Training Farmers To Think Like Investors

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Farmers have to wear many hats to be successful these days, but venture capitalist usually isn’t one of them. Pete Nelson and Margaret Oldham at AgLaunch have created educational resources for farmers that want to capture more of the upside of ag technology.

Nelson… “Margaret has put together an entire training that we're going to roll out to additional farmers outside about helping farmers understand how venture capital works, what the multipliers are, what is the model, and the more we've trained farmers, we now have a cadre of farmers that include urban aquaponics to you know, big scale grain folks in the Midwest that are now thinking like investors. So they're using their farm brains, but they're looking at portfolio management. We've got to have some good things that could sell and could sell into big companies that would be game changers from a biotechnology perspective or an animal health perspective, and we need to think about it like investors. And so as we sort of grounded the reality of the ground truth thing on the farm with how investment works, and that's only going to get better for us and thinking about portfolio management.”

Nelson says this is part of their greater mission of resilience and profitability for the American farmer.