Small Batch Ag Processing

Small Batch Ag Processing

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

What’s holding farmers back from growing more high value specialty crops rather than commodity crops? In a word, markets. The processing capacity needs to exist to bring differentiated crops to market. Daniel Oh is the CEO of AgCertain. They are trying ot bring large scale commodity efficiencies to smaller scale batch processing.

Oh… “The wonderful thing about the commodity industrial agricultural system that we've created in North America is that we have great nutrition availability, very high quality food. At the same time, as all of this has come together so we can produce lots of food, at high rates, at relatively small cost per unit, we have made it nearly impossible for a large system to produce smaller batches of discrete identity products. So, for example, if you want to have industrial yellow number 2 corn, you can go get that anywhere. But if you want to have non-GMO corn, and you want to have it for whatever reason. It's hard to do that because the system is set up for very large. And over the last 50 years, what used to be family and co-op smaller size operations, how they dispersed, we efficiently as an economic system basically said, we don't need that. We're going to get bigger and bigger. And as we did that, we lost smaller processing and gathering capability.”

This interview with Daniel Oh originally appeared on The Pacesetter Podcast.

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