395 episodes

This show explores the people, companies, and ideas shaping the future of the agriculture industry. Every week, Tim Hammerich talks to the farmers, founders, innovators and investors to share stories of agtech, sustainability, resiliency and the future of food.

We believe innovation is an important part of the future of agriculture, and real change comes from collaboration between scientists, entrepreneurs and farmers. Lead with optimism, but also bring data!

For more details on the guests featured on this show, visit the blog at www.FutureOfAgriculture.com.

Future of Agriculture Tim Hammerich

    • Business

This show explores the people, companies, and ideas shaping the future of the agriculture industry. Every week, Tim Hammerich talks to the farmers, founders, innovators and investors to share stories of agtech, sustainability, resiliency and the future of food.

We believe innovation is an important part of the future of agriculture, and real change comes from collaboration between scientists, entrepreneurs and farmers. Lead with optimism, but also bring data!

For more details on the guests featured on this show, visit the blog at www.FutureOfAgriculture.com.

    FoA 421: Decision-Grade Farm Data With Jim Ethington of Arable

    FoA 421: Decision-Grade Farm Data With Jim Ethington of Arable

    Headstorm: https://headstorm.com/
    AGPILOT: https://headstorm.com/agpilot/
    Arable: https://www.arable.com/
    FoA 256: Agtech Collaboration and Data-Driven Decision Agriculture with Jim Ethington of Arable
    Today's episode features Arable CEO Jim Ethington. Jim first appeared on this show on episode 256 back in 2021 and I was pleased to get a chance to sit down for a second interview with him in person at World AgriTech in March. 
    His background is impressive. Prior to joining Arable in 2018, he spent 10 years at The Climate Corporation where he was VP of Product and grew the company to 50 million paid acres and built a team from 10 to over 600 individuals. So he started at Climate in 2008 when they were still called Weatherbill and stayed with the company through the big acquisition in 2013 and for years after that. 
    So Jim has been thinking about the challenges and opportunities in digital agriculture for a long long time and it shows in the insights he shares in this episode. 
    If you’re not familiar with Arable, they are an ag technology company that provides data insights and recommendations to help farms be more productive and sustainable. Specifically they have created an intuitive system for farmers and agronomists to optimize irrigation, fertilizer applications and other important farm decisions. This is all based around their Arable Mark 3 device. 
    Jim is also one of the guests suggested by Lawrence King at Headstorm to give one of their client testimonials. Similar to Amie at Wilbur Ellis and Claudia at Microsoft, I wanted to make this one a full length episode because Jim is someone I wanted to have back on the show anyway to get an update on Arable and more of his insights on the future of ag. And he doesn’t disappoint. I’ll drop you into the conversation where he’s explaining the key insight from farmers that informs the work they do at Arable. 

    • 37 min
    FoA 420: Farmer-Driven Innovation With AgLaunch And Ag Ventures Alliance

    FoA 420: Farmer-Driven Innovation With AgLaunch And Ag Ventures Alliance

    Headstorm: https://headstorm.com/
    AGPILOT: https://headstorm.com/agpilot/
    Ag Ventures Alliance: https://agventuresalliance.com/
    AgLaunch: https://aglaunch.com/
    FoA 068: Farmers Investing in AgTech with Spencer Stensrude of Ag Ventures Alliance and Matthew Rooda of SwineTech
    FoA 117: Bridging the Gap Between AgTech Entrepreneurs and Farmers with Pete Nelson of AgLaunch
    Today's episode features Pete Nelson and Margaret Oldham from Aglaunch and Spencer Stensrude at Ag Ventures Alliance. If you’ve been a long time listener to this show - i mean a REALLY long time listener - you heard Spencer back on episode 68 in 2017 and Pete on episode 117 in 2018. I’ll link to both of those classics in the show notes. Since that time the two organizations have partnered together based on a shared mission of investing in farmer-led innovations. They each have unique aspects to their models, which i’ll let Pete, Margaret and Spencer describe to you. But they also are joining forces in a way to put the farmer at the center of investing in and incubating early stage agtech companies. 
    There are some really interesting points brought up in this conversation that I’ve been thinking about a lot since we recorded it a couple of months ago. Things like, should billion dollar unicorn exits be the measure of success for venture capital? Or number of viable lasting companies? Or maybe jobs and economic impact on communities? Is the fact that venture capital gets poured into so many businesses that fail a feature or a bug when it comes to advancing agriculture? And does the fact that we are in a commodity driven business mean that by definition, all of the value created by companies will eventually get squeezed out and extracted by low cost leaders? Some thought provoking questions that I think you’ll enjoy pondering as you listen to Spencer, Margaret, and Pete. 
    Spencer Stensrude invests at the intersection of transformational technology and agriculture. He is the CEO of Ag Ventures Alliance, which is a farmer-owned cooperative with a mission to increase farm profitability. They make venture capital investments in startups with a direct impact on farmers. Before joining AgVA, he started and operated some small businesses, invested in income-producing real estate, and worked in the commercial lending industry.
    Pete Nelson has been experimental farming, venture investing, and creating innovation hubs in agriculture with farmers across the US and Canada since 1997. He is currently co-founder and President of AgLaunch, a nationally recognized farmer-led innovation platform for advancing the next generation of agricultural technologies.
    Margaret Oldham is the Vice President of Innovation at AgLaunch. She is an experienced marketer and coach with a reputation for...

    • 49 min
    FoA 419: Laser Weeding And Growing A Robotics Company Toward An IPO With Paul Mikesell of Carbon Robotics

    FoA 419: Laser Weeding And Growing A Robotics Company Toward An IPO With Paul Mikesell of Carbon Robotics

    Headstorm: https://headstorm.com/
    AGPILOT: https://headstorm.com/agpilot/
    Carbon Robotics: https://carbonrobotics.com/
    Paul is the founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics. What Carbon Robotics is doing is novel and interesting in and of itself, and we’re going to talk a lot about that in today’s episode. But it’s important to note that Paul has a really impressive history of building technology companies outside of agriculture.
    Before starting Carbon Robotics, he co-founded Isilon Systems, a distributed storage company, in 2001. Isilon went public in 2006 and was acquired by EMC for $2.5 billion in 2010. In 2006, Paul co-founded Clustrix, a distributed database startup that was acquired by MariaDB in 2018. Immediately before Carbon, Paul served as Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Uber, where he grew the team and opened the company’s engineering office in Seattle, later focusing on deep learning and computer vision. 
    So in today’s episode we’re going to talk a lot about laser weeding, building a field robotics company, Paul’s views on artificial intelligence and where he sees applications for the tech in agriculture, and the challenges an opportunities ahead for carbon robotics and agtech in general. 
    I’ll drop you into the conversation where Paul is explaining his desire to jump from tech to agtech, and how that transition has been for him. 

    • 37 min
    FoA 418: Bayer's Collaboration With Microsoft | Claudia Roessler | Mark Pendergrast

    FoA 418: Bayer's Collaboration With Microsoft | Claudia Roessler | Mark Pendergrast

    Headstorm: https://headstorm.com/
    AGPILOT: https://headstorm.com/agpilot/
    Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (ADMA): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/data-manager-for-agriculture
    Ag Powered Services: https://agpoweredservices.com/
    "Scaling Sustainability Through Bayer & Microsoft Partnership": https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/bayer-and-microsoft-partnership
    Today's episode features conversations with Claudia Roessler and Mark Pendergrast. A quick heads up on a couple of things before we dive in: first, both of these interviews were recorded at World Agri-Tech in San Francisco and they were other conversations happening in the media room for part of the time, so I hope you’ll forgive a little bit of background noise. Second, similar to Amie Thesingh’s episode last month, I originally recorded these interviews to be spotlight episodes featuring the work Headstorm does. Just like in Amie’s case I thought this story warranted a full-length episode, so we will focus on the work Microsoft and Bayer are doing together, but I will also include the role Headstorm is playing in all of this as well. Just a heads up on that. 
    You heard from both Claudia and Mark as part of our Generative AI episode which was #409, but the focus today is on this initiative started by Microsoft with their Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, or ADMA. We’ll also explore the collaboration with Bayer Cropscience, in particular they’re Ag Powered Services Platform that brings together agronomic data for a variety of applications. 
    Because sometimes this data stuff can get a little abstract, I think it’s probably helpful to level-set with some basics. Starting with cloud services. I think most of us intuitively know what a massive leap forward cloud computing has been for technology in general. From software applications to file storage to other sources of data - cloud computing is how we are able to power digitization. The cloud is not new obviously. But what has become clear is that just giving people access to the cloud isn’t enough to really tap into the power of all of this information - it’s just a place to store it. Moving from stored data to actionable data is a very very heavy lift - especially in an industry like agriculture. 
    So, Microsoft started creating industry-specific data management platforms. They describe this as “industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to connect farm data from disparate sources.” They’ve been successful with similar efforts in other industries like retail, finance and healthcare, and last year they unveiled Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, a continuation of the work they were doing with FarmBeats, which you might remember from episode 266 with Microsoft’s Ranveer Chandra. 
    So when it comes to making data more valuable, the cloud is a massive step forward, now we have another massive step forward in ADMA, and we’re also going to talk about what could be yet another massive step forward Bayer’s Ag Powered Services. Bayer is providing additional data infrastructure that they first developed to use internally, and now are offering to other companies that rely on agronomic data to power their various digital applications. 
    The ultimate goal here though is that data no longer becomes the bottleneck to progress. If a buyer, for example, wants to pay a farmer more for certain agronomic practices, all they need is...

    • 42 min
    FoA 417: Commercializing University Research For Better Nutrient Management | Phospholutions | Sentinel Fertigation

    FoA 417: Commercializing University Research For Better Nutrient Management | Phospholutions | Sentinel Fertigation

    Headstorm: https://headstorm.com/
    AGPILOT: https://headstorm.com/agpilot/
    Phospholutions: https://www.phospholutions.com/
    Sentinel Fertigation: https://www.sentinelfertigation.com/
    I’m a firm believer that in the U.S. our agricultural research and extension programs at our land grant universities truly are national treasures. But of all the outstanding research that’s done at these institutions every year, not enough of it seems to get commercialized. Today we highlight two young entrepreneurs that each began their entrepreneurial journeys at their respective campuses, and are today growing real businesses helping farmers with different aspects of nutrient management. 
    Today, you'll hear from Hunter Swisher, founder and CEO of Phospholutions which initially commercialized research done at Penn State. He does a great job talking about some of the major issues with the status quo when it comes to phosphorous. If you haven’t looked into it before it’s seriously eye opening. 
    Then we’ll move west to Nebraska, where Jackson Stensell formed his company Sentinel Fertigation based on research he was doing as a grad student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He also focuses on nutrient management but specifically on irrigated crops. 
    Hunter Swisher currently serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Phospholutions, Inc., which he founded prior to graduating with his B.S. degree in Plant Sciences from Pennsylvania State University. Phospholutions is a sustainable fertilizer company with the mission of improving global phosphate efficiency. 
    Jackson Stansell is the founder and CEO of Sentinel Fertigation. Sentinel Fertigation leverages satellite imagery and geospatial data to empower precision nutrient management - particularly for nitrogen fertigation. Originally from Dothan, Alabama, Jackson did his undergrad at Harvard where he also played football. He was pursuing a masters degree at Nebraska when he turned the research he was doing into a business and decided to put his PhD on hold to commercialize the technology.

    • 36 min
    FoA 416: Robotic Mushroom Harvesting with Sean O'Connor of 4AG Robotics

    FoA 416: Robotic Mushroom Harvesting with Sean O'Connor of 4AG Robotics

    Headstorm: https://headstorm.com/
    AGPILOT: https://headstorm.com/agpilot/
    4AG Robotics: https://4ag.ai/
    As you heard a bit about in last weeks episode, mushrooms are an incredible indoor crop with a ton of advantages and potential. But they are also extremely labor intensive. 
    “When you have a crop that doubles in size every 24 hours, you're often picking mushrooms at the end of the shift because you know that they'll start colliding with other mushrooms or their caps will open up by the next morning. So you pick them too quickly. Whereas if you know, I can come back in three hours and pick that, you'll gain the extra yield and weight that'll come with it. A robot is, is able to do that, that you know, shift labor can't accommodate.”
    Sean O’Connor and the team at 4AG Robotics are bringing automation to this industry. But they’re not the first to have this idea, which means they have to work a bit harder to gain farmers’ trust. 
    “Decades of people saying that we're gonna solve harvesting through automation, much like the rest of agriculture as well, and decades of people being wrong. So that barrier for acceptance of an MVP is very low, and you gotta have something that truly adds value to them from day one.”
    Today is not only an education in mushroom farming, but a candid look on what it takes to bring technology to an established industry. Sean O’Connor  of 4AG Robotics on today’s Future of Agriculture podcast.

    • 38 min

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