In this episode, I talk with David Schurman, co-founder and CTO of Perennial, about their verification platform for climate-smart agriculture. Perennial uses geospatial data and machine learning to unlock agricultural soils as the world’s largest carbon sink.

Highlights:

• How Perennial gathers and annotates training data from satellites and ground-based observations.
• Handling variations across satellites and geographic locations.
• Stratifying training data across the kinds of variables that matter.
• Collaboration between machine learning engineers, remote sensing scientists, and crop scientists.
• The importance of gathering more training data than you think you’ll need.
• Respecting the data.
• The nuance of communicating performance metrics.

Links:

Perennial’s website

Perennial on LinkedIn

David Schurman on LinkedIn

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