Future of Agriculture

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.

Mark Kahn is the Managing Partner of Omnivore, an India-based venture capital firm specifically focusing on funding entrepreneurs who are working to advance agriculture and food systems. Before this role, Mark served as the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Godrej Agrovet and Strategy Manager of Syngenta. Mark earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and has extensive experience in rural marketing, corporate strategy, product development, research and development, mergers and acquisitions, and new business incubation.

Mark joins me today to discuss his business, Omnivore, and share his insights on the agritech landscape in India. He shares differences between the makeup of the agricultural sectors in India versus the United States, including how the family dynamic plays a role in certain Indian aspects of agriculture such as dairy farming. Mark also explains impact investing, and what Omnivore looks for when it comes to choosing which start-ups to invest in.

“Venture capital is like jet fuel. If you put jet fuel in a jet, the jet flies. If you put jet fuel in a Ford, the Ford explodes.” - Mark Kahn

This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast:

• What led Mark to build his venture capital firm Omnivore and some of the companies the firm has invested in.
• How to determine whether or not your company is suited for venture capital and the role of scalability in making this determination.
• Trends Mark has noticed with entrepreneurship and the talent dynamic in India’s start-up sector.
• The farming dynamic in India, including how many farmers there are in the country and the average farm size.
• How the Indian dairy industry works, the socio-cultural aspects of this, and the industries India ranks highly in.
• What leads many smallholder farmers to want to adopt new technologies and how accessibility plays a role.
• What impact funding and impact investing is, how it is a spectrum, and how it differs from ESG investing.
• Changes Mark has seen in agriculture, what he sees for the future of agriculture, and why Mark prefers “agritech” over “agtech.”
• Mark’s thoughts on exits and three ways exits could happen.

Resources Mentioned:

• Upstream Ag Insights

Connect with Mark Kahn

• Omnivore
• Mark Kahn on LinkedIn

Share the Ag-Love!

Thanks for joining us on the Future of Agriculture Podcast – your spot for valuable information, content, and interviews with industry leaders throughout the agricultural space! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts and leave your honest feedback. Don’t forget to share it with your friends on your favorite social media spots! And be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of ag.

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What does a more distributed regionalized or even localized food system look like at scale? How can producers capture more of the value of that type of food system? What is the right type of investor to help fuel that sort of system?

Stephen Hohenrieder spent his early career in capital markets and has an agricultural background. Stephen now works for family offices. These are investment entities that invest on behalf of a single-family. In this episode, we talk about investing in regenerative agriculture, what a distributed food system looks like and how the family office investor can be a great fit for making these ambitions a reality. Stephen began by combining different food source experiences in Hawaii to support his regenerative agriculture goals through investment.

“The goal was to develop a perspective on each of these different areas of food and then use my background in investing to deploy capital in ways that would support a regenerative food system that I hope to be a part of.” - Stephen Hohenrieder

The investment profile of a family office and the amount of risk they are willing to undertake varies between each family office. His mission is to “figure out how we could steward the vision of that operation into the future and bring in aligned capital that had a very long term perspective.”

“As I explored this thesis for how I believe our food system is evolving and really increasingly being redefined by fragmentation after a period of consolidation and centralization, I have focused on four pillars that are really authenticity, connection, traceability and transparency.” - Stephen Hohenrieder

In many of Stephen’s investments he looks to not only add value to the food chain process but also the farm itself. Stephen believes people are “reconnecting with the source of their food” leading to a consumer driven cultural shift for producers. Consumers are now more interested in connecting with a set of values than a third party certification and producers are needing to communicate these inherent values to gain consumer loyalty.

This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast:

• Meet Stephen Hohenrieder, an investor supporting regenerative agriculture
• Explore how he views the cultural shifts in the supply chain
• Learn about where he sees the future of the agriculture industry heading

Share the Ag-Love!

Thanks for joining us on the Future of Agriculture Podcast – your spot for valuable information, content, and interviews with industry leaders throughout the agricultural space! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts and leave your honest feedback. Don’t forget to share it with your friends on your favorite social media spots! And be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of ag.

Learn more about AgGrad by visiting:

Future of Agriculture Website

AgGrad Website

AgGrad on Twitter

AgGrad on Facebook

AgGrad on LinkedIn

AgGrad on Instagram

We talk a lot about data in agriculture. Yield data, aerial data, weather data, soil data, data interoperability, data ownership, and on and on and on. What we’re not talking about enough, however, is data quality. More and more and more data is not helpful unless it is QUALITY data. We have the quantity, there’s no shortage of farm data out there, but how do we improve the QUALITY?

We often fall into the trap of assuming more data is better data, when in reality, better data is better data. We’ll explain why in this episode. You’ve probably heard of data being “cleaned” or being “scrubbed”. But what does that mean? Why is this so hard to do with farm data? Why is this a problem and what can be done about it?

“Right now the industry is really really excited about all of the data that we can produce...but I really feel like the second generation of the data wave here in agriculture is going to be quality, and comparability, and what metrics do we measure excellence by. Those are going to be the things that make the difference.” - Kyle Mehmen, General Manager, MBS Family Farms

All of these are questions and more are addressed in today’s episode as we bring on farmer Kyle Mehmen and New Leaf Symbiotics Technical Sales Lead Brad Walkup to talk about their experiences in focusing on getting higher quality data from their trials.

“Agriculture for years has been a race to see who can grow the most commodity. I feel like in the next 5-8 years, I’m hoping we can get to the point that we can differentiate crops by quality. Therefore a grower will have a unique value position in the market, rather than just #2 yellow corn.” - Brad Walkup, Technical Sales Lead, New Leaf Symbiotics

This episode is another one that I’ve partnered with my friends at In10t to bring to you. This year I’ve really wanted to explore where innovative ideas meet practical realities in agtech, and there is no company doing more in this area than In10t, so they’re the perfect partner, not only for this episode, but also for episode 194 called “Accelerating AgTech Adoption” where we talked about the importance of on-farm trials, and episode 215 entitled “Bridging the Gap Between Farmers and AgTech” where we talked about the real challenges in getting trials right.

From those episodes, you may assume In10t is a consulting company that helps arrange farmer trials. That’s how they got their start, but as VP of Technology Mike Hartquist will tell you, they have evolved into a technology platform as well.

“We look at technology as almost the third piece of the pie. We do (technology) well, and we want that to be the core of how it fits together, but our people and process is really how we got here...We don’t want to create this cool tool, but it’s not useful. Let’s get out in the field, and go walk fields and use a spreadsheet, and go figure out how it works and what works and what doesn’t, and then let’s let technology make it better for us.” - Mike Hartquist, VP of Technology at In10t

Share the Ag-Love!

Thanks for joining us on the Future of Agriculture Podcast – your spot for valuable information, content, and interviews with industry leaders throughout the agricultural space! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts and leave your honest feedback. Don’t forget to share it with your friends on your favorite social media spots! And be sure to join the new Future of Agriculture Membership for even more valuable information on the future of ag.

Learn more about AgGrad by visiting:

Future of Agriculture Website

AgGrad Website

Great show for you today, especially for the entrepreneurs in the audience. We have on the show Joe Dales, who in his current capacity is the CoFounder and President of Agri & Food Innovation at RH Accelerator in London, Ontario, Canada.

In this episode, we talk about the importance and the elusiveness of product-market fit - meaning creating not just a great product or service, but one that the market is eager to pay for. We also talk a lot about attracting and retaining talent to the ag industry, and the future of work.

Joe’s extensive experience in bringing innovations to the market really shines through in this episode. He has been involved in successfully launching over 40 agtech innovations ranging from crop protection products, to seed varieties, to biologicals, to software companies. In 1998, he co-founded Farms.com Ltd. and AgCareers.com which have grown to become a leading supplier of innovative solutions to farmers, agriculture and food companies around the global, he remains a major shareholder and director.

Be sure to stay tuned to the end of this episode for great stuff from Joe, but also a startup spotlight. This one is another Canadian company, from a few provinces over in Alberta. Rob Saik makes his third appearance on this show to talk about his newest venture AgVisorPro, so make sure to stick around for that at the end of today’s show.

Joe Dales Quotes:

“I’ve always looked at where innovation in agriculture come together, and think about how they can help farmers.”

“You'll know when you get product-market fit, you definitely know when you don't have it, because there's crickets. I'll take it to (farmers like) my brother or my best friend, and say, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ And they'll go, ‘that's nice’, but they aren't gonna use it.”

“Building (software) is sometimes the easiest part. It’s the education, it’s the branding, it’s getting people using it.”

“Our sector isn't a true consumer sector. It's more B2B than B2C because every decision can be hugely costly. If they make a bad decision, you know, on selecting a crop or where they spend their time. And they've got it to do list usually a mile long, especially in season. So giving them a new scouting app or giving them a new tool. You better show them how it'll save them time and money, and that it's proven.”

“Just about every company I'm dealing with, talent is the number one issue. They could scale; they could do things a lot more quickly. But there's a farmer or there's a CEO and he needs four more highly motivated, highly skilled, highly networked individuals to help them grow the business.”

“We look at the product and the concept: where is it? Do we like it? And then quickly we move right to the founders: what do we think of them? Do they know the sector? You know, if they want to do something on dairy farms: are they from a dairy family? Unless you're from it and really intimately knowledgeable about the sector, or willing to pay the price and go out and visit, you’re higher risk.”

“So all these technologies are swirling around in our sector and this just, how do we, how do we onboard them? How do we get them up and running? And how do we help farmers get the value out of them? Because once they do that, then there's real companies there.”

“I wake up everyday trying to help farmers save money (and/or) make money through innovation. And I've had success, but still I love doing it every day. It gets me moving early in the morning and I’m very passionate about it. And I feel good in some small way, we're helping feed the world. So it's pretty easy to remain motivated.”

Rob Saik Quotes:

“The number of times through the course of the year, when a farmer could reach out to really talk to people with deep domain expertise that could help the farming operation are numerous”

“If farmers or anybody out there has deep domain knowledge in farm software, like a Climate Fieldview or Granular or Trimble ag software. They could list themselves as a software expert and help other people in the sector. It could be other farmers helping other farmers.”

“But coming through COVID people are starting to realize that technology can shrink time and space. We can stretch brains and not bodies, just as we're doing right now (recording this podcast), we can solve problems from a distance.”