Making Finance and Opportunities Accessible to Farmers With Jayce Hafner of FarmRaise

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon hashtag SD TechOS with your host Neil Bloom.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and I am thrilled to have you here on the Talkers and Tech podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities and we do it weekly. So thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbrewedtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I'm thrilled to have on new San Diegan Jase Haffner, co founder and CEO of Farm Raise. Hey Jace, thanks for being on.

Thank you so much Neil. It's awesome to be here and it's great to be in San Diego. We're loving it.

Welcome, welcome. So stoked to have you here as we're talking pre show the most farms apparently in in any county. 7,000 farms. Not a bad place to start a farm tech ag tech business. Take give us a one minute overview of what farmers is.

Absolutely. So we're a platform that makes it really easy for small and mid sized farmers to connect with and apply for grants and loans to start up and scale up their farm businesses. We help farmers match with the hundreds of farm grant and loan programs that are accessible through the U.S. department of Agricult and private Funders. And when a farmer, you know, goes out to scan the Internet for options on their own, they're just inundated with tons of information, tons of bureaucratic forms that are just tough to fill out on your own. And we've made it into a simple, straightforward 15 minute process to connect with and apply for funding. And I know this is important because I actually grew up on a farm and went to the process of trying to apply for grants to more sustainably graze our cows and it was a nightmare.

Super interesting. Farm tech or agtech meets fintech. I like farm tech. Farm tech and fintech.

Fear of squarely Farm tech.

Yeah, I love that. I want to hear kind of the genesis of that even more so from your farm experience. But it sounds like you grew up on a farm. Take us through how you, how did you get here? Like, did you always know you were going to build this kind of business?

I grew up way back east in Virginia in the Shenandoah valley on a 160 acre Angus beef cattle farm. And growing in the up in that context as a kid, I just loved helping my dad out with the farm business. The goats were my main responsibility, you know, raising Pygmy and Nubian goats that we would then sell at market. And we also had a herd of Angus beef cattle. The flip side of that is as a farm business owner, the work is incredibly exhausting. It's physically draining, it's also mentally straining because there are all these things that pop up in the day that you don't expect. Like market prices shift, the weather shifts, you have a broken fence, the cattle get into the neighbor's field, there's just a lot of stressors. And at the end of the day, there's very little time, energy and bandwidth for a farmer to deal with the business side of their farm business and to monitor their cash flow, to look at expenses and to identify the best financial resources to grow their operation. And so we didn't have time to work on that. When I was growing up and our farm struggled to expand as a business, we were operating in the single digit margins year over year. But there was one program that really up leveled our farm business that changed everything for us. And this was a grant program from the U.S. department of Agriculture that's specifically designed to help farmers invest in their soil health. And by soil health I mean, you know, the organic matter of their soil, the water retention in their soil. And the way you can make your soil health better as a cattle farmer is you can rotationally graze your cattle around the field. So rather than, you know, grazing the whole paddock down, you can move them around using electric fencing and that sort of thing. And so we got a grant from the USDA that helped us transition our cattle to regenerative grazing practices. And it was. The cows loved it because they were accessing fresh grass every day. And the ecosystem loved it. We were attracting suddenly new birds and wildlife species back to the farm. But what was really cool is it also boosted our bottom line. Because our grass was so healthy, we could graze the cattle outside for three additional months throughout the year. And that translated to about a $40 an acre profit boost for us, which was awesome. So it was just this amazing example of how a little bit of finance can pay for a project that can then transform how you do business as a farmer. Better for the environment, better for your wallet. So that context got me really interested in finance, especially after, you know, trying to apply for this grant and seeing how hard it is as a farmer to go through that paperwork process, which it's often a barrier to unlocking those benefits. And so I had this interest as a young person and carried it with me into adulthood, into the next chapter.

Oh, that's super interesting. Okay, so what was the finance world like? Cause that's not typically the same. Same world of like, being on a farm, that's for sure. A little more stuffy.

It certainly can be. I found myself in business school out at Stanford because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I saw getting my MBA as the route to getting the training and also the network that would help me really successfully launch a business. And I wanted to do it in the agriculture space. And I also knew that I didn't want to do it alone. I wanted to find someone who could help me build this over the course of our lives and who had complimentary strengths to my own. I was looking for someone who not only, you know, had a different, maybe technical skill set, but also a different approach so that we could balance each other out and make a strong team. And I found that person in my co founder at business school, Sammy Teleton. She has a background as an environmental scientist. She had worked at the U.S. department of Agriculture for a number of years before coming back to business school to get her degree. And we started co founder dating while we were there. We were both doing research, actually for our separate theses. I was looking at California ranchers, especially in the Central Valley, how they reacted to carbon markets, you know, basically producing carbon credits on their land through more sustainable Practices, how farmers viewed that whole process. I was researching that and talking to farmers about that. Sammy was researching Midwestern row crop farmers and the barriers they faced in investing in soil health practices, especially through an economic lens. And we were looking at two very different types of farming systems. Midwestern row croppers are producing, you know, massive quantities of high quotient protein crops, corn, wheat, soybeans. And then you have the cattle ranchers in California, totally different culture, different production system. But they were both saying the same thing, which is, I have so much trouble finding funding opportunities for my farm and applying for those opportunities. Could you please just build us a turbotax for farm funding? And so we saw this opportunity across two very different cropping systems, but two, you know, systems that represent the majority of producers in the US and we saw this opportunity and that's when we knew we had to get started right away. This was a mission worth dedicating our lives to making finance accessible so farmers can be more profitable and sustainable on their farms. So that's when we started building prototypes. We raised a little bit of capital and got into an accelerator in Palo Alto and found our third co founder, Albert Abedi, who brought the engineering expertise to power our product forward.

That's so cool. I love how it all happened. I mean, it sounds like we all know, like it doesn't happen like that in a, to us in a perfect environment. Right. Like you, you have to at some point take the leap, I would imagine. Right. So was there you were working on this kind of by night or was this actually already a project during business school that you were kind of doing by night? Like, how did you balance the idea versus testing and validating and knowing when to rip the band aid and go all in on it?

Yeah. So I have a lot of student loans and I knew that I would have to make this financially feasible in order to pursue it full time. I would have loved to have bootstrapped it, but I just didn't have. I was not sitting on a nest egg that could make that feasible. And so I had to go out and raise money with Sammy. We had to, you know, make this, get, get ourselves a little bit of Runway. So securing a grant from Stanford, getting some venture capital in the door, made this dream into a viable business for us that we could then scale up into a profitable business over time. And that was really that first check in the door is when I knew we had the infrastructure we needed to pursue this with confidence. And not confidence in the idea so much as confidence in the security of Being able to build without those financial worries. We already had confidence that the idea was going to go somewhere and we wanted to be the team to tackle it.

Really cool. So take us through kind of, I guess, what you learned by day that you then applied into once you were all in on this.

Yeah, I mean, in the Stanford curriculum, it really emphasizes failure and like running tests and failing quickly and then sort of learning from that and running another test and failing again. And so we really leaned into building no code prototypes, especially before we had an engineering team, but we still do that today. Two weeks ago we ran another no code test and just to de risk product features as we move. And so there are amazing no code, you know, tools out there, like Zapier, like Typeform that you can use to automate and serve your customers efficiently and sort of build a mock up of the product. And so we just built some of those and got them in front of farmers. And farmers immediately said, I like this. Or they said, I'm not. Basically they voted with their actions. I didn't use it. And so that was. We knew we had failed at that and needed to try something again. And so I think that idea of running discrete tests in your life is such a valuable thing. And that is something that I did learn in the classroom that I apply to life every day. I don't know how many it's. It's hard to take classroom lessons and apply them to a startup, I think because most of the learning is on the job. But that is one thing I think that was a really valuable learning from business school.

Yeah, absolutely. So obviously a lot of this was happening during the pandemic. Right. As well too. Take us through, like what that did to running a business, but also from your customers too, like what. What did the farm community go through during this time period over the last two years?

Oh my gosh. It was a terrible time for the farm community. And it's. Their farmers are still really struggling from the pandemic because what most immediately happened, first they were dealing with fluctuating market prices even before the pandemic hit because there was currently a trade war going on with the US administration and China. And there were some other geopolitical contexts that were just making market prices fluctuate in a way that it made it really hard for farmers to capture the value of what they were producing at market. And it was a very unpredictable situation. Then you add to that Covid hitting and supply chains were suddenly massively disrupted. Farmers who were producing beef could no longer take their beef to market in a dependable way. And you know, there were accounts, there were situations where you had hog producers having to slaughter on their own like hundreds of hogs in a day because they couldn't take them to market. It was just, just a horrible, horrible situations that were both absolutely financially devastating and then psychologically devastating in terms of what they had to do. And then the stress of that financial insecurity. And so I'm just like getting the chills thinking about that period. It was a really, really bad time for farmers. And so of course they were looking for funding. And fortunately the US government snapped into action and quickly put forward a Covid relief program for farmers that had a pretty simple application. A lot of farmers didn't know about it at first and so we helped farmers apply for that as well as some private financial opportunities. We directed farmers to just get some relief in the door during that situation. So it was a really on the flip side in terms of our business, it was a meaningful time to start the company because farmers so desperately needed funding in that moment. We ended up incorporating on March 4, 2020, which was I think right when lockdown, right before lockdown happened in California. And that was the last day I saw my co founder for 11 months. I went back to my farm in Virginia and just weeded out the sort of pandemic there. And we didn't meet up again until the following April. We didn't meet our co third co founder, we recruited him completely remotely and didn't meet him until the April 2021 in person, which was wild. And all of our investors, except for our first investor, we met remotely and did our pitches on Zoom and everything. So farmeries is now proudly building a remote company. But I think the pandemic definitely shaped that and it's a really interesting challenge to build a company culture in a remote environment. Just we had our second all team retreat last week in Albert Green, New Mexico and it just reminded me of the power of being in person and how much faster you can go when you're just in person. And so I think baking in in person time in the year ahead is going to be really important for us even as we continue to recruit talent remotely and build remotely.

Totally. So you're so always will be or not always, but for now you're remote. And no like necessarily a core concentration of talent per se.

We are remote, but we do have a concentration of talent in San Diego. We have a couple employees here and we're always looking to bring more on because what we're Finding is we have pods in different cities, we have a couple people in Denver, we have a couple people in San Diego, we have a couple of people in New York City and we're, we find ways to co work together in that way and we also tend to attract more people to come and visit us when we have those situations. So yeah, we are remote but we like encouraging co working wherever it's possible for sure.

So take us through kind of where you're at today. I mean it sounds like you incorporated two years ago right around now. Where's the platform right now? How big is the team? Like what are you building out right now?

Yeah, we're now a team of 17 and we have built out a platform that makes it really easy for farmers to identify grant programs that are right for their farm. They get a one on one advisor that provides text based coaching for them as they navigate their farm funding journey. They can set up their business plans with farm raised and they can ultimately apply for funding through our platform. So they can apply for one of the biggest sustainable agriculture funding programs in the United States. Billions of dollars every year allocated through this program. It's a complex application but we've simplified it to 15 minutes and farmers can apply through that and then eventually they're going to be able to manage their, their funding on the back end too. And we see this farm funding sort of chapter as a wedge. This is the first act of farm raise. But our vision is much bigger. We are going to be building the full stack financial services platform for the farm. So we see this as a platform where farmers will be able to efficiently inherit or buy a farm. They'll be able to fund a farm, invest in it, bank it, insure it and ultimately pass it down to the next generation in a sustainable way.

Wow. So cool. Do you know the team locally? Omni sync? You heard of them?

I think I've read about them. I haven't met them yet.

So. So they're kind of, they're kind of parallel to you. They're doing it for like life science and hardware companies to access like sbirs and kind of those kinds of grants. And you're doing that in the, in the agriculture world.

Yeah. That's really cool.

So we got to make sure you guys meet. We'll connect you to Rupak because I'm sure you're learning a lot of the same things the same time, especially around like figuring out how to navigate the federal kind of language and Alphabet soup and distill that down to your farmers, which smartly sounds like you're doing it by phone or any accessible means in that nature, which is super cool. So we'll make sure we make the connection there. Take us through what brought you to San Diego. Like, it sounds like you've lived across the country, different places.

Yeah. So in business school, I got down here on breaks whenever I could. I, as I said, I was on student loans, so I was trying to like, keep my travel as local as possible in California. And you can drive down here. I actually remember taking a bus down here for spring break. And when I got down here, I was just amazed by how friendly the people are and the sustainability of the lifestyle and also just the natural beauty. It's just awesome to be, you know, like hustling really hard all day to the point where your eyes are kind of hurting, you're tired of looking at a screen and then to be able to like go outside and see natural beauty and feel renewed in that way. I just, I knew I could be better at my job if I was in an environment that renewed me. My husband felt the same way. And so we've always kind of dreamed about moving to San Diego, but we, we don't know a lot of people here. We're just kind of starting out from scratch in terms of building our community, which is why I'm super excited to be speaking with you and meeting you, Neil. And we've been so happy in this decision. We've really enjoyed settling in here and we found it to be like just the environment we need to build this type of company right now. And my brother actually just moved out here too last month permanently. So we're excited to have him out here and just be building that community. So we think we'll. We'll hopefully bring some more people in and meet a lot of people in the coming months.

We love that. Welcome to town. First of all, we'd love for our audience listeners to reach out and connect and bring you into their communities as well too. We mentioned depending upon when this is going live, I. It might. The events I'm about to say might already have happened. But coming up, you know, so many good events like March Mingle and Startup Convergence and Innovation Day, we make sure that people find you and say hi and connect you in because we're all about that is you, you grab, you nailed it on the head. San Diego very much like give before you get and want to make sure we're kind of value add to each other. So we love having you here. So congrats.

Welcome. Thank you so much. I so appreciate that.

So you've been here a few months now. Have to by now you have to have noticed our taco scene. Do you have a favorite taco spot?

Oscars pb I mean, I think, I think Oscars Pacific beach is our favorite so far, but we're trying to explore and look for new opportunities too. Do you have any suggestions?

Oh, so many, so many. Well, first listen to like every episode of this podcast because there is every, there's and actually we have a taco database. We'll send you our taco database of every answer that's been mentioned for the last four years on here. Yeah, exactly. Oscar is, is a fan favorite for sure. Their ceviche is constantly mentioned all the time and obviously they're fish tacos. But yes, there's more to branch out from other name brands like Taco Stand and City Tacos, which are very popular to the unnamed ones that you only know because it's there, you know, late Friday nights in a parking lot of a Target or something. So there's a right taco spot for every time of day. And we're excited to welcome you into our taco region as well too.

Thank you so much. I can't wait.

Well, we're, we can't wait to one have some tacos with you but also help you grow your team. I know you mentioned you're hiring right now. What are some of the roles that you're hiring for?

Yeah, we're currently looking for full stack engineers who have at least three years of working experience. And one of our core values at Farm Raise is farmer obsession. And what we mean by that is you don't have to have agricultural experience experience, you don't have to have worked on a farm. But we are looking for people who, in addition to, you know, that technical skill set, have a curiosity about farmers and a desire to help small farmers grow their businesses to be more profitable and sustainable. And we're here working in San Diego. It'll be fun to get some more folks from San Diego on our team. And yeah, very much an open book. If there's anyone listening who would like to learn more about the role and chat more.

Absolutely. We'll make sure we link the roles in the show notes. Also got to make sure I connect you. I'm just giving a shout out because I know she listens. Jennifer Schoenick at Escondido who's looking to build the ag tech kind of hub of Southern California in Escondido from big farms like Pasta Avocado Henry's Avocado. All the way down to startups who are building tech and creating a sandbox environment where farmers can test and try and use their farms as places to test and try technology. So making sure I'll connect you, but also giving a shout out to Jennifer for kind of leading the charge on Escondido's AgTech hub to be wow, what a cool model.

I mean, that's such a great way to bridge the disconnect we've often seen between the tech, Silicon Valley, venture and startup world with real farmers. And I love that sandbox idea. It's brilliant.

Yeah, I think the technology world, applying it to the wide reaches of San Diego, from military to chips and phones to life sciences to agriculture. Like we mentioned, how many farms are here, which taps right into the technology of our natural resources. Like we very much have built a lot around energy independence here, from water to power to other things. So it's really cool to find ways where those industries blur lines and test and try and collaborate. So if we can help you do that as well, we'd love that and hopefully attract more companies like yours to the areas too. So, Jase, thanks so much for being on. Thanks for telling your story and look forward to seeing you soon.

Same here. Thank you so much, Neil.

Cheers. Thanks for tuning in to the Tacos and Tech podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshbroodtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also follow fresh brewed tech on all of our social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it.

Hey.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it. Hey.

Sam.