CoolBot

Description

Cara Parks:

"Ron Khosla left the technology industry to farm with his wife in New Paltz, New York. He focused on solving inefficiencies in an effort to compete as much as possible with conventional growers. Khosla approached day-to-day farm problems with a “better living through technology” philosophy.

One early success was the CoolBot, a controller that allows farmers to create walk-in coolers using a 10,000-BTU air conditioner, the type that dots New York high rises during summer months. Using a series of sensors, the controller tricks the air conditioner into lowering the temperature well below where an AC unit normally shuts off, while also keeping the unit from icing over. While it sounds simple enough, this device can save a small farmer thousands of dollars. Khosla says he has sold over 12,000 of the controllers. (The CoolBot is $299 plus the price of an air conditioner, whereas traditional coolers run in the thousands.)

He also worked on other energy-efficient techniques, such as using warm water piped under plants to warm seedlings in a greenhouse. Khosla estimates that this system reduced his fuel outlay by 90 percent, a savings of about $2,000 a month for the 1,500-square-foot greenhouse.

However, Khosla, who has gone on to serve as an advisor to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, realized that the greatest impact came from making his own labor more efficient by ruthlessly tracking metrics on nearly every aspect of plant cultivation. “We went from taking 25 seconds per plant to working and working and working until it was 1.3 seconds per transplant,” he says. That type of efficiency helped make his farm profitable. “Farming is a count-your-seconds activity,” he says." (http://the-magazine.org/22/hoe-down#.UiRMijZkPnl)