Lumo CEO Devon Wright sought out a solution to making farmers’ water use cost-efficient and remotely accessible. We sat down with him to hear about his experience as a serial entrepreneur, the importance of broadband access to rural communities, and the ways the U.S. can realize our sustainability goals.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create Lumo?
I‘m originally from Canada. In 2012, I started a company there, and five years later ended up selling it to Yelp. So that's what moved me out to California. After moving to Occidental, which is in California’s wine country, I was made painfully aware of the water shortage issue here. This was a stark contrast to Canada, which has 2 million freshwater lakes and plenty of access to water. Occidental is a fairly rural community—most of the agriculture is centered around wine, apple orchards, and a few other specialty crops. Since the droughts, the groundwater in my neighborhood, which is our primary water source, has been running out.
In a community that's dependent on sustainable groundwater and also as a farmer myself, I felt the pressure of the water shortage. Irrigation is the biggest user of water in the world. And here in California, upward of 80 percent of freshwater withdrawals are used for irrigation. I started to question what had been done to build the technology that can help us better understand our water use and improve the efficiency of the water systems that we have for growing crops. So I built a prototype of a tool that can help farmers have more efficient control and visibility of the water that they're using.
What does Lumo do?
Our product is a smart valve that improves the water control and monitoring capabilities of farmers for more precise irrigation. Lumo also has remote features which farmers can utilize to help save on costs and farmer alerts for things like advanced leak detection. This helps them save water by avoiding catastrophic leaks and irrigating in the evenings when evapotranspiration is the lowest. We just recently commercialized our product with really good interest and plan to put out 250 valves this year.
As a company with customers in majority remote, rural areas, how have you been able to navigate access to internet connectivity?
Hands down, the biggest hurdle that any of us face in the agricultural technology space is access to cellular connectivity, and solving this problem is what will truly make the agtech sector take off. Right now, our priority is figuring out how we can get better Internet service to growers.
In large cities, cellular signal strength is pretty reliable, but on farms and in more rural areas, it’s rare that you’ll find a clear connection. And even when a connection is present, you have to use chips connected to expensive base stations that require lots of logistical work to connect to valves out in the fields. This shouldn't be the case—ideally, every device that we want to put in our fields would have its own chip with connectivity to any carrier. This is vital to the work of agtech applications especially, but at the moment, it's hard for us to find partnerships with carriers. And once you go through third-party aggregators, you can end up paying high prices on megabits, a cost that we’re forced to pass on to our farmer customers. Direct investment into telecom for startups would unlock a whole new world for our work, and ultimately, would help us make major improvements in food quality and productivity per acre by accessing data from the field. The U.S. is in an amazing position to produce more food and feed the world due to our rural availability, but our lack of connectivity in these areas is limiting how productive farmers can be. Any subsidies that can go to folks getting more coverage on the rural side are going to be really powerful in bringing prices down and the adoption of productivity-improving technology on farms.
Right now, there's a lot of interest from some policymakers around supporting green tech—what can policymakers do to promote startup innovation in the sector?
It starts with setting clear objectives. We tend to set really big climate goals, and when we don’t see immediate results, we become disappointed and lose energy and public sentiment around sustainability generally and the impact it can have on our lives. We should figure out where we can make the biggest impact and then set aside funds and resources directly for those initiatives.
I think the government does this well with water—they’ve calculated how much freshwater we use generally, and they know which industries use what percentages of water. They divide funds and grants to try and encourage the entrepreneurs and industries involved in those areas to develop technology to make a change. We need to apply this idea to fighting climate change broadly—clear priorities make it easier to focus and align tech to a public initiative. For some reason with our bigger climate goals, such as lowering the global temperature or reducing carbon, we seem to lack strategy; it could also be because that’s so much more complex. It’d be nice to see a few priorities laid out followed by action plans to align our resources around them.
Are there any other local, state, or federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
Over the last few decades, many in D.C. have tried to suggest smarter federal approaches to how we manage water, and I think finding better ways to get that data is one area where the government can improve—and Lumo exists to help with that. We want to be the standard for how irrigation is done, and get our smart infrastructure widely adopted. A digital record of water use across the agricultural community and geographic tracking would be a huge benefit for governments, local, state, and federal.
What are your goals for Lumo moving forward?
In the long term, we want to be the biggest irrigation management system in the country, and eventually globally. That would also make us the largest system of digital water recording. For now, we're focused on proving the capabilities of our product and improving drip irrigation, which is vital to 16 million acres of specialty crops here in America. That would give us a good foothold to scale to other crops and start building out even more.
In the short term, we’re trying to get into the wine industry, which is considered a specialty crop. Our smart valves have built-in flow meters and an option to attach a pressure sensor, and we want our system to unlock the potential of specialty crop irrigation.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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