Host Maureen Ballatori sat down with Tracey Wiedmeyer, the CEO of Gripp, in this episode of Spilled Salt to discuss the exciting intersection of agriculture and technology. Tracey’s roots, growing up on a Wisconsin farm became an asset in developing an agtech startup that is changing the way farmers manage their equipment and operations.
From Farm Roots to Agtech Leadership
Tracey’s story is one of passion and persistence. After graduating college in 2000 and working as a software engineer, he caught the entrepreneurial bug early. His experiences ranged from working at a Chicago startup to running his own companies, including a venture that used video game technology for market research. However, his love for the farm never faded. With hands-on experience in logging, construction, and farming, Tracey always knew where the real problems lay.
Creating Intuitive Technology for Farm Management
Tracey’s history and experience in both startups and farming led him to create Gripp. Tracey saw firsthand how farmers often manage multiple assets using paper logs or spreadsheets, which can be hard to update or share when a key worker leaves.
Gripp solves this problem by using QR codes—sticker-like labels that work like a digital profile for anything on a farm. This system lets farmers track equipment maintenance, share images, and even chat about issues directly within the app. The easy-to-use design is similar to popular apps like WhatsApp or Facebook, making it simple for teams to adopt.
Building Trust with Farmers and Slow Adopters
Acknowledging the traditional slow adoption of agtech by farmers, Tracey took the tool right to the farm. Gripp’s design lets farmers use the system with a single scan of a QR code and builds upon existing app frameworks familiar to the farmer. With a pricing model that avoids overwhelming farmers with too many choices and a month-to-month subscription, the platform aims to build trust from the start. As Tracey explains, if a farmer can use the tool with ease, the entire team will follow.
A key part of Gripp’s success comes from listening to its users. Tracey spends time on the ground—talking to farmers, walking fields, and even riding in tractors—to understand their challenges. This feedback drives the constant evolution of Gripp, ensuring that the technology is built for the real needs of modern farm operations. As the conversation shows, the goal is to create a tool that not only tracks equipment but also helps teams communicate and share valuable knowledge.
Gripp Provides Award-Winning Agritech
With awards from the American Farm Bureau Federation Ag Innovation Challenge and AgriNovus Indiana, as well as recognition at the Iowa Ag Expo, the company is gaining momentum. Tracey sees a future where the platform becomes even more powerful by using artificial intelligence to analyze unstructured data like images, videos, and notes. This could help farmers spot trends, such as changes in production that might affect their bottom line.
Tracey’s journey shows that blending farm life with technology can lead to innovative solutions. His work with Gripp not only helps farmers manage their assets but also builds a community where knowledge is shared easily and efficiently. For startup founders and those in agtech, this conversation is a reminder that understanding your customer and staying true to your roots can pave the way for success in even the most traditional industries.
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 industry.
Today’s guest is Tracey Wiedmeyer. He’s the CEO of Gripp. Gripp is a QR and mobile app system that enables farmers to track operational activities, access valuable operational knowledge and routines and reveal critical insights about their farm operation. Gripp breeds connectivity into equipment and operations for farmers without the cost of expensive hardware sensors.
What I love about this conversation with Tracey is you can tell that he’s passionate about building a tech solution that works for the farmers in their applied state. I absolutely love that.
The company just won a number of awards, including the top prize at the American Farm Bureau Ag Innovation Challenge in January in San Antonio. He talks about some of the other awards that they’ve recently won as well.
I love Tracey’s story because, like me, he grew up on a farm and is building that experience into the work that he’s doing today to add value and efficiency to today’s farm operation.
Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey Tracey, thanks for joining me. The way that I always love to start these is in the beginning. Your career trajectory has led you to where you are and the work that you’re doing now with Gripp, but take me back to the beginning of your career. What’s the story?
Tracey Wiedmeyer: I graduated college in 2000, went right to work as a software engineer, was doing some software consulting and pretty early on got the entrepreneurial kind of bug.
I went to work for a startup in Chicago, and loved what I was doing. The company was actually burning quite a bit of money. We turned it around after five years and went to the owner and said, Hey, let’s take the 2 million at EBITDA we’re throwing off and let’s get you 50. And he is basically like, no, I’m good with 2 million, turning it into a lifestyle business.
There isn’t a kind of build and conquer the world type of mentality anymore. At 28, I left and I couldn’t call the shots as a software architect at that point, but I’m like the next company I work for, I want to call the shots. A lot of hubris at 28.
I eventually started a company about a year later. We were doing 3D market research for large brands, so basically like a video game to help Kellogg sell you more Pringles or Cheez-Its or Bud Light or whatever it was. It was very sophisticated. We raised a ton of venture capital.
I was there for 12 years as Chief Technology Officer and eventually left and went into private equity. And I was in the waste management space. So basically it was the first time I could take my bag, a laptop and a crescent wrench, put my boots on, walked to the customer’s job site and put a hydraulic transducer on their 40 yard Home Depot compactor.
And I was like, man, this brings me back to my roots. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, lots of monkey grease and around tractors and all sorts of stuff. And I was like, man, this is insane. I feel like I’m on the farm again and I get to use my technology background, software background.
That company eventually got bought. And then I started doing another role for the same private equity company. I knew I had to get back to this industrial thing with software.
Private equity to me is always like putting lipstick on a pig in a way. You’re just trying to make it and dress it up enough for somebody to buy it.
I got in contact with Purdue at that point, who spins ideas out of agriculture with kind of underserved places and spaces and markets. They were kicking this idea for Gripp out, which is basically equipment maintenance and agriculture. It’s underserved, a very broad topic, but they try to bring in entrepreneurs and people who can help take that to market.
And so I got involved. I said, hey, I own tons of equipment today. I live on a big chunk of land. I still do logging and forestry and construction and all sorts of stuff in my spare time. And I know, I feel the problem firsthand and I know how to solve it.
So that kind of led the story into Gripp and we fast forward a couple years now at this point and here we are today.
Maureen: That’s awesome. And we’ll talk more about Gripp in a minute here for you to explain the company and what you do and who you serve.
Going back to, you mentioned you got the entrepreneur bug early. Same. Like I feel like I was just naturally intended to be at the helm of my own ship. And there’s nothing like it, right?
All of the work that you’ve done leading up to this has prepared you to be able to thrive and excel in your leadership at Gripp, but they’re not the same, right? Even being at the helm of another company is not the same as when it’s yours.
Tell me more about the Purdue angle that you just mentioned. You said that they have an arm where they’re bringing companies to market. Talk more about that. What is that program?
Tracey: It’s an organization called DIAL Ventures. So DIAL is digital innovation, ag or food laboratory systems. It’s a university so it comes with an acronym for a very long name, but essentially it’s Purdue saying, look, we’re very well known in ag. We have an extensive network across the country and internationally. Why don’t we bring in entrepreneurs who can help incubate ideas by probing that network?
And so a couple of times a year, they do this fellowship program where they’ll bring 12 entrepreneurs in. They’ll start with 12 or 15 different ideas. And then through the course of like two to three months and site visits and walking operations, shaking farmers hand, manufacturing, food systems, whatever it is, they whittle those down to the top three. And that’s a lot of back from investors in the DIAL program, their network, all the people that have participated.
And then those three get pitched back to the LPs for DIAL to say, hey, how big of a problem is this? Is this really something worth solving? And the ones that they say yes to, they give a little bit of seed capital to, and then they start this whole start a company process.
Their innovation partner is a company called High Alpha Innovation. They kind of run a venture studio program there, but it’s all the scaffolding of like, know, cap table management and how do you bank accounts and all that sort of stuff is sort of laid the groundwork for you, but they bring in these entrepreneurs to basically take the idea and run with
Maureen: It’s awesome to be able to get some initial capital out of that too. There’s obviously a number of accelerator programs throughout the US that have a model like that.
I think it’s a fine balance to strike between giving an entrepreneur enough support so that when they leave the nest, they are able to go and thrive and bolstering a startup in a way that doesn’t really have enough traction, right? And so it sounds like they’ve struck that balance well.
Tracey: There’s a lot of ventures who do progress. This is a little unique one as it’s, just an agriculture program. So when you need a subject matter expert or an opinion or sounding board, the program says, we got you, we have XYZ at this company, let’s hook you up on the operations side.
That’s where High Alpha comes in and they’ve got all that operational, how to hire, how to do payroll, how to put your bank account into a treasury account to build it. All that sort of stuff is there on speed DIAL for the folks that are almost like first time founders.
And for me, because I started a couple of companies now, I didn’t necessarily need that backdrop, but it’s there for you when you need it, which is great. They’re trying to, High Alpha was trying to spin out like 40 companies in two and a half years or so. So they’re in the business of creating entrepreneurs.
Maureen: What are some of the things that you changed in those very early days as you were developing the business?
Tracey: That’s a really good question. The idea, so underserved equipment maintenance and agriculture, great. Okay. The way they thought that was going to be solved was basically loosely Uber for mechanics on farms. And when I got the idea or took the idea over all the research he had done, was like, gosh, I don’t know a single farmer that’s going to let a rando onto their farm to fix their billion dollar combine.
For whatever reason they didn’t talk to the right people or not enough or whatever it was, but that hunch that I had based on how I grew up was basically born out. They said, we have trouble finding mechanics. Your dealers charge us a lot. But I still I’m not going to, I might do it,if you built it, I might try it… that type of thing. I was like, that’s not enough to build a business. That’s like a consulting side gig. And so we knew building a marketplace like that was going to be tough.
So we just put our product discovery hats on to what else plagues you. And basically farmers said, we have trouble tracking everything that we own, not just the stuff on tires, communicating amongst our team is a hodgepodge. It’s off the WhatsApp or group text. And when I want to get back to that, I had the infinite scroll problem two months ago and it’s not tied to a piece of equipment or a person, it’s tied to the operator.
All those sorts of things came up and our mindset, myself and my co-founder who I worked with before was like, man, Corporate America solved these challenges decades ago. Like you don’t bring your email, your personal email to your new job. That stuff’s been solid for a long time.
Maureen: So now talk about Gripp and what you built and why, who it serves, what’s the big problem that it’s solving.
Tracey: What we basically do is we track anything you can put a QR code to. So we have QR codes that are like stickers, big and small, PVC cards you can zip tie, magnets, you name it. But it’s basically like anything you want to keep little digital notes on.
So think of it like a Facebook profile for everything that you own. It’s got a lot of pictures, it’s got documents very easy for anybody to use because when they scan that code, they’re immediately at that digital profile.
You don’t need an app or a password to contribute information. So of course folks will start with their most expensive things, which are typically on tires, but we’ve done some weird things like cherry disease tracking. We’ve done hop production. We’ve done H2A housing, grain bins, center pivots, schedule 40 underground irrigation, like all sorts of things.
It’s because the farmer says I want little bits of information that I can recall easily. And I don’t want to have a point solution for each one of those. Like I don’t want to just use John Deere for the green stuff and Case for the red stuff and a Chevy app and a DOT and food. And all of a sudden they’re feeling like, I’m not doing 10 different apps for the same people. It’s just too confusing for my team.
So we’ve built that apparatus. I touched on it a little bit, but the communication thing is a big problem on farms. What we’ve done is said, okay, you can track little bits of information, reminders for service alerts and oil changes and stuff like that and parts list. But wouldn’t it be nice if when you communicate about that thing that you’re tracking, that conversation stays alongside that piece of equipment too.
We’ve built something akin to a group text or WhatsApp channel for every piece of equipment. It’s even further than that. An operation has assets and assets has activity, which is the preventative service, the oil change, the breakdown, the inspection. Each one of those basically creates almost like a threaded Slack channel for that particular piece of activity where people can communicate, they can mention each other, upload more pictures to diagnose.
Then from there, that information includes resources for training people. Like, hey, here’s a video of how to do the five point grease inspection and the grease zerks are kind of under this pan and you gotta pull it down. Or let me show you how to start it, it starts harder, use the mod. Whatever it is, that tribal knowledge that we call it can stay with that piece of equipment.
Maureen: Your original idea was something along the lines of like Uber mechanics for farm equipment, which then evolved into solving the greater need of, I don’t need to just fix the equipment. I need a tool that’s going to sink all of my equipment and my people in one place in an easy to use, easy to search interface that works anywhere.
Tracey: You named it. It’s interesting because we hear it all the time. We go onto a farm, most people are like this can’t possibly be true, but 98 % of the time it’s paper books, it’s a spreadsheet and it’s their memory. It’s all up here.
I’m like, what happens if Jimmy, who’s got it all up here leaves the farm? He’s like, then I’m screwed. So it’s those types of approaches because they don’t want four or five different apps that charge a user by month, which doesn’t work in any way, is they’re clumsy to use, you have to have a PhD to use it on the phone, like that stuff has just kind of run its course.
Maureen: Are you integrating AI into the tool at all in terms of being able to summarize information or anything? How are you integrating AI into it?
Tracey: The first thing we’ve done is automatic translations. So inside of that activity thread, an H2A worker who speaks Spanish could put a note in there, speak into your phone, whatever it is, we’ll translate that to English. The owner or whoever gets the notification or the farm manager can reply in English. The person sees it in Spanish. So we’ve seen such a tremendous amount of information there because like there’s a dairy we’re on.
He was getting two or three words of broken English, if anything, right? A lot of times they’re like, I don’t have a voice, I’m just not going to say it, it’ll run to disrepair, the bacteria counts will rise, whatever it is. Now you get paragraphs of information, because everybody feels like they have a voice, which is great.
I think what we’ve seen now that we’ve been in the market for almost a year is, as we collect more conversations, more human centered information, pictures, videos, documents, parts lists.
It’s all mostly unstructured information. And so we would expect over time to be able to use like an LLM over the top of that to make sense, right? You know, hear this farmer’s like, don’t give me a dashboard where I have to wonder what to type and probe around that. And we’re like, okay, what if we could allow you to ask just natural questions about your operation, or we could surface trends.
One of our Apple customers was keeping a paper book of their five pound scale. And it’s like somebody calibrated it, wrote the number down, but it wasn’t their job to interpret the number. And nobody’s going to thumb through 100 sheets of paper.
When they’re doing it with Gripp, like the trend there is like smack in your face and now they’re, they’re seeing like 16% overages in the bag weights. So like they’re sending a lot more apples to Walmart and Costco than they should be and never knew about it.
Those types of things, that’s an obvious trend, but those types of trends in organizations, farming, manufacturing, construction, they just don’t happen because that information escapes the farm.
Maureen: Like you mentioned, the agriculture industry in many ways is so far behind what corporations figured out years and years ago, right? Where my husband’s in supply chain, he calls it, you watch the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves, that sort of thing, right?
Well, in agriculture, I think, especially with the idea of the paper books and there’s so many different people and the language barriers, you don’t have the ability to watch those pennies, but like you gotta watch the dollars because you’re a nimble organization usually, right? It’s hard to find workers, especially in harvest season. And so a tool like this that can help keep on top of all of that stuff is amazing.
You mentioned you’ve been in the market for a year. And I know in things that you’ve even just mentioned in this conversation, but we’ve discussed before as well, that you have a lot of direct conversations with your end user, right? So you’re frequently talking with that farmer about what they’re looking for. How has that shaped what you’ve built and what are your kind of assessments about having that sort of close relationship with that farmer?
Tracey: It goes back to the days when I could put the laptop and the crescent wrench in the same tool bag. You know, and it’s like, we don’t, because the low-hanging fruit is so low for right now, like we don’t have to pitch Steve Jobs, Field of Dreams type of stuff.
All we have to do is listen to the customer, the farmer, walk the field, shake their hand, help them maybe set up or jump on the tractor with them or the combine or whatever it is in the buddy seat and just listen to what challenges that they’re trying to solve that have not been solved or overlooked by everyone else.
There’s plenty of software out there that does asset tracking. It’s been around for a long time. There’s plenty of communication tools. You know, nobody’s combined them. And furthermore, nobody’s combined them for the farmer, knowing they’re doing 10 jobs at once and can’t sit behind a keyboard every day. And so when you start to think about those aha moments, just from the conversations you have, like we’re still, our roadmap is still filled with feedback from customers.
it’ll be that way for a long time. And so we’re very proud of that. We launched 70 plus operations almost a year ago. Nobody’s left the platform even with month-to-month pricing. And so we know that the emotional note of what we’re doing is solving that need. And so that’s something we’re really, really proud of.
Maureen: That’s pretty remarkable. No one has left the platform. Good for you. So Gripp also recently got some big news at the American Farm Bureau Federation Innovation Competition just in January, right? What was that?
Tracey: The American Farm Bureau Federation puts on what they call the Ag Innovator Challenge every year. They start with a video pitch talking about your business, how it’s going to solve a challenge for ag.
They had a couple hundred participants this year, I think that was last June. Then they have an extensive sort of review and panel process and then they whittle it down to the top 10.
We made the top 10. Last October, we pitched another panel of judges across the industry and you get a seven minute pitch and then seven minutes of questions. And so the winners of the top 10, they picked the top four and then at the Farm Bureau National Convention, which was January of this year in San Antonio, you get on stage and you have to pitch to a new set of judges in the audience.
Maureen: And that was four companies, right? That pitched at the convention.
Tracey: That pitch is a little different because it’s three minutes, no slides. You can bring some props on stage, but I always joke with people like you got to pull out your eighth grade forensics experience and try to connect emotionally too. And that’s not as easy as it sounds.
I mean, for us, it was a bit easier because I had a paper book and a little whiteboard and the clipboard and you know, the mobile phone. You could kind of tie that together, but you know, it’s difficult when you’ve got a bacteria app for dairy or you’ve got a soil amendment or a software platform that analyzes soil.
We ended up pitching, we did real well. We took the top spot and it was just a phenomenal program to be a part of. All the mentors we met were really, really great.
Maureen: What was the top prize?
Tracey: Top prize is $100,000.
Maureen: That’s awesome. And so what, how will you prioritize that in the business? Because I’m sure you could spend a thousand, a hundred thousand dollars six ways, right? To optimize the business. So how will you allocate that first?
Tracey: For us right now, because we’re getting value from the platform, 70 plus customers and growing, we know what we’re providing has value. And so now it’s basically an awareness campaign for Gripp, which is we could go into a bunch of farms and say, hey, here’s what we do.
And I get this all the time, which is like, I didn’t know something like that exists. Yeah, it hasn’t existed. You wouldn’t know about us.
And so now we have to cast a shadow that’s bigger than us in terms of finding where farmers hang out. And so we’ve got a lot of distribution of partnership deals in the works.
I like those in terms of the $100,000 because it puts a lot of that money back into rural America where our customers are through referral programs, sell through those types of things. So we’re excited about that.
We’ve got a lot of early sort of seeds planted there and the traction looks good but that’s going to be a big part of this year.
Maureen: How will you break through to be able to build relationships with that end farmer customer? Because what we all know is that farmers are slow to trust, right? They trust what they’ve always known, they trust referrals and testimonials and that sort of thing.
But for Joe Stranger to walk on their farm, which you physically can’t do with every potential customer, right? But so to theoretically walk into their life and try and pitch something, even if it’s going to benefit them, I think farmers are naturally apprehensive. How will you get around that?
Tracey: A lot of that has been engineered into Gripp from the start. We’ve been hearing that forever.
There’s a couple of things that you mentioned. One is, I pitch stuff all the time. It’s too complex. I got a free monitor in my combine that’s been sitting there collecting dust for a year. It’s too hard for me to use. So it just sits there, I already paid for it, you know? And so, yeah, that’s hardware related, but the software platform is very similar.
So that’s one thing that we’ve said, this has to be as simple as the tools that you already use. So make it look like WhatsApp, Facebook, uploading a picture. Everybody knows how to do that. So that’s been one big area.
The second is the pricing model we have basically is like small, medium, large buckets of QR codes. And we do that because it doesn’t ask a farmer, how many things do you own? And then they’re like, they get anxiety because they don’t know they’re spread all over the place.
So we try not to give them that anxiety or that friction point and then month-to-month pricing as well. Which is like I always tell every customer look if this doesn’t do what I’m telling you it’s going to do, don’t pay me next month.
Invariably because we’re pragmatic because we’re honest about what we do and what’s coming and what we don’t do and ways you may be able to work around that.
And then when they try it I could literally have you scan a QR code now, that’s the sales pitch. Right at the call, scan it, and we’ll show you how easy it is.
Those three or four things line up to build credibility and trust right off the bat. And so they know it’s not going to be a huge upfront investment. There’s a long-term commitment. It’s simple to use. If I can do it, my team can do it. And that just changes the game.
Maureen: Where my mind is going with that too is that’s a great way to get your first 200 customers. And then the challenge or opportunity, if you will, right, is to leverage the trust that you have gained with those core customers and your sort of personable approach and that those concepts that are working and then have them work for you with the story that’s being told through all of your marketing channels, your website, your emails, your social media, ads that you run, conferences that you attend, trade shows that you’re exhibiting at, that whole thing.
I love that you mentioned, how do we cast a shadow that’s bigger than us? I love that idea and there’s scalability in that model.
Tracey: I think we’ll always have a direct channel. You know, that’s obviously what we’ve done so far. We get people to come into our website, put their credit card in, they’re off and running. We’ll always make that little less friction. Like there’s work we have to do there for sure.
Maureen: Right, that Farmer John already told me to use this, I’m already bought in, he showed it to me, let’s go.
Tracey: The farmer, the younger ones, at least are buying software like the rest of America, if we can put it that way.
Then I think when we look at distribution scale, it’s associations, folks that already have existing relationships with farmers. So there’s a one to many type of approach there. We’ve got some of those remarks.
And then we’re getting pulled now into places where farmers like, Hey, I’ve got trusted partners that do work on my farm that I would like to be able to contribute information to the stuff that I own. So a third party dealer or mechanic or irrigation specialist.
We’ve got some of those things that are squarely in our future in terms of, how do we enable that network to do business on Gripp, even if it’s not a financial transaction, but communicate together again, personal text, WhatsApp, email.
We’ve got some manufacturers that are starting to put our QR codes on their equipment as they manufacture it, create a way to support manufacture to the owner, and then we’re one click away from the farm as well. And so we’ve got some approaches like that to help magnify the scale, but also make it as easy as possible for everyone in that channel.
Maureen: When we were talking earlier, you mentioned that AFBF, the ag innovation competition that you just won is not the only thing that you’ve just won. What else do you have to celebrate?
Tracey: Yeah, we won at AgriNovus out of Indiana. They had a producer-led challenge last fall and announced it in December. That was a very similar award type approach. It was like six to eight weeks of scheduled programming. You met a bunch of different organizations and ag, know, the soy and corn Alliance and folks like that. And then you had to culminate with a pitch that was evaluated by a bunch of 12 or 13 farmers on the judging panel. And so another win for us, it’s always nice to be recognized by your potential customers as something that we needed. They had 80 or 90 participants there.
Then last week, at the Iowa Ag Show, we were voted People’s Choice winner in their Innovation Hub, as well. So yeah, we’re super excited about it.
Again, the accolades from farmers is what matters for us, because that’s what we’re trying to solve. And it’s just been a wonderful reception for Gripp in the market.
Maureen: It sounds like it’s been going according to plan, right? But one of the reasons why this is called spilled salt is because there’s salt that gets spilled. There’s things that don’t go according to plan along the way. What have been some of the struggles that you’ve encountered as you scale Gripp?
Tracey: DIAL Ventures, traditional venture backed company we’re trying to live into the promises that we make in a sustainable kind of frugal path, which, depending on what angle you come into ag investing is either impossible or there’s not enough of it or whatever.
So we got a little bit of seed capital from Purdue. And then about a year ago, we started raising capital. It had been a very tough, difficult time to raise capital in ag because it had been a frothy three to four years previous.
And so I’ve raised 70, 80 million a venture in my career. This was by far the toughest, the toughest one. And you think even if I’d have this traction metric in zero churn and all that sort of stuff in any other industry, it would have been a slam dunk to close funding in three, four months, I think, just based on my past.
There’s a level of skepticism. There’s some seed, of pre-seed money and ag tech that’s just difficult. It’s dried up. And so we’re finally through that small raise, but it was just challenging. had to bring back the size of the team and put people in furlough and defer salaries and all the things that you do to sustain.
Thankfully, our farmers and our customers, some of them are a cap table, they have been the ones, the biggest supporters.
And that’s how it’s been kind of a bit of happy news in the end, but it’s challenging to go through that kind of like you start when you’re running your own thing and there’s nobody left to shift blame to. You have to take it and you gotta eat it and you gotta take your spoonful every day and love it.
Maureen: And you have to figure it out. In 2020, I had to furlough employees. I took myself off payroll. I mean, that was a tough year. And so I know what that feels like and it sucks.
I think that to be able to persevere through something like that, to get to the other side and know that there is something to keep working toward too, right, is something that only the founder can know. Asking, is this worth continuing to push despite the challenges that I’ve faced?
I think too that with the current landscape of agtech investing is a challenging environment. And I think it has been for the last four or five years in particular.
I do think that we’ll get to a better environment. I think that it will equalize out. I think it’ll take another five years or so for it to get back to what is a more normal environment.
And I think that the growth that you’ll experience in that time, even though you didn’t get the capital that you needed when you needed and wanted it, you still persevered, made it work, figured it out and made it to the other side, you’re going to be that much stronger of a company and you’ll have retained more of your equity throughout that process too.
Tracey: It’s a lot like the product discovery work that’s enforced kind of the business model and how we go to market and that sort of thing. Like on the fundraising side, we’re not there’s plenty of investors that are “spend at all costs” and “spend it because there’s more” and there’s not.
Ag is so different in that mindset that we’re building Gripp in a sustainable way with those metrics kind of forward for us, know, top of mind all the time.
Maureen: What are some of the trends that you are seeing in the ag tech industry? And I would say, of course the access to capital being one, but what are your thoughts about just that at large trends that you’re seeing in the ag tech industry?
Tracey: I would say there’s a couple on the equipment side. And maybe they’re not agtech related, but they definitely will impact agtech.
Part of it is I’ve heard so many times in the conference I’ve been at this first quarter we’re not necessarily interested in buying the million dollar combine every year anymore.
Yeah, grain prices are depressed for sure. But that means I have to professionalize my organization to be more deliberate about how we maintain the stuff we’ve already purchased.
And so there’s a different mindset there when you’re leasing a tractor for three years, like ultimately it’s somebody else’s problem in the future and are there going to be disasters that happen in the first three years? Probably not. But that mind shut that has shifted a bit in the minds of farmers.
I think the other the other trend is diversification among farmers, given depressed grain and the pressure on international sales from countries like Brazil, you’re going to have to think about what is your organization, your farm organization, look like in the future as you partner with a protein operation or look at a construction business on the side or look at different crop types.
That diversification will impact everybody who’s selling equipment, biologicals, robotics, autonomy, all that stuff, because you have a very diverse set of owners at this point who can’t be experts in just corn and soybeans. So the education and the hand holding and the white glove service to them is really going to affect everybody trying to bring a product to market.
Maureen: What are your thoughts about farmer sentiment? You know, I gave a talk at Cultivate last year, which I think is where we originally met, which is part of Ag Tech Week Fargo in North Dakota.
And my take on the agriculture industry as it relates to agtech was that we’re going to see, continue to see slow uptake and that it would be the studies that I read, was like 4% growth or 6% growth or something like that, like very slow in terms of growth of the ag tech industry because farmer sentiment is like we were talking about lack of trust, slow to adopt, slow to change, that sort of thing.
What are your thoughts on farmer sentiment in ag tech as a whole?
Tracey: I feel the 4% is grossly underestimated. I feel like there’s a lot of pressure, a lot more groups coming out to help farmers shuffle along.
We are part of AgLaunch. They have a farmer trial network across the mid-south and Pacific Northwest.
They’re projecting the growth, their farmer base. I don’t know, I’m going to make this up, but it’s like 40 to like 400, right? It’s because they’re getting interest from farmers that want to stay on the cutting edge, but want to, they understand that to bring a successful product to market, takes farmer input. If you don’t have that, like you’re just dead in the water.
I think through organizations like that, you’re going to see farmers say, look, I have to, the demographics are shifting, know, you farmers taking over that sort of thing. And we joke all the time. We do it almost every week.
Then, we think the farmers need a Fractional Chief Technology Officer because they just know what’s out there, how it impacts what the ROI could be, how to think about that in five or 10 years. But once you have that information becomes obvious to them what to do. And that’s what I’m most excited about is especially because we’re on the low cost side, we’re on the ease of use side, we’re tackling something they all implicitly know it’s a very exciting future for us.
Maureen: So you think that there’s more organizations that are championing this sort of matchmaking between ag tech and creative use cases of how to be more efficient in your farm operation and the farmers themselves that don’t have the knowledge per se yet, right?
In terms of what is the right tool for me that there is some more of that sort of matchmaking happening and changing customer sentiment as younger folks who are the next generation that’s coming in that’s used technology all their lives, right, is coming in and is ready to apply some of that technology that they used when they were in college and in their old job that they’re ready to bring that into the farm.
Tracey: Sometimes it starts with succession planning. They’re not going to be here forever, maybe five or 10 years. How do I start that process? And I know the way that I’m doing it, because my dad did it, my grandpa did it… That’s just not going to work.
So you square that against the pressure that people are projecting on grain prices on row crops. Like you have to do something, you have to think about how to scale, how to professionalize, how to maximize the people you already have. And so I think there’s just a lot of inbound interest in places like that.
I think a lot of people see it and a lot of people are trying to swarm and help out and probably help farmers stay in business, thrive, grow, scale.
Maureen: I agree. I have seen a lot more folks who are in the, that are playing in like the succession planning. And I shouldn’t say playing, like they’re doing important work in succession planning to help that next generation come in and prepare the outgoing generation for the changes that they’re going to see and prepare the incoming generation to respect the outgoing generations way that they’ve done it, right?
That’s a big thing. There’s a lot of emotion and therapy that goes into those sorts of transitions. And so that’s a big deal.
So last question for you, everyone a little bit about what’s next for Gripp.
Tracey: For us, it’s really trying to build that network effect into the platform. It’s really doubling down on that. We’ve got a couple of manufacturers of short-line equipment.
There’s some dealer pilots going on, irrigation equipment, third-party agronomy, those types of folks that the farmer is saying, look, this information is valuable to me. When I communicate, I want to be able to make that accessible.
And so we see a huge opportunity there. That’s going to take a little bit of time to build out, but it’s really the same problem, whether you’re communicating within your team, on your farm with WhatsApp or text, you’re doing that with your dealer, your mechanic, your seed seller, all that sort of stuff.
There just isn’t a way to make that life easier for the farmer. And then I think we feel like ag is such a green field opportunity, there’s not a lot of options for farmers right now, but really any small, medium sized sort of blue collar industry suffers from the same thing. You can’t hire a full-time person to sit in the cube, learn complex software, and pay the high prices. They suffer from the same challenge.
So some of our farmers are already diverse, in construction, things like that. So they’re using different sets of equipment, but we’ll eventually tackle those spaces over time as well.
Maureen: So smart. Well, congratulations on all your success and your traction that you’ve gained. I look forward to continuing to watch you grow and continue to serve this market that is much needed for what you’re bringing to the table. So thanks for joining me.
Tracey: Thanks a lot. I enjoyed the conversation.