Las Marías
My first job was at Las Marías, Argentina's largest yerba mate and tea company. The owner wanted to bring old plantations back to life and handed me Ana Primavesi's work on tropical soils. That was the seed: soil as a living system, not a substrate.
Agronomist, University of Buenos Aires
I graduated in agronomy and joined the Aquaculture department, teaching and doing participatory research with small-scale fish farmers in the northeast.
PhD on integrated agri-aquaculture
My doctorate looked at family farms in Misiones that added fish ponds to their crops and animals, and asked whether that integration made them more resilient. It was the first study to evaluate real cases of this in the region. Part of the work was done at UNESP in Jaboticabal, Brazil.
Blue River Technology, California Strawberry Commission
I moved to California and into agtech: computer vision and robotics for row crops, then research for the state's strawberry growers.
Mavrx, Trace Genomics
Aerial and satellite imagery for crop management at Mavrx, then soil biology at Trace Genomics, where I'm an inventor on two patents for measuring soil microbes.
Planet
At Planet I build products for agriculture on top of daily imagery of the whole planet: crop biomass, field monitoring, compliance for agencies. The season stops being a snapshot and becomes a film.
What has come out of it
Research
- 2026Digital technologies and sustainable development in agricultureBook chapter, first author. Agriculture 4.0, Springer
- 2024Planet's Biomass Proxy for monitoring aboveground agricultural biomassGuillevic et al., Field Crops Research
- 2024The Biomass Proxy: global agricultural monitoring through fusion of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2Burger et al., Remote Sensing
- 2024Enhancing alfalfa biomass prediction with remote sensingLucero et al., Remote Sensing
- 2022High-cadence Earth observation in maize phenology classificationNieto et al., Remote Sensing
- 2021Observing sucrose accumulation with Sentinel-1 backscatterden Besten et al., Frontiers in Remote Sensing
- 2011Integrated agri-aquaculture systemsBook chapter, sole author. Springer
Patents
- 2024Microbial quantitationUS 11,984,197 B2, first inventor
- 2022Soil health indicators using microbial functional genesUS 11,385,215 B2
Writing and talks
- 2026Modernizing agricultural compliance with AIInterview, Planet Pulse
- 2026Seeing signal through the noise, and morePosts on Planet Pulse
- 2021Monitoring crop nitrogen status with satellite dataPlanet Stories
- 2017ASTA annual meeting, ChicagoConference presentation
- 2009Integrando actividades en la provincia de MisionesLEISA, Revista de agroecología 25(1), in Spanish
Essays, and what I'm reading
- Oct 2026Carbon comes from belowWhy living roots, not rotting stubble, build the soil carbon that lasts
- Oct 2026The crop afterWhat carp ponds in Misiones taught me about rotations and cover crops
- Oct 2026The plant is not the unitWhy managing crops plant by plant misreads how yield works
More essays are in progress. Meanwhile, the books I keep returning to: Natalia Ginzburg's Las pequeñas virtudes, Ricardo Piglia's Formas breves, Antonio Tabucchi's Sostiene Pereira. The rest is on Goodreads.