FASTCON: Food, Ag & Supply Chain in Tech Conference

The agricultural aspects of our food systems are large, complex and critical. We’ve seen considerable hype around the potential for disruptive innovation here, particularly in our supply chains. Much of the hype has failed to produce the waves change predicted due to three primary reasons — difficulty, trust, reliability.

We’ve seen diffusion of innovation in agriculture before. As a matter of fact, the law of diffusion of innovation was created here (Beal and Bohen 1957). Infrastructure could be considered the greatest advancement in the grain industry in the last century, but the landscape of farming has dramatically changed since 1957. Machinery, inputs and precision practices have advanced by leaps and bounds, and yet digital infrastructure, remains siloed. It’s dried, stored and waiting.

Bushel has built an incredible product around transporting that data; bringing it back to the producer in a sensible manner, and doing so from a large variety of sources. Our vision is to connect and enhance the grain industry through digital infrastructure. And we’re doing it when the timing is right, with trusted solutions for a mass market that’s ready for cooperative innovation. We’re helping growers and producers find efficiency in monitoring their outputs, completing transactions and sending data where it needs to go. And we’re doing it in a reliable way that resonates with a mass market.

This presentation will describe the technical approach that Bushel uses, discuss some of the challenges to this approach and cover the importance of our partnerships and the mutual benefit obtained by introducing cooperative innovation in data exchange.