The reason for today’s special episode is The Farm Workforce Modernization Act that recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is now moving on to the Senate. This legislation is an effort to make progress on the mess that is U.S. ag labor policy. Shay Myers, a farmer who was featured on this show back in episode 178, called me to talk about the importance of this bill to U.S. farmers and their employees. In fact, over 300 agricultural organizations supported the bill. Ag labor reform...
Mar 30, 2021•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thanks to the FieldWork podcast for sponsoring this episode. Visit www.FieldWork.org to learn more. This episode is a good follow up to Episode 250 about one example of how agtech is helping smallholder farmers in developing countries. We are again talking about the potential for agtech in developing markets in this episode, but this time from a different perspective. My guest Igor Buchatskiy sees real opportunities in very large integrated agricultural operations. Whereas last week we focused o...
Mar 24, 2021•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thanks to the FieldWork podcast for sponsoring this episode. Visit www.FieldWork.org to learn more. We talk a lot about the types of technologies that are geared towards larger operations, but what’s out there that has the potential to really improve the lives of small farmers, especially of those in developing countries. We have a really interesting example of one of these innovations in this episode. Weather Risk Management Services is an India-based company that collects data to help producer...
Mar 17, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thanks to the FieldWork podcast for sponsoring this episode. Visit www.FieldWork.org to learn more. David Doll is the General Manager of Rota Unica Agriculture based in Portugal. He grew up on a direct-to-consumer apple and peach orchard in southern Indiana, then got a master’s degree in plant pathology from UC Davis. After a decade as a farm advisor for the University of California focused on tree nuts, he took on his current role of moving to Portugal to manage a large-scale diversified tree c...
Mar 10, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast We can all agree that sustainability that comes at the expense of productivity and efficiency is not truly sustainable at all. We are going to need to meld together what’s best for the productivity and profitability of growers with the ecosystem services they can provide. Just recently agtech company FluroSat announced that they acquired another agtech company, Dagan , and the combined company was re-branded to a new name: Regrow . You might remember FluroSat founder Anastasia Volkova from her f...
Mar 03, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast The question of “what are the real problems in agriculture that need to be solved?” is one we ask often here on this show. If you ask that to a dozen people, you’ll probably get about 20 different answers. But herbicide resistance is one that hits home for many. As you’re about to hear, the tools we’ve been using for decades are becoming less and less effective, and the pipeline for new active ingredients has been empty for a long time. Every year more and more weeds show signs of resistance - w...
Feb 24, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today Janette Barnard co-hosts to bring us an innovative virtual fencing product for cattle ranchers. Frank Wooten joins us as the founder of Vence . Vence offers producers optionality in their grazing operations whether large or small. This technology provides for rotational grazing opportunities while bridging obstacles such as large uneven terrain, poor connectivity and weather dynamics. The ramifications of this opportunity may allow US producers to better compete in the grass fed and grass ...
Feb 17, 2021•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s show connects back to episode 241 with Craig Rupp of Sabanto, where we talked about, among many other things, how the Climate Corp has been able to become a central data collection platform on so many large scale farms. Ranjeeta Singh, the Chief Product Officer of The Climate Corp joins us to further explore data ownership, product strategy and design thinking. Ranjeeta was hired last year to drive the product strategy and roadmap for Climate’s digital farming solutions. She has more tha...
Feb 10, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is one of two short episodes I’m releasing for you today, both exploring some aspect of farm data. You may have already listened to the first part with Dr. Terry Griffin at Kansas State University. Now we turn our attention to another Purdue graduate, Aaron Gault, cofounder and agronomy manager of Advanced Agrilytics. Advanced Agrilytics offers agronomy services equipped with their analytics platform, which helps farmer customers get a better picture of what’s working and not working in the...
Feb 03, 2021•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast For the first time, I’m releasing two episodes on the same day. I’ve trimmed each of the two episodes down to about half of my normal length so the total time commitment on your part is still about the same as a regular week, but if you’re a subscriber, you probably already noticed, there are two today. There’s a few reasons for this, but mostly it’s to try something new. This isn’t something I’m planning to keep doing on a regular basis, but maybe occasionally, if you like it, so let me know wh...
Feb 03, 2021•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Big shoutout to two new members of the FoA community this week, Italo Guedes and Sara Faivre, thank you both for your involvement and support. If you’d like to support this show and join a community of some really smart people passionate about ag, you can do so at www.patreon.com/agriculture . For years, I have been on a somewhat public quest to understand regenerative agriculture. Where is the line between regenerative and not regenerative? Are these claims I’m hearing of more profit with very ...
Jan 27, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Craig Rupp is the CEO and founder of Sabanto. Prior to founding Sabanto he was a cofounder of 640 Labs where FieldView Drive was originally created. The first part of today’s episode will be about Craig’s journey at 640 Labs and its eventual acquisition by Climate Corp. Despite all of these impressive innovations and industry game-changers, that’s not the only thing he joins us to share about today. His current project, Sabanto, is gaining momentum and continuing to develop its autonomous tracto...
Jan 20, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast In recent years, the idea of farmers getting paid based on stewardship has really taken off. Whether that’s the discussion of companies paying for carbon sequestration, soil conservation, water quality or any other number of “ecosystem services”, it seems to be a trend that is not going away any time soon. But how much real demand is there for this vs. just marketing and PR? Obviously, we all want cleaner air and water, but who is lining up to pay for it to create the right incentives to make it...
Jan 13, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we are joined by Naeem Zafar. Naeem is a 7x serial entrepreneur and 5x CEO, with multiple successful exits. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of TeleSense, an IoT company creating real-time wireless sensing and predictive analytics for the stored grain industry. TeleSense is a portfolio company of Fulcrum Global Capital and adds to their story that we have had the privilege to share with you so far. A lot of the attention has been paid to sensors in agronomy with soil, water, etc. But...
Jan 06, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Around the new year I like to reflect on previous episodes and pull out insights that I think are important for the future of agriculture. As I reflected on the content from this past year, an insight became immediately clear: agtech has a long way to go. As much as we talk about the money that has poured into the industry and how much potential there is for the future of agriculture, progress has been, by most measures, slow. And change - in a lot of cases - has been minimal. This isn’t an indi...
Dec 30, 2020•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Check out another great ag podcast: www.OffIncome.com . Today’s episode is really one of those that I think embodies my vision for this show. It’s the vision you just heard me reference: where we take innovative ideas, in this case artificial intelligence, and we look at the point in which the meet practical realities. The reason this is so important to me, is: first, it’s so much easier to learn and understand new technologies by observing their use cases. And secondly, I am convinced this inte...
Dec 23, 2020•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the biggest criticisms of ag tech and really many ag innovations in general is they often seem to be a solution that is looking for a problem rather than the alternative. This mismatch is often doomed to fail leaving many ag entrepreneurs frustrated. The Beef Alliance is trying to change that in the cattle feeding industry through their program called Feeding Innovation, a Beef Alliance Startup Challenge. The Beef Alliance wants smart entrepreneurial, problem solvers to see real potential...
Dec 16, 2020•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Victory Farms is a Tilapia farming operation on Lake Victoria in Kenya. Since it was founded in 2015 it has become the largest fish farm in East Africa and is now the fastest growing Tilapia Farm in all of Africa. Joseph Rehmann is the CEO and founder of Victoria Farms and joins us today to share his journey towards becoming an innovative entrepreneur in Kenya with an environmentally sustainable aquaculture operation. “It really felt like an opportunity to be where I wanted to be, in a field tha...
Dec 09, 2020•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the series finale of exploring agtech adoption with In10t. Co-founder and COO Kevin Heikes joins as co-host to setup this episode which features Josh Miller and Elizabeth Blessum from BASF. Make sure you listen to the other three episodes in the series: FoA 226: The Problem with Farm Data FoA 215: Bridging the Gap Between Farmers and Agtech FoA 194: Accelerating Agtech Kevin reflects on the journey of founding In10t and what we’ve covered in these episodes as well as in his first two Fut...
Dec 02, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Back by popular demand is guest co-host Janette Barnard. She co-hosted on episode 225 about direct-to-consumer meat, and is back today with Lamar Steiger, a consultant who is helping Walmart rethink their beef supply chain. They’re doing some really innovative stuff trying to improve quality and create shared value. Janette is the author of Prime Future, a weekly newsletter about trends in the animal protein value chain, and she’s the managing principal of Rock Road Consulting helping companies ...
Nov 25, 2020•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit another great podcast: www.OffIncome.com . Are agtech and regenerative agriculture at odds? Regenerative is committed to working WITH nature, and agtech is often trying to manipulate nature in some way. Agtech is often automating and trying to displace human capital, when regenerative is often trying to bring people back to the land. Agtech often includes buying new hardware or paying a monthly as a service fee, when regenerative is trying to rely as much as possible on what can be generat...
Nov 18, 2020•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our sponsor: www.OffIncome.com. Today’s episode is a great example of true agricultural innovation. Most of you know our food system is heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers to efficiently get nutrients, especially nitrogen to most of our crops. However, some of those crops, think legumes like soybeans, pulses, and peanuts, have a symbiotic relationship with fungi that enable nitrogen fixation from the air and make it available for the plant. Today’s guest asked the question, what if w...
Nov 11, 2020•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast “We’re going to bring a lot of new, interesting, innovations leapfrogging across the world.” - Francisco Jardim Today we explore an international agtech powerhouse, Brazil. And we have the perfect guest to talk about the developing agtech ecosystem in the country, Francisco Jardim. Francisco is the Founding Partner at SP Ventures which invests across multiple industries, but as you’ll hear, he has particular expertise in agtech. Francisco has been investing with SP Ventures for over 13 years, an...
Nov 04, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Typically when we think of food waste we imagine processed food ending up in the landfill. In this episode we explore a solution to reduce crop waste caused by microbes, mycotoxins or viral particles. Nanoguard Technologies has developed a device to reduce the microbial load without any residue or additional chemical input. Larry Clarke is the CEO of Nanoguard Technologies and joins us today to share the advances the company is making. “Being able to reduce these mycotoxins saves the farmer from...
Oct 28, 2020•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rural locations often have limited connectivity to cellular data. Dr. Sara Spangelo is the CEO and co-founder of Swarm Technologies. Their company launches constellations of small, sandwich-sized, low cost, two-way satellites into lower orbit space to provide affordable global connectivity. Different space programs offer them access to launching their devices including Space-X and Vega among others. “That will provide us with a network of 150 satellites for global continuous coverage - covering ...
Oct 21, 2020•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Great show for you today, especially for the entrepreneurs in the audience. We have on the show Joe Dales, who in his current capacity is the CoFounder and President of Agri & Food Innovation at RH Accelerator in London, Ontario, Canada. In this episode, we talk about the importance and the elusiveness of product-market fit - meaning creating not just a great product or service, but one that the market is eager to pay for. We also talk a lot about attracting and retaining talent to the ag indust...
Oct 14, 2020•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast We talk a lot about data in agriculture. Yield data, aerial data, weather data, soil data, data interoperability, data ownership, and on and on and on. What we’re not talking about enough, however, is data quality. More and more and more data is not helpful unless it is QUALITY data. We have the quantity, there’s no shortage of farm data out there, but how do we improve the QUALITY? We often fall into the trap of assuming more data is better data, when in reality, better data is better data. We’...
Oct 07, 2020•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Can a farmer transition from the commodity market into a full-scale direct-to-consumer brand? The answer is “yes”, and David Newman is proof. But this isn’t a story of an overnight success. The transition for Newman Farm has been in the works since the 1990s. Over the past 20 years he has learned many lessons, and he was kind enough to share some of them on this episode. This is a special episode of the “Future of Agriculture” Podcast because for the first time, the interview did not include our...
Sep 30, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast We've seen the rise of alternative energy and alternative protein, could alternative plastic be next? Mark Remmert is the CEO of Green Dot Bioplastics. This fascinating company manufactures low-cost, biodegradable materials for a variety of uses. There is an obvious sustainability story here, but it's also a peek into what can be a rapidly growing company and industry segment in the coming decades. Green Dot is a portfolio company of Fulcrum Global Capital, who partnered with us on this episode....
Sep 23, 2020•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Daren Williams joins the show to help us better understand the role of producer-led commodity groups. Daren is the Senior Director of Global Communications at the Almond Board of California. He has worked in agricultural communications for over 30 years, much of that with producer-led commodity groups like almonds, beef, apple, dairy and pork. The Almond Board of California supports all 7,600 almond growers, as well as many others in the almond growing community from suppliers and beekeepers to ...
Sep 16, 2020•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
