No more settlement checks in the mailboxes. Bushel continues to roll out its tools to digitize grain transactions for the industry and farmers. In its latest introduction, Bushel has added Bushel Payments, Bushel Wallet and Bushel Wallet Link.
All three of those financial tools further reduce the paper trail of buying and selling grain.
As Bushel CEO Jake Joraanstad explains, the digital financial technology will mean faster payments for farmers, quicker reconciliation for agribusinesses, and an overall a better way to manage their businesses.
“Think about what it actually costs to send a check—from the printing, to manually handling the check in the mail, the gasoline to deliver to the check to a rural mailbox, and then for the farmer to likely drive to town to deposit it,” he says. “If you look at other parts of the world, for example in Australia, 90% of ag payments are electronic and completed within a 15 second window.”
The new tools are being rolled out with two Bushel customers—including Consolidated Grain & Barge, Ag Valley Cooperative–with others coming online in the near future.
The technology enabling the money to be moved from agribusinesses to farmer accounts is called Bushel Payments.
Using Bushel Payments, farmers can access their Bushel Wallet via the Bushel app and it can be linked to up to six U.S. bank accounts for electronic transfer. The digital wallet was developed specifically for agriculture. The fees associated with this functionality are said to be less than $10, whether it’s a $10,000 settlement or a $10 million settlement.
Joraanstad says it’s the way Bushel has respected the scale of the agriculture business as well as its details that makes these products the first-ever of their kind to be offered for farmers. The work on Bushel Wallet and its suite of tools has been going on for two years.
“Before this, farmers did not have good options. Now, we built a toolset that works for the broad industry and moves how the money flows. These new offerings continue our mission at Bushel which is to digitize the infrastructure of agriculture,” he says.
Additionally, Bushel Wallet has a fully routable account and is FDIC insured.
Bushel has built a tool to expand Bushel Wallet’s functionality to other businesses outside of its traditional network and Bushel platform—such as ag retailers, insurance providers, and equipment companies, to use and embed in their own . Bushel Wallet Link is an API for such businesses to use to connect functionality for payments and transactions.
Another consideration of the account setup is farmers enroll once and don’t need to re-enroll with each business they transact with.
Bushel reports more than 60,000 farmers are users of its software today and its customers settle $60 billion in grain every year.
“We expect that next year we’ll have the largest payment network in agriculture,” Joraanstad says. “We think the farmer is ready for a tool that allows them to not go through the paper process.”
