Thomas Atwood doesn’t look like a farmer (in fact he’s more of a database jockey) but as a board member and the interim President at PureSense, he’s guiding a company that directly helps farmers in a crucial way – monitoring and managing their water usage.  I spoke with him in Menlo Park last week in a decidedly non-pastoral setting. California has a $19 billion agricultural market according to Atwood, $6 billion from almonds and grapes alone. (Other less regulated California crops account for even more than that.)  Almonds are a thirsty crop, requiring 48 inches of water per year. This year in California, water shortages, natural and man-made will cost farmers $160 million. (The wisdom of growing thirsty crops in arid regions is fodder for another story.)  Combine water shortages, drought, and environmental regulations and you have a recipe for difficult times for farmers and for people who eat food. Atwood gives an example of a grower with 100,000 acres under management with yields of about $3,000 of produce per acre.  He claims that the PureSense system can result in a 10 percent improvement in yield (or a 10 percent reduction in water usage), which calculates to a heck of a lot of marzipan. PureSense is a beautiful example of how Silicon Valley-derived Information Technology can benefit an industry not known for its high-technology.  PureSense creates a turn-key, wireless network of sensors embedded a few feet deep in the soil that provide a real-time visualization of soil moisture and the deep water bank. Its business model is software-as-a-service, which frees the farmer from installation, configuration, and maintenance of the system. PureSense then provides the user with a rich, custom picture of their field’s water status and behavior. Getting back to Atwood’s database background – it would seem the company has some ulterior motives in its data gathering. The soil and water info is compiled into a huge database of every farm in the state. And that info can be sold to entities like the Dept of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the like. PureSense is VC-funded as reported by Greentech Media News with a $4.5 million Round A from One Earth Capital received earlier this year. In the words of Denis Prosperi, an almond grower and processor, "Water is still the best fertilizer for a crop."