Future Of Agriculture

Calgren Renewable Fuels https://www.calgren.com/  Maas Energy Works: https://www.maasenergy.com/ California Milk Advisory Board: https://www.realcaliforniamilk.com/  Dairy Sustainability Award: https://www.usdairy.com/media/press-releases/2021-dairy-sustainability-awards-winners-10-year-anniversary  Today’s episode is a great story of collaboration, public-private partnership, innovation, and sustainability. Before I introduce the guests on today’s show, let me set the scene for you a little bit: a group of 15 dairies in the central valley of California are getting paid to turn their cow manure into renewable fuel. Twelve of these dairies are connected via underground pipeline that transports biogas from on-farm digesters to a centralized conditioning facility which processes and markets the fuel. So the dairies not only receive a milk check, they also receive a manure check. All the while they are drastically reducing their own emissions and replacing 3 million gallons of fossil-fuel diesel with near-ze

OWL GitHub https://github.com/geezacoleman/OpenWeedLocator Weed AI https://weed-ai.sydney.edu.au/about  Guy Coleman Twitter: https://twitter.com/GeezaColeman William Salter Twitter: https://twitter.com/williamtsalter  Video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/guy-coleman_the-openweedlocator-owl-is-now-live-its-ugcPost-6835703385925283840-LdvF  On the show today we have Guy Coleman, and William Salter. Guy is PhD Student at the University of Sydney and Fulbright Future Scholar currently based at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on the interaction between artificial intelligence for weed recognition and plant morphology in large-scale production systems. Guy also has experience in alternative weed control technologies like lasers and targeted tillage. Willam Salter, who you will also hear called by his nickname in this episode, Tam, is a postdoctoral agricultural scientist at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on several important aspects of plant and weed science, ranging from improvin

AgOpenGPS: https://github.com/farmerbriantee/AgOpenGPS Autonomous Tractor Skiing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-T-rrny1Vk Brian's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efarmerdot  Brian Tischler is a farmer in Alberta, Canada. He farms with his neighbor who he shares equipment with to cover a combined 2,500 acres of wheat, barley, oats, canola, flax, and peas. He started his career in the medical technology industry, which you’re about to hear more about, but then he bought his family’s farm when his dad was ready to retire in the mid 90s.  Brian is going to share how he started learning how to build software to solve a basic problem, and how that lead to a community of thousands of people around the world who are a part of what is now an open source project called AgOpenGPS. We’ve done a few episodes on open source before, and its really inspiring to see farmers, who have always found ways to hack together solutions to their own problems, do the same with digital technologies as well. Today’s episode will fo

OGRAIN: https://ograin.cals.wisc.edu/ (https://ograin.cals.wisc.edu/) YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/uwipm/search?query=erin%20silva Today’s episode is all about organic farming. Now, organic may be a concept that you have strong opinions about one way or another, but no matter what your perspective, I really encourage you to listen to what our guest has to say.  I originally invited today’s guest, Dr. Erin Silva onto the show to clear up one specific question I had: are organic standards so restrictive that it makes it difficult to grow organically and build soil health through practices like no-till. But once we started the interview I started thinking of all sorts of perceptions of organic that Erin was able to clear up for me. If you’re open to really examining the myths and realities of organic agriculture, we’ve got a great show for you.  Dr. Erin Silva is an associate professor and state extension specialist in organic and sustainable cropping systems at University of Wisconsin - Madi

Precision AI: https://www.precision.ai/ Fulcrum Global Capital: https://www.fgcvc.com/ Protein Industries Canada: https://www.proteinindustriescanada.ca/  Today’s episode is another great example of how artificial intelligence and computer vision are impacting the ag industry. Today’s episode will focus on a row crop application. Specifically, we’re talking about new drone spraying technology from Canadian startup Precision AI.  Long time listeners will recall that we’ve talked about drone spraying on the show before, but today’s episode goes even deeper into both the technology and the opportunities that can come from the per plant precision that it offers. Also cool about this episode is our guest, Precision AI founder and CEO Daniel McCann. A three-time startup founder with over 25 years in technology in diverse industries such as artificial intelligence, fintech, security, fast food, and agriculture, Daniel provides a unique perspective on how technology impacts our world.  Daniel was a finalist in th

SomaDetect: https://somadetect.com/ Prime Future Newsletter: https://primefuture.substack.com/ Our guest on today’s show Jordan Lambert actually mentioned back on episode 261. She has a technology that is easily installed in a milking parlor that collects milk data at the individual cow level. Not just on milk quality - which is one big factor, but also on cow health. It turns out, the milk can tell us a lot about how that cow is doing. This way, a dairy producer can see trends in not just their herd as a whole, but also in individual cows.  Bethany Deshpande is on the show. She is the CEO of SomaDetect, which is the company doing all that stuff I just mentioned. Bethany completed her PhD in Biology, and isn’t from a dairy background originally, but started SomaDetect when she saw an opportunity in the industry to apply some technology originally developed by her father. We’ll get more into that background later in the episode.  But she’s certainly dove headfirst into the dairy industry these past five ye

Benson Hill: https://bensonhill.com/  Today’s episode features Matt Crisp, CEO and co-founder of Benson Hill. Benson Hill describes themselves as a food tech company unlocking the natural genetic diversity of plants with its cutting-edge food innovation engine. Basically, they are trying to improve plant-based ingredients by attacking every aspect of the value chain from seed to processing to sales.  The “plant-based” movement so far, has been trying to mimic the flavors and nutrition of the products they are trying to replace. Matt Crisp’s vision at Benson Hill that you’ll hear today on this show, is that they have the chance to surpass those products, but they will have to do so with better ingredients - which can only come as a result of better genetics and processing.  Matt’s road into health, nutrition, and agriculture actually came from his early career in venture capital. Hearing about how those things tie together is how we’ll start today’s episode with Benson Hill CEO and co-founder, Matt Crisp. 

AGCO Corp: https://www.agcocorp.com/  Louisa Parker-Smith: https://news.agcocorp.com/news/agco-names-louisa-parker-smith-director-of-global-sustainability Email Newsletters: Upstream Ag Insights: https://upstreamaginsights.substack.com/ Software is Feeding the World: https://rpethe.substack.com/    Today’s guest is Louisa Parker-Smith, who is the Global Head of Sustainability for AGCO Corporation. Most of you listening know all about AGCO - they are a major farm machinery designer, manufacturer, and distributor, including tractors, combine harvesters, hay & forage machinery. This includes brands like Fendt, Massey Furgeson, Challenger, Valtra, Gleaner, and many others. They also have a growing grain and protein division which offers grain storage, seed processing, and protein production equipment. In Louisa’s role as head of sustainability, she sets strategy for AGCO’s sustainability programs and ESG which stands for environmental, social, and governance. It’s a very hot topic especially among publicl

Visit Bushel online: https://bushelpowered.com/ Today’s episode takes a peak inside one of the hottest agtech companies to come along in recent years: Bushel. I’ve known about Bushel for a couple of years now, and originally just understood them to be a company that was digitizing scale tickets, which is actually how they started. Scale tickets, for those of you who don’t know, are the paper receipt that accompanies a load of an agricultural commodity that usually includes how much was delivered to where, what the grade factors were, etc. It’s really important because historically this is what is used to get paid properly, to keep effective records, and to have a paper trail for bankers, etc. Then this year they raised a $47M series B round and acquired long time farm management software company FarmLogs, and it became clear that I needed to get them on the show to explain all of these pieces and how they fit together.  Joining me is Bushel co-founder and CEO Jake Joraanstad as well as Jesse Vollmar, who w

Learn more about SWAT Maps: https://www.swatmaps.com/ Fieldwalker Agronomy: https://fieldwalker.ca/  Jonathan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZRAgri  Today’s episode is all about precision agriculture, so if you’re into agronomy and variable rate technology, or what our guest would prefer to call optimal rate technology, you’re in for a real treat. If these terms are new to you, at a basic level we are talking about technology that is being used to understand the variability of a field so that the precise (hence the name precision) amounts of a given seed, fertilizer, or other input can be applied in a way that maximizes the crop response, and of course, overall profitability. Plants don’t grow by the acre, they grow on an individual basis and may respond differently based on site-specific factors. For more on precision ag, find these previous FoA episodes: 256, 244, 243, 218, 211, 200, 196, 179, 175, 108, 25.  Today’s episode is part of a series I’m doing called the Tech-Enabled Advisor. These are episod

Inari: https://inari.com/ "From Farms to Incubators" book: https://bookshop.org/books/from-farms-to-incubators-women-innovators-revolutionizing-how-our-food-is-grown/9781610355759  We have on the show Ponsi Trivisvavet, who is the CEO of Inari, the SEEDesign company that uses predictive design and advanced multiplex gene editing to unlock the full potential of seed to build a more sustainable future for the food system.  Ponsi joined Inari in 2018 when they were just over a year old. Since that time they have grown from a 35-person company to a 190-person company. Before Inari, she held a number of leadership roles at Syngenta, most recently as president of Syngenta Seeds North America.  Today’s episode talks about some of the potential for gene editing for the future of our most widely grown crops, the approach Inari is taking to commercialize this technology, whether or not consumers are accepting this more than they did with GMO’s, and what impact this could have on farmer profitability and overall su

http://www.futurityfood.com/ (www.futurityfood.com) http://www.linkedin.com/in/jackbobo (www.linkedin.com/in/jackbobo) http://www.twitter.com/Jack_a_Bobo (www.twitter.com/Jack_a_Bobo) TED Talk: Why we fear the food we eat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thiOicCQRWY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thiOicCQRWY) White paper: The role of innovation in transforming the food system: https://animalagalliance.org/resource/white-paper-the-role-of-innovation-in-transforming-the-global-food-system/ I have on the show a guest whose work I’ve followed for a long time, and someone who I’ve connected with a handful of times over the years, and am really glad to finally get him on the show, Mr. Jack Bobo. Jack is a food futurist and the author of ‘Why smart people make bad food choices.’ He is also the CEO of Futurity, a food foresight company that advises companies, foundations and governments on emerging food trends and consumer attitudes and behaviors related to the future of food. Recognized by Scientific American in

SWARMFarm Robotics https://www.swarmfarm.com/ Burro https://burro.ai/  Farmwise https://farmwise.io/  ZTractor https://ztractor.com/  Carbon Robotics https://carbonrobotics.com/  TerraClear https://www.terraclear.com/ Today’s episode is going to be a highlight reel from a virtual event I hosted for the FoA community. That event was an ag robotics roundtable, which featured six robotics companies to have a discussion about the challenges and opportunities of bringing more automation to agriculture. The event lasted every bit of the 90 minutes we had scheduled, and it was even more enlightening than I had anticipated.    So today, I’m going to bring you some of the highlights from that event in a condensed format, and make sure that You’re going to get a chance to hear more about:      What’s driving the robotics revolution?  Labor costs Non-chemical options Precision agriculture Tech advancements and cheaper materials (generally) How they’re setting up th

PMA Takes on Tech: https://www.pma.com/content/podcast/takes-on-tech Aromyx: https://www.aromyx.com/ Today's two part episode starts off with a higher-level picture of the innovations in produce with Vonnie Estes, vice president of technology for the Produce Marketing Association. Then we’ll drill deeper into one aspect of food quality, arguably the most important aspect of food quality: flavor. For that we’ll talk to Josh Silverman, CEO of Aromyx, a company that is digitizing taste and smell. I was able to sit down with Vonnie Estes and capture some valuable insights about the challenges and opportunities of bringing technology to the produce industry, the role of indoor agriculture in fresh produce, alternative funding models for companies that want to serve some of these niches, and the digitization of quality and of supply chains, which will of course lead us into part two with Josh.  Vonnie Estes is the VP of Technology at the Produce Marketing Association.  She has held leadership positions at promin

This episode is brought to you by AgVend (www.AgVend.com)  Today’s installment of our Tech-Enabled Advisor series is really an insightful look at how a farmer-owned cooperative is leaning into the digital changes that are happening in our industry to remain relevant and provide value to their farmer shareholders.  KC Graner is the senior vice president of agronomy at Central Farm Service, a co-op in southern Minnesota. As an advocate of the cooperative system, KC has spent his career embedded in member-owned organizations. Prior to taking on his role at Central Farm Service, KC worked at WinField United, serving over two dozen different retail cooperatives across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.   For today’s episode, we are partnering with http://www.agvend.com (AgVend). You may remember AgVend from  https://aggrad.libsyn.com/page/6/size/25 (Episode 125) back in 2018 with CEO Alexander Reichert. AgVend is the leading provider of digital tools to serve the producer of tomorrow. Their suite of products is des

Today’s episode is broken down into three parts: first, a brief primer on some of the issues contributing to the issues in California. Second, one potential hydrological solution going forward: groundwater recharge. And finally, we’ll talk about water markets by highlighting the new Nasdaq Veles California Water Index. To help me tell each of these three stories I have for you three different guests that you’ll hear from today: Dr. Safeeq Khan, Dr. Helen Dahlke, and Lance Coogan.   You can also listen to previous episodes 159 with Dr. David Zetland, 161 with Adam Borchard, or 198 with Chris Peacock to get more information about these topics. 

Resilient Biotics: https://resilientbiotics.com/ Fulcrum Global Capital: https://www.fgcvc.com/  My guest on today’s show is Chris Belnap, the CEO of Resilient Biotics, which is an early-stage animal health company that develops microbiome-derived, live therapeutics for livestock. In other words, they analyze the microbes that naturally live inside of cattle, then they administer those that are most beneficial to make the cattle more resilient to certain diseases. Specifically they are focused on a biological solution to bovine respiratory disease, which is currently very reliant on antibiotics.  Resilient Biotics is a portfolio company of Fulcrum Global Capital, which long time listeners will remember have partnered with me on several episodes in the past. What stands out about Fulcrum, and you can probably pick up on this if you’ve listened to all of these episodes with portfolio companies from their first fund, is that their LPs, their investors, are from production agriculture. They care about solving

Ranveer Chandra: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/ranveer/ Overview of Azure FarmBeats: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/industry/agriculture/overview-azure-farmbeats  FarmBeats: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/bill-gates-features-farmbeats-on-gatesnotes/ Microsoft has been making waves in the agtech industry with its FarmBeats project and Azure cloud computing service. That effort can be traced back to 2015 when today’s guest, Ranveer Chandra, wrote a memo which led to him starting and running the FarmBeats project. FarmBeats for those who do not know, provides a way to collect on-farm data and track that data using cloud computing models. It’s not a product that farmers buy, but it’s a platform that agtech companies build upon. In fact, previous guests of this show are customers of Microsoft to power their technology.    Ranveer is the Chief Scientist of Microsoft Azure Global, and Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research. He started the FarmBeats project at M

World Resources Institute: https://www.wri.org/ (https://www.wri.org/) Follow Rich on Twitter: https://twitter.com/waiterich Recent blog post: https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/08/us-agriculture-emissions-food  More from Rich: https://www.wri.org/profile/richard-waite  Our guest today has spent years diving into this question of the environmental impacts of the food system, and what can be done to optimize the amount of food that gets produced and distributed, while minimizing the negative externalities of that system.  Rich Waite is a Senior Research Associate in World Resources Institute’s Food Program. He is an author of the World Resources Report: Creating a Sustainable Food Future, which focuses on solutions to feed 10 billion people by 2050, including boosting agricultural productivity, reducing food loss and waste, shifting toward plant-rich diets, and protecting and restoring forests and other natural ecosystems. Rich is also the Data Lead for Cool Food, an initiative that helps major food providers

Thanks to FieldAgent by Sentera for sponsoring. Visit https://sentera.com/.  On today’s episode I’m joined by Todd Vagts who is a technical agronomist for the Channel Seed brand which is part of Bayer Crop Science. Based in southeast Minnesota, Todd works with Channel salespeople and seed dealers (who they called “Seedsmen”), to make sure they are up to date with technologies and to problem-solve in the field. Todd is a farmer as well - lives 30 minutes from the farm where he grew up. Todd has a master’s in Agronomy from Texas A&M, and stayed down in Texas to focus on cotton for a while before coming back to the midwest where he is focused now.  Todd has been interested in drones for over a decade, but as you'll hear it took a while for them to really find a place in his day-to-day work.