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Grit Road Partners: Adding Value To Nebraska’s AgTech Landscape
Ben Williamson and Mike Jung launched Grit Road Partners to address a market gap in the venture capital landscape and fund AgTech founders in Nebraska and the Midwest.
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Five Things: AgTech Connect
These are a few of the major takeaways from the 2023 AgTech Connect conference. TL;DR agtech is full of opportunity and Nebraska investors are paying attention.
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Iowa startup Terva wants to be Zillow for farmland
When you’re looking to buy residential property, it’s easy to use a site like Zillow to find out almost everything you would want to know about a home. If you’re a farmer looking to expand your acreage, the process isn’t quite as simple. The Ames startup Terva is hoping to simplify the process and to…
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Michigan startup FarmLogs expands to Des Moines
For five years the Michigan company FarmLogs has been helping farms with technology that helps map out fields and soil composition, track rainfall and more. FarmLogs got its start in Ann Arbor, but the company recently announced it was expanding into Iowa, opening an office in Des Moines. How FarmLogs works Co-founder and CEO Jesse Vollmar…
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The Poultry Exchange offers an online marketplace for chicken meat
Most chicken meat is sold by contract, but about 10-20% is sold on the spot market, a labor-intensive process that requires a lot of phone calls. “There’s a sense of drudgery,” said Janette Barnard, Founder & CEO of The Poultry Exchange. “Less than 10% of the volume takes 40% of the time.” And the buyers…
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KinoSol plans to launch Kickstarter to bring its revolutionary dehydrator to Western markets
Ames startup KinoSol is planning to launch a Kickstarter later this month to fund production of solar-powered dehydrators aimed at Western markets. KinoSol was founded in 2014 by Clayton Mooney, Elise Kendall, Mikayla Sullivan and Ella Gehrke when the quartet was attending Iowa State University. They came up with KinoSol while participating in the Thought…
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New ag tech accelerator in Des Moines plays to Iowa’s strengths
Iowa’s economy has two great strengths: insurance and agriculture. In 2014 the Greater Des Moines Partnership, an economic and community development organization, announced the Global Insurance Accelerator, aimed at growing insurance-based tech startups. It only makes sense that the partnership would seek to do the same for agriculture, which it will do with a newly announced…
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Isadore Ag brings the power of data to seed corn drying
Drying seed corn is labor intensive and time consuming. Many farmers sleep in their truck to monitor the highly-sensitive process. Sioux City based Isadore Ag is a seed dryer management system designed and manufactured by Dan Elliott and Russell Valentine. For most farmers corn dryers are a basically a black box, according to Elliott, and many…
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DigiFarm puts the precision in precision agriculture
While the general public adjusts to the idea of self-driving cars, in the agricultural world it’s old hat. Navigating corn fields is a different experience from driving on streets and freeways, but DigiFarm is there to help make sure it’s a safe journey. Most tractors, combines, sprayers and other big pieces of farming equipment come…
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Quantified Ag’s LED tags light up to identify sick cattle
An agriculture career was the furthest thing from Vishal Singh’s mind growing up in Pleasanton, Nebraska. “My idea of ag was a lot of manual labor, and it didn’t look like fun,” said Singh, Founder and CEO of Quantified Ag. So what changed? “I took a job at UNL in a department that was working…