Thank you to our quarterly presenting sponsor, Merck Animal Health Ventures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ Blue Ocean Barns: https://blueoceanbarns.com/ Today’s episode features Joan Salwen, co-founder and CEO of Blue Ocean Barns. Joan grew up in the long shadow of her family’s Iowa farm where she harvested cherries and cared for the sheep. During 20 years as a Managing Director at Accenture, Joan managed $50M+ client relationships and led the firm's Atlanta practic...
Jun 01, 2022•39 min
Thank you to our quarterly presenting sponsor, Merck Animal Health Ventures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ EverAg: https://www.ever.ag/ Dairy.com: https://www.dairy.com/ Prime Future: https://primefuture.substack.com/ Today’s episode is really a unique opportunity to hear from someone who has been working on what it means to digitize agriculture supply chains for over two decades. I can’t think of anyone who better understands the potential here for our industry, bu...
May 25, 2022•37 min
Thank you to our quarterly presenting sponsor, Merck Animal Health Ventures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ Jan Willem van Groenigan https://www.wur.nl/en/Persons/Jan-Willem-prof.dr.ir.-JW-Jan-Willem-van-Groenigen.htm Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JWvanGroenigen YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJz4ijSeqjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt77IvHaZuY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6em_8iFfKIk Jan Willem van Groenigan is a professor of Soil...
May 18, 2022•34 min
Thank you to our quarterly presenting sponsor, Merck Animal Health Ventures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ Innovating Agtech: https://soundcloud.com/user-73017811 SomaDetect: https://somadetect.com/ Books: Adventure Finance , Farm and Other F Words , The Third Plate Today’s featured guest is Hannah Senior. Hannah grew up in a farming community but followed a career into corporate life working with multinational companies, including 5 years with the retailer Tesco. S...
May 11, 2022•42 min
Thank you to our presenting sponsor Merck Animal Health Ventures! https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ Loftus Labs: https://www.loftuslabs.com/ FoA Community: www.Patreon.com/agriculture . Today’s episode is all about farm business data and analytics. The story is different from others you’ve probably heard about though, in that Loftus Labs is not selling a product. They offer a service to help farmers to build customized processes to gain deeper insights into their unique...
May 04, 2022•41 min
Thank you to our presenting sponsor Merck Animal Health Ventures! https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ Floating Farm: https://floatingfarm.nl/ Vence: https://vence.io/ We have a fascinating story today about the world’s first floating farm. To some of you that may sound far fetched or maybe even like a gimmick, but I assure you it’s anything but. And it can open our minds to new possibilities for what and where a farm can be. Even a livestock farm. Today's episode features...
Apr 27, 2022•41 min
Thank you to our presenting sponsor Merck Animal Health Ventures! https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ Unfold website: https://unfold.ag/ John Purcell LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jppurcell/ Unfold Twitter: https://twitter.com/Unfold_Ag John Purcell, Ph.D. has worked in agriculture for over 30 years, including long career at Monsanto and then Bayer. For the past dozen or so years before leading Unfold he worked in their vegetable seed division. His earlier work le...
Apr 20, 2022•40 min
Thank you to our presenting sponsor Merck Animal Health Ventures! https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ StockCropper website: https://thestockcropper.com/ StockCropper YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheStockCropper Zack Smith Twitter: https://twitter.com/zebulousprime Today’s episode really speaks to the core of what this podcast is all about. We look at the current trajectory of where agriculture is headed, identify some of the negative outcomes associated with that tr...
Apr 13, 2022•38 min
Thank you to our quarterly presenting sponsor Merck Animal Health Ventures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ I’m very pleased to welcome the leader of the Merck Animal Health Ventures Team, Stephen Murray, joining me on today’s episode. Originally brought up on a sheep and beef farm in New Zealand, Stephen spent the first part of his career as a dairy veterinarian in that country. He decided to leave private practice for industry, which led him through a series of role...
Apr 06, 2022•35 min
Today's episode is brought to you by Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/ The Yield: https://www.theyield.com/ "From Farms to Incubators" book: https://bookshop.org/books/from-farms-to-incubators-women-innovators-revolutionizing-how-our-food-is-grown/9781610355759 Joining us on today’s show is Ros Harvey, founder and CEO of The Yield, which is an Australian agtech company that focuses on leveraging data science to provide large specialty crop producers with digital playbooks to improve farmi...
Mar 30, 2022•31 min
Kristjan Hebert Twitter: https://twitter.com/KristjanHebert Kristjan Hebert website: https://kristjanhebert.com/ Hebert Grain Ventures: https://hebertgrainventures.com/ "Traction" by Gino Wickman "Get a Grip" by Gino Wickman "Rocket Fuel" by Gino Wickman Joining me again on today’s show is Kristjan Hebert. Kristjan is the managing partner of Hebert Grain Ventures (HGV), a 30,000 acre grain and oilseed operation in southeast Saskatchewan. If you listened to the last episode, you already know that...
Mar 23, 2022•27 min
Today's episode is brought to you by Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/ Kirstjan Hebert: http://www.kristjanhebert.com/ HGV: https://hebertgrainventures.com/ Maverick Ag: https://maverickag.com/ Kristjan Twitter: https://twitter.com/KristjanHebert Joining me on today’s show is Kristjan Hebert. Kristjan is the managing partner of Hebert Grain Ventures (HGV), a 30,000 acre grain and oilseed operation in southeast Saskatchewan. After a brief stint at accounting firm Meyers Norris Penny, he ca...
Mar 16, 2022•34 min
Today’s episode is brought to you by Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/ Suma Reddy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suma-reddy-0285386/ Future Acres: https://www.futureacres.co/ Wavemaker Labs: https://www.wavemakerlabs.com/ JOIN THE FOA COMMUNITY: www.patreon.com/agriculture Joining me on today’s show is Suma Reddy, the co-founder and CEO of Future Acres. Suma’s company builds advanced mobility and AI solutions for farms, starting with a robot called Carry, an autonomous harvest comp...
Mar 09, 2022•38 min
Previous guests featured: Richard Waite Dan Kittredge Jason Persall Paul Winters Xin Yi Lim Mark Remmert Sarah Mock Join the FoA Community: www.Patreon.com/agriculture For most of the history of industrial agriculture, consumers demanded of the food system four foundational criteria: price, safety, taste and convenience. This has not changed, nor do I have reason to believe it will in the future. What has changed is that we have realized that if we make those our only criteria, we fall victim to...
Mar 02, 2022•37 min
Pasturebird: www.Pasturebird.com Prime Future newsletter: https://primefuture.substack.com/ Join the FoA Community: www.patreon.com/agriculture Paul Greive and his in-laws decided to raise 50 chickens in their ¼ acre backyard, when those sold quickly he bought more, eventually becoming the largest pastured poultry producer in the country. To scale Pasturebird, they built their own automated range coop to autonomously move 6,000 birds to new pasture every day using solar energy. This growth and i...
Feb 23, 2022•42 min
Farmland LP: https://www.farmlandlp.com/ Join the FoA Community: www.Patreon.com/agriculture Today’s episode is a unique approach to farmland investing. Farmland LP buys farmland and adds value by doing things like planting higher value crops, converting to certified organic, and implementing regenerative farming practices. The company then leases the land back out to farmers who agree to maintain these practices. Joining us on the show today is Farmland LP founder and managing partner Craig Wic...
Feb 16, 2022•33 min
Leaf Agriculture: https://withleaf.io/ GROWMARK: https://www.growmark.com/ FoA 238: 5 Barriers Limiting Agtech: https://aggrad.libsyn.com/foa-238-5-barriers-limiting-agtech-and-the-companies-breaking-through-them FoA 275: Digital Infrastructure for Ag Supply Chains: https://aggrad.libsyn.com/foa-275-digital-infrastructure-for-ag-supply-chains-with-jake-joraanstad-and-jesse-vollmar-of-bushel Bailey Stockdale is the CEO of Leaf Agriculture which builds developer tools for agriculture. What that me...
Feb 09, 2022•38 min
FarmRaise: www.FarmRaise.com Building a startup in ag? Email me: [email protected] Support this show and join the FoA community: www.Patreon.com/agriculture A point we try to drive home as often as possible here is that innovation on its own doesn’t really get anywhere until it can be implemented. For agriculture, that often means that the ideas we talk about here on this show need to actually work for farmers. So for the future of agriculture to be more data-driven or more technological or more re...
Feb 02, 2022•37 min
Sound Agriculture: https://www.sound.ag/ Support this show: www.Patreon.com/agriculture Today, I’m excited to bring you an interview with a very interesting company in agtech, and a unique one in many ways. Adam Litle is the CEO of Sound Agriculture. Which is in the “sound science” sense of the word not the audio sense of the word. They have some really interesting scientific approaches to, on one hand, activating beneficial microbes to provide more nutrition to crops. And on the other hand to p...
Jan 26, 2022•34 min
Grounded Capital Partners: https://www.groundedcapitalpartners.com/ How would you rate the Future of Agriculture podcast using a scale of conventional (1) to aspirational (10)? Where along that spectrum do you think it should be? Email me at [email protected] to let me know or send me a DM on Twitter or LinkedIn. Our guest today, Stephen Hohenrieder was first on the show back in episode 216 to talk about building a more distributed system. It remains one of my most popular episodes, and I still hig...
Jan 19, 2022•34 min
Granular: www.granular.ag Platinum Ag Services: https://platinum.ag/ We have on the show Cassie Misch who is an independent crop consultant and the owner of Platinum Ag Services located in Northwest Indiana. As part of her offerings to farmer customers, Cassie is a Certified Services Agent for the Granular Agronomy suite of services. One of those farmer customers is Jake Smoker, who also joins us on today’s show. Jake farms with his father, Greg, in LaPorte County, Indiana where they grow corn, ...
Jan 12, 2022•37 min
Dawn Equipment: http://www.dawnequipment.com/ Underground Agriculture: https://www.undergroundagriculture.com/ Joe Bassett on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeatDawn Soil Sense Podcast: www.NDSoilSense.com Joe Bassett is the president and CEO of Dawn Equipment Company. Dawn makes smart soil-engaging products enabling farmers to plant seeds more precisely and prepare the soil with greater efficiency while using less fertilizer. They specifically focus on row crops like corn and soybeans. You’ll al...
Jan 05, 2022•38 min
Semios (108): https://aggrad.libsyn.com/future-of-agriculture-108-data-driven-sustainable-agriculture-through-iot-and-machine-learning-with-michael-gilbert-of-semios Manolin (120): https://aggrad.libsyn.com/future-of-agriculture-121-electricides-with-andrew-diprose-of-rootwave Harvest Returns (093): https://aggrad.libsyn.com/future-of-agriculture-093-crowdfarming-with-chris-rawley-of-harvest-returns We are revisiting three different former guests from 2018 to ask the question “Where are they now...
Dec 29, 2021•44 min
InnerPlant: https://innerplant.com/ "From Farms to Incubators" https://www.farmstoincubators.com/ This week we are exploring the concept of engineering a plant to provide signals of stress like pest pressure or disease pressure or nutrient deficiency. InnerPlant is developing traits that serve as biosensors for when each of these unique types of stressors occur. This can be monitored via satellite for early detection and hopefully swift and precise action by the farmer. InnerPlant founder and CE...
Dec 22, 2021•37 min
Omnivore: https://www.omnivore.vc/ Tenacious Ventures: https://tenacious.ventures/ SP Ventures: https://www.spventures.com.br/ Merck Animal Health Ventures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ Last month I gathered four agtech venture capitalists who all happen to be very popular previous guests of this show to talk about what they’re seeing in agtech investment, and to speculate about where things might go from here. What resulted was a great conversation talking about h...
Dec 15, 2021•37 min
Hello Tractor: https://hellotractor.com/ Jehiel Oliver on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jehiel/ Software is Feeding the World Email Newsletter: https://rpethe.substack.com/ Today’s episode is about how Hello Tractor is bringing tractors to farmers in developing countries. This is a tremendous story of figuring out the logistics of how to maximize the use of farm machinery where it’s needed most, and deploying the technology and processes to make this happen at scale. At a real basic leve...
Dec 08, 2021•38 min
The Nature Conservancy: https://www.nature.org/en-us/ "Building Soil Health Through Innovation" https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/building-soil-health-innovation/ Renée Vassilos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rvassilos/ Today’s guest is Renée Vassilos. Renée manages The Nature Conservancy’s investments in innovative companies that will help scale regenerative agriculture production practices. Prior to joining T...
Dec 01, 2021•34 min
Bionutrient Food Association: https://bionutrient.org/ Bionutrient Institute: https://www.bionutrientinstitute.org/ Bionutrient meter: https://bionutrient.org/bionutrientmeter Over the past few years, the term “nutrient density” has been popping up more and more. There are a lot of claims being made about farming practices like regenerative agriculture producing more nutritious food or more nutrient dense food. But is this true? I mean, if you increase the amount of one nutrient are you really m...
Nov 24, 2021•33 min
AgWorld: www.AgWorld.com John Silvera on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-silvera-02b838175/ Today’s episode is another installment in that series, and it’s a really cool story of how John Silvera, an Independent Crop Consultant in the central valley of California, is using one tool in particular, AgWorld, to offer much more to growers than just agronomic recommendations. In this episode we’ll talk about the return on investment of farmers hiring independent crop consultants, why John ...
Nov 17, 2021•30 min
See GUSS in action: https://gussag.com/ Almond Journey Podcast: https://www.almonds.com/almond-industry/industry-news We have on the show today another great example of this in GUSS Automation. GUSS stands for Global Unmanned Spray System, and joining me for today’s episode is COO Gary Thompson. As the name implies, GUSS sells a fully autonomous sprayer for use in orchards and vineyards. Which is really interesting, because there is no piece of equipment that goes through these operations more t...
Nov 10, 2021•33 min
