Bushel Acquires GrainBridge, Leader Says ‘Standardization Breeds Innovation’
There’s big news in the ag data space as Bushel announces it has acquired GrainBridge, a two-year old joint venture of ADM and Cargill.
“This gives us the opportunity to continue to build out the digital infrastructure needed in U.S. agriculture,” says co-founder of Bushel Jake Joraanstad. “Having both ADM and Cargill commit to the Bushel platform allows us to coordinate better and enable this to happen in a much more realistic way.”
As Joraanstad explains, the past 100 years saw a huge level of infrastructure investment to make U.S. agriculture relevant and competitive in the global market. In his view the same level of investment needs to be made in the digital infrastructure but in the next 10 years—a much more compressed timeline.
“The digital infrastructure we have today is antiquated–at best,” he says.
Bushel has been leading a march to more digitization, and before the acquisition, Bushel had 210 customers totaling 2,000 live grain receiving locations. Earlier in 2021, Cargill had joined the Bushel network, which allowed the platform to touch 40% of the U.S. grain volume at origination. Also in 2021, the company said it reached the milestone of 50,000 farmers logging into the Bushel mobile app.
“Our vision is to create a sustainable, transparent and efficient supply chain from a digital tooling perspective so that we remain relevant to a global agricultural market,” Joraanstad says. He adds that standardization of data in this segment of agriculture is essential and “standardization breeds innovation.”
Joraanstad says this brings the company to focus on three areas for its business:
- Commercial Elevators: “This is the core of what we do, and it’ll continue to be the largest area of investment and focus,” he says.
- Farm Management: Since the June 2021 acquisition of Farmlogs, the company expanded into farmer-facing software. Joraanstad says up to one-third of the Bushel team will be focusing on this product and its integrations.
- Digital Data Movement: “You’ll hear more about this year next year,” Joraanstad teases. “But it will build on the offer system we launched within Bushel Trade, and there’s much more to come. One of the biggest opportunities is to help move money with a lot more around the transactional elements.”
“We are a pure software company,” he says. “And we are independent. Even with the grain elevators who invested early in our company, they are minority stakeholders. And with the acquisition of GrainBridge, we are maintaining our independence.”
Bushel was founded in 2011 in Fargo, ND, and will maintain the GrainBridge offices and development team in Omaha, Neb.
“Some of the traditional GrainBridge tools will be wound down over the next 12 months, and the tools they bring to the table with data, data refinement and machine learning work will be brought to a broader set of customers via Bushel,” Joraanstad says.
ADM and Cargill will work with their respective customers on the timing of the transition.
Four years ago, Bushel was founded with a core product helping digitize grain companies’ businesses (it was launched from now 10-year-old Myriad Mobile.) And Joraanstad boasts the company has not changed its core mission.
“From the smallest co-op to the largest and everyone in between this solidifies our plan to be the leader when creating tools to make an industry more effective,” he says.
When asked about the threat of cyberattacks, Joranstad says the company has worked hard to keep data security paramount and has undergone additional security measures as it’s scaled.
