After serving in a corporate leadership role for the Agriculture Division of DowDupont, CEO at Dow AgroSciences, and CEO at Lindsay Corporation, Tim Hassinger joined Intelinair as CEO and president on January 3, 2022. With his more than 37 years of agribusiness experience, he says momentum is in the favor of the tech company as it expands its footprint and capabilities.
What aspects of Intelinair drew you to be involved in the business?
I’ve been in ag my entire career—I wanted to stay in the industry. But I wanted a different type of experience from my prior roles, so a startup in the digital space fit that. I’ve been on the Intelinair board since 2021. I get excited about the technology because I have confidence in our ability to scale. The fast-paced, growth-oriented environment attracted me.
What are your thoughts on leadership and agribusiness management?
The customers are the same across all sectors—you are working with farmers and/or you are working with the retailer who then services the farmer. In the digital space, the range of adoption and experience varies. A fundamental difference is adapting your approach with customers to meet them where they are in the journey—whereas in my prior industry sectors, their adoption was established.
In the coming year, what should we expect from Intelinair?
Growth is the key. We’re going to cover twice as many acres this year than the prior year. We’re working with new customers, and we are launching a new product—which is a significantly enhanced AgMRI product. These innovations will change the user experience. We’re still a corn belt focused company---Illinois and Indiana are the primary areas where we are focused–but we are expanding to take on new customers and different geographies.
Tell us about the development of the AgMRI product.
We are excited about our product as AgMRI has gone through thorough testing and is well beyond proof of concept stage at this point. This year, we’re bringing additional innovation to enhance the value our retailers and farmers see from AgMRI. We want to be part of their business. We have a list of 20 crops we have done or are doing development on.
What’s one tech development with the AgMRI product that we should watch?
This is a tool that can help them grow their top line and improve their productivity. One of the most exciting areas for us last year was disease detection in corn. Our product detected disease in corn before the crop was showing visible symptoms. In fact, we detected disease in fields, had someone walk to scout, and they came back frustrated that they didn’t find any indication of disease. We found that plant temperature was increasing before any visible symptoms. This field needed a fungicide spray that most likely wouldn’t have been found until it was too late. Our alerts and insights can help retailers find opportunity and gain additional sales.
What is the value proposition to farmers?
For farmers, we see a yield opportunity by being able to identify what’s going on in a field that you may not have seen with your own scouting. There’s an opportunity to make decisions based on those insightsand an opportunity to target where there are problems andfocus their resources. We identify issues before they become problems with our technology platform. It is difficult to know what’s happening in all fields all the time, and AgMRI allows farmers to target the biggest opportunities for impact.
