CropTalk

Kyle Barnett

Welcome to CropTalk, Your favorite podcast for all things greenhouses, CEA, and AgTech! Whether you've been with us since day one or you're a brand-new listener (hi, welcome, grab a seat!), we're here to bring you insightful conversations with the people shaping the future of agriculture.​ Hosted by the endlessly curious Kyle Barnett, CropTalk dives into everything from growing tips and industry trends to personal stories and business advice. We talk with growers, greenhouse operators, AgTech innovators, and anyone with a good story to tell. It's like chatting with your smartest friends over coffee, except about crops (and usually with fewer coffee spills). Now powered by IUNU, CropTalk has had a little glow-up. We've added more resources, expanded our guest list, and doubled down on making every episode better than ever. So whether you're here for the wisdom, some entertainment, or both, you're in the right place. New listeners, longtime fans, welcome to the CropTalk family. Let's talk crops and grow together!

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  1. 281: The Plant Leads the Operation w/ Pieter Slaman & Tim Van Hissenhoven

    Episode 281

    281: The Plant Leads the Operation w/ Pieter Slaman & Tim Van Hissenhoven

    In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Pieter Slaman, founder of GaaS Solutions and advisor to Green Gardens in Slovenia, and Tim Van Hissenhoven of Cultivators. Pieter spent over a decade scaling Little Leaf Farms into one of North America's leading greenhouse lettuce operations, while Tim was raised in a Belgian greenhouse, spent years in commercial hydroponic lettuce in the Netherlands, and now takes operations from first business concept through technology selection, startup, and grower training. We walk through the discipline both of them practice the same way, letting the plant lead the operation while sales, finance, and the boardroom organize around it, and the morning walkthrough that tells them within minutes whether a facility is healthy, from sizing up labor by the cars in the lot to reading the propagation field first. We cover why the first seven to eight days after seeding decide the fate of the crop, and how Pieter holds germination at 97 to 98% through redesigned germination boxes, screening, and fogging. We get into the failures they see most, greenhouses engineered around a technology instead of the crop, projects sited where the grower fights the climate every day, and operators who forget they run a low-margin business with no buffer. We also cover vertical farming's narrow economic window, the finance-versus-grower fight over yield as equipment ages and light degrades, and how they pressure-test vendor claims of 2.5 to 25% yield gains. The conviction that the fundamentals have to be right before any technology earns its place runs through the entire conversation.

    59 min
  2. 282. Innovation Doesn't Sell Itself w/ Jennifer Neujahr and Ted Buis

    Episode 282

    282. Innovation Doesn't Sell Itself w/ Jennifer Neujahr and Ted Buis

    In this episode of CropTalk, we sit down with Jennifer Neujahr and Ted Buis, co-founders of Next Step Solutions. Between them they bring nearly six decades in horticulture: Jennifer spent more than three decades introducing products across six continents, including the 60X scale-up of Hydra fiber while building the horticulture group at Profile Products, and Ted grew a Dutch substrate company from €40 million to €200 million in turnover across 11 operations in nine countries. We get into why innovation doesn't sell itself, and why grower economics decides whether a new product gets adopted no matter how good the technology is. We walk through their Innovation Journey framework, the five steps from unvalidated technology to validation, commercial proof, funding, and scale, and Ted's point that real strategy means being clear on what you won't do. We cover the substrate market itself: the Wageningen University projections for global growing media demand through 2050, where the missing volume comes from, and the place of peat, coconut coir, and wood fiber alongside emerging materials like rice hulls, sugarcane bagasse, miscanthus, hemp fiber, and hydrogels. We also cover the costs growers overlook, from disease pressure to the 10 to 25% sell-through loss tied to pay-by-scan in North American retail. We close on predictions: fewer but larger operators, food security pulling India, China, and Africa into controlled environment production, and the new crops surfacing from wasabi to cacao. The case that a market has to be built before it can be scaled runs through the entire conversation.

    54 min
See All Season 7 (2)

4.7
out of 5
38 Ratings

About

Welcome to CropTalk, Your favorite podcast for all things greenhouses, CEA, and AgTech! Whether you've been with us since day one or you're a brand-new listener (hi, welcome, grab a seat!), we're here to bring you insightful conversations with the people shaping the future of agriculture.​ Hosted by the endlessly curious Kyle Barnett, CropTalk dives into everything from growing tips and industry trends to personal stories and business advice. We talk with growers, greenhouse operators, AgTech innovators, and anyone with a good story to tell. It's like chatting with your smartest friends over coffee, except about crops (and usually with fewer coffee spills). Now powered by IUNU, CropTalk has had a little glow-up. We've added more resources, expanded our guest list, and doubled down on making every episode better than ever. So whether you're here for the wisdom, some entertainment, or both, you're in the right place. New listeners, longtime fans, welcome to the CropTalk family. Let's talk crops and grow together!

Information

  • Creator
    Kyle Barnett
  • Episodes
    281
  • Seasons
    7
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2024, CropTalk Media, a iUNU entity
  • Show Website
    CropTalk

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