In this episode of Spilled Salt, host Maureen Ballatori sat down with Andrew Jason, Ecosystem Director at Grand Farm, to discuss the evolving landscape of agricultural innovation. The conversation highlights how Grand Farm is building a collaborative ag tech ecosystem, the current challenges facing startup funding, and emerging opportunities shaping the future of agriculture.
Accelerating Innovation and Building Ecosystems at Grand Farm
Grand Farm is emerging as a key platform for agricultural innovation, connecting growers, startups, and global partners to solve real-world challenges through applied technology. As Andrew Jason explains, the mission centers on collaboration and experimentation across a diverse network. “It’s putting together the vision. Identify what are the challenges you’re trying to solve and then bring the people together.”
Grand Farm operates a 600-acre innovation campus while expanding through partnerships like the University of Georgia. This hub-and-spoke model allows companies to test products across regions without heavy infrastructure investment. Early growth came from experimentation, including dozens of events during 2020. Jason notes, “We threw a lot of events that nobody showed up, but we threw events that several hundred people showed up.”
Scaling Through USDA Collaboration, Partnerships, and Field Trials
A major milestone for Grand Farm is the USDA-backed National Proving Grounds initiative. The goal is to create a standardized testing network for ag technologies. “What the USDA wants to do is create a nationwide testing network where they can work with industry partners.” This could accelerate validation and adoption for startups.
Ag Tech Funding Pressure and Market Shifts
Ag tech funding remains under significant pressure, creating a challenging environment for founders trying to raise capital and scale solutions. Following a surge in investment during 2020 and 2021, the market has seen a sharp pullback, with fewer large deals and limited high-profile exits. This has led many investors to take a more cautious approach, holding onto capital longer and prioritizing proven traction over early-stage potential.
“This is a tough, tough industry to launch and scale,” Jason says. Long product development cycles add to the strain, as startups must often wait an entire growing season to validate their technology. Missed timelines can delay progress by months, slowing both revenue and investor confidence.
The structure of agriculture also complicates growth. A highly fragmented customer base, combined with dominance from large incumbents, makes market entry difficult. At the same time, broader economic pressures on farmers, particularly in key crops like soybeans and cotton, reduce willingness to adopt new technologies.
What Comes Next for Agriculture
Still, founders are adapting. Many are focusing on clear milestone tracking and consistent communication with investors to build trust over time. Others are shifting toward sectors with faster paths to value, including biological inputs and alternative crops. While capital is tighter, the reset may ultimately favor more disciplined, resilient companies positioned for long-term impact.
Market disruption is pushing diversification beyond corn and soy. “I think we grow too much corn, grow too much soy,” Jason says. Innovations in crops, biologicals, and even space agriculture point to a more resilient and diversified future for the industry.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries.
Today’s guest is Andrew Jason. He is the Ecosystem Director at Grand Farm. Grand Farm, which is powered by Emerging Prairie and is a spinoff of the original Emerging Prairie ecosystem, is a network of growers, technologists, corporations, startups, educators, policymakers and investors who are all working together to solve problems in agriculture with applied technology. They are a global platform for agricultural innovation doing field trials and projects, building and nurturing a global innovation ecosystem, producing and hosting conferences and events.
They have their annual Ag Tech Week coming up in early June, which is not to be missed. And they’re also doing innovation consulting.
My conversation with Andrew today was robust. We talk about the United States Department of Agriculture and how some national efforts are coming to roost at Grand Farm and also how that’s part of their history. We touched on the current state of Ag tech fundraising and one of my favorite topics of all time, space ag(riculture). Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey, Andrew, nice to see ya.
Andrew Jason: Hey, Maureen, thanks for having me. Looking forward to this.
Maureen: Yes, yes, my pleasure. Me too. So I met Andrew originally in Fargo, North Dakota. We’ll talk a lot about Grand Farm and his work there, but I always like to start at the very early days. I’m a big believer that your backgrounds really informs the work that we do now. And so tell me a little bit about your early career days and early interests prior to the work you’re doing now.
Andrew: Yes, absolutely. Well, it’s great to have you in Fargo, Maureen. You know, everybody should visit Fargo. Yes, especially I give, I think anybody that comes to Fargo in like December through February should get like a gold star or a little trophy saying they survived that trip. But yes.
Maureen: Yes, the same is true for upstate New York. It looks exactly the same. It was like frigid cold. It’s a miracle if you make it out alive. Yes. That’s right. That’s right.
Andrew: For sure, hey yes, we’re hearty people, we need to stick together more. Yes, yes my background is media. So I went to school here in Fargo-Moorhead for journalism and Spanish. So the original intent was I was going to be a globe trotting journalist, kind of traveling the world, breaking stories, kind of that hard hitting news.
And when I was in college, I got started with a little kind of a media startup publishing company, a lot of kind of city nightlife, fitness, kind of things like that. Got started with there. was one of the kind of first employees and it was just one of those great timing coincidences that work out. I quickly grew with them when I was in college, spent almost a decade with them and kind of oversaw the entire publishing side of the business. So we had six monthly publications kind of across the region here.
And during that time started to fall in love with the community of Fargo here. It’s kind of infectious, I guess, if you will, because again, I was going to leave town and kind of be this globe-chotting journalist. Got sucked in here.
And during that time, I got to know a guy by the name of Greg Tehven. He was the CEO of Emerging Prairie which Grand Farm kind of spun out of. I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit about that. But you know, he was a big believer in building the community you want to live in.
And that’s kind of how Grand Farm got started. They ran a bunch of, this Emerging Prairie ran a bunch of events, TEDxFargo, 1 million cups. Grand Farm was born out of that. I just kind of, helped me see the possibility of Fargo and kind of fall in love with the community. And when Grand Farm got started about six years or so ago, almost seven years now, you I just kind of got so excited about it and joined the team.
Maureen: Did you have any, so Grand Farm was so agricultural, did you have any agricultural background prior to that?
Andrew: Yes, not much. You know, like a lot of people in the world, generation removed. So I grew up in northern Minnesota, kind of in the land of trees and lakes. But my grandparents were farmers. Cousins taken over the family farm. They are kind of their land. So my experience was kind of going down as a kid to my great-aunt and uncle’s place.
Maureen: Mm-hmm, got it, got it. So the journalism and Spanish and kind of your interest there, I can see how that translates to the work that you’re doing in storytelling now. What are some of the lessons learned, especially you said you spent almost a decade in that role, what were some of the critical lessons that you learned from the journalism perspective that may be beneficial to folks who are listening that want to engage with media a little bit more. What are your tips there?
Andrew: Sure. Yes, I mean, I think a few things that kind of like stood out from that kind of experience would be one, think always approaching kind of life just in general with a sense of curiosity and questions, right? I am not an expert on anything, but I know how to ask good questions and kind of dig into that.
So I think the ability to approach everything with a curiosity mindset is really important, especially as you’re talking about technology innovation, right? It’s always an evolving goalpost. You never arrive. The target’s always going to be 10 years in the future. So I can just always approach it with that mindset.
The other thing I think of is communication skills as a parent. This is something I think a lot about, especially with changing generations. I think communication, especially peer-to-peer person-to-person communication is going to be really important. And I think as AI impacts everything, what does that mean for this relationship, driven, world and work that we do, Maureen, assume that you’re all focused on the relationship side of things.
And then I think the other thing is just having that understanding on, this kind of goes with that curiosity mindset, kind of research. Understanding on how to find information, who to go to, what resources are out there, what sources can you dig into.
Maureen: Yes, I think that’s great advice, especially all of it really working together. Remind me how old your kids are.
Andrew: Two and five.
Maureen: Okay, so mine are a little bit older. My daughter’s almost 10, my son is 11, but the awareness and teaching them communication skills is also something that is constantly at the forefront of my mind, especially with my daughter who is a little more meandering, right? Sometimes I have to stop her like, okay, think about the words that you want to say and then let me know when you’re ready.
So it’s so critical to teach those lessons early on when they’re young, like my kid’s age and your kid’s age, but also how that asking good questions leads to the ability to do research in advance to solve a question that, know, answer a question that you’re trying to get an answer to or be prepared for a conversation that you’re going into.
You know, I’m a big believer that everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time and this whole no need to be scared of somebody who’s got this status or anything, right? That we’re all just people. And I really think that perspective plus I do my research, right? I’m going to look somebody up before I go into a meeting to be prepared and have the ability to entertain the discussion.
But all of those skills are important not only in journalism, but also for entrepreneurs and for anybody who’s working or honestly living a life. Like I’m a big believer too, that these skills it’s not just career, but a well-rounded lifestyle.
Andrew: Yes, I mean, hundred percent. And, not to get too philosophical about it, but I think with the advent of AI prompt engineering is becoming more and more important. And ultimately what it comes down to is asking the right questions, prompting the right piece of kind of like feedback from the AI, which is kind of like just another way of, know, if I’m looking and going into a meeting to kind of sell somebody, you got to kind of like steer that conversation in a way and have that relationship built up with them. AI is going to be along those same fronts too. You have to be able to accurately prompt, get that information.
And to me, what that means for society, what that means for education is pretty interesting. Maybe five, 10 years ago, the traditional liberal arts education, I was maybe getting a little, not sick of, but maybe poo-pooing a little bit. Now I feel like when anybody can be technical, what’s going to drive humanity and kind of our value is going to be the arts, the philosophies, that’s something that AI will never replace for the human.
Maureen: Yes, I totally, totally agree. We’ll book you for another conversation another day. We’ll talk about that because I could go down a rabbit hole on that too. And we had Scott from Chipp on the podcast as well, who I know is also based in Fargo. And he had some really interesting perspectives too about the evolution of AI and how businesses can start to use it if they haven’t yet, as well as like some really big interesting ideas about what’s next for AI.
But anyway, we’ll have that conversation another day. So you eventually left this media company and you went to Emerging Prairie, talk a little bit about that, what made you want to make that jump, and then also start to talk about, you mentioned that Grand Farm is a spin out from Emerging Prairie. I’m very curious about how Grand Farm was established. I understand it was a number of parties coming together to make that dream happen. So I’d love to hear more about that.
Andrew: Yes, absolutely. So Emerging Prairie, which Grand Farm spun out of, was starting around 2012, somewhere in that timeframe. And it was kind of the idea of a bunch of entrepreneurs came together and said, entrepreneurs need four things to be successful. One, they need access to customers, access to talent, access to capital, and then access to other founders because entrepreneurship is a lonely industry.
And so really kind of the Emerging Prairie set out to kind of tackle that. Fourth one is how do you build out, connect and celebrate this entrepreneurial ecosystem in our community and so that’s what the kind of Emerging Prairie’s original focus was on is kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem building so we ran a co-working space back when co-working spaces was a still pretty new concept.
Maureen: I used to run coworking spaces as well. Did you know that? Yes. I had two locations in 2020, I don’t know, a little prior to COVID and then fizzled out shortly after COVID.
Andrew: I did not know that. Interesting. Yes, I mean, that was one of those things. I mean, anybody that knows the WeWork story knows how that was a hot industry and then a very cool industry. Right. And we experienced that. And we also host a lot of events to bring people together, just little happy hours to big 2000 people event. And at one of our events, TEDxFargo, a local entrepreneur by the name of Barry Batchelor, who was a New York City kid. went to the cheapest school to study engineering and aerospace. And that happened to be North Dakota State University. So he came in in the 1970s.
He met a farm girl from Ada, Minnesota and fell in love. ended up staying in the community here. And during that time he got started with a company called Steiger Tractor, helped poke one of the first computer chips on the tractor. and then that kind of scaled. eventually launched, left that and launched Phoenix International, which was acquired by John Deere. And he got sick of being a leader at John Deere.
So we started a company called Appareo that got acquired by AGCO. And so then one of these like intrepid entrepreneurs has a very impressive background in kind of the bona fide to match his dreams, he challenges us to think about what’s a region’s major.
And he kind of compared it to Silicon Valley. And for anybody that knows the Silicon Valley story back in the 1930s, 1940s, it was a sleepy kind of agricultural community. And then there was a man by the name of Fairchild who started a company called Fairchild Semiconductors in the 1940s. That was at the kind of the boom of semiconductors that quickly scaled. Then there’s what’s called the Traders Eight left that started that’s found their own companies that scale that other founders came out and that kind of eventually grew to be Silicon Valley as we know it. And he compared that to kind of our region back in the late 1800s.
There’s these bonanza farms, 10,000 acre farms are using state of the art technology for 1800s. Bobcat was founded here after a turkey farmer was sick and tired of shoveling out their turkey manure. So they developed the world’s first skid steer, which became Bobcat. So again, this long standing history. So he challenged us to see what the region’s major was.
And that’s kind of when a group of community leaders came together and said, well, it’s got to be ag and specifically agriculture technology. And so that was kind of the genesis of Grand Farm. That was in 2017. Kind of fast forward a little bit. This is kind of like when I started to get involved in this.
In 2019, USDA Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue was coming through town to go pheasant hunting with our US Senator John Hoeven. And Hoeven called us and said, Hey, I understand you’re working on this Grand Farm thing. You want to launch it? And we were like, okay. So we had 40 acres of soybeans, a tent, a porta potty and a dream. And then the US Senator and Secretary came back and we launched Grand Farm. And that’s kind of like how we’ve scaled up from there.
Maureen: Wow, incredible. don’t, I never heard that story. That is amazing. Especially because it gets back to one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot, not only in terms of businesses and regions, but really people, which is also what we’re talking about here, is the idea of a vision, knowing which direction you want to go in. Right?
And so it takes someone to say, what do you want to do? Or you to ask yourself that even, right? What do you want to do? And knowing what the answer is to be able to respond to somebody coming through town pheasant hunting and being able to see, I see potential in this. And I’m going to give you the money that you need to turn it into basically like put it on steroids.
So the original foundation of it, though, the 40 acres, the porta potty and the tent. That was born out of this original concept of what’s our region’s major and we feel that it’s Ag tech. Let’s get started in that direction. Is that right? Okay.
Andrew: Yep. Yes. I mean, and that’s kind of like the way I view it. You know, our work really is community building, relationship building. It’s kind of interesting. I recently joined my church council and I just kind of learned behind the scenes of how this kind of like what churches are all focused on is kind of like community building and bringing people together. And there’s a lot of similarities when it comes to that kind of in our work. It’s putting together the vision.
Identify what are the challenges you’re trying to solve and then bring the people together and there’s a lot of different ways that you could do that. You could do that through events. You can do that through small gatherings. You can do that through actual like putting out a challenge and let’s say like, right, we’re going to run some trials out of Grand Farm, focus on those.
Maureen: So what are some of the things that you have tried over the years that have been both successful and unsuccessful as you have grown Grand Farm into what it is today?
Andrew: Yes, a lot of unsuccessful stuff I would say. I think one.
So we launched in 2019, but we really, that was kind of like the ceremonial launch, you know how it goes. And then really the first year of activity was 2020, which is obviously a very interesting year to launch.
So one of the things I do think that it’s kind of always interesting that we reflect back in those years and kind of who were the challenges, who were the losers, who were some of the winners and ultimately, what happened with that was we were able to get access to people that we probably wouldn’t have been able to.
We were able to do these COVID safe events outside, under a tent, in a field. So we were able to experiment a lot. That year we did about 50 some different gatherings, kind of from May through September. You know, people were hungry for just community and coming together safely.
We saw a lot of success with that. threw a lot of events that nobody showed up, but we threw events that several hundred people showed up that we weren’t expecting for. And it’s kind of been interesting. A couple of things that we have done that maybe didn’t land as well.
I think one of the things is that the key team at Grand Farm, we don’t come from an agricultural background, which I think provides its strengths and challenges. You know, I think one of the challenges in ag maybe that it’s, I’m cautious on how I phrase this, but it’s a little bit of an old boys club, right? You’re working ag.
You’re staying ag. There’s not a lot of it’s kind of like an incestuous industry. People just move from this place to this place. They’re selling the same thing. They’re doing the same thing, just a different color of product, right? So I think having kind of us being able to approach things with a fresh perspective, we tried some things. didn’t work. We tried some different things that did work. And I think one of the key things that we have kind of like landed on is kind of our operating ethos is, especially as we’re scaling kind of around the country, is go into a region, really focus on what are the top challenges that our producers, kind of the region are facing from an agricultural standpoint.
So kind of understanding those challenges, understanding this technology landscape. So just spending time meeting with companies from around the world. These could be big corporates like Microsoft, what tech do they have, the little startups from Japan, India, wherever. And then figuring out how do we run events, programs, test plots, projects to bring that tech with the challenge.
Maureen: Yes, that makes sense. You just mentioned that you’re working on and have achieved in some, in many cases, scaling around the country and around the world. What does that look like for Grand Farm, especially considering you are a couple hundred acres in North Dakota? Now that aspect, certainly you can’t pick up the ground and make it global. What are the ways that you’re expanding that reach?
Andrew: Yes. A couple of things on that standpoint. So one in Grand Farm, have a 600 acre innovation campus is what we call it. Think of it as a Research and Development playground where startups, researchers and industry partners can come run test plots. Then we’ll run events and programs, projects to bring out thousands of people every year.
In North Dakota, Precision Planting runs the Precision Technology Institute in North Dakota on 300 of those acres. So they’re also doing their own kind of projects, test plots, events, things like that. But the idea now is that we can work with a company from Costa Rica that has a product that they want to test. They send us the product, they give us their plot protocols, we go on executive. And so we’ve kind of launched our first expansion into the state of Georgia. It’s in partnership with the University of Georgia.
So it’s the University of Georgia Grand Farm. It sits on 250 acres in Perry, Georgia, right next to the Georgia National Fairgrounds. And kind of up here, we’re solely independent. Our own 501C3 nonprofit. We’re not associated with any university economic development group. Down there, it’s a true partnership with the university. So they own the land. We build out the ecosystem, run the events programs, and then they kind of run the field operations side of the business.
And so kind of like why they found value in us is they want to turn Georgia into the premier hub for ag innovation for the Southeast. They saw this as their mission or their region’s mission. They were like, well, Grand Farm is already doing this for the upper Midwest. So let’s partner with them.
And so that’s kind of going to be the operating model as we kind of scale this thing is like we’re not going to go out and buy 500 acres in Georgia, 500 acres in California and kind of run it all ourselves. We want to be a compliment to this work that’s already happening there, not compete. But now what allows that is this company from an imaginary company from Costa Rica. We can now work with them. Have one central project manager work with them.
They can do testing in North Dakota and in Georgia on different crops, soils, things like that. And then now it becomes this like spoken hub model where we can support this company as Grand Farm and they can kind of do their own, just come to attend the events and kind of for the publicity side of things.
Maureen: Yes, and it allows Grand Farm to stay nimble, it sounds like too, right? And not get too bogged down in trying to do it all, but only do what makes sense. And I think the Georgia scenario is a perfect one, right? Rather than having to employ a bunch of staff who’s going to put the literal stuff in the ground.
You can activate on the programming side and maybe you need only a light lift of people, maybe some of your people travel down on occasion, right? But it allows you to do what you do best and stay niche focused and nimble on what’s best for you. I love that model. So you mentioned that the USDA coming through was kind of the big shift between what was 40 acres and is now 600 acres.
You recently had USDA pass through again just recently, right? So talk about that huge news.
Andrew: Yes, well, thanks for the teaming me up here. So just on Tuesday, we hosted Under Secretary Scott Hutchins and our US Senator John Hoeven to announce the concept of this National Proving Grounds.
And basically what the USDA wants to do is create a nationwide testing network where they can work with industry partners. It’s not a perfect analogy, but I kind of call it the, this is my media background, kind of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. That’s what USDA wants to do with these companies. And so what we’re going to be doing.
Maureen: That they would, sorry, before you continue, just to be sure that I understand your reference there, you’re saying that when a company goes through a test at a national proving grounds network farm, that they get effectively the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval because the testing has been done in a way that’s vetted that makes it in theory more better, more validated, right, than just a more informal trial.
Andrew: True. Basically what’s going to be happening this year is this is going to be kind of our pilot year. We’re going to be running this at our sites in North Dakota and at the University of Georgia, Grand Farm in Georgia. And we’re going to be evaluating companies focused on two aspects, weed scouting and then weed destruction.
So currently what we’re doing is we are kind of, there’s kind of two paths that are happening right now. So USDA is working with wheat scientists from around the country to design kind of plot protocols, to make sure that the studies are actually going to be done in a kind of set scientific method, methodological study aspect.
And then we’re kind of the national program management office. So one helping kind of recruit the companies in the selection process. And then two helping this kind of scale.
And so as we scale this this year again, North Dakota, Georgia, 2027, we want to add one or two other locations. Those locations are to be determined. I think it’s going to be kind of a, ultimately it’s going to be a USDA decision where those land. So we’re still working through a lot of details at the moment as we can scale and launch these things. So it’s kind of like you’re building the parachute as you’re falling out of the plane, which is always fun.
We don’t know if it’s always going to be a time of weeding and scouting, but let’s just use that as the analogy. But now you can imagine, just imagine 10 to 20 years from now you have this proving ground in every state focused on testing and evaluating technology that are focused on that state’s crops.
And that’s why the partnership is with USDA Agriculture Research Service. They’re a billion dollar research organization. They have about 90 some research institutions or kind of labs around the country. So it’s a great natural partner to kind of launch and scale this concept with.
Maureen: So will that have partnerships? First of all, congratulations. That is incredible. I also didn’t realize that Grand Farm is essentially serving as the national office for these continued hubs that already exist and will continue to grow, which is incredible. And kudos to you because it also, it shows what you’ve been able to create in such a short period of time because to get that kind of notoriety and trust from the USDA when you haven’t been around for 50 years, is pretty remarkable.
Andrew: Yes, mean, 2020 was really our first year of operations. So it’s been six years and we have to give a lot of credit to our U.S. Senator John Hoeven. He is a very forward thinking and innovative kind of U.S. Senator and has been very helpful as we’ve kind of launched and scaled this.
Maureen: So for those, for additional locations and perhaps I don’t want you to share anything out of turn and you might not even know what the additional locations may be. And I don’t want to imply that you do, but in terms of, see I think about my own backyard with Cornell University being here, right? And the amount of research and well done research that’s happening in our own backyard here feels like a natural fit for the kind of place where something like that would do well because of the higher education institution?
Do you think that that is a factor in what will make successful additional locations as a part of this? Or I guess maybe better asked is what makes the DNA for a potential fruitful location for testing like this to be done well?
Andrew: Yes, I mean, that’s a great question. And the answer is we don’t know where the next locations are going to be. you know, kind of the current thinking is and again even as for the funding for this thing, the scale is not like this came with hundreds of millions of dollars to kind of scale and launch this. So we’re still figuring that out. Some of the thinking is that the USDA NIFA, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture will help kind of support and scale this.
But the idea that I think is going to be really strong is that the land grant universities are going to be a key piece of this, right? They already have the expertise, they have the land, they have the extension network. Extension is such a valuable resource in this country. So that is probably going to be the way that we scale and launch this is with the universities as well.
Maureen: I can see that making a lot of sense. Where my mind went is exactly like we just talked about with Grand Farm has been one of the reasons I’m sure of many why Grand Farm and Emerging Prairie has been able to be successful is that nimble nature and not trying to reinvent the wheel, but rather think creatively about how can we solve the problem that we’re uniquely suited to solve, not how can we try to rebuild this all the way from scratch.
And so trying to rebuild and create researchers across the US when they already exist in land grant institutions and extension services makes a lot of sense. Let’s shift gears a bit to talk a little bit about the current landscape of ag tech investment, especially with you all working so closely in ag tech and startups and scaling, helping companies scale, providing them direction and community.
It’s been a tough couple of years for the Ag tech industry. And I’m just back from the Animal Ag Tech Innovation Summit in Fort Worth, Texas over the last couple of days. And I asked some questions there too about thoughts on the landscape, which I’m happy to share. But I’d love your perspective first on what it looks like from your sort of boots on the ground day-to-day observations.
Andrew: Yes, for any ag entrepreneur that’s trying to scale something, this is a tough, tough industry to launch and scale. I think for a lot of different reasons. One, it’s a very distributed network. Farmers, right? You know, there’s a lot of farmers, but there’s not a lot of farmers around the country or world really.
Two is there’s some big juggernauts in the industry. I have a lot of the market share. Three, the testing cycles is so long, right? So if you’re looking to launch a product and you want to get it ready to kind of test in March, you can do the test plots. Great. But if you don’t have it ready until June, you gotta wait a whole nother nine months. You can actually start to do your testing. So the cycles is very long on that. And then obviously the ag economy has been, well, at least from a crop standpoint, kind of been in the tank.
I had soybean farmers, cotton farmers, sugar beet farmers. They’ve all been really struggling. And I’m assuming a lot you and a lot of your listeners probably know about Ag funders, a kind of state of ag tech investing or whatever it is and kind of the boom that was what 2020, 2021. I don’t have the numbers exactly in front of me, but that was massive.
And then there has been a steep, steep, steep decline to only 15 billion or something like that in the last couple of years. So I think that is going to be interesting. I think the other thing that is a challenge is there hasn’t been a big exit in ag funding or investing since field view.
I think there’s been some Monarch Tractors that have been getting a lot of press over the last couple of weeks, because they’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars. And then they’re basically developing an autonomous electric tractor and it didn’t quite pan out for them.
So they declared bankruptcy. So I think that got a lot of press around the state of ag investing being broken, which I don’t know if it is, but then I think there is a kind of a ray of light out there with Halter. I’m assuming this was probably a big component of the animal event you were just at, as Halter was valued at $2 billion now and has raised several hundred million dollars. Peter Thiel’s group has invested in it.
So I do think that there are opportunities that are going to start to emerge around it.
Maureen: Yes. So what I heard from I sat at a roundtable on the second day that had I won’t name names specifics, right. But just had a number of investors at the table as well as ag tech startups. And a lot of what you mentioned was mentioned there. Certainly they’re waiting for exits. Right. It has been a huge component of it that we’re sitting on the dollars that we thought we would have back by now.
You know, are just tied up. But also, I think that I always try to look for the silver lining. What is a key takeaway that founders can do, right? Because there’s often they’re they’re looking for, well, I still need to fundraise regardless of the environment, regardless of the difficulty. I still need to go in that direction.
And I think good advice that I have heard before, not only at that table, but also from Adam Bergman with Ecotech Capital who was on the podcast last year, a couple of years ago as well, about sharing founder story milestones is an excellent way to keep the investment community up to date on what you’ve got going on, right?
So setting up the goalpost, knocking it down and then setting up the next one, right? Is a really good way for founders to be able to build trust despite this environment so that when it is time for you to go out and raise, you’ve got this history of we set this goal, we accomplished it, we set this goal, we accomplished it, we set this goal and we missed it, but here’s what we did to respond, right? Because it’s not all rainbows and butterflies there’s challenges in all of it and you’re going to have setbacks.
And then the cycles of agriculture was also mentioned too, just that it’s naturally longer lead times because of your ability to get the product tested, right? Regardless of what it is. Yes, I’m also, I’m hopeful that we will start to see some positivity. was some discussion there at that table too was, is this rock bottom? This might be rock bottom. And that’s a good thing because that means it’s only up from here. Yes. So here’s hoping.
Andrew: Thank you. Only way to go out, but I love it. I love an optimist. But there’s one thing that entrepreneurs are, is eternal optimists.
Maureen: Yes, and you have to be.
All right, last question for you. A little bit about what’s next for Ag tech or perhaps even like what is, I think you have a unique perspective on this one. Something that you think that the Ag industry needs right now that it doesn’t have.
Andrew: Yes, exactly. Well, probably some exits I think would be a good one. Woo, that’s a good question, Maureen. What’s next for Ag? You know, I think a couple of things are one. So obviously we’re here in the upper Midwest in North Dakota. One of the things that’s unique about North Dakota, even though we’re Midwest, is from an agriculture standpoint, we’re pretty diverse.
There’s about 45 different crops that are grown here. We’re in the top one or two for about 14, like flax, canola, barley, edible beans, things like that. And then down in Georgia it’s obviously a very diverse landscape when it comes to Southeast with fruits, vegetables, and things like that.
And there’s been a lot of publicity around the struggles for soybean, cotton farmers, sugar beet farmers, these groups that rely on exports, kind of these international markets. So there’s a lot of disruption that’s happening and kind of with some of these traditional grown crops out there. And to me, again, I want to caveat how I say this, but I think we grow a lot of, grow too much corn, grow too much soy, what does this mean for some of these new crops that might be more important from a humanity standpoint, from a nutrition standpoint, from a feeding standpoint, from a fueling fiber, yada yada. To me, that is really interesting and exciting.
So I think there’s a lot of crops, like the one that Cargill‘s interested in is camelina, a winter crop. And they’re looking at it to buy some camelina. So they’re trying to produce that.
We had some hemp trials out at the farm last year, not from a CBD standpoint, but they’re looking at it from a pharmaceutical and oil standpoint. What can you do with that? So I think to me, that is one thing that I’m going to be very curious about is will this market disruption allow us to expand our agricultural standpoint, get less corn and soil?
Other markets that will help support and grow the kind of the consumer or help support farmers. And it’s like one of my favorite parts again, kind of caveat. One of the most unique partners that I enjoy working with is just across the interstate from Grand Farm is called SB&B. And what they do is they are a food grade edible soybean processor. So they work with their farmers in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin to grow non-genetically modified soybeans that they’re shipping to Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand for tofu, edamame, things along those lines. And their farmers are getting a premium because it’s obviously going to food, international markets. And to me, that is an example of what some of this market disruption is. So maybe less on the tech side, but still disruption and innovation.
Maureen: I think those are important points. I’m glad you mentioned that too, because you mentioned something about the difficulty that corn and soybean farmers have faced in recent years that when we were just talking about the landscape of investment and talk about a silver lining, six months ago even, who would have thought that the difficulty that we’ve been going through with international exports on corn and soybeans in particular would be something that we could have this conversation about now because and I don’t mean to downplay that because you know it’s easy for for you and I, who are in the ag ecosystem but not the farmers who are looking for an outlet right.
Andrew: Yes, we don’t have to buy a several hundred thousand dollar new planter to enter into a new crop.
Maureen: Exactly, exactly. But the new perspectives that a change like that brings with the change in the international exports for products like corn and soybean, what does that open people’s mind to to say, what could I do differently here? What could I open my eyes to instead, as well as the whole ecosystem and supply chain of how can I think differently about something that could grow that we’re not currently utilizing.
I am incredibly excited about hemp. I think that there’s immense possibility in, from a fiber standpoint, industrial hemp, as well as I haven’t heard of it from, I mean, of course I’m familiar with oils being used in consumption, right? But not from a pharmaceutical standpoint with folks testing at a large scale in that regard, but there’s a lot to be excited about in terms of hemp as well as cannabis too.
We are at the ground floor of a brand new agricultural product that is going to change the game for many farmers and could, right? And that’s an exciting thing, but also the innovation that it demands for how companies use what’s possible to grow as well.
Yes, so just the opportunity in the ecosystem like that is certainly silver lining to take the downside of international markets and flip it to how can we think positively about what’s possible.
Andrew: Yes, a hundred percent. The other thing kind of tangentially related to that, and this is just on my mind recently, because I spent some time with the CTO for PivotBio with fertilizer prices the way they are, what that means for on-shore fertilizer production in the US, but then also kind of new uses of that kind of fertilizer.
So I think the biological market is one that is going to start to see some traction. And it’s kind of like nitrogen prices are going through the roof. PivotBio obviously has a product that can kind of help replace some of that. It’s going to be a lot cheaper.
And the other thing that I, to me, thought was really interesting as they were saying that a five gallon bucket is the equivalent to a train car load of nitrogen.
So to me, it creates a lot of different kinds of logistically kind of from an operations standpoint, what does that actually mean? So they’re like the CTO for PivotBio was talking to a group of farmers from Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan doesn’t obviously have the same infrastructure that the US has when it comes to rails and things like that getting the shipment around.
Well, now what does this mean when they can like just carry in a five gallon bucket of PivotBio’s product, or they’re talking about how they work with farmers in Kenya who don’t use any fertilizer and now they just package like little packet like the little ketchup packets of their product and put it in a backpack and hike it out to the farmer. So, Yes, I’m not trying to sell PivotBio, but I think that sort of idea is going to be really interesting with light of the year prices.
Maureen: That’s something to be really excited about in agriculture across the board. I think the potential with biologicals is immense. It’s so untapped.
The other thing, you guys have hosted a space ag event in the past as well. I am so obsessed with space ag. I just think, again, like I just mentioned about hemp and cannabis, the possibility there to be on the ground floor of something that doesn’t exist in the market right now at scale. Space ag is the same thing, right?
The opportunity that we have there to reinvent and make possible agriculture in space is so exciting to me. So anybody who’s listening to this who wants to call me about space agriculture, please do.
Andrew: Loop me in on that one. Yes. One of my core work memories will always be, probably, it was sometime in 2020, was right after my daughter was born. So my wife was on maternity leave. She was in the living room. I was kind of in the kitchen working and through a series of connections, I got in touch with the head of plant sciences for NASA. And they were talking about their 10 year roadmap on how you’re going to feed people, how you’re to scale things as we go to the Mars and obviously the Artemis missions that are happening right now. And it was so inspiring to me.
That’s why we launched the Space Ag Conference and kind of the idea is kind of like threefold with that conference is one, obviously there’s been a ton of space technology that have had direct impacts to agriculture. Satellites is the obvious one. A lot of the LED technology for greenhouses has been, was developed by NASA is another example.
But the second one is that my two favorite genres to read are science fiction and the age of exploration, kind of like that 1600 to 1900s. And what I find really interesting is like when you do this novel crazy exploration, like re-embarking on now in space, that unlocks new technologies, new capabilities.
And so to me, that’s like the second aspect that we were looking at would be how do we take some of this learning from space and bring it to agriculture. Obviously, if we’re growing, producing food and with limited oxygen, limited water, yada yada, that’s going to have a lot of applications in ag.
And then the third one is kind of like space is cool. I have a five-year-old, she wants to be an astronaut. Everybody wants to be an astronaut as a kid, right? I still want to be an astronaut. Yes, well, our time might be running out here in the morning, but maybe our kids can, but you know, it’s like, let’s use this to inspire the next generation of agriculturalists. of like that.
Agriculture is a little bit of an old boys club. It’s always been, you grow up in ag, you go into ag, we need net new people entering into ag, because there’s just not enough people growing up in ag. So it’s like, how do we kind of get the next generation of agriculturalists excited? And that’s an opportunity I see.
Maureen: Yes, I think that perspective of new innovations that from solving that unique problem of how do we grow agriculture in space and being able to solve that and bring it back to U.S. agriculture is really fascinating. It kind of reminds me of a square peg round hole. What was the movie? Apollo, one of the Apollo movies.
Andrew: Oh, Apollo 11? 13?
Maureen: Which was literally like a square peg round hole solution and that sort of problem solving, what do you do with limited resources is a really cool thing. I love that parallel of what it can bring back.
We’ll have to compare notes on sci-fi books because I’m also a sci-fi book nerd. So this was awesome. Andrew, thank you so much for your expertise. Really excited to continue to watch Grand Farm’s growth, especially amidst the USDA’s continued enthusiasm in what you’re doing too. So keep up the great work.