Startup brings digital future to farming
Startup shows how having right tech tools can make industry efficient
It’s about a hockey player, a farmer and an economist from Yale walking into a downtown Ottawa tech startup and … no, wait … they’re all the same guy.
Brennan Turner was raised on his family’s Saskatchewan farm, studied at Yale, played in the Chicago Blackhawks’ and Ottawa Senators’ AHL farm teams and worked on Wall Street as a commodity trader before founding FarmLead, a tech startup with offices on Bank Street — as well as in Chicago.
His business partner and co-founder, Alain Goubau, was also raised on a farm, in Lefaivre — roughly an hour east of downtown Ottawa — and studied chemical engineering at McGill before travelling the world working for a multinational corporation, earning a law degree from Harvard and starting a clean-energy company.
“We talked a lot about what the future of the farm was like, both coming from the farm but heavily passionate about agriculture,” Turner said, “and just said if there’s an opportunity to help guide this transition into a digital world, the e-commerce side
of the farm, the opportunity is here and we’re probably the best to do it, given our background and where we sit, still involved in our family operations and being involved at harvest time.”
Farming, if those two are any guide, is resolutely turned toward the future. It gives me hope to see that all those issues we care about, from food security to sustainability and keeping local farms locally owned, are concerns shared by this tech-savvy generation of agriculture experts. They’re also big on connecting farmers to one another through virtual tools, allowing them to get a better sense of the state of their industry, because, as it turns out, knowledge matters in farming as much as anywhere else.
The tool they created, FarmLead, has been described as an eBay for cash-grain trading. Instead of contacting each potential buyer individually, farmers post their offerings online and wait for offers from verified buyers. Transactions take place 24/7 right from the phone, tablet or computer. The service is free for farmers until a transaction occurs, at which point they pay a commission.
Farmers using the platform represent 13 per cent of all North American production of grain, oilseeds and pulses ( beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils). All but one of the top 20 North American grain buyers by volume use FarmLead to make their purchases.
It makes selling grain — or peas or lentils — easier. But also more profitable because, on top of facilitating transactions, the application gives users access to data that allow them to get a better sense of what the markets are doing, when is a good time to sell, and what buyers are looking for. All this automation frees up a lot of valuable time and energy that farmers can use to do something more productive than being on the phone.
The most recent release of FarmLead’s product is called Combyne, a cheeky take on that enormous piece of farm machinery, the combine. If you’re as unfamiliar with farming but as nuts about Pixar movies as I am, think of the bull characters in the Cars series — incredibly useful.
Combyne will allow farmers to organize their networks and their bids, acting as a CRM (customer relationship management) tool. More than a simple eBay for cash-grain trades, the new version of the platform is a cross between LinkedIn and WhatsApp. Reactions so far have been “very positive,” Turner said.
Connections, networks and the time-sensitive sharing of information are very much part of the future of farming. Turner sees how the more than two million different data points his firm has accumulated documenting transactions as yet another way to help farmers’ bottom lines. With this information, farmers know the timing of the bestselling opportunities and how to take advantage of them with just a few taps.
Farming is still about growing things. But with the right technology, farmers have tools to be connected to one another and to their markets, making them as efficient as possible. The healthier the farm, the healthier our food. It’s a future we’ll all benefit from.
Brigitte Pellerin is an Ottawa writer.