Are you an entrepreneur with farming’s next big idea?
Row Crop Challenge winners earn the opportunity to participate in the AgLaunch365 accelerator, a program designed to calibrate the needs of farmers with emerging technology.
“AgLaunch is a farmer-centric organization,” explains Margaret Oldham. She and Christophe Jospe with NORI, who was a winner in last year’s Row Crop Challenge joined AgriTalk host Chip Flory to discuss technology.
“We had to make sure it worked for farmers first,” says Jospe, whose company is a marketplace for farmers to sell carbon credits. “And we had to get their input from the get go. If it doesn’t work for them, we weren’t going to succeed.”
“Unlike a crop, which you can touch or weigh or see, this is an abstraction,” he says and emphasizes having farmer input very early on for the company has been key to building its strong foundation.
Applications for the upcoming Row Crop Challenge are available online and due by Aug. 31.
Up to 10 companies will be selected to participate in a virtual sprint week held November 16-20, 2020. Teams will present their refined pitch to a panel of farmers and aligned investors at the end of the sprint week.
“Farmers help us identify the startups, the winners and are involved in our trials phase,” Oldham says. “We have farmer networks in the mid-south, Iowa and Oregon. And we all work together to help accelerate founder’s success.”
Hear more about this opportunity on this recent AgrITalk segment:
