Future of Agriculture

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 both Peter and Vincent van Wingerden. Peter has a background in engineering and started his company to build large buildings on the water. His experience in New York City in 2013 prompted him to focus full time on the concept of a floating farm. He’ll talk more about that in the moment. Joining Peter is his son Vincent, who also happens to work in agtech with Microsoft. Vincent is a Technical Architect for data and AI and ag is one of the sectors he is working in. It was so great to have both Peter and Vincent on the interview to talk about the floating farm, and about agricultural technology and sustainability more broadly.  Stay tuned to the end of the episode for a short profile on Vence, a company we featured by in 246 and has since become a portfolio company of Merck Animal Health Ventures.  Support the Future of Agriculture podcast by joining the FoA community! www.Patreon.com/agriculture 

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 led to innovations for crops such as corn, cotton, and wheat. John earned his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the USDA before going into industry. He is also part owner of a family ranching operation in Montana.  John started thinking about genetics for vertical farming while still at Bayer, but they decided that the vertical farming industry was so different, it not only needed it’s own products, but it’s own company focused on it. It was at that time that Bayer and investment company Temasek formed Unfold as it’s own independent startup focused exclusively on vertical farming. John was tasked with building this company from scratch.  **JOIN THE FOA COMMUNITY: www.patreon.com/agriculture

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 trajectory, and explore how people and technology can play a role in creating a better future. I’m excited to share with you today’s conversation with farmer and Stockcropper co-founder Zack Smith. If you’ve listened to the episode with Joe Bassett, or the recent episode with Paul Greive of Pasturebird, or if you spend any time on ag twitter or ag youtube, you probably have an idea of what the StockCropper is all about. But today’s episode goes deeper into why these types of innovations are important. We talk about consolidation in ag and its impact on rural communities. Zack shares about his journey into soil health and how that’s changed his operation and led him to the point that he felt it was critical that he find a way to incorporate animals onto his crop land. And we talk about these two diverging paths of being the low cost producer vs being a value added producer. A lot of great stuff in today’s episode.  It used to be common practice for farmers to raise a diverse mix of animals and crops in a somewhat integrated system. Over the years through technological and policy changes, most farmers became more specialized, and today the majority of our crops and livestock are produced separate from each other. However, this creates other challenges that Zack will talk more about, and there is a growing push to try to integrate crops and livestock more for the sake of soil, the environment, and rural economies. StockCropper is creating a system to help with this. Their first product is the world’s first multi-species, solar-powered, electrically-driven, autonomous mobile grazing system, called the ClusterCluck. Zack’s going to talk a lot more about the system and what it represents for the future of agriculture.    

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 roles and acquisitions to working for Merck Animal Health in 2011. Stephen built the animal health ventures group from its foundation in 2016 - developing the team, ways of thinking and processes that are needed to invest, partner and work with young technology businesses that are of strategic interest to Merck Animal Health.  Today’s episode covers how an established industry leader embraces technology as a core competency, what the acquisition of Antelliq meant to that end, the role of strategic investors in the early stage startup ecosystem, and his thoughts for where the future of animal agtech is headed.

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 farming operations and supply chains. The Yield is planning an expansion into the U.S. market this year after establishing themselves in Australia over the past seven years. We have an interesting conversation about their approach to farm data, why their playbook is a different approach from other digital ag companies, her thoughts on data ownership, and the need for more holistic approaches to agtech. 

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 this is part two of the interview, and I highly encourage you to go back and listen to part one if you haven’t done so yet. Kristjan talked in that episode about his transition from working in accounting to coming back to his family’s farm, the business principles and processes he has put in place to grow his operation, and a lot of just great business advice relevant to not just farmers, but anyone who is trying to run their business better.    We continue that theme today as we dive into the operating system that Kristjan uses to run his company. When I say operating system, some of you might think I mean software, and that’s not what I mean at all. This is adapted from a program called the Entrepreneurial Operating System or EOS. We talk about the principles involved which include vision, people, data, issues, process, and traction.    Kristjan describes his scorecard of 15 key metrics that he tracks to make sure his business is performing well and headed in the right direction. In the last episode he talked about some of the financial metrics that are included in the 15, but today he’ll go into some of the other important metrics he tracks.

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 came back to farming with a focus on profitability. He is a graduate of Texas A&M’s The Executive Program for Agricultural Producers (TEPAP), which you will hear reference a couple of times today.  Danny Klinefelter of TEPAP, whose name will also come up in the interview, refers to Kristjan as “one of the most progressive young farmers he knows”. On top of all of that, Kristjan is also the co-founder of online farm labor platform WorkHorse Hub as well as Maverick Ag - providing custom designed lending, accounting, and insurance solutions to producers.   For this interview, I’m doing something I almost never do: I’m splitting it into two episodes because I thought there was so much here worth your time. In part one today, we talk about the financial lessons he learned from being a CPA that he now applies to his farm, the importance of building a team, dealing with landlords, how is thinking about policy and sustainability, and more. Next week we will go over the operating system he uses to do all of this as well as some of his views on agtech - so that’s just a teaser to listen in again next week.  Know some other strategic, forward-thinking, unconventional producers that should be featured on this show? Email me: tim@aggrad.com

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 companion that increases production efficiency, improves farmworker safety, and provides real time data and analytics. So think like a fully autonomous cart or wheelbarrow that transports table grapes from where they are picked to where they are loaded out of the vineyard.  We definitely talk more about Future Acres in this episode and Suma’s vision for the intersection of people and technology in agriculture. We also talk about the labor problems that technologies like this help solve. But mostly, we talk about ideas for funding companies like this. Especially, the venture studio that Future Acres was born out of, what they’ve learned from equity crowdfunding, and a tiny little bit on leveraging communities of people to form special purpose vehicles or SPVs which are ad hock groups of investors that participate alongside VCs or angel investors. So much fascinating stuff covered in this episode.  Suma’s career got started as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali working with smallholder farmers. From there, she joined a high growth microfinance startup in India which IPO’d and eventually sold for a couple billion dollars. Then she returned home to the U.S., and after business school jumped into climate and agriculture with renewable energy projects followed by cofounding an indoor ag startup called FarmShelf. But she felt pulled back to outdoor agriculture and she found this opportunity to start Future Acres at a venture studio, and that is where we dive into today’s episode with Future Acres CEO Suma Reddy. 

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 a host of other problems: health problems, climate change, environmental degradation, inequities, and unfortunately the list goes on.    New values have emerged from consumers that want more out of our food system beyond just the price, safety, taste and convenience which of course remain vital.  After spending some time reflecting on the past 300 episodes of this show, I’ve compiled a list of seven consumer values that I think will continue to shape the future of the ag industry, and I’ve drawn from former guests to share them with you today.  Now I realize fads come and go. But I don’t think we’re talking about fads here. I think we are talking about underlying values that will continue to inform the way consumers eat, buy, and vote in the future. And we as an ag industry ought to be aware of them and factor them into our strategies for the future of agriculture. Climate Impact Nutrition/Health Connection to an Authentic Source Fun & Social Experiences Hunger and Poverty Alleviation Waste Reduction Social Impact

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 innovation caught the attention of one of the largest animal protein companies in the country, Perdue Farms, who acquired Pasturebird in 2019. Janette Barnard returns to co-host today’s episode which is an incredible story of entrepreneurship, technology, regenerative farming, and a glimpse into the future of agriculture.