Future Of Agriculture

SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Follow Paul Sullivan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SullivanAgroThese Field Report segments are short occasional episodes where we will hear from the people who actually use and hopefully benefit from the innovations we discuss on the show. We’ve already been doing this through the spotlight segments that have aired at the end of about one episode every month. I’ve really enjoyed these sort of customer testimonials that are provided from our quarterly presenting sponsors. So I’m taking what we were doing with those spotlights and creating standalone episodes with a similar concept: only now sometimes it will be associated with the sponsor, and sometimes not - just profiles of farmers and other users of agricultural innovations giving their report from the field. In today’s case, Paul Sullivan is a certified crop consultant and agronomist in Eastern Ontario. He has operated his agronomy services firm, P.T. Sullivan Agro, since 1997, and started using SWAT MAPS in

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/University of Saskatchewan Precision Agriculture Certificate Program: https://admissions.usask.ca/precision-agriculture.phpI wanted to have a conversation about cutting edge tools and the future of digital agriculture, and I definitely think we succeeded in bringing that to you today. Both Steve and Preston are thinking deeply about the best ways to collect and analyze data, think about variability, and utilize this deeper understanding for real world outcomes on farms. Dr. Preston Sorenson is a research associate in the department of soil science at the University of Saskatchewan. His work focuses on mapping soil properties using a range of data sources, usually from satellite imagery and elevation data. He also works a lot with soil sensor systems, in particular for rapid carbon measurements. And carbon measurement is something we definitely get into today. Dr. Steve Shirtliffe is a professor also at the University of Saskatchewan but i

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/The Context Network: https://contextnet.com/Today's episode features Christian Guffy of the Context Network. I wanted to bring Christian on the show to talk about talent and growing a client services firm. I think those are both interesting and important topics that I haven’t done a good job of covering on the show. In client services, which is the business I’m in with the consulting that I do, all you have to sell is your talent. So finding ways to recruit, retain and develop talent is extremely important. It’s important in any business, but especially in a business where your people’s abilities is the only thing you have to offer. Christian had some great perspective on this and some interesting insights into the way Context operates. For some quick background here, and some context on Context: Christian is a Partner at The Context Network and has been with the firm in a variety of roles for 10 years. He has a wide range of experience i

SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Corteva Agriscience: https://www.corteva.com/These new Field Report segments are short occasional episodes where we will hear from the people who actually use and hopefully benefit from the innovations we discuss on the show. We’ve already been doing this through the spotlight segments that have aired at the end of about one episode every month. I’ve really enjoyed these sort of customer testimonials that are provided from our quarterly presenting sponsors. So I’m taking what we were doing with those spotlights and creating standalone episodes with a similar concept: only now sometimes it will be associated with the sponsor, and sometimes not - just profiles of farmers and other users of agricultural innovations giving their report from the field. In today’s case, Brett McArtor is a senior research associate at Corteva Agriscience based in Johnston, Iowa. Corteva has three major focuses: crop protection, seed, and digital which supports those other two - and that’s where Brett

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/WonderCow: https://wondercow.com/The Business of Food Newsletter: https://jenniferbarney.substack.com/I believe that there are a lot of opportunities for those of us in agriculture in paying attention to food and health trends. I don’t personally love the term “food is medicine”, but obviously poor diet is a major cause of health problems, and we would all be better off to spend more of our time and probably our dollars prioritizing health and nutrition in our food choices. And that includes food supplements. But even I, who loves thinking about cutting edge things in food and ag, was pretty shocked to hear last year of the trend of people including colostrum from cows in their diet. Colostrum being the milk produced by the mother at the time of giving birth. As you’ll hear today, there is a growing number of health-conscious consumers that are looking to the unique nutritive bioactive properties of colostrum and this powder is selli

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/ProducePay: https://producepay.com/Today's episode features ProducePay founder Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck. Born and raised in a 4th generation farming family from Mexico, Pablo brings over 20 years of experience in the fresh produce industry. After growing up on the family farm – Campos Borquez, a premier supplier of fresh asparagus and grapes to the United States and Canada – Pablo went on to work for The Giumarra Companies, managing grower relations in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and the United States. Pablo returned to the family farm as Chief Financial Officer, then went on to complete his MBA at Cornell University, where the idea of ProducePay was started, founded and launched. Last year the company announced that longtime board member and advisor Patrick McCullough would take over as CEO, and Pablo moved at that time into the role of Executive Director of the board. But as you’ll hear in this interview he is just as energized as ever about

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Lavoro Agro: https://www.lavoroagro.com/Software Is Feeding The World Newsletter: https://www.rhishipethe.com/sftwWork with Rhishi: https://www.metaldoglabs.ai/Brazil has officially overtaken the US to become the top corn exporter in the world. And companies like Lavoro Agro are seizing a huge opportunity to bring more technology to Brazilian farmers. "A US corn farmer is gonna be two times more productive than that Brazilian farmer, and the difference really is gonna come down to technology. And that technology comes in the form of inputs. And inputs is really where Lavoro plays." That's Lavoro's Chief Digital Officer, Alex. Wimbush. Today, he sits down with guest host Rhishi Pethe, who was also his colleague when they both worked at the Climate Corporation. I'm noticing a lot of companies out there almost have like a FOMO about AI and you know, some of these new tools like ChatGPT. Are you feeling the pressure from certain folks, like, Hey, we ne

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/TransparentSea: https://www.transparentseafarm.com/[Video] "How America's Biggest Indoor Shrimp Farm Sells 2 Million Shrimp Every Year": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AK_RQ1uaGs[Video] "Tour of TransparentSea Farm's urban shrimp farm": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wnyi1Sc6pk Today’s featured conversation is with Steve Sutton, founder and CEO of TransparentSEA Farm in Southern California. I’m excited to share this one with you. I became very interested in indoor aquaculture this past year. As I think about vertical farming for vegetables, my biggest concern comes down to spending big dollars on real estate, technology, energy and labor to produce a product that really isn’t that valuable - both in terms of dollars and nutrition. However, with fish, you have a much more valuable product than say lettuce. So, why haven’t we been talking more about indoor aquaculture? That was the question I asked myself, and it turns out, some people HAVE been

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Forage Capital Partners: https://foragecapitalpartners.com/Jim Taylor of Forage Capital Partners. Jim has been involved with financing growth companies for over 20 years and has created and managed seven different funds prior to Forage. He was a founder of three growth equity funds, three subordinated debt funds, and the Farm Credit Canada Ventures direct investment program. Jim has raised and managed over $500 million dollars of growth capital in the Ag food industry. Jim has carved out a reputation for himself as the go-to person for anyone with an ag or food company with a proven product and business model that is ready to take on outside investment for growth. His approach makes so much sense to me as someone who can be a bit skeptical of a lot of what I see in early stage venture capital. But we’ve never covered this on the show, so I’m very excited to share with you this conversation with Jim Taylor.

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Kessler Ag Ventures: https://kesslerag.ca/FoA 398: The Evolution of Precision Agriculture with Cory Willness and Derek Massey of Croptimistic TechnologyThis is the first installment of a new series of the podcast called "Field Reports", where we will hear from the people who actually use and hopefully benefit from the innovations we so regularly discuss on the show. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, because in this respect, the show has been very one-sided. We hear from the visionaries that are creating new ventures, technologies, programs, research and ideas. But we too rarely hear from those that try them, buy them, and have to make them work in practice and in the field. We’ve been doing this a little bit through the spotlight segments that have aired at the end of about one episode every month. Those are sort of customer testimonials from our quarterly presenting sponsors. I’ve really enjoyed these stories and the tried a

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Verdi Ag: https://www.verdi.ag/Arthur Chen is the CEO of Verdi, which is helping to climate-proofing agriculture with the world's first scalable platform to personalize healthcare for plants, helping the world's largest food brands radically optimize farm productivity and sustainability. In 2022, Verdi saved farmers over 7 million liters of water. Prior to Verdi, Arthur conducted precision agriculture research sponsored by Mineral at Google X. Arthur and I talk about variable rate irrigation, gaining traction as a new agtech company, and how technology like Verdi’s can make an impact on the future of agriculture. 

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Cquesta website: https://cquesta.com/FOA 200: Drones for Spraying, Seeding, and Pollinating with RantizoMichael Ott is the CEO of Cquesta, a deep root trait company that helps crops tolerate stress and earns carbon credits to farmers with no change in agronomic practices.  Michael is also the Founding CEO and Board Member at Rantizo, the nation's largest drone-spraying company. Before Rantizo, Michael worked in corporate venture capital backed by Monsanto, Novozymes and Bunge, where he invented a patented technology that delivers a tiny amount of nitrogen to a rice seed as it grows.  Michael has a Master's degree in Chemistry from the University of Iowa and two decades worth of experience in finance and agriculture.  He is an author on five patent applications and has raised over $180 million in investments over the course of his career. Michael was named PrecisionAg 2021 Entrepreneur of the Year.Michael and I talk about Cquest

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Agricultural Economic Insights: https://aei.ag/AEI.ag Presents Podcast: https://aei.ag/podcast/David Widmar is an agricultural economist specializing in agricultural trends and the farm economy. Through his research, he supports agribusinesses and farmers in their strategic and planning efforts. David is the Managing Partner of Agricultural Economic Insights, AEI.ag, which he co-founded with Dr. Brent Gloy in 2014. Prior to AEI, David was a researcher with the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University and served as the economist for the Kansas Department of Agriculture. I highly recommend you subscribe to AEI’s content and go check out their podcast, AEI.ag Presents. I especially recommend their season on the 1980s farm crisis.In today’s episode, David and I discuss farmland values, the impact of higher interest rates, how to think about risk, and how to manage volatility in things like markets and inflation. 

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Cory Willness on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-willness-78b76246/Derek Massey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-massey-61aa909a/SWAT Agronomy Podcast: Apple, SpotifyFOA 211: Ground Truthing AgTech with Cory Willness: https://futureofagriculture.com/episode/foa-211-ground-truthing-agtech-with-cory-willness Cory Willness and Derek Massy are the co-founders of Croptimistic Technology, the creators of SWAT MAPS. Cory is the CEO, and Derek is the CTO. They’ve been working on building precision ag tools for about 20 years together. Cory says he’s the hustler and Derek is the hacker. Derek is an electrical engineer and software developer. His dad was a farmer and Cory came to him in the early 2000s to start building software together. At that time, Cory was an independent crop consultant and the owner of CropPro Consulting, which is a company he still owns today that does agronomic consulting in Western Canada. It’s through

Variable Rate done RIGHT with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Zordi: https://www.zordi.com/Casey Call on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-call-03a3b03b/Technology in agriculture can help reduce production costs and improve efficiencies, but it can also open up new possibilities for quality that goes beyond the average consumers’ expectations. “Our economic picture is to be able to capitalize on growing a better product and supplying a better product to the consumer, but also being able to kind of fix our labor costs and control those to a certain point.”That’s Casey Call, co-founder of Zordi. Which I first thought was a robotics company focused on building robots for greenhouse agriculture. Turns out they are that and more - using their own proprietary technology to build  and operate their own greenhouse farms. “Getting people access to this produce is kind of the key. When people start having our strawberries, they're like, oh, well we get it now. And so getting more and more of th

Turn your data into actionable value with SWAT MAPS: https://swatmaps.com/Toby Kiers, PhD website: https://tobykiers.com/Toby's TED TALK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjwvaF3P_5Q&t=273sScientists are discovering incredible interactions between plants' roots and soil dwelling fungi called mycorrhizal fungi. These relationships are integral to how plants function, including of course, our crops. But despite their importance to fundamental aspects of plant development, there's still so much we have yet to learn."We know, for example, that the fungi, when it colonizes the root system, it can actually change the gene regulation of the plant, such that the plant is no longer able to access nutrients directly from its root system. It kind of creates an addiction onto the fungi that makes it so the plant is giving more carbon to get at the nutrients."That's Dr. Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who studies these mycorrhizal fungi. She shares why this work is so important for biodiversity, for crop developm

Put AI to work on your farm: https://farmwave.io/Prime Future Newsletter by Janette Barnard: https://primefuture.substack.com/ "Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West" by Christopher Knowlton: https://www.amazon.com/Cattle-Kingdom-Hidden-History-Cowboy/dp/1328470253/ref=sr_1_1" It was a Darwinian struggle across the open range, as it often is in a capitalist society. A struggle to survive, to outcompete, to adapt on the fly, to changing circumstances brought on by new technology, emerging monopolies, changing regulations, fluctuating markets, and fickle weather. From one angle, the story of the Great Beef Bonanza is a record of remarkable human ingenuity and technological advancement. From another, it's a case history of the calamities that befall those who ignore economic or ecological realities in a single-minded pursuit of the American dream. The open range cattle era and its role in shaping America deserve to be more broadly known if only as an instructive cautionary tale."That is a passage

Put AI to work on your farm: https://farmwave.io/Featured Podcast Episodes: "The Future of Ag is De-Globalized" on The Business of Agriculture"What an Aging, Shrinking Population Means for Ag (and Everyone Else)" on The Business of Agriculture"Marc Arnusch on how farmers are using ChatGPT" on Agtech...So What?"An Agtech Marketing Masterclass with Dan Schultz" on The Modern Acre"Crop Resilience Redefined: Power Pollen Revolutionizing Corn" on Farm4Profit"Driscoll's Global Commitments and Climate Smart Strategies with Marta Baptista" on Fresh Takes on Tech"Why You Should Definitely Try Ostrich Meat" on The Farm Traveler PodcastOther Resources Mentioned: FoA 186: Five Trends for the Future of AgricultureFoA 238: Five Barriers Limiting AgricultureFoA 342: Leading from the farm: insights from farmer innovators"The End of the World is Just the Beginning" by Peter ZeihanFoA 380: Equity Capital for Farmland with Ben Gordon and Kyle MehmenFoA 379: The Farm Entrepreneur Mindset with Evan Shout of Maverick Ag

Put AI to work on your farm: https://farmwave.io/CNH Industrial: https://www.cnhindustrial.com/FoA 349: Robotic Harvesting and Beyond with Kyle Cobb of advanced.farmFOA 180: The Journey of an AgTech Entrepreneur with Colin Hurd of Smart AgSoftware is Feeding The WorldUpstream Ag InsightsMarc Kermisch is the Industrial Global Chief Digital and Information Officer of CNH Industrial. Under his leadership, the Company’s Information Technology (IT) and Digital organizations are focused on delivering easy to use, mobile first digital experiences, coupled with advanced vehicle technology that drives productivity for customers. He is also responsible for leading the Company’s global product engineering, industrial design and R&D teams, strengthening its alternative propulsion offering and overseeing product safety and compliance. All of these efforts ensure the Company’s vast product portfolio meets the highest standards for customers.I probably don’t have to introduce CNH Industrial to you, but the short version

Put AI to work on your farm: https://farmwave.io/Texas A&M Website: https://agecon.tamu.edu/people/fischer-bart/Southern Ag Today: https://southernagtoday.org/As we approach the end of 2023, one thing that many in agriculture thought would happen this year that hasn't is a new farm bill. "The farm bill attracts this outsized attention. It's carrying some baggage that probably was not envisioned, you know, 80 to a hundred years ago when this process was started."That's Dr. Bart Fisher, who spent eight years with the House Agriculture Committee, and today is a professor of ag policy at Texas A&M. The lack of a farm bill brought up a lot of questions for me about this legislation. Like what are the impacts of not having this bill in place? What causes these types of delays and are these farm bills which have been around since the 1930s even still relevant?"It's just incredibly important for the productive capacity of this country that we maintain a safety net for growers because it costs so much to produ