Tag: AgTech

Fact: soil health fanatics can be the life of the party.

Also fact: soil health fanatics might just be saving the world.

Or at least that’s what one Arizona-based soil science startup is trying to do. MyLand is a soil health company that believes “healthy soil gives us healthy food, healthy people, and a healthy planet.”

And Canada-based Ag Growth International (AGI) is saying “us too!” They are acquiring a minority stake in MyLand so they can have a seat at the board table and install some of the MyLand systems throughout North America.

Soil systems service: The systems AGI wants to install would extract live, native microorganisms from a farmer’s soil and reproduce them in mass quantities. Those organisms are then integrated in a farm’s irrigation system to deliver them back to the ground. It’s like a chocolate fountain, but with soil.

Laying the groundwork: The MyLand system has been in development since 2010 and is unique in that it’s a service-based subscription model with a monthly fee. There’s no up-front cost, and farmers get full benefits of the cost savings, increased yields, increased land values, and carbon captures.

The president and CEO of AGI says this implementation of regenerative agriculture technology like MyLand’s is “critical from a sustainability perspective.”

Successful soil story: A farmer in the Arizona desert was able to increase organic matter from less than 1%  to more than 3% in a three-year period. Of course, the total impact of the technology depends on plenty of variables, but the company has proven results that continuous use of the MyLand System reduces input costs and increases yields.

Next up: The company is planning flagship soil health centers in Florida, California, and Texas to increase interaction with farmers.

A new corn trait is in town, and farmers will say yes, please and thank you.

Counting the kernel: Pairwise, a new startup company from the Leaps by Bayer program, has created a new corn phenotype that will have farmers counting more than the usual 16 rows on an ear of corn – an exciting possibility for future yields.

They’re field-testing the corn now, and the company is optimistic farmers could see this trait offered in the pipeline in the next couple of years.

Soundbite: “So, the traits that we’re working on are actually around increasing the amount of productivity per acre that a farmer would see on a per-plant basis in the field,” says Ryan Rapp, chief technology officer for Pairwise.

“That is pretty different than what’s going on in agriculture. Historically, we’ve reached higher yield because we’ve used higher plant density. This is actually about making each individual plant produce better.”

Science says… Most of the time, new transgenes can take up to 10 years from testing to implementation in the field, but with proven science from Bayer and the focused approach from Pairwise, they’ve fast-tracked this to just two years.

This trait would be added to traditional corn hybrids through “stacking” – where scientists can offer a trait portfolio package to farmers to suit their specific needs. Talk about service.

Fields of the new high-count kernel corn plant are being tested in Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota.

Those long, dusty days clearing rocks from fields may become a thing of the past.

The rundown: TerraClear, creator of an innovative field rock-picking system, recently announced a $25 million Series A funding round.

Better than back-breaking: Attach the Rock Picker to a skid steer or compact track loader, drive through the field, and let the Rock Picker do the rest. No more repetitive and monotonous heavy lifting, saving time and labor needed to clear fields.

Pick-up line: “There are more than 400 million arable acres worldwide that have been waiting for a cost-effective and productive solution to this problem,” noted TerraClear founder and CEO Brent Frei.

By the numbers:

• 400: The average number of rocks picked per hour.
• 300 pounds: The largest rocks the picker can lift. Whoa.

After releasing the Rock Picker earlier this year, TerraClear quickly sold out. But due to this latest round of funding, machines are being built and orders are being taken.

And that’s good news for those medium-to-large farms that spend $5,000-$150,000 annually fixing equipment busted by rocks.

Oh, and this: It’s not just the Rock Picker. TerraClear uses drones and artificial intelligence to create a “rock map” of a field. This allows the landowner to plug in the coordinates and drive straight to the issue.

Future state: Using computer vision and automatic hydraulic controls, the AutoPick technology currently under development will rock your world. Rocks will be identified and picked up all via pure automation.

Sustainability is the name of the game for these startups who recently raked in new piles of investment dollars.

Here’s a snapshot of where agtech startup bucks are headed for environmentally-friendly microbes, biofertilizers, and biomolecule injections:

1. The biofertilizer biz. Kula Bio recently raised a cool $10M in a seed round led by Collaborative Fund, which hosts notable nature-conscious groups like The Nature Conservancy and Lowercarbon Capital, to name a few.

Specializing in sustainable nitrogen solutions, its Kula-N product is a next-generation nitrogen biofertilizer that helps farmers maintain yields while lessening the impact of traditional fertilizers.

2. Citrus’ savior? Invaio Sciences came up with almost $89M in a Series C round led by Flagship Pioneering. One of its focus areas is preventing Citrus Greening Disease by injecting a natural peptide straight into the crop versus spraying crop protection products.

Besides citrus, Invaio is working on products to help olive and perennial customers. Since its founding in 2018, Invaio has been in a steady R&D phase but plans to have products on the market by 2022.

3. Paring down the phosphorus. Earlier this month, Israeli startup GroundWork BioAg closed on $11M in venture financing.

Mycorrhizal inoculants are the new, shiny science behind maximizing yields while reducing the need for phosphorus fertilizers. While conventional farming practices typically destroy mycorrhiza and other microbes that occur naturally in the soil, Groundwork BioAg hopes to reverse the trend. It also sequesters carbon. #win-win

Tortuga AgTech is ramping up to build hundreds of automated harvest robots, and the company has producers pickin’ and investors grinnin’.

Refresher: In 2017, Tortuga secured $2.4 million in seed capital to begin designing robots that could harvest fresh, delicate fruits grown in controlled environments (AKA — greenhouses). They began designing the robots for strawberry harvest, and by 2019, they’d scraped together another $5 million to further refine the product.

And now, this: Venture capitalists, including big-wigs like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning, have climbed aboard the harvest train…in a big way. A newly announced Series A round will dump $20 million into Tortuga’s bank accounts.

The startup will use the cash to build hundreds of new robots that will pick berries in 2022. Using a grower-contracted model of traveling robots, the funds will also be used to pay employees operating robot fleets.

With a unique history of putting growers first during research and development, investors see big things on the horizon for Tortuga. Larry Page, managing director of Lewis & Clark AgriFood, put it this way: “We believe Tortuga can be the world leader in on-farm technology and automation.”

While we’re here: AppHarvest, the Nasdaq-listed high-tech greenhouse startup, is getting in on the robot action as well. The company purchased Root AI, a robotics-focused firm that claims that its Virgo robots are the world’s first “universal harvester.”

The price tag? A cool $60 million.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…another drone company.

Guardian Agriculture, a Boston-based startup, just deposited a batch of seed money from seed businesses. $10.5 billion from big-time players [Bayer, Wilbur Ellis, FMC] will help this startup bring digital farming to America’s farmers with its first drone system for crop protection application.

Ready for liftoff.

The autonomous vehicle is called an “eVTOL” – electric vertical takeoff and landing. Each drone has the capacity to spray or fertilize up to 40 acres per hour on pre-planned routes. The drone collects and acts on data to reduce product waste.

The drone’s benefits could be three-fold:

• Extend growers’ reach
• Reduce environmental impact
• Minimize product resistance

When these flying sprayers go out into the big, big world, they “are capable of eliminating hundreds of millions of pounds of unnecessary pesticide use annually while helping farmers grow healthier, better-protected crops.”

You can drone your own way.

Rather than being an expensive up-front cost to farmers, the drone would be offered as a service – which is how crop-dusting services are currently offered. The service ranges from $10 to $45 per acre based on Guardian’s surveys of farmers. There’s no upkeep for farmers, either.

What’s ahead: With $20 million of preorders on the docket, Guardian will ramp up manufacturing to ship out drones to early-adopting farmers in Florida and California.