Future of Agriculture

Check out the SWAT Agronomy Podcast on any podcast platform!  Please participate in our listener survey to help us focus the direction of the show:  https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU If you’ve ever tried to grow any food crop - shoot, even a garden - you know that insect pests are unavoidable. Over the past 100 years, chemical pesticides have been developed as efficient and cost effective ways for farmers to manage these pests. But as I’m sure you know, they are not without their downsides: pests are building resistance, they are constantly under environmental scrutiny, and frankly, there hasn’t been much innovation in this space.  Our guests today, Anna Rath and Ben Cicora of the company Vestaron say: we’ve seen this before. They’ll lay out a case for you that what’s happening right now in ag chem has already played out in human chemistry. The clear winner has been biotechnology: namely using peptides, which are essentially just proteins except smaller, instead of chemistry. In human pharmaceuticals, this gave rise to companies like Genentech and Amgen. In agriculture, Vestaron is pioneering their peptide-based products that have the same effectiveness as the chemical alternatives, but with a new mode of action, and without some of those negative externalities of chemicals.  Now I want to be clear here, because it can get confusing: peptides are different from other biologicals that you hear about in agriculture, and may have even heard about on this show. Those are generally microbes, these are short chain amino acids. Again, they’re basically proteins, only smaller. So they’re not ag chemicals, but they’re also not biologicals in the classic agricultural definition of the term. Making this clear is actually part of their challenge in commercialization, which we get into in this episode.  I know some of this gets a little technical, but I highly recommend you stick around and have a listen to this episode. If this is the first time you’re hearing about peptides, I guarantee you it won’t be the last. 

Please participate in our listener survey to help us focus the direction of the show:  https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU  While we here in the U.S. have an agricultural system built upon exports, while our guest today lives in Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates which currently imports 80% of their food. What we view here as needed viable technology to create a more sustainable agriculture is likely to be different there.  We have on the show His Excellency Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi. Dr. Tariq is the Director General of the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO). He leads the organisation’s efforts to grow and diversify Abu Dhabi’s economy through private sector investment. He also oversees strategic initiatives that support the emirate’s economic growth and reputation on the world stage. One of those initiatives was to entice leading agtech companies from around the world to establish new R&D and production facilities in the emirate. In 2020, ADIO announced partnerships with AeroFarms, Madar Farms, RNZ and Responsive Drip Irrigation to bring innovation to the area to turn sand into farmland, solve complex global agriculture challenges and expand the profile of local food producers. ADIO is investing $100 million in those four companies to build facilities in Abu Dhabi, each tasked with solving regional and global challenges. They are also partnering with three AgTech companies, US-based Nanoracks, India’s FreshToHome and Pure Harvest to develop ‘land, sea & space’ AgTech projects in Abu Dhabi, offering $41.3m in incentives to the innovative companies to develop next generation agriculture solutions to support food production in arid and desert climates. In this episode, we talk about these initiatives from a high level, and how Dr. Tariq is looking at bringing ag innovation into the region to create a more food secure environment. His Excellency holds a PhD in Economics from the Imperial College London, and graduate degrees from Columbia University and London Business School.   Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website

Check out the SWAT Agronomy Podcast on any podcast platform!  Please participate in our listener survey to help us focus the direction of the show:  https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU  Over the past decade, one of the areas agriculture has changed significantly is in the number of available digital tools that can be used on the farm. On the surface this is a great thing, but if - and only if - these tools are easy to use and produce actionable results. And even then, a farmer is only going to use so many tools even if they are all great.  Jim Ethington has been thinking about these issues for over a decade. He started at The Climate Corp in 2008, when it was still known as WeatherBill and was not yet exclusively an ag-focused company. He stayed with the company for a decade, through many milestones including the acquisition by Monsanto and the integration of the 640 drive that we featured in episode 241 with Craig Rupp. He left the company in 2018 as VP of Product to take a job as the CEO of Arable, which is where he still works today.  Arable offers systems that are easy to install on any farm to enable data-driven decisions using Measurements that Matter. With real-time, continuous visibility and predictive analytics of over 40 metrics, their flagship product, the Arable Mark is a straightforward and versatile tool that can be adapted to any field's demands, and can satisfy any producer's need to know even the most granular tidbit of information about their harvest.    Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website

Today’s episode is brought to you by FieldAgent by Sentera. One key piece of the agtech conversation that often gets overlooked is the most likely customer for a lot of digital tools may not actually be a farmer. For many of them, an advisor to that farmer may be the one actually performing that task, and may have the biggest vested interest in adopting cutting-edge technologies.  We’re calling this little mini-series “The Tech-Enabled Advisor.” We will profile some of the farmers’ advisers: agronomists, ag retailers, consultants, and other local professionals that farmers rely on for guidance, advice, and implementation. To help me identify the right tech-savvy advisors for these episodes, and to make sure we hear from different types of guests, I’ve asked various agtech companies to partner with me on these episodes.  The first one to say yes, was the sponsor of today’s episode: FieldAgent by Sentera. FieldAgent enables agronomic advisors to make more timely decisions by taking data they’re already using on a daily basis – such as satellite, weather, equipment, soil, and field operations and integrate it with drone data and their machine learning capabilities. In this episode, we are joined by Matt Larson, Agronomy Sales Manager for CHS in Holdredge, Nebraska. CHS is a leading global agribusiness owned by farmers, ranchers and cooperatives across the United States. Matt and his team of 6 utilize technology like FieldAgent alongside Climate FieldView and CHS’s Agellum platform to service their farmer customers.   “The biggest thing we need to do to separate ourselves is bring new ideas. Everybody has a fertilizer price. Everybody sells a seed of some kind or a chemical of some kind. The big thing that we need to do is separate ourselves with technology, being a big one, service, information to growers, and just being able to offer those different ideas that maybe somebody else hasn't quite caught on to yet.” - Matt Larson   Matt has seen the business model of agronomists and agronomy sales evolve over the last 12 years whether it's via communication methods, producer expectations or relationships with the farmers. He has found that farmers want to see more verified data before adopting new technology and a lot of that can now be shared via the new digital platforms.     “Growers have all this data. They have the planting data, they have the seeding data, harvest data, their spraying, all that stuff. What do they do with it? And that's where I think it's our job to dig through the weeds and find out what's the real, what's the fake for them, what makes a difference and then bring that to them.” - Matt Larson    Please participate in our listener survey to help us focus the direction of the show:  https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU  This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast: Matt Larson, Agronomy Sales Manager for CHS in Holdredge, Nebraska Discover how Matt incorporates new technologies like FieldAgent, Climate FieldView and CHS’s Agellum platform for his customers Listen to a discussion about what data matters to producers and what methods do they prefer to use to access it Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website

Please participate in our listener survey to help us focus the direction of the show: https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU Today we get a unique global view into agtech and agribusiness. We are joined by Greg Meyers, who is the Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer of Syngenta based at their world headquarters in Switzerland. Most of you are familiar with Syngenta but you may or may not know they are the largest crop protection company in the world and the third largest seed company in the world. They also provide digital ag platforms to 125 million acres of global crop production.  Greg offers his perspective as someone with a front row seat to the global digitization of agriculture. We talk about the agtech customer in various countries, Syngenta’s acquisition strategy, their role in both digital ag and soil health, and some interesting ideas worth pondering about the future of agriculture.  “The reality of it is that a lot of the growers really have a very specific set of things they're trying to accomplish. And obviously the nature of the work is there's a really compressed window in which those activities have to happen. So if you're trying to create these solutions and they don't fit within that window of work, they really have a hard time finding a fit.” - Greg Meyers Greg comments that he sees a lot of agtech startups with a really innovative piece of technology that doesn’t answer a direct problem the farmer needs solved. “It’s almost like a solution looking for a problem...So what we’re trying to do is to take our innovation experience in chemistry and biology and marry it to agronomy and computer science,” explains Greg. Finding market fit without incorporating these many different aspects of farming within a specific problem and pain point can lead to a lack of interest by the producer. For example, predictive models in Brazil help solve scouting issues for Asian Soybean Rust while in the “mega farms” of Eastern Europe maximizing fuel efficiency and coordinating the use of different farm equipment is a significant advantage. Syngenta has strategically chosen partners and acquisitions to support specific pain points identified by producers in their specific region.  “We focused on companies that have already had traction. They had a great market fit. They already had customers and we acquired them not because of the revenue they were getting, but because they really understood the local market well and they had good customer relationships. They were adding value to the grower. They're adding value to the growers advisor….and so we've really built our software platform around trying to be able to help the whole ecosystem that helps farmers.” - Greg Meyers This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast: Meet Greg Meyers, who is the Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer of Syngenta Explore the agtech industry from a high level perspective and why Greg thinks some technologies are more successful than others in getting adopted Discover the goals of Syngenta’s acquisitions and how they choose partners going forward Learn about the future of Syngenta and where their focus is for the future Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website

Please participate in our listener survey to help us focus the direction of the show: https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU  E-commerce is nothing new. I think all of us have probably bought more online than ever this past year. But the company we’re featuring today, Pinduoduo, has taken this to a whole other level by gamifying e-commerce and making it a social experience. A big part of their strategy is selling agricultural products online. One of the biggest drivers changing the future of agriculture is consumer preferences, what they buy and how they buy it. Today we explore some pretty incredible insights into how this is changing in China.  We have on the show Xin Yi Lim, who is the executive director of Sustainability and Agricultural Impact at Pinduoduo. The platform, which has been described as “where Costco meets Disney”, started in 2015 and has grown to over 700 million active users in China. Before joining Pinduoduo in 2018, Xin Yi worked for SIngapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, both in its Singapore and New York offices as a technology and media analyst.  “Really what we are trying to provide is a way for producers or merchants to sell a larger volume of products in a shorter period of time. And in so doing, they can reap the benefits of economies of scale and how we do that is through this notion of a team purchase. So it starts off by the realization that for a lot of people, what you actually want to buy for things like say food or fresh produce can be influenced by those around you.” - Xin Yi Lim   She highlights that this opportunity gives producers “a lot more visibility” to their consumers by allowing customers to share their interests and purchases. Pinduoduo introduced team purchase to consumers with discounted products and has expanded to including a gaming component. Participants can play a game that results in free or discounted produce. This allows Pinduoduo to not only get more engagement from their users but also to see which participants are most influential to other users. In fact 90% of their revenue comes from merchant advertising targeting likely consumers.    “As we continue to grow, I think it's really also gone beyond just a team purchase. It's also encouraging more and more interactions by the users with the platform. So like what I mentioned earlier, that social graph of how you interact with your friends, how you influence them and they influence you. That helps us to refine our idea of what it is that you're interested in and give you the right recommendations.” - Xin Yi Lim   Pinduoduo has expanded beyond grocery items and also supplies agricultural inputs among other products. Xin Yi Lim comments that she has seen value and influence for agricultural producers from live streaming efforts by scientists, agronomists and other fellow producers suggesting the ongoing expansion of the scope of potential influence.    This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast: Meet Xin Yi Lim, who is the executive director of Sustainability and Agricultural Impact at Pinduoduo Explore this e-commerce platform that is influencing consumer trends and allowing producers to distribute their product at a higher volume Learn about the wide array of products Pinduoduo provides to its customers and the techniques they use to entice consumers to buy on their platform   Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website

Thanks to the Field Work podcast for sponsoring this episode. Visit www.FieldWork.org to learn more.  Interest in local and regional food systems has been trending upward for a long time. The pandemic has only accelerated consumer interest in having strong relationships with where they buy their food. But what sounds easy on the outside: farmer produces food and consumer buys it - is much more complicated in practice. First of all, there aren’t enough local/regional slaughterhouses for livestock producers to scale their direct-to-consumer operations because of low margins, regulations, and labor. Today’s episode tells the story of how Adam Parks built a local meat business, and how he is part of a group that has formed a cooperative to solve this problem of local meat processing. Adam is the founder of Victorian Farmstead Meat Company located in Sebastopol, California. They have been selling local meat in the area since 2010 at farmers markets, through a CSA (community supported agriculture), and more recently through home delivery.    “I developed a network of six to eight local ranches that raised for me… And we set about taking fresh meat to the farmer's market. That was kind of what made us unique was that we were the first local people to really bring fresh meat to the farmer's market.” - Adam Parks   Adam’s collaboration with local producers allowed him to take advantage of a trend he noticed after the 2008 recession involving the consumer preference for a more controlled, less extravagant splurge with high quality food items. Adam also created a newsletter that has helped to build a relationship and trust with customers developed at farmers markets.    “Once we gain that trust, we protect it like gold. Our long-time customers will tell you that they don't worry about what they buy from us. They know that it's as good a product in terms of how it's raised and how it's processed as they can find. And so they just get what we have available.” - Adam Parks   Adam remarks that having control over the meat processing aspect of his operation became more attractive as his business continued to expand. He started a 120 square foot butcher shop and is hoping to expand to a much larger standalone facility very soon. Slaughter and USDA sanctioned facilities tend to be hours away which is another part of the business he hopes to make more efficient and sustainable. Adam is one of 16 founding members of the Bay Area Ranchers Cooperative (also known as BAR-C), which is a coop of local producers who are pooling resources to build a mobile USDA-inspected meat processing facility in the area. They hope to be in production this May.    This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast: Meet Adam Parks, the founder of Victorian Farmstead Meat Company located in Sebastopol, California Explore how Adam grew Victorian Farmstead Meat Company through local farmers markets and collaborations with producers Discover Bay Area Ranchers Cooperative (also known as BAR-C), which is a coop of local producers developing a semi-permanent USDA sanctioned slaughter facility   Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website

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 like this has been attempted for decades, but has never been passed, mostly due to politics.  First, what does this bill do? Put simply, it improves the process for H-2A workers, which is the name of the visa for temporary agricultural workers. It also makes it mandatory that agricultural employers e-verify employees legal work status for employment. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, it establishes a program for agricultural workers and their families who are already in the United States to earn legal status through continued agricultural employment if they meet certain requirements. 

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 on smallholder farmers, this episode is about the very large, sophisticated operations that are hungry for technology and innovation in the developing world.  Igor is a mechanical engineer by training, but after getting his MBA at the University of Chicago, he started a career in management consulting. That led to a job with a family office back in his home country of Ukraine. It was in that role that he discovered his love and fascination for agriculture in 2007. Since that time, he’s worked all over the world with agricultural operations and agtech startups. He’s based in Boston, but you never know where in the world he is going to be. In fact, at the time of this interview he was working on a project in Saudi Arabia.    “(Working in agriculture) was a revelation. Seriously, I thought wow, that's what I should have been doing for the last 10 years instead of mechanical engineering and management consulting because it was just an amazing experience. So I dove head in into that business and we started growing it, bringing new technology, new breed, new genetics, et cetera, et cetera.” - Igor Buchatskiy   Igor shares that he was able to be a part of the “Ukranianian Golden Rush” which involved former Soviet union republics recovering from the collective farm system that was no longer in place. The economics and margins were very favorable in the agricultural sector that had previously flown under the radar of other investors. He observed the consolidation of many small farms into large dominant players in the industry.    “What gets me excited is the fact that there are so many bright ideas, you know out of the box ideas that are happening now. And we are at the point in time where the technologies are becoming more accessible, more affordable, and we're getting to the sort of a scale at which all these technologies and all these ideas are starting to converge.” - Igor Buchatskiy   Igor shares that in Ukraine and Russia he is observing a lot of large vertically integrated operations. By virtue of the size and employment support of these companies, they are able to use, take advantage of and capitalize on new agriculture technologies where a small benefit in margin can create major revenue on that scale. This allows for large gains in agricultural technology companies by engaging with some of these major players.    This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast: Meet Igor Buchatskiy an entrepreneur, ag startup mentor, and board advisor. Discover Igor’s journey into agriculture and the potential he saw in the industry Learn about the agriculture industry in the Ukraine and Russia and the trend towards large vertically integrated operations   Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website

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 producers manage their risks. The company started off as offering just crop insurance products, which is still a big part of their business, but they’ve also expanded into products that incentivize and reward farmers for using risk management strategies.  In other words, a farmer pays a premium and agrees to certain farming practices. In return they are provided a guaranteed yield, and paid if their yield drops below that threshold. This helps take away the risk of adopting new practices. Weather Risk Management Services has worked with over 30,000 farmers in India already, and hopes to grow to one million farmers in the next five years. Founder Sonu Agrawal joins us to share the process, goals and impacts of the company. “So in many developing countries … not only in India, but several countries in Asia and Africa, there is very low or no access to crop insurance contracts. And since there is no crop insurance, access to finance is also a big challenge because banks do not lend money to small farmers. The banks are not covered against losses due to adverse weather events. So there is a complete lack of access to crop insurance.” Sonu Agrawal Sonu shares that Weather Risk Management Services provides access to affordable crop insurance that also provides incentives to “the farmer to use better risk management practices.” These practices include things like using drought resistant seeds, applying additional nutrition to the crops or arranging irrigation to their fields. Satellite data helps to monitor these additional practices to make sure the crop is insured appropriately. Farmers then either benefit by way of a reduced premium or increased coverage based on a projected yield. “Before we enter a village, a lot of analysis is done…..So we analyze and then identify the more important risks or the factors which have resulted in sub optimized yield. And then the whole production process, what we call the package of practices, is designed in such a way so that we can improve the yields gradually.” - Sonu Agrawal Farmers are offered smaller contracts when they start with Weather Risk Management Services. This is done to overcome any trust concerns and allow producers to take advantage of the gradual increased yield at their desired pace. There is a lot of learning done by the farmers and the company to assess what yields can be expected and what measures can be taken for improvement in these initial smaller contracts. Sonu shares that in the first year of collaboration with a farmer they expect a 5-7% increase in yield, followed by 10-12% in the second year and up to 15-20% in the third year.  This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast: Meet Sonu Agrawal the founder of Weather Risk Management Services Discover what their company offers small farmers in rural areas of India where crop insurance and financing access is limited Explore the innovative methods used to incentivize increased yield production practices Join the FOA Community! Be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of the ag industry. I’m sending out my email newsletter on a more regular basis, focusing on what I call the front lines of agtech: where product meets producer. You can sign up for that at www.FutureOfAg.com. There’s an email icon in the center of the page, just click on that and it will take you to a signup form. Do you have suggestions for topics to be explored? Tweet them to me @timhammerich or email them to tim@aggrad.com.  Find us online! Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website