FoA 297: A Case Study in Farm Data Integration with Leaf Agriculture and GROWMARK

GROWMARK: https://www.growmark.com/

FoA 238: 5 Barriers Limiting Agtech: https://aggrad.libsyn.com/foa-238-5-barriers-limiting-agtech-and-the-companies-breaking-through-them

FoA 275: Digital Infrastructure for Ag Supply Chains: https://aggrad.libsyn.com/foa-275-digital-infrastructure-for-ag-supply-chains-with-jake-joraanstad-and-jesse-vollmar-of-bushel 

Bailey Stockdale is the CEO of Leaf Agriculture which builds developer tools for agriculture. What that means exactly is what we’re going to spend most of today’s episode talking about, but in the meantime, you can think of them as the company that enables integrations between technology providers so that the user experience is seamless. In other words, technology users will never know they exist. Their customers are technology providers in the industry. 

People like Brendan Bachman, who joins Bailey and I on today’s show. Brendan is the Senior Agronomy Technology Manager at GROWMARK/FS, which is one of the largest producer owned coops in the U.S. Brendan has worked there for about 16 years in various agronomy and technology capacities. For the past five years he’s been in thor sole working in strategy and implementation of different ag technologies with their various member companies and working with agtech companies to help them find market fit with growers.

After Bailey’s first appearance on this podcast in episode 238 we also featured Bushel in episode 275 diving deeper into the concept of digital infrastructure. Both of those would be great to re-listen to with this one. Today you’re going to get something though that you didn’t get in those past two episodes: a tangible example of why digital infrastructure is needed, how companies like leaf work with technology providers, and we’ll end with a deeper exploration into how an infrastructure provider makes money, differentiates themselves, and deals with competition. This is a different episode, but one I found really fascinating. One technical note: Bailey’s air pods failed us towards the end of the interview, so you’ll notice his audio quality change pretty drastically. But stick with it: he has some really interesting comments towards the end about how all of this plays out for the future of agriculture. 

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