FoA 275: Digital Infrastructure for Ag Supply Chains with Jake Joraanstad and Jesse Vollmar of Bushel

Visit Bushel online: https://bushelpowered.com/

Today’s episode takes a peak inside one of the hottest agtech companies to come along in recent years: Bushel. I’ve known about Bushel for a couple of years now, and originally just understood them to be a company that was digitizing scale tickets, which is actually how they started. Scale tickets, for those of you who don’t know, are the paper receipt that accompanies a load of an agricultural commodity that usually includes how much was delivered to where, what the grade factors were, etc. It’s really important because historically this is what is used to get paid properly, to keep effective records, and to have a paper trail for bankers, etc.

Then this year they raised a $47M series B round and acquired long time farm management software company FarmLogs, and it became clear that I needed to get them on the show to explain all of these pieces and how they fit together. 

Joining me is Bushel co-founder and CEO Jake Joraanstad as well as Jesse Vollmar, who was the cofounder and CEO of FarmLogs and now is the VP of Farm Strategy at Bushel after the acquisition. We discuss why a company that is focused on supply chain would get into the farm management software business, what is digital infrastructure and how it makes money, why they don’t see blockchain as the answer for this digital infrastructure, and how they might use the data they’re collecting to provide unprecedented insights back to their customers. 

Bushel has some pretty impressive feathers in their cap: they’ve raised a total of around $75M now, much of it from corporate venture capital arms of large grain companies such as Cargill, Scoular, The Andersons, and Continental Grain (which I actually think is more of an investor and holding company than a grain company nowadays, but we’ll count them anyway). Even more impressive is that Bushel boasts 60,000 active users on its platform, which is used at 2,000 grain buying locations throughout the US and Canada. They reach 40% of grain origination in the US  and handle $22 billion of grain contracts each year.