AcreForward Podcast

The only constant in agriculture is change. The sector circulates on a carousel of challenge, technology and adaptation, evolving with every rotation – the fourth industrial revolution, if you will. On this week’s AcreForward podcast, Laura Handke sat down with Nir Naor, who has helped to pioneer the artificial intelligence (AI) that is revolutionizing how insights drive decision-making on the farm. 

As one of the first AI experts to join the Taranis team, Nir has been instrumental in the continued development of Taranis’ AI. 

Are you interested in deploying conservation programs across your farming operation but aren’t quite sure where to start…or when to start? You aren’t alone. Over the past decade, USDA conservation programs have multiplied to provide more producers more variety in implementing soil health, water quality and wildlife conservation opportunities. In doing so, the application windows have staggered and the entire process has become a complex web of paperwork facilitated by timing that many farmers find challenging. 

New year, new face, same industry-leading and forward-thinking conversations. We’re shaking things up on the AcreForward podcast, giving you a new listening experience. Each week, different members of our team will host, from customer success representatives and sales to our marketing and product support teams; every conversation will leave you with a better understanding of what drives Taranis. 

This week, Cory Edge from our customer success team sits down with Drew Garretson, vice president of innovation, sustainability, and public policy for the newly formed Keystone Cooperative, formerly Ceres Solutions, for a conversation centered around what keeps the gears of retailers across the U.S. turning. 

“At the end of the day, we report back to the American farmer. There’s no other way I could see myself working in another industry or business model,” Garretson says. 

Serving the farmer starts with the structure of a company. What is the mission, and how do the established metrics and key performance indicators align with supporting that mission? 

For ag retailers across the U.S., the customer is straightforward enough: farmers. The challenge and innovation lie in how those retailers choose to structure the service and support a farmer needs to be successful.

When employees become like family, you’re doing something right. If you’ve had the chance to work with Nicole Hall, who has served our Taranis team as a customer success representative for the past couple of years, you understand how integral she and her teammates are to our team and your experience. 

Nicole grew up on a farm in Boone County, Indiana. Never straying far from her roots, Nicole transitioned into a role on the family farm after acquiring her most important title, “Mom” to Hank Allen.

In this episode of the AcreForward podcast, Mike sits down with Nicole’s dad, Dave Chance, a first-generation Indiana farmer and proud grandpa, to learn about Nicole’s family’s farming operation. 

“Nicole has had a great experience (at Taranis) as a Customer Success Representative, but she and her husband John are actually joining the farming operation and she’s chosen to stay home with Hank and help us on the farm with a lot of the electronic things we have going on,” Dave shares. “We’re excited, not only to have her home and have our grandchild with us to watch him grow, but we’re just excited to see what the future brings.”

In the dynamic realm of agricultural Technology (AgTech), few stories capture the essence of innovation and perseverance like that of Taranis. Founded in the early 2010s, Taranis embarked on a mission to revolutionize crop monitoring and analysis using cutting-edge technology. Through a combination of strategic vision, technical expertise, and relentless determination, the company navigated the challenges of the startup landscape to emerge as a trailblazer in the field of AI-driven agriculture.

In this episode of the AcreForward Podcast, Ofir Schlam, co-founder of Taranis, reflects on the company's journey, stating, "We didn't know how it was going to be done...but we followed this protocol, and it just took time and got done." This sentiment encapsulates the spirit of innovation that propelled Taranis forward in its quest to redefine agriculture.

In this episode of the Acre Forward Podcast, host Mike DiPaola interviews Nate Eitzmann of Asmus Farm Supply, located in North Central Iowa. The conversation revolves around the challenges and opportunities faced by farmers in the region, especially during a particularly dry growing season.

The definition of progressive, Landus President and CEO, Matt Carstens, joined Mike on the AcreForward podcast to talk about some of the greatest challenges farmers are facing today. Spoiler alert: inputs and agronomy don’t make the list. 

“If we can get this (health insurance) under control, that spouse that may be better at merchandising or selling and hedging grain can come back home full time. That son or daughter can come back from college or graduate high school and join the farm right away. That’s powerful, and people shouldn’t have to take jobs off the farm just for insurance. We are better than that as an agricultural community — as the United States of America, for people that provide the feed and fuel for us all. We have to do better. Landus has a lot of passion around that,” Carstens says. 

On Taranis’ live stage at the 2023 Farm Progress Show, Mike recorded a special episode of the AcreForward podcast with Sam Lowers, strategic account manager with Landus. The topic was crop intelligence, and how that data fuels the brains behind farm operations.

Mike quickly found out that Sam’s view on his customers closely aligns with Taranis’ own: He calls them “farmers of tomorrow.” Why? “Our focus is farmers not necessarily based on size, but based on their position for the future … and how can we grow with them.”

Like Taranis, Landus is anything but traditional in its approach to serving customers. One of the coop’s big focuses is helping farmers have healthy long-term businesses, not just for themselves but also for their families. 

Talking with their growers about keeping them up at night, they found the number one answer was health insurance. “So we're working on offering health insurance to farmers – affordable health insurance,” Lowers says. “That's not something that traditional ag retail is doing.” The hope is that by January 1, 2024, Landus will be able to offer affordable health insurance to its members.

Listen to the AcreForward Podcast to catch the rest of the discussion.

Mike DiPaola and Agri Spray Drones owner, Taylor Moreland, share their insights on ag tech, how they find value for their customers, and why both companies are passionate about empowering rural America in this don’t-miss episode of the AcreForward podcast. 

“There’s a lot of overpromising when it comes to technology and ag, so taking what is out there and then finding what can actually be accomplished on the farm, is where we have to meet in the middle.”

- Taylor Moreland, Agri Spray Drones

If you missed the Farm Progress Show this year, you missed more than the latest in machinery and agriculture innovation. Our Taranis team was onsite and recorded live interviews for the AcreForward podcast with members of our partnership network. 

With a growing number of acres enrolled in the AcreForward Crop Intelligence, Landus is the “forward-leaning, progressive cooperative working with the farmers who want to be here tomorrow and will be here tomorrow,” says GROW Lead, Jamie Orr, who joined Mike on stage to talk technology, innovation, and what sets Landus apart in the cooperative marketplace. 

“The main difference is the phone number that (customers or potential customers) can call. Someone will answer the phone most hours of the day,” he says. “We have experts behind the phone that can answer anything about Landus and our products.” 

Orr cites technological advancements and Landus’ commitment to providing customers with the new and innovative solutions those technologies deliver as another distinguishing driver of the company—a driver Taranis aligns perfectly with. 

As a one-time resident of the Innovation Center, located at the Landus headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa Taranis and Landus have a history. And Orr offers that the advantages Taranis provides help him and his team better serve their customers. 

“Managing a virtual team, we can be sitting behind a desk, whether in a farmer’s office or our office, and understanding what is happening in a farmer’s field, down to an insect level,” Orr explains the value Taranis brings to his team. “No one, no matter how good of a scout you are, can find everything. Taranis takes a lot off our sales staff. It makes them more efficient and can bring better customer service to the farmer.”

With a family farm in northeast Iowa and Orr located in Illinois, being part of the farming operation can be challenging. Taranis is a connection Orr has found that helps him stay engaged in what is happening in the fields and a part of the management conversation. 

“I can take a look at our family fields every day, and I can ask, “What’s going on in this field” from four hours away. I can look at a lot of acres in a short amount of time,” he says. 

To hear more about how Orr’s team is putting Taranis AcreForward Intelligence to work to expand the expertise of senior agronomists, more effectively and efficiently train new sales and agronomic team members, and take the guesswork out of conversations from the buddy seat of the combine, tune in to this episode of the AcreForward Podcast. 

“It’s special to be a part of something that is emulated around the world.” – National Event Director, Matt Jungmann

Join Matt and Mike for a behind the scenes look at this year’s Farm Progress Show. They talk about attendance, playing favorites between Boone and Decatur, and how President George W. Bush has been involved in the show.

If you’re a fan of TikTok, Tyler Tobald of JTAC Farms does a great job of breaking through the marketing to give honest on-farm reviews. The young musician-turned-farmer lends a unique perspective to his family’s farming operation that includes capitalizing on out-of-the-box opportunities and practices with a focus on technology. 

Dr. TikTok, as our host, Mike DiPaola, Chief Commercial Officer, jokingly refers to Tobald, has been making waves on the social channels and, in doing so, inadvertently sharing a message that is near and dear to the Taranis mission: making agriculture better by bringing small communities together through information and using service to bring people closer. 

A Central Valley Ag customer, the north central Kansas farmer, tells us that the 2023 growing season was his 10th year of farming, sharing that his road back to the tractor cab took the long way around the barn. 

“I was a musician growing up. I went to Kansas State University on multiple musical scholarships, but burnout brought me back to the farm, looking for what I wanted to do with my life. I realized about four months into working on the farm that I had found myself more than I had in the past four years of college,” he shares, adding that the career change didn’t come without a learning curve. 

“Farming was not an easy thing to do, especially my first two years—I don’t enjoy being the dumbest person in the room, and I found myself listening to people talk about herbicide rates and fertilizer blends. I knew that I had a lot of self-learning to do.”

If you follow ag radio, news, and crop reporting, you’ve heard the name Chip Flory. The iconic voice is quickly discernable, as are the insights and no-nonsense outlooks it provides farmers around the country twice a day every weekday.

This week, Mike is joined by Chip to talk through what continues to fuel his journalistic fires today,

where the industry is headed, and the ins and outs of the Pro Farmer Crop Tour—from where it started to how the team arrives at the “magic number” every August.

We’re talking “soybeans with beaks,” the swamp full of rich men north of Richmond, and service-based journalism in this jam-packed AcreForward hour of knowledge and insights.

In this week’s AcreForward podcast, Chief Commercial Officer, Mike DiPaola sits down with Stateline Cooperative’s Jody Soma and Kelli Barnett to talk about what it takes to provide agronomic insights that make a difference for every acre.

“It’s about bringing the right products and interacting with the grower at the farmgate,” Stateline Regional Account Manager Jody Soma told Mike in this week’s AcreForward podcast. “We want to make sure that our customers are going to get the highest level of customer service, but also the quality advice that really helps them maximize their performance and crops.” 

Soma and Kelli Barnett serve in the same role on opposite sides of the Stateline Iowa-Minnesota territory. Both agree that customer needs don’t vary, customers need products that work, and all involved want to ensure that corn and soybean plants don’t see a bad day. Both leaders grew through agronomy retail opportunities, including seed sales, throughout their careers to position them to lead a team of agronomists that know what their customers need before the customers themselves do.

To ensure that their team drives efficiency behind the scenes for the farmers they serve, Soma and Barnett make accountability a vital part of their leadership. 

“We make sure that we are holding our team accountable. We want to ensure that we give that extra two-to-three-week outlook as we forecast what we need to be looking for and project that out to our sales team of what they might be seeing in the field in those next few weeks,” Barnett says. “We want them to be able to have those conversations with growers to be on top of what needs are.” 

Stateline Co-Op is unique because the cooperative works within a very diverse portfolio of companies; the team and business strive to deliver the best products with the value their customers need. 

“We don’t hold our agronomy staff to having to sell a certain product from a certain company. We have diversity within multiple brands to ensure that we allow our agronomists, in their local markets, to do what’s best for their growers,” Soma tells us. 

Helping to decide what’s best for their growers isn’t one that is taken lightly—a lot goes into making sure advice is solid and valuable. That’s why the Stateline team leverages data heavily to learn from what the numbers—from soil tests to yield monitors—are telling them. Their team understands that some things can’t be changed in a season, but what they learn better prepares them for future crop seasons. 

“The beauty of being a good agronomist is being able to analyze different things,” says Soma. “We talk a lot in the industry about what a normal year looks like anymore—there isn’t such a thing. But we, as agronomists, have to use the tools in our toolbox to be the best we can be out in the country. We know that we can’t be perfect, but there’s a lot we can do to mitigate risk for our customers.” 

Soma tells us that focusing on yield goals has helped agronomists reach for every tool available and notes that the results have been nothing short of impressive. 

“We have been able to have high-producing crops in tougher years. It’s mindboggling that in two years of droughts, we’re still putting out over 200-bushel field averages; 20 years ago, we would’ve had 100-bushel yields on those same acres in these droughts. We’ve really made leaps and bounds to start achieving higher yields, and to do that, we’ve had to adjust our practices, which include looking at different fertility programs, different hybrid, and variety selections—micronutrient, foliar feeds, fungicide treatments—all of that and how we can do it on a bigger geography.”

Nationwide aerial data capture across multiple business sectors developed by the man who “was Moneyball before Moneyball”?  

Sign us up to hear more about that.  

This week Mike sits down with Fly Guys founder and CEO, Joe Stough, to learn more about Joe’s vision to connect people who want to fly and can fly with the opportunities to do that work across many business verticals.  

A native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, Joe Stough is the quintessential outdoorsman. Duck hunting, “chasing red snapper”, shrimping, and crabbing are just a few of the pastimes you’ll find him and his family enjoying between the months of March and August. For the remainder of the year, you’ll find Stough on his 1,000-acre rice farm. 

Baseball took Stough to California, an address change he credits as instrumental to his career. 

“I found myself really interested in writing software, and California was a great place to be a software developer back in the late eighties, early nineties,” he says. “While in grad school, I wrote a software program, which ran the housing department, and realized that writing software was what I wanted to do.”  

A love of baseball intersected with a love of math and statistics to create what Stough joking calls the Moneyball before the Moneyball.  

“(College baseball and a love for statistics) intersected and the very first program I designed was a baseball statistics application,” he says. “It was too early—the Moneyball that didn’t come to fruition before the real one did. I had to pivot because coaches, at that time, weren’t ready for that sophisticated level of data capture.”  

AcreForward is a lot like baseball Taranis Chief Operating Officer and host, Mike DiPaola says, “In agriculture, we’ve always had the stats. But it’s only been the last three years that the right tech has come together to enable us to start really looking at them.” 

DiPaola and Stough talk about risk and software’s role in defining and mitigating risk to loss, and Stough’s commitment to operational excellence.  

In 2020, after creating software that served the biggest of oil and energy players in the sector to growing a food delivery app startup from conception to a 200-million-dollar public company, Stough found himself sitting on numerous boards, one of which was Fly Guys.  

“I saw the same signals. I was seeing the front end of the demand curve in an organization that was young and needed to rapidly mature to have more scalable processes and technology, and I saw an opportunity to bring my skills,” Stough says. “I made the decision to go from a full-time board member, scattered across a half dozen companies, to a full-time CEO.” 

Fly Guys, an aerial data capture company connects with companies and individuals who need aerial data. Working across many industry sectors, Fly Guys supplies aerial data to construction, real estate, agriculture, energy—wherever demand for the data exists, with Stough sharing that the company serves more than 30 vertical markets.  

“We’re specifically looking for those companies that have high-frequency demand, and agriculture represents high-frequency demand because of the nature of the work that you’re doing where you want to fly the same acreage multiple times as the growing season progresses,” he says. “On the supply side, we have about 300,000 individuals with an FAA license to fly a drone commercially. And in the middle, is the analytics company, like Taranis – if all a farmer had was the data, they would get little value from it. Taranis provides the AI and the know-how to identify problems and opportunities. Those three pieces, make up the design that we have for the Fly Guy’s marketplace.”  

Listen to the episode or continue reading at AcreForwardPodcast.com.

Every acre tells a story, and that story shouldn’t stop at the farm gate or the desk of the farm office. To make an impact, the story of every acre and how farmers and their team of advisors and retailers are growing more with less need to be front and center in the mainstream conversation. That’s where Leah Beyer has carved her niche: telling those stories. From the fields and pastures to the kitchen table and R&D lab, Beyer made it her mission to put the stories of American agriculture and the technologies that help to prop it up where they are most visible to the widest and most diverse audience: the Internet. 

Don Lamb leads teams that act as advocates and cheerleaders for agriculture and work to protect soil and water. He does this while farming his own land and serving his calling to help farmers in other parts of the world better understand practices and principles that can improve their yields. He’s a champion for all of agriculture and shares that he holds the story of Taranis and the opportunities the technology delivers near and dear to his heart. 

In this week’s AcreForward, Mike DiPaola is sitting down with him to learn more about how he gets it all done. Lamb, who serves as Director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture talks about what agriculture technology means to his farm, how he sees Indiana and other states benefitting from the value of technology and the ripples it makes: from a changing workforce need with new challenges to the education and communication that agriculture needs to reach its potential, Lamb shares his insights on how agriculture can move the acre forward. A native of Lebanon, Lamb says that his calling isn’t only supporting and bolstering agriculture in the state of Indiana. As a husband and father of four daughters, Lamb realized early on that sharing his passion for both agriculture and Christianity outside of the U.S. could have a great impact. 

“AgriStewards was really something that God started. I don’t think we had a strategy to get it started, but He did, and it’s been a blessing to watch it grow. The idea is to teach subsistence farmers around the world how to take better care of their soil. We do that through a curriculum called Farming in God’s Way,” Lamb says. “We’re not trying to moderate, westernize, or mechanize agriculture for them, we’re teaching a person that’s farming half an acre to better care for their primary food source.” 

The basis of agriculture, at its core, the agronomic and soil health education that Lamb and the volunteers who support the mission teach to subsistence farmers can and does double their production. The mission has served 30 countries to date and is led by Brian Smith, who spends time both leading AgriStewards and helping on Lamb’s family farm. 

Lamb talks about the undeniable technology connection and how humbling it was to spend time in Uganda helping farmers, just this past February, and return to conversations of Taranis flying his own acres.

“I taught farmers in Uganda to do a better job of farming with a hoe, and then I get back that next week and we’re talking to Taranis; thinking about using drones on our farm to identify weeds and tell us what our stand count is in our corn and soybean fields. You just think about that perspective—it blows me away,” he confides. “What we do is as simple as using a hoe and putting a seed in the ground with the right inputs. In many ways, we’re doing the same thing with a seed and a hoe and specific inputs as we are a 24-row planter and a drone to monitor the crop. The perspective is just incredible.” 

FaceTime was still something only realized in sci-fi movies a decade ago, certainly not an application farmers would think of as a monitoring opportunity for their fields. Today, that unfathomable communication tool, is the yield of multiple technologies intersecting with an affordability threshold that makes them viable for on-farm use. The farm is evolving, and with it is coming the season-long knowledge of what is happening in a field, on an acre, and to a leaf. Today, FaceTime is what DiPaola likens the communication and connection Taranis provides both growers and the retail ag partners they work with.

Lamb tells us that he’s most excited about Taranis heading into his third year of AI-driven insights. Why? Because his farm has fully embraced utilizing the insights, has developed the discipline to use it, and, as he shares, changed management strategies to fully incorporate what is being learned. 

Taranis’ Mike DiPaola sits down with Scott Downey, Purdue University, to talk ag technology, sales, and what it takes to truly provide value to a customer in this week’s AcreForward podcast. What we learn is that the agriculture value chain has changed, as have those who make up the links of service within it. True differentiation, Downey tells us, comes from not just knowing your product, but knowing your place in the value chain, knowing your customer, and, most importantly, knowing and having a passion for how you connect to their goals.

In the inaugural AcreForward podcast, host and Taranis Chief Operating Officer, Mike DiPaola, sits down with Luke Carlson, Board Chairman for Central Valley Ag Cooperative (CVA), York, Nebraska, to discuss the ins and outs of technology’s role in value delivery.