What drew you to the company and to the role?
Agriculture is my fourth industry. Before this, I spent a decade at Amazon on the retail side of the business. When this opportunity with Farmers Edge was presented to me, I started researching the industry more deeply. Peeling back the layers and looking at the role of technology over the years—and the reputational challenges AgTech has faced—I saw an opportunity to apply my background in tech and operations to build solid technology solutions and help push the digitization of agriculture forward.
What changes did you aim to bring to the company?
My mandate was to assess the entire business model. A lot of ag technology solutions, including ours at Farmers Edge, were compelling—but adoption wasn’t where it should be. Our previous approach was very product-centric: launch a solution, and assume the customer would adopt it. But every grower is different, and a one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work.
So, the questions I focused on understanding were: Why is there a gap? And how can we create more value?
Your new product is Managed Services. Tell us what it offers.
With our enterprise business, we are completely customer centric. We start by understanding the customer’s business: what are they trying to do, and how can we help?
For example, if you’re a CTO at a large agribusiness, we bring both agronomic expertise and technical capability under one roof. That allows us to build custom solutions for operations, supply chain, and reporting. If your business is scaling from 1 million to 200 million acres, we can support that growth so your team can stay focused on the core business. In short, our Managed Services solution is designed to scale with customers.
We launched this under a year ago and the traction that we’ve received from these large agribusinesses has been significant. We are trying to address an unmet need in the marketplace for these large agribusinesses and take away the burden from these CTOs and CIOs who want to digitize, but don’t have a reliable partner to do it with.
What’s changed about Farmers Edge in the past three years?
The name “Farmers Edge” reflects our original focus: building tools for individual growers. Now, our model is focused on helping large enterprises—retailers, insurers, and input companies—depending on where they are on the tech adoption curve.
We can build new technology for them, improve what they already have, or white label our own. That flexibility helps them go to market faster with fewer resource demands.
We think of ourselves as an extension of their technology team—only more agile.
What percent of your business is focused on Managed Services today?
Roughly 80% of our team is focused on Managed Services, because that’s now our lead offering. We still have a base of growers across North America and Brazil using our variable rate solutions, and we continue to serve them. We also operate two soil testing labs that support both growers and enterprise clients.
What would you say are the most significant milestones for your team so far?
A key milestone was when we were able to define the problem, articulate it in a way that was simple for agribusinesses to understand, and then execute it with urgency and discipline in a way that we were also able to hold to our commitment. The last thing we wanted was to have an expectation mismatch with the ag tech and leave the business with a painful experience.
What’s an example of a recent project?
We support a variety of segments across agriculture—including insurance, ag retail, sustainability, and farm productivity—and each partnership looks a little different depending on the need.
One example is our work with the National Sorghum Producers, where we’re providing carbon intensity scoring for 1,700 fields and digitizing over 400 farms. It was a near turn-key solution that helped them meet evolving sustainability and compliance requirements without having to stand up internal infrastructure.
We’re also working with insurance providers in both Canada and Brazil to modernize risk management systems and enhance data-driven decision-making.
In ag retail, we build white-label technology platforms and agronomic tools that can scale with our partners—whether they’re launching digital agronomy services, expanding e-commerce, or centralizing data from across their network. Across every segment, the value is the same: taking the complexity off their plate so they can stay focused on what they do best.
You’ve shifted from public to private. What’s the story there?
We’re now backed by Fairfax Financial, a long-term investor based in Toronto. They’ve been around for four decades, have a strong track record of value investing and have outperformed the market with a compounded return of over 18% annually.
We’re well-capitalized and financially supported by Fairfax.
Like many in the technology sector, we experienced post-IPO correction. Going private allowed us to focus on successfully executing the pivot. Like I mentioned earlier, our Managed Services offering has been extremely well received by the industry.
Where do you hope to be five years from now?
In five years, I want Farmers Edge to be seen as the gold standard for digital transformation in agriculture. Not just as a service provider, but as a strategic partner that enables the world’s largest agribusinesses to scale, adapt, and lead.
We’re building a category-defining company – one that makes technology a competitive advantage, not a barrier, for the entire industry.
