Commercializing Ag Research

Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
The success of American agriculture has come in no small part from the contributions of research and extension, but commercializing those solutions still needs improvement. Connie Bowen of Farmhand Ventures says The Vine by UCANR is designed to help provide steps and resources for commercializing new innovations.
Bowen… “ANR has, for a long time, observed that while there's some really phenomenal research happening in the context of ANR and the UC system. That research kind of gets published and then doesn't really solve problems for growers. There's a commercialization problem, right? And like the tech transfer problem in ag, I think it gets talked about a lot. I don't think it gets solutioned on. And so we at Farmhand Ventures have worked with the Office of Innovation at UC ANR to iterate and refine some programs under The Vine, which is the current initiative of UC ANR Office of Innovation.
Bowen says the program doesn’t necessarily prioritize venture-backable companies.
Bowen… “We're not exclusively focused on building venture-backable companies. That's really important in the context of agriculture because not all of the solutions that we need to be commercialized are going to be venture-backable companies or should pretend to try to be venture-backable companies.”
That’s the founding general partner of Farmhand Ventures, Connie Bowen.