Escondido AgX Gathering & Fireside Chat with Jayce Hafner of Farmraise

Hey everyone. Good to see you all. End of January. I won't say it. Happy end of January. So we'll say it's so nice to have you all here and man, we're excited for 2024. We are a smorgasbord of industries tonight as we always love to be. Who is a farmer, grower? Let's see some hands. Hi. All right. Tech founder or working on a tech product? Yeah. Scientists or science related. Working in the research side. Academia. Awesome. How about supporting whether it's support system from service provider wise or investor banker Alibaba. Awesome. Great cross section of the community here. So thank you all so much for coming. My name is Neil Bloom. I am with an investment group called Interlock Capital. We invest in early stage innovative hardware, software and consumer companies based here in San Diego and also love to build community and grow it together. When Jennifer Schoenick with the city of Escondido reached out to me two and a half years ago now to say what could we do to bring a few different business communities together. We put our heads together and this is the beautiful music that we created. And so we're going to talk through a little bit of some of the groups that have come together to make this community even more galvanized. We're also going to talk a little bit through the hackathon coming up March 7th, 8th, 9th. Who anyone here bought their ticket yet for the hackathon? Coming up, a few of you I know the Arcus Nexus crew already has coming up from Tijuana. Love it. And so we'll talk through that in a second. But first and foremost, I want to bring up Jennifer Schoenik from the city of Escondido.

Thank you. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us in beautiful Escondido. The weather could not be more perfect and I would like to introduce our city, myself and some of our team members and talk about what we're doing here. So I am the director of economic development for the city of Escondido and we like to say that our city is rich in agriculture and ripe in technology. And that is because this city was really founded on the agricultural industry. It's how this downtown grew and how the city became so amazing. And today we, we also see a rising number of technology companies locating to our city and growing here. And the marriage between agriculture and technology is so beautiful in our community. And the more I get to know people in this space, the more interesting it's becoming and the more problems we're solving together, the Sign of a good startup is that every time you talk to the entrepreneur, they're doing something new and interesting or getting more capital. The same thing is happening here with this initiative. So now Neil and I started this initiative by having this hackathon, this three day event where people came together and worked on different ideas. He'll talk more about that in a minute. And this initiative has grown. It's been codified in a document with the city and also our team has grown. So I'd like to introduce Pedro and Tyler. Could you raise your hands? You want to come up and say hi to everybody? So now you won't just see me at events and you don't just have to call or text me if you have a question or want to get connected to anybody in this group. LinkedIn request Pedro and Tyler, who can help connect you to people in our amazing community. And they are here building this with me. And so thank you so much, Pedro, and thank you so much, Tyler, for being a part of this amazing initiative. And in addition to them, we also have had an amazing partnership growing with the UC system. So Neil, would you like me to bring up Gabe? Okay, so with that I'd like to introduce Gabe, who can talk about UCANR and what we're working on next with them. Thank you.

Thank you. Jennifer, Neal, some of you I might have met last time. I see some faces that I work with in the Central Valley and other places. So I work for the UC system. UC Aga Natural Resources. We're a university wide across the entire state of California entity that really has supported the translation of science, technology, information and support for the agricultural community across California for over 100 years. So that really started with UC Davis, UC Riverside and UC Berkeley. But it's really grown across the system. As you know, innovators and scientists from all the UC and students have been interested in agriculture, food security, climate related topics. And so we're just seeing this massive interest. Our job is to support really the commercialization of novel technologies, the workforce, the economic development. So we have sort of a three pronged strategy in our program that we've built called the Vine. The first one is Connect and this is an embodiment of Connect. Today we just released a statewide newsletter that we would love to feature. Escondido and your startup. So please see our team. We're all here today. Hanif, Terry, Lucy, Hannah, Lonnie. We brought the team in force today cause really we wanted to demonstrate our commitment to Southern California, this region, the city of Escondido. As great emerging partners and really a statewide hub that we will connect to our statewide network of other sort of ag tech innovation regions and we have the opportunity to bring people from all over the world and we'd love to bring innovators here to this region and also to help bring your innovations around the state, around the US and globally through our programs. So we're just super thrilled to be here. We're also embarking on a feasibility study to really hone in on this agtech Innovation center concept and to really figure out what's going to be the differentiating facility that's going to create really a place on the map for Escondido and bring that global draw to this region as opposed to other regions around California or the U.S. so we're thrilled to be here to be part of the community and you'll hopefully see a lot more of us and our team as time goes on. Thank you.

Thank you, Gabe. Thrilled to be working with you guys. So thank you all for making it down. I want to also welcome you to the Churchill House, who's been here before. Yeah, love it. Especially if you've been to one of our ag events. So thank you. Ryan and Courtney from the Churchill House. You guys rock. We love working with you. Can't wait for the next event in March. Also with RGA alliance helping the back end back office of startups small and large. So thank you guys. Thanks for bringing the weather too. Appreciate it. January. Yeah, love it. Yeah, I know. And we're really here to talk about innovation. Right? And so we're about to jump in with Jace from Farm Raise who's going to tell us about her idea. But in a few short months, and really less than two months, we're all going to be working on potentially new ideas for startups. And so after the talk here, I'm actually we're going to panel or have a few people come up and give their pitch or talk through their startup they're working on. So if you have, if you already have an idea for the hackathon or already working on a startup maybe looking for some funding soon, we're going to bring that up after our fireside chat here. But I want to talk through a little bit of the hackathon just because it's coming up soon. And when people hear hackathon, some people think like, bring out your laptop and start writing code. Well, one, I'll tell you, AI is kind of, you know, we don't need to write code anymore. Right. No, I'm just kidding. But what we're really after is taking ideas and turning them into businesses. And so we have a really awesome facilitation. Through 50 hours, we will take ideas and turn them into businesses. And we have some of the winners who turned them into businesses actually here tonight. Can I actually put you on the spot and. Yeah. Introduce yourself and tell us about the idea you had versus the business you have that you're running now. Sure. Hello, I'm Mario Di Matteo. We're a farm in Bonsal. We're launching a 28 acre, you pick, blueberry farm. And we've been just raising money and getting to the next level and raising more money. And the hackathon was awesome. It got us more pitch ready and I think we lost. But it was. No, you didn't.

You got third.

We came in third. But no, it was awesome. And we have technology involved. We're utilizing a composting system that we developed. It's aerated static pile out of Davis that's taking local horse manure and turning it into super nutrient dense compost within about two months. And we're using that for our blueberry farm. So we just planted 850 blueberry plants last week and we have soft opening sometime this year and big plans for the future for agriculture in north county. So hackathon, the beauty of it, no one loses whatsoever. In fact, what actually is winning is like the persistence to stay even through three days. Remember when we started we had like 12 ideas, 13 different ideas on the wall. Right. Three lasted through the day, through two and a half days. Right. So what the hackathon will be, we'll start kind of a kickoff kind of like this actually. We like to do kind of a welcome and we'll have a little bit of like lightning talks and then we'll dive into the kind of team formation so people will come with ideas. And we're actually last time we had pretty broad range, like open call for anything. And a lot of our investor and academic and research judges kind of said, hey, it'd be kind of cool to have a few buckets. And so we picked three focus areas though open to feedback on that as well. But the three focus areas are kind of breaking up kind of the customer journey, if you will. So bucket number one, seed and soil. So really the focus on growing, like where are the ideas around that? Obviously that's a big area. So any area around that, super interested in ideas for innovation. And then what happens after that? Well, the food makes its way all the way to table and so the Food kind of journey, food production all the way to table is another whole area that's ripe for innovation. And so that's. We're going to kind of bucket that. And the last is really a focus on our local agriculture community. It's kind of part marketing, part. Part branding, part differentiation, part policy. We'd love to hear some ideas of innovation around that. And so those are kind of the areas that we heard from you in feedback and surveys, conversations throughout the year. And those will be kind of the three. There'll be weightings from the judges of. Did you meet one of those criteria? That'll be kind of another grading pool for this year, the way that it'll work. So we'll facilitate groups forming. And I think we have two of our winners from Team Microbe here, Eddie and Ying. Hey, guys, thanks for coming. It's great to see you here. I hope you'll enter another idea this year. Oh, Eddie's a judge. You could still, maybe you could seed an idea, give some ideas to some other people. And so we're going to form teams and there's, I think, people who participated last year is a unique way of how we do that. And even from there, the ideas that you may come with, you may say, you know what, I had an idea, I want to join someone else's, or you came expecting to join someone else's and you heard the pitches and you're like, you know what, I have one too. So don't necessarily think that you're stuck in what you are intending to come with, because we're going to pull and push as a group and form really dynamic teams in that regard. So that'll be night one is really the team formation, getting to know each other, getting to know a little bit about the idea and like doing a little bit of the research that says, you know, what exists and how could we. Tomorrow we'll start planting the seed. How could we. What's the quickest path to validating that? What is the quickest path that we may be able to talk to potential customer to get raw feedback? And that's what really is it about, is the validation without kind of pitching the idea. So we'll walk through how that goes on day two. So March 7th evening, March 8th. So that's a Thursday, March 8th, all day Friday. So be ready to come hang for Friday with us. And then Saturday morning into midday will be the pitch competition. So we'll teach you how to also storytell. What did you just go through, because you're going to go through some pivots. Right? You're going to go out and talk to some people, whether it's by phone. We had a one team go out to a few wineries last year and talk to some vintners and understand what electronics do they use out in the field to communicate when you're up in the hills. And they came back like, oh, different than what we thought, let's retool here. And I think they came in second place. But the point is that what your idea is within 24 hours is going to pivot and it's going to change and we're going to help you with that. And we want to hear the story what you went through from day one to day three. And that's what you'll get to do in front of judges. And we've seeded it with some prizes. We've got cash prizes, at least 10,000 in cash prizes and another equivalent amount. In this year, we're adding in, working with Aquilius, which is a local startup incubator. We're going to actually take the top three teams and seed them through an incubator program as well. So really excited to be working with the Coolius on that. And so thank you. Cool team there. So that'll be March 7th, 8th, 9th. And if you look on your tables, there is a flyer for it, a QR code, and I'm giving out a special code, just good for tonight for a discount code if you want to grab a ticket. I think the early bird ends tomorrow actually, so grab your tickets when you can here. And I think the prices are going to go up by the end of the week. There's three kind of tickets, so we'd love for everyone to be a participant, really, like come join us. But you know, two and a half days, I understand if it's not possible for everyone. So we have a ticket for coming to the opening, coming to the closing, if you would like to exhibit. And we had about 15 companies, maybe later stage, like the great AGBY team here, who are exhibiting an existing product out in the field. We'll have exhibitor tables. So if you'd like to exhibit at opening and closing, that's an option as well too. We have mentor options, so, you know, for. And we've got a big great pool of experienced growers and entrepreneurs who'll be placed throughout the hackathon to give feedback and guidance, but also just kind of challenge your assumptions, which is really important during a hackathon. So it's going to be beautiful. We're really Excited. We're going to do it here. We're going to take over every space that Churchill has for us. The groom suite, the bridal suite, upstairs, downstairs, probably be out here because, you know, it's San Diego, Escondido. It's going to be beautiful. So come join us and we're really excited to have you. Anything I'm missing on the hackathon? No. Okay, well, without further ado, the main event, I am really excited to introduce you to Jace Haffner from Farm ra. First, why don't we just have you give quick, high level overview of what farm raise is and we'll just kind of have a little conversation. Sound good?

Thank you, Neil. And thank you to everyone here, the city of Escondido and this incredible community of founders and investors and farmers. I'm so excited to be here and I'm coming in as a relatively new San Diegan. My husband Rajiv, he's in the back. We just moved to San Diego a couple years ago and we met out in California. I'm actually originally from Virginia. I'm an east coaster. We met in business school and after graduation we knew that this was the place we wanted to be. We felt pulled here and we've been overwhelmed and just every day so thankful to be in this community. We've just been so welcomed and we felt so inspired to be here as founders and builders and lifelong learners, really. So just so grateful to be here. And part of this conversation a little bit about Farm Raise. We are a startup that helps farmers master their finances. And what that means in practice is we are a platform that makes it incredibly easy for farmers to ingest all their core farmer data in one place. And in the back end, our software structures that data into tangible outcomes for the farmer to produce all the core documentation they need to run their business. And this is a huge pain point for farmers. And we can get into this more in our chat. It's one that I experienced on my farm growing up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. And it's an opportunity to both make farmers lives less stressful and more productive, but also to build more secure and sustainable supply chains for our consumers around the world. So I'm really excited to dig into this conversation today, Neil, and kick it off to you.

Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much. I think we met like, very shortly after you moved here. I saw that they had moved here. You moved here from somewhere else in Southern California, right? Or Northern Rancho Cucamonga. That's right. But we won you over. Down south. So take us through a little bit of your background. You teased that you have kind of a farming growing background. Take us through that and kind of when was the spark, what was the first spark for farm raise?

So growing up on a 160 acre Angus beef cattle farm in Virginia, we never had good tools to grow the business side of our farm business. Our financial data was scattered haphazardly across notebooks, receipts and shoeboxes often. And this, this is something that really used to bug me. It would be all across the cab of my dad's pickup truck. And as you can imagine, when we'd have to do our monthly loan report or do our taxes or report out to any of our stakeholders, there would be this stressful, time consuming, multi hour process where we'd be scrambling to get all the documentation in order and we were always exhausted. There was enough time in the day to balance the books. We were dealing with lots of big macro events that we couldn't really control like the weather, the markets, and then, you know, random calf dies and we have to deal with the mom and figure out how do we, you know, take care of this cow that doesn't have a calf anymore. Our fence breaks down, the bull gets out. There's just all sorts of things that happen in a day. And we manage our business so reactively from for years. And millions of farmers manage their businesses really reactively and deal with the same challenge of not having good tools to grow their business. We miss out on opportunities to grow, to be more efficient, to invest in practices that are sustainable and enable us to pass our farm down to the next generation. And this problem impacts the entire agriculture industry both upstream and downstream. But because investing in farmers, business success means more secure and resilient supply chains for the world. So as you can see, I'm really passionate about working alongside farmers to help them equip their businesses with the tools they need to succeed. And I took this passion to Stanford GSB where I had kind of an unconventional business school experience just talking to a bunch of farmers. It's also where I met my co founder, Sammy. Her background was actually working at the USDA before starting the company. Mine most immediately is in agriculture investing. Before that I worked for a bit at Apple, but I always had the farm in the back of my mind. And during our time in business school, we spoke to a bunch of producers on both coasts of all production types in many different sizes. But they gave us this common refrain where they said we don't have enough time in the day or Good tools to optimize our business. Could you just build us a TurboTax for farm funding and make it easier for us to unlock opportunity for our operations? And Sammy and I looked at each other and said, let's build an MVP and see if there's willingness to pay here. So we did. It was a very simple, like a form stack form that streamlined a very complex bureaucratic cost share grant program that the U.S. department of Agriculture offers farmers. And we posted our landing page in some farmer Facebook groups and within a week, hundreds of farmers had signed up. And that's when we looked at each other and we said, whoa, this is a really big opportunity and this is a problem worth spending the rest of our lives working to solve. Let's help farmers master their finances. And that's when we decided to really take things to the next level.

So you come out of stealth, if you will, or you, you know, first time really being in front of the customer. What was an assumption that you had that got completely flipped on its head? You know, like you thought blank and it was actually complete opposite once you actually had people interested in even trying the early product.

My parents are very skeptical of technology in general. We didn't have a computer in the house until I was in high school and we didn't have Internet in the house until I went away to college. So I grew up with that mental framework and I applied it to all farmers and thought I think most farmers are probably skeptical of technology. I had this assumption and it's actually a fairly common, I think, refrain that I hear in a lot of my investor conversations and community conversations. This question is always revolving around will farmers adopt new technology? But that assumption came hardcore into question in our discovery process. And I have learned now through our conversations with thousands of farmers that farmers are often the first to adopt a new tool or technology. And you see this innovation playing out shout out to agbi, you know, across farmers fields every day. They are on the forefront of cutting edge innovations and solutions. The core thing we have to unlock for farmers is we have to show the value of the tool. They need to be able to grasp why this solution is useful. Ideally in the first few minutes of use, you know, we're building a tool that is revolutionizing and digitizing paper notebook record keeping, which presents a really high bar as a product design requirement. We have to show in the first few minutes how our tool is easier to use than a pen and paper. That is no quick feat, but it's a requirement that we take very seriously in every feature that we ship. And so it's been a great learning for us that farmers are actually early adopters many times, but we just have to show that value early on.

Great feedback for sure. What is. So you get started, you get going, you have a team. It doesn't naturally that you find investors like, what was the actual process? Were investors interested in tech for ag? Is that an industry that you had to educate people on or did you find a ready community of ag friendly investors? How'd you go about that process? Wow.

Fundraising is such a rabbit hole. And if anyone's thinking about it now, I would be happy to dig in more for a deeper conversation around that because I think there's lots to unpack. In terms of our initial fundraise, we found that investors were very excited about the opportunity in agriculture. I mean, there is a massive wave of digitization that's about to happen in this industry and we're just about to crest that. And with that opportunity comes certainly risk. But for a first mover that is able to win the trust, the hearts and minds of farmers, there's massive reward there. And we see this paradigm playing out across other massive behemoth, ancient industries and agriculture is coming next. And VCs get that. They're really excited about that. Now that's not to say we can just walk in like, you know, an AI startup and say, hey, we have this idea, let's give us this valuation, let's roll. No, you really have to think through and really plan ahead strategically. Why now? What are you going to do with the capital to get to the next level and have some tangible proof points lined up, most important for yourself and your team to go out confidently to market with investors. And we found that to be really important to have those proof points lined up because there is skepticism, of course, about how we're going to execute and be the winner in that industry. I think some of the common questions we got from investors and for anyone raising in agriculture, these are things that we need to be prepared to answer. One, how did you back that into a big market opportunity? How many farmers are you going after and how are you assured that you're able to monetize that as a financial services company targeting anyone who sells an agricultural product, we had an easier job than most showing that big market opportunity. But there are ways to do that across different verticals in agriculture. I think just being strategic about how you're envisioning your big company vision is key. And maybe what you're building is not backing into a venture backable market and that's okay too. You can find other investors to go alongside you for the journey, but just making sure that you have that plan in place and can communicate that clearly is important. And then revenue helps a lot. You know, show that farmers will pay for your service. It really does a lot more to be able to show that graph than say, hey, like farmers are using my product but they're not paying for it. So there's, there's that piece. And the more that you can show proof points of not only being able to monetize the initial customer, but potentially the wider ecosystem that farmers work in, the more powerful your pitch can be and the bigger the opportunity becomes too. So those are some things that we saw as we got started.

Awesome. You talked through a little bit about like big macro trends that affect the farm, but also hyper micro. Right. Like a calf dying, you know, is just as real as the weather to a farmer, to a certain regard, like what are some industry trends that you're seeing right now that's, you know, kind of wind under the sails for the agriculture industry and tech playing into that.

Well, on the fintech side, the digitization of the SMB space, especially through accounting firms, is massively playing out in our favor. Because what you're seeing now is farmers all have a relationship with an accountant and it's usually like a small town accountant that runs a unique shop close by and they go in and they meet with their accountant every year to do their taxes or to get their books done once a month. And those accountants are now saying, look, you all have to get off of the pen and paper ledger. You got to get onto a digital solution. Because the fact that you're spending so much time creating a paperwork trail and mess is actually costing me. We need to get this all in the cloud and simpler for everyone involved. So this helps us, those of us who are shaping the future of fintech and agriculture, to have a tailwind enabling us to more quickly acquire farmers, especially as we use accountants as channel partners and real collaborators in this digitization opportunity. So I think that's really helpful in the fintech angle. On the wider industry trend, there is a huge tailwind in billions of dollars flowing in from governments, CPG companies, other stakeholders, impact investors on the regenerative agriculture front. And I think there may even be some investors in the audience who are investing off of that thesis here today. This is a thesis that I think is only going to gain traction as we see more stakeholders holding large corporations accountable to meet certain scope 3 scope 5 emission reduction benchmarks. They're going to have to show how they are investing in their supply chains in a way that enables low carbon farming and this funding flowing into agriculture and is very new. There's a lot of it and there are a lot of things that still need to be figured out and a lot of kinks and paperwork in that process that need to be enabled by technology. And I think this is a massive opportunity for the industry and also to be real change makers in transforming how we do business in agriculture in the decades ahead.

I'm going to toss you a softball here, you know, to talk about the product a little bit. Like, why doesn't TurboTax or QuickBooks work for the farmer? Like, why? Farm raise?

Yeah. When we first set out to build an accounting solution as part of our platform, we were expecting to be up against QuickBooks. But it turns out only a small segment of farmers in our audience today use QuickBooks. We estimate around 10 to 15%. And those who do are really unhappy with it for two reasons. One, every farmer has to file a Schedule F tax reform once a year. These tax categories that you have to back into and organize all your financial data around, all your receipts around, all the loan reporting a farmer has to do and other documentation throughout the year backs back to that one form. So that's annoying if you're on QuickBooks. And the second piece is it takes farmers a long time to learn QuickBooks. It can have a somewhat steep learning curve. And a farmer doesn't want to sit down for 60 minutes and watch a YouTube tutorial on how to use a tool. They want to be able to get started and ideally have something that they can use in their hand as they're walking in their field, being able to look up more than down. And so that's what we're aiming to build.

We're going to do questions here shortly, so I'll kind of wrap it up here in a little bit. But how do you make sure you've always got kind of the voice of customer in your ear? I mean, yes, you've got growers using the product every day, but it's also very easy to just kind of sit down and be like, look, I'm running a business. It's software, it's product. I've got a lot of stakeholders. Is there something that you do uniquely to kind of constantly keep in contact with your customer?

Designing for the farmer is a core product requirement for Farm Raise. And at the heart of our company, our number one value is earning farmer trust. And There are several ways that we implement that, both in terms of how we build product and how we go to market with farmers. But at its core it is ensuring that we are iterating every step of our product with our customers. We have one of the most engaged, vocal, excited customer bases I've ever, ever seen. I'm just amazed by how farmers who have so little time sit down and write us paragraphs of feedback and excitement around what we could build next in our tool. And creating a community experience on the app through how we interface with farmers in scalable ways and soliciting their impact through videos, face forward tools, digital demos. Getting them involved that way in a hands on way has enabled us to get a really tight feedback loop both as we're designing and preparing mvp' to ultimately build and ship and then also after we ship so we can keep iterating on that product. But if we don't have farmer trust, we have nothing. And I think that needs to be at the core of every ag tech startup.

Okay, so what is next? Is there a bigger next horizon? Other product features, Vertical, horizontal, Like where, where you headed?

I'm so glad you asked Neil. So one of the reasons I've been very heads down over the past year is because as we have been going to market with our core platform, we discovered a feature opportunity on there that enables us to create more value and to monetize the wider financial services system in which farmers sit. So today Farm Raise's software not only powers farm businesses, we also power agriculture financers and funders in accessing, diligencing and servicing their farmer customers. And what that looks like in practice is an agriculture lender, farm credit association, a bank, an ngo, a government that has a farm funding program. They can use our software to help farmers more efficiently apply for access and ultimately report on through our core platform their progress in that program, accessing financial products more efficiently and saving everyone more time. And so we're really excited about that product. We've gone to market in the back half of 2023. With that, we have several enterprise customers on that live now and I think there's huge synergies between that feature and our wider value prop for our farmer community.

And I'm sure there's some grant funding at the federal level to kind of power what you're doing to get those products out to the community as well. So I want to make sure Caroline from Omnisync and you guys chat about non dilutive funding options for you as well too. Where is Caroline? Are you here yeah. Awesome. Shout out to Caroline and she will be. I'm going to put you at a table right after this to come have anyone talk to you about non dilutive funding opportunities that you can speak to. Hold on. We're going to put you on the microphone. Sorry. And then we'll go around and do questions.

Thank you. Hi everyone, I'm Caroline from OmniSync. Most people know us by Turbo SBIR. So basically like TurboTax for finding and applying for SBIR funding, we have a partnership with the Department of Energy which is a free resource for innovators to get matched with corporates and investors. And we also have a market research tool called TurboInnovate that most corporates are using for scouting. So if anyone's interested in market research, investors partnering and of course non dilutive capital, come see me at the table. Absolutely.

Any questions for Jase? I can keep going. So I want to talk to Jase all night. Any questions related to you mentioned investors? Your path there, selling into directly to the farm community. Here we go. Absolutely. I'm Miles, I'm in engineering services hardware builds downtown San Diego and I am also a big fan of hardware community stuff and I'm here to learn a little bit more about the ag tech community. I guess in your experience you've probably seen a lot of different ag tech communities promoting your product and learning about this world. Escondido sounds like an awesome place to grow this. Are there any other model communities or model cities that you've seen that are doing something special that we can replicate here?

Does that make sense? It's such a good question. And wheels are turning on the spot. At the heart of any effective entrepreneurial community, I have seen a few common things. One is common purpose in a mission that's bringing people together time and again. Whether you know, we are feeling tired or up for it, it brings us back and I see that here. Really, it sounds like you have a good thing going with momentum around a core mission. The second piece is ensuring that there is really good, I'd say mentorship on all sides. Not just just flowing one way up and down, but really learning from each other and being able to practically apply that. I'm thinking back even to when I was working before farm raise in Washington D.C. and there's a really strong govtech community there. And one of the things that I thought was really cool about that is there's a lot of collaboration across the private and the public sector there and it's not flowing one way, it's going both ways. How do we learn from each other and create opportunities to just grow in new ways? And I think where we can really catalyze that and pressure test it comes down to something that Neil's already working on and I think is going to be really critical here, which is how do we just get started, right? Because that's the scariest and hardest thing. There's a lot of things that are really, really difficult about entrepreneurship and sometimes the hardest piece is just getting started in a lean way and testing your idea and asking someone to pay for it. And so the more you can pressure test that in a constra with some creative constraints, the more data points you have to not just say, oh, am I going to do this or not? But to say, what do I need to learn next to further validate this idea and to continue down this path. Because at the end of the day, if you want to do it, you can find a way to do it. Maybe just not in the way that you originally conceived. So those are some very high level things. But I'm excited to be a part of this and to learn from you all and figure out how we can get it right.

Saw a few more hands, few other questions. I'm Craig Kolaggi. I'm associated with the last remaining commercial dairy here in San Diego. The Frank Conine dairy. Used to be over 200 dairies in San Diego alone and we're the last remaining one to survive. We have multiple business units supporting the dairy, otherwise the dairy would be gone as well. How does your program deal with farms, and I suspect most farms deal with, have just one income source. In many cases they have multiple income sources and multiple business units, including the one I'm associated with, which is our soils and composting operation. How does your software delineate and manage such a diverse portfolio of different companies, all tied to one umbrella, if you will. The Frank Konine Dairy, for example.

Thank you for that question and my hat's off to you for figuring out a creative and I imagine a challenging way to keep thriving in this environment and to keep your operation going. That's inspiring to me. I'm really excited to hear that it's been a success for you. We see a lot of producers working on creative ways to build different enterprise units that stack into a sustainable business model. And every day I am overwhelmed and inspired by what producers have achieved in that way. And this also creates a core design requirement for our product too, because to support the modern farm entrepreneur, you need to be able to account for different business entities. We're seeing one producer often managing multiple entities, sometimes multiple entity formats, Sole proprietorship llc, sometimes there's a C Corp or an NGO in there as well. And so one feature that we're actively building into the product now is actually the ability to support multiple entity structures in our core accounting program. And we already enable producers to bucket out a clean P and L for every enterprise they produce on their farm. Because it's essential to be able to understand where are my costs, where are my greatest revenue expansion opportunities? And to make that decision easier and clearer for every producer is something that we really pride ourselves on making faster for the producer. So I'd love to learn more about your operation after this. Thank you for sharing.

Awesome. Eddie.

Yes.

I'd like to ask you in what.

We'Re doing here in Escondido as growers, and specifically avocado growers, we're taking Escondido's wastewater and using that for irrigation. And when you look at the benefit of agriculture in particular avocados and doing a service like that for a community.

And also the, what we call the.

Non market benefits, the carbon sequestration and.

Erosion and all that, is there a place in.

Your accounting system that would give some value to that and be able to use that then as documentation to maybe influence a local government policymaker?

This is a fascinating question because there is so much opportunity, I think now, especially as we're seeing carbon and other credit monetization happening across the US and the international landscape in farming. How can we create proof points that enable producers to access incentives for doing the right thing on their landscape and for creating benefits that are quantifiable for the wider community throughout those ecosystem services. So yes, we are actively working on that. And one thing that we do today is we've developed a funding library specifically for producers. We have almost 1,000 funding programs in there that we're tracking regularly. We're looking at core government programs and state government programs and local NGOs, but we're also bringing in some opportunities like the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund that pays producers for investing in agricultural practices that conserve energy and water across their landscape. And what you are describing sounds like it's potentially a practice that you could get rewards for if you plugged into the right market or funding opportunity. Today on our platform, we are working to help farmers document the practices that they're doing as part of their logging entry, as well as the P and L for every enterprise they are creating on their farm. And our goal is to be able to have a clean track record that has a really strong proof point, not just for producers on how to best manage their farms, but also for financers to understand and see the impact of how a practice can actually quantifiably produce a benefit to the landscape and the farmer and then ideally reward the farmer for it in a way that's very clear and transparent to the producer. And so I would love to talk with you more about that. It is something that's on our minds and we're currently surfacing funding opportunities for farmers around that and there's a whole opportunity to further prove that out and I think quantify those benefits as we continue to build.

Let's give a hand to Jace Haffner from FarmRays. Thank you so much. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. Well, that is not the end of our show. Thank you all for coming, but we've got more to do, so what we're going to do is we're going to break back out. We're going to offer the top tables in the back as places to have kind of topical conversations. So, Carolyn, love to have you there. I'll go place myself there as well to kind of talk more on the equity financing side. I will say not to. Like, I'm going to manage my own expectation here. If you were at the August event, I interviewed Lou from Bluenalu. We after that fact, invested in Bluenalu. So there might be a precedence here of companies who get interviewed here on stage. Not promising anything, but let's keep talking Chase. But we also still have food from the One Kitchen Collaborative out in Oceanside. Thank you guys for supporting this and we're really happy to be working with them. So grab some more of that. We have more to drink. And then we're gonna have the AGBI team come up and they'll be the start of a little bit of pitch practice or just pitch. Maybe it's a practice for the hackathon, or maybe you're just getting to know the community and want to tell everyone what you're working on. So we will have AGBY come up first and we're gonna cycle through some companies, but in the back will kind of be topical networking as well. That will probably be kind of the end of announcements, if you will. So I won't come back up. Thank you all so much for coming out. And remember, if you didn't grab the QR code, grab one now for the hackathon. Grab your tickets. We're looking forward to seeing you back here. March 7th, 8th, 9th. Don't worry, I'll email you tomorrow just to remind you again as well, too. But again, thank you all so much for coming out. And let's bring agby up to talk about their Ag Drone.

Hi, my name is Brianna Layfield. I am the founder of agb. This is, this is Nate Nows. He's my chief pilot. He was the first UAS pilot with DPR in California. We started in 2019 and we're one of the first in the US to get approved to apply with drones. And so we can apply virtually anything. Pesticides, nutrients, we do seeding, we do granulars. So anything that can be approved aerially for application, we can apply. We found that most farmers and growers wanted agtech as a service, not as a product that they were purchasing. And the amount of regulations and everything that you have to do in order to apply with these legally is fairly high. It took us over a year and a half to get all the necessary certifications. So in doing that and providing it as a service, we're kind of taking away one of their pain points. So we, we apply all over the state of California. We're expanding this year, so we are looking for funding. We're, we're developing teams up in Salinas, up in Northern California for the vineyards and in the Central Coast. And we want to start expanding what AGB's mission is, which is to provide the best application service possible. We're very big on efficacy of this tech. We don't expect farmers to take it on a leap of faith. We want to show them that it works effectively and well. And, you know, so we do a lot of research with the ucs and Cal states to that end as well. So it's very important to us that we're providing a service that gives them a good roi.

Sure. Hey, everybody. As Brianna said here, I'm Nate. I am the, the chief pilot for agby. And just to get started, there's, there's a lot that goes into this technology. But just so everybody knows, it's not just one of those types of, of services where you get to sit back on a roof in your flip flops and fly a drone around. There's a lot that goes into it. Like Brianna said, we have a code of ethics when it comes to it. When we want to do this job and when we want to do it right and be the best benefit that we can be to growers and farmers alike.

Thanks, guys.

All right, well, that might be it. Open networking. Make sure you meet. Go move to a different table real quick and meet someone else. I think we got a. We got some groups, populations sitting with each other, who knows each other. So thank you all again and we'll see you again soon in March. Cheers.