Scot Chisholm

Huge news for CattleOS ! We are beyond excited to announce that we have been selected as part of Cultivator powered by Conexus’s 5th Cohort for the Agtech Accelerator. One of CattleOS’s biggest focuses is a customer and community centric product which is something this program will help us achieve. Excited to share more updates as we go on this journey! 🎉 #agtech #TechTo

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Seed selection is one of the most important decisions you make each season. In this episode of The Impact Farming Show, we sit down with Everett Boots, Western Product Specialist with FP Genetics, to talk about seed genetics, product development, and the real-world challenges farmers are navigating today. Everett shares his journey from the Crop Development Centre into his current role, what drives his passion for agriculture, and how he works alongside farmers, agronomists, and retailers to build trust and deliver tailored seed solutions. We also discuss: ✔️ The biggest pressures facing producers ✔️ How genetics can strengthen on-farm performance ✔️ The future of seed innovation in Western Canada ✔️ Why relationships matter as much as results If you’re thinking about performance, resilience, and long-term farm strategy — this episode is worth the listen. 🎧 Tune in now to The Impact Farming Show. https://lnkd.in/gvVrfsTf FP Genetics #FPGenetics #SeedSelection #Agriculture #Farming

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Fellow agtech fund managers - we're competing on metrics that don't matter in agriculture while LPs walk away from agtech entirely. Deal count. Celebrity advisors. Media coverage. None of it correlates with farmer adoption or sustainable returns. Sarah Nolet and I just published a piece on what actually moves the needle: building shared credibility in the asset class instead of fighting over slivers of pie. Let's work together. Agtech's next phase of maturity depends on it. Full article in the comments ⬇️

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Very excited to welcome Niman Ranch into the Regenerative Organic Alliance community with their ROC beef! With demand for organic beef far outpacing supply in the US, Niman's transition of 105K domestic acres to Regenerative Organic Certified with the goal of expanding to 250K acres by 2028 is a huge deal of the US beef market. https://lnkd.in/evrW3d2Z

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Agritech startup Halter reported as raising a USD2B round led by Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. An important detail is that Halter is in their 13th year in operations. Investors in startups can make enormous returns on investment, but often it takes a decade or more to cash out. Patience is rewarded. Accelerating Asia Ventures invests in numerous agritech startups whose revenue is growing at a rapid pace. We expect to see great ROI from investments like iFarmer, WeGro Global, EASYRICE Digital Technology, AgriCore, RootsAg, MAYANI. If you're an investor and looking for compelling long term investments, invest alongside us: https://lnkd.in/ghRcz8ND Article: https://lnkd.in/gqnFdpZv

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Whole Foods Market and Mad Agriculture have partnered to create a 1,000-acre "biodiversity highway" across U.S. farmland, beginning in Wisconsin, to restore ecosystems, support pollinators, and build climate resilience. Backed by up to $1 million in matching funds and support from brands like Applegate and Bob's Red Mill, the initiative aims to operationalize perennial agriculture and ecological restoration at scale. #regenerativeagriculture #regenerative #food #agriculture https://lnkd.in/eJ4ktnVs

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It's frustrating to see stories like this where the takeaway is "investors must have told them to scale too fast." Guardian's challenge wasn't that they scaled too fast, it's that in scaling it became clear how hard their challenges were. Guardian's last round was $15m as a fast follow from a $20m Series A. Using normal VC math, that would put their post-money valuation roughly around $120m range. (+-$40m) If they were a non-AI-washed, DCF-valued SaaS company, you'd expect their valuation to be ~10x annual revenue. That means they'd need to be making $12 million/year, and likely require a range of 27,000 flight hours/year. To get to $12m/yr, I math that they'd need roughly 88 robots that "just work." ($12m/$15acre/30 acres an hour, 4 visits a season/120 day season/10 productive hours a day; which is 1/10th the size of the Predator Program or the largest autonomous mine truck programs. There's a world where that works, but the challenge is that in robotics, everything is hard. Building a hardware platform that "just works" is incredibly hard for a use case like this, not in the least because fertilizer is corrosive and hard on parts (and rotors are sensitive). The size of their drone required it to be tethered to the ground, which may have easily cut into my 30 acres per hour estimate. If it didn't (if they autonomously sprayed while tethered to a moving truck), some really intense control work would have been needed. And they had to market their services in a competitive market that cares less about drones being cool, and more about cost per acre. Let alone field support. All of which costs real money, and explains why a team as good as Guardian needed $55m. The big problem with this story, though, is that in the long run, Guardian wouldn't get a SaaS multiple. All that field support and hardware capex would likely put them into a services business's multiple, with a 1-3x revenue multiple. That means they would need a Predator-sized fleet to justify their prior valuation (let alone their next round). As investors saw just how hard that business was, they probably opted for something easier. Like generative AI SDRs. As an industry, we keep seeing this story play out - investors pour money into a startup when it's full of vague hope, allowing the company to become overvalued relative to its DCF fundamentals, and it struggles to make the leap from hype to reality. The reality is that if your hardware is >$20k/unit and you make <$100k/yr of services margin, and your business relies on: -you building a custom vehicle, and -you building custom on-board autonomy, and -you building a custom fleet management system, and -you need to be a world-class services operator, Then you need an unfair capital advantage to survive long enough to prosper. As in, you need to be a passionate billionaire's pet project. And if you're not, you need to scale back and partner with others to do 2-3 of those bullets.

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𝐀𝐈 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐑𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 Rural businesses historically struggled with customer acquisition and visibility. AI flips the equation. 𝐇𝐨𝐰: - AI-powered digital marketing tools find customers anywhere in the world. - Personalized e-commerce and content creation become turnkey. - Predictive tools optimize supply chains and pricing. - Translation and localization open global markets. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭: A rural entrepreneur can sell globally from a town of 500 people, and compete on equal footing. #RuralInnovation #AIForGood #FutureOfRural #DigitalDivide #AIEmpowerment #InnovationEcosystems #EntrepreneurshipEverywhere #AIFuture #EconomicOpportunity #TechForRural #CHSI

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Are consumers leaning into certifications, or tuning them out? Coming out of Expo West, it feels like there were an infinite number of certifications. As the landscape gets more crowded: USDA Organic, Non-GMO Project verified, B Corp, Regenerative Organic certified, NSF certified, non-UPF verified, Fairtrade USA, Glyphosate Residue Free certified to name a few — which marks will actually move the needle at shelf? Which do consumers consider are worth paying more for? And which are noise? Curious what you are seeing.

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