Digitizing Harvest Contracts and Settlements

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Despite all of the technology that’s being created for agriculture, many operations still happen offline. Billions of dollars of grain, for example, are transacted with paper contracts and paper settlements. Jake Joraanstad and his team at Bushel are hoping to change all of that by building digital infrastructure for the grain industry.

Joraanstad… “Most grain contracts today are done on paper. There's maybe a 10% adoption of e-sign in the industry. Just like there's maybe a 10% adoption of ACH payments in the industry. Both of them are poor adoption and for no good reason. And it's certainly not the farmer's fault. The grain facilities have a poor process of doing these things. And so the ones that are adopting e-sign, great, but so many of them haven't. And so what we'll do is we'll say, okay, you've got a 5,000 bushel contract and you signed it electronically on the bushel platform.”

Joraanstad says digital contracts are just the beginning.

Joraanstad… “Now imagine if that came in through an electronic offer instead of a phone call, and then it was signed electronically. Now we've created a ton of value on that simple 5,000 bushels of a contract. And so that's an example of the kind of thing we'll track in the future for our company internally, and some of our goals around how do we make sure our company is building towards creating value for our customer and their farmer.”

Learn more at www.bushelpowered.com.