Seed is big business.

The global seed industry has a market value surpassing $50 billion (as of 2023) but, more importantly, it plays a vital role in ensuring food security and supporting sustainable, quality crop yields.

As with much of the agriculture sector, the seed supply chain faces a number of pressures; the ever-present challenges that come with growing seasonal crops, notable shifts in regional and global climate conditions, and rising seed prices. In the US alone, prices paid by farmers for crop seed increased by an average of 270% between 1990 and 2020.

Smart technological solutions can help to make the supply chain as efficient as possible, reducing costs and seed waste. That’s where QuarterPoint, a partnership between Seedbox Solution and Trace Engineering, come to the fore.

The US-based start-up has developed an innovative platform, drawing on IoT-enabled sensors in seed boxes (the ‘SmartBox’), that gives producers, dealers and farmers unprecedented levels of insight about the environment, location, container fill level, and overall quality of their seed inventory.

We caught up with Joe Waldman (General Manager) and Kevin Grimstad (Chief Technology Officer) to find out how QuarterPoint developed their seed distribution solution.

Let’s go back to the beginning. How did QuarterPoint come to be?

Joe: Perhaps the best place to start is with Seedbox Solution where I’m Director of Business Development.

At its heart, we’re a returnable packaging company with a particular focus on the agriculture industry. We developed a new style of seed box that ships more efficiently when nested that, in simple terms, means that you can now stack boxes three-high in a trailer rather than two-high. That’s an immediate efficiency that makes a big difference to customers, particularly when you consider the hundreds of thousands of seed boxes in operation around the world.

I’ve been there almost five years now, but about three years ago we reached a turning point where we wanted to explore adding another layer of value. The seed inside each box tends to be worth between $5,000 to $15,000 per box and, while people have a pretty good idea about what happens at the ‘point of fill’, this box and the high-value contents are often put on a truck and never seen again until the box is returned at the end of season.

That’s a lot of time when very little is known about the inventory. So, we set about ways of developing a smart trackable box, and an accompanying platform, that could provide crucial insight to make the entire supply chain more efficient.

I’d actually met Kevin through mutual friends, and as we started exploring the idea of a SmartBox and platform, it was clear that the Trace Engineering team were perfect for it.

There must be some very particular engineering challenges in developing a solution that’ll be deployed in a wide range of conditions.

Kevin: It’s certainly one of the more challenging IoT applications – the SmartBox is so autonomous and is deployed in vastly different environments. Fortunately Trace Engineering’s background is primarily in aerospace and defense sectors and, of course, they require highly dependable devices that provide accurate data in some really harsh settings.

I think we were well-timed in doing this work, though, with the sensors and componentry that is now coming available. Saft, for example, produce safe, stable batteries with a really solid power density that can also handle the high current draws of some of the modems that we use without losing efficiency.

Is it a solution that you’d not have been able to develop in the past, then?

Kevin: We would have been able to develop some kind of smart box in the past, but it would’ve been very different. We’d not have been able to produce hardware with a 5 to 10 year lifespan, we would not have had the ability to connect in so many rural settings. So, it feels like the right time for this tech.

That’s true of the software platform too as we developed it using Rust, a newer and safer programming language. So many IoT companies and frameworks use the C language, and we’d have been able to make that work. But Rust has such secure methods for managing memory and processing asynchronous data and so when various events happen – be it a seed box going in motion, a specialized background measurement, or a network directed update – we can feel really secure in the data we’re communicating with our devices.

It has also been a treat for us as engineers to have success with and contribute to such a thriving open-source community!

What has the response been like from the seed industry?

Joe: Really positive. I think everyone in the industry knows the value of this information, and it’s information that people don’t currently have.

Within the US alone we’ve got billions of dollars’ worth of inventory that is dispatched to a highly fragmented dealer network, then fragmented even further into tens of thousands of farms, all without visibility about whether the seed has been stored, the condition of storage, or if it’s even been planted

A SmartBox is something that can help all levels of the supply chain and the accompanying dashboard that we’ve developed has been done so with that in mind. You want that macro-view at producer level so you can optimize your operation and processes, but we also wanted to give micro-level detail that can help farmers in their day-to-day.

If seed is not stored correctly, the germ and vigor of the seed can be affected – perhaps having been exposed to too much heat or moisture for example – and the stock can become worthless. This can be devastating for a farmer. Individual farms often pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for seed, not to mention all of the other input costs for planting, storing and harvesting, and yet you’d know more information about your pizza order than your seed inventory. Having this new level of visibility could potentially stop quality issues before the seed goes in the ground, saving money and time. A farm only gets so many chances to have a successful season, a severe replant incident could jeopardise an entire operation even if the cost of the seed is covered.

Additionally, we added regular quality of life improvements like being able to locate an individual box via Bluetooth, in a warehouse full of boxes, which can be a real time-saver

Kevin: We have a tremendous amount of data that comes from our smart boxes and our job has been to develop an interface that can distil those statistics into a story that makes sense to the user. Ultimately, it’s about giving people at all levels of the supply chain the insight that helps them make smart decisions.

Images credit: Quaterpoint LLC

So, what’s on the horizon for QuarterPoint and this tech?

Joe: We’ve recently secured a service contract with a large seed producer to implement the SmartBox platform across its entire corn box fleet – starting with 10,000 SmartBox devices this year.

Then it’s about continuing to grow the business within the US and overseas, and exploring other potential uses for our platform. The SmartBox and the software has been designed to be adaptable and there are plenty of opportunities to help supply chain management beyond the seed industry.

Kevin: It’s really sparked a lot of very interesting conversations. Even within our own team we’ve had discussions around how the data we’re collecting could fill critical gaps in both scientific and commercial use cases. Outside of our own passion and interest in those areas, we’ve now got this great (and growing) pool of sophisticated sensors around the US and in the areas in which crops are being grown. It’s an exciting time for us.

The SmartBox, as well QuarterPoint’s future monitoring solutions, are powered by Saft IoT batteries, chosen for their safety and reliability in a wide range of applications.