This story appears in the May 4, 2014 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
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- From a tree that grows on dormant farmland to an app that saves farmers hours in surveying, these innovators are finding breakthrough ways to improve life on the farm.
- From a tree that grows on dormant farmland to an app that saves farmers hours in surveying, these innovators are finding breakthrough ways to improve life on the farm.
Rob Leclerc AGFUNDER
Leclerc, 41, had a Ph.D. in biology and a background in artificial intelligence when he went to work with an African agribusiness company and became fascinated with the challenge of connecting a winning idea with willing investors. In 2013 he launched AgFunder, an online investment platform for the global agriculture industry. Handling $1.3 billion worth of projects, AgFunder connects private and institutional investors with ventures ranging from cattle ranches in Brazil to Hawaiian dairy farms to cloud-based ag software. He says he wants to make it the "financial infrastructure" of farming.
Naveen Sikka TERVIVA
Despite his M.B.A. from UC Berkeley, Sikka, 35, spends much of his time these days in the field, literally. He founded TerViva in 2010. It develops new crops to thrive on land no longer being productively farmed: for example, played out acreage in Florida and Hawaii that once grew citrus and sugarcane. Its first commercialized crop is pongamia, a tree whose pods can be processed into biofuels, fertilizer or animal feed. It's similar to soy but yields up to eight times the harvest while requiring less water--an accomplishment that has drawn $5.5 million in private capital and grants to date.
Jesse Vollmar FARMLOGS
He grew up on a midwestern farm, but his passion was always for tech. Vollmar, 25, did a brief West Coast stint participating in startup incubator Y Combinator before returning to Michigan in 2012 to found FarmLogs, a software platform that helps farmers harness data to make crucial decisions, such as which fields, according to meteorological data, will be too wet to work on a particular day. FarmLogs exploits the reach of high-speed Internet into remote rural communities to save farmers hours of labor a day, he says. More than 5% of U.S. farms with row crops now use the technology, which has attracted $5 million in investment.
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