The session begins with Danielle Gould, founder of Food+Tech Connect, outlining her organization’s mission to re‑engineer the food system through data, technology, events, and education. She describes the historic lack of information flow in agriculture, her early experience using social media to gather market data, and the explosion of food‑tech companies—from farm‑management software to sustainable protein startups—driven by cross‑disciplinary talent and rising investment (from $350 M in 2011 to $3.8 B in the first half of the current year). Gould then introduces Ali Partovi, an angel investor and co‑founder of Code.org, who brings a Silicon Valley mindset to sustainable agriculture. Partovi argues that efficiency means producing more with less, and that sustainable practices can be both environmentally superior and more profitable. He explains Farmland LP’s business model: raising capital to acquire cropland, converting it to organic, biodiverse operations managed by specialist farmers, and using rotational cropping to boost cash flow from ~3 % to ~8 %. He highlights scaling obstacles—land access, capital, and complexity of biodiverse management—and how Farmland LP mitigates them through revenue‑share partnerships and a planned REIT structure, aiming to democratize investment in sustainably managed U.S. farmland.
Chapters
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Danielle Gu, founder, Food+ Tech Connect. Hi, everyone. First, I want to start out by thanking Diane, Jill, and Gerald for inviting me to speak and also to curate the Food for Thought series. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Danielle Gould, and I'm the founder of Food Tech Connect. And like many of you, we have a very big, audacious vision. So our mission is to fundamentally re-engineer the food system by lowering the barriers to success for the people and businesses who are creating a better future for food. And we're doing this in a couple of ways. So first, we have our blog where we track food tech investment, and innovation trends. We have our events, our hackathons, like HackMeet and HackDining, where we bring the worlds of food, technology, and design together to rapidly prototype solutions to big problems in food. And last, we have our newest venture, Food Tech Ed, which is an online learning community where we are trying to lower the— improve the access to entrepreneurial business education. So, 5 years ago, I had this big aha moment where I realized that there was one big issue at the core of many of the issues that we've been talking about throughout the 2 days. And that big issue was that there's this really poor flow of information across the food system, or there's a lack of information flow. And so, I realized that technology was this tool that we could use in order to improve that. And so at that time, I was working for a company called Bright Farm Systems. We were— at the time, we were a design consultancy for rooftop greenhouses. Now owned and run by Paul Lightfoot, but I was there before Paul was there. And so when I was at Bright Farm Systems, I started using Twitter for for PR and business development. And I became amazed by how much information people were sharing online, openly sharing information that we didn't have access to as a company, but that we needed to make important business decisions. Things like prices to pay to producers, yields, how much food was being grown in cities. And so I started thinking, you know, this information was being shared on Facebook, on Twitter, on the ComFood listserv. How might we scrape all of this data together to get a better real-time picture of what's going on in the food system? I thought, what would a smart grid for food look like? And I thought, you know, how can we use data and technology in order to improve real-time decision-making, connect all of the amazing projects and ideas and people that are working to improve the food system all over the world? And how could we use technology to scale sustainable food in a way that preserved the integrity with which it's been built? So, I started tracking what was going on. And at the time, there were 50 organizations, including the Food and Agriculture Organization, that were really thinking about data and technology in order to improve food. Today, there are over 3,000 companies— this is not including the NGO world— that are working on everything from farm management software and sensors to help small and medium-sized farms improve operations and increase profits, to platforms that are helping restaurants reduce and manage food waste, to apps that are helping eaters think more intelligently about what they're putting in their bodies. And then there are all these new companies that are cropping up, these new food companies that are working to develop more sustainable sources of protein, to feed the growing demand for protein. And what's really, really exciting about all these companies is that you have people coming from all different worlds that are bringing their expertise from finance, technology, design, and they're using it to solve great food problems. And thankfully, there's a lot of funding that's starting to pour into this space, which is important because as we're driving innovation, it's going to take a lot of money. So for example, when I started out, there was no money coming in. People were— you know, terrified of this space. In 2011, there was $350 million invested in food in the US, in food tech in the US. And in the first quarter or first half of this year alone, there's been $3.8 billion invested in the food tech industry. And so today, I'm here to introduce you to 4 of the companies that— and people that are doing amazing work to level the playing field for sustainable food using technology and innovative business models. They're working to create a more equitable, a healthier, and a more— and a more resilient food future. And it is my great pleasure to introduce you to the first speaker. You're going to be hearing the speakers throughout today. The first speaker is Ali Partovi. Thank you. Who is an angel investor who has dedicated his life to sustainable food. He is an early investor in Farmland LP, Facebook, Dropbox, and he's a co-founder of Code.org, which is an organization that has taught over 40 million students how to code in the last 2 years. And he wants to take the lessons that he's learned on how to scale coding education and bring that to the food industry. Hi.
Is this where I'm supposed to stand? Sorry. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to stand.
It's okay.
I'll just stand here. Hi, my name is Ali, and I'm here to bring the Silicon Valley perspective to sustainable agriculture. You're probably groaning and thinking the last thing we want in our food is more technology, and I would agree. But technology stems from the word technique, and Silicon Valley is not about the wanton application of tech, but about embracing new techniques. It's about having the imagination, the optimism, and the audacity to think that if a new technique is superior, then it can replace the old technique. It can scale to change the world. Silicon Valley is about embracing capitalism, not to hoard wealth or to protect the status quo, but to redistribute wealth and to disrupt the status quo. In agriculture, we have— We're often faced with this difficult choice between, on the one hand, an old system that is putting too much carbs in our diets and too much carbon into our atmosphere, but it's supposedly more efficient and more profitable, and therefore we're stuck with it. I reject that choice, because to me, efficient means something that is less wasteful. Efficient means producing more with less. It's not efficient to deplete scarce resources where we're mining minerals in Morocco, burning fossil fuels to ship them across the Atlantic to put them on fields that already had those nutrients in the first place. That is not efficient. It's more efficient, I believe, to do things sustainably. And I believe that sustainable agriculture can be more efficient, can therefore be more profitable, and therefore can scale to change the world. So I'm here to talk about one of my favorite investments, Farmland LP, which is a real estate fund that buys cropland, converts it to organic sustainable practices, and in doing so almost triples its profitability. So let's talk about profitability for a second. There are a lot of ways in which sustainable agriculture can make more money, both in terms of more revenue and lower expense. For one, there's a lot of money in selling feed and and fuel, but there is more money in producing and selling food, food that humans eat. For another, rotating crops with livestock actually makes the land more productive. You can produce more with less. And then on the other side, there's enormous expenses to be saved when you don't use as many chemicals. The costs that go into the industrial unsustainable agriculture system are enormous. All those chemicals and antibiotics are not just ecologically bad, they're economically bad. It costs less money to produce food sustainably. I'll say that again: it costs less money to produce food sustainably. At this point, you're probably thinking, what the— then why would it cost more to buy organic food at the supermarket? And why wouldn't more farmers be doing this? So the answer to that question, to both those questions, is the same thing: More farmers are doing this. Organic acreage in the United States has more than tripled in a little over a decade, up to 3.5 million acres. Problem is that that is still a drop in the bucket out of over 300 million acres in the United States. And that line there, when you look at it compared to the growth in demand for organic, is not looking so good. The demand for organic has more than quadrupled in the same period of time and is continuing to grow faster. We are eating more than 4 times more food, more organic food in this country than we are producing ourselves. That is why organic food is more expensive. Not because it costs more to produce, but because the supply of it is way less than the demand for it. So the challenge is, how do we take this system that is more profitable and more efficient and just make it scale even faster? Now there are some obstacles to scale, and those obstacles come down to things like access to land, access to capital. And there's a complexity in biodiverse management of farmland. The efficiency in industrial agriculture is about specialization, about one farmer who can manage 10,000 acres of just one single crop rather than keeping in their head tons of different crops. So Farmland LP helps overcome these challenges. What Farmland LP does is very simple. We raise money from investors, we buy land, we convert it to sustainable organic practices, and in doing so, we almost triple its profitability. And we manage the complexity of the biodiverse farming practices, and we do so by rotating around different producers. So rather than having one farmer who is a mad scientist like Klaus keeping all these things in their head straight, each of our farmers is a specialist. So what does that mean? We have a sheep specialist. We have an asparagus specialist. We have a grain specialist. And we rotate them around. So each farmer has access to a virtual monoculture that spans thousands of acres, but they rotate that around and we manage that rotation in a way that optimizes for the soil health and for the ecology so that each farmer gets real financial benefits from recycling of nutrients. And that translates into profit. So we take land that is generating 3% cash flow, and after a few-year conversion period, we're generating 8% cash flow. And when something is more profitable, it can scale to change the world. So we currently have about— we currently have about $50 million of land under management, and we have a new fund that just opened up that is raising $250 million. to do this practice, and that is still a drop in the bucket. Something like $200 billion of farmland is changing hands in the United States as aging farmers are retiring and their children aren't necessarily rising up to take their place. Meanwhile, there's young progressive farmers that need access to land and may not be able to afford to buy it. What Farmland LP does is buy the land and make it available to the progressive farmers at very affordable revenue-share partnership-based arrangements rather than a cash lease. So if you know anyone who is an investor, tell them to look up Farmland LP. And our long-term ambition is actually to become a publicly traded REIT, a real estate investment trust. And that would mean that everyone in this room who might have a few hundred dollars of savings could use it to buy their share of sustainably managed American farmland. Thank you very much.
