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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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‘It’s Like a Driver’s License for Cows’: Why One Wyoming Company is Creating NFTs for Cattle

Back when Rob Jennings helped found the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition back in 2017, he knew he needed to find a use case that resonated with residents of the Cowboy State. It didn’t take him long before he settled on beef.

“Back then, there was a lot of conversation around about how grass-fed, grain-finished Wyoming fat cattle beef was being mixed into commodity feed yards with lesser animals, let’s say,” Jennings said on a Zoom call with The Spoon. “And so we developed this idea about how you could use blockchain to verify the animal’s provenance.”

Back then, Jennings worked with the University of Wyoming to develop the technology for his first blockchain startup called Beefchain. And while he and other early blockchain enthusiasts found the idea of putting the information about a steer on the blockchain exciting, Jennings found the response more muted when explaining the technology to ranchers, mainly because many of them still couldn’t see the immediate value of such a tech-forward solution.

That’s when Jennings started to think about ways to utilize NFTs. With the early implementations of storing cattle data on the blockchain, Jennings said they would hash an entire excel spreadsheet and put it on the bitcoin blockchain.

“Yes, you’re putting the information there, but it wasn’t functional,” said Jennings.

He knew that there were certain challenges in cattle ranching that could be met head-on with the utility provided by NFTs that would go beyond simply putting information on the blockchain. He knew that to build something cattle ranchers and others in the industry found useful, he had to create a platform for an individual digital record and add on additional functionality through the application layer brought on by an NFT. That’s when he founded CattleProof.

“It’s like a driver’s license for cows,” said Jennings. “I’ve always believed that whatever you want to do with blockchain and all of the functionality that’s promised to us down the horizon, and it starts with creating that record.”

Attributes about the cow such as age, genetics, ranch of origin, and more can be stored and easily accessed by the holder of the NFT. Additionally, certifications such as an inspection record can be appended to the NFT.

“Traditionally, inspection records are a piece of paper,” said Jennings. “Inspectors say, ‘okay, these hundred cows are good’, and then you have that one piece of paper you take along the supply chain. So what we wanted to do is create the ability for all of this metadata that’s associated with each animal to travel along the supply chain. So the next guy who buys this animal, whether it’s one or one hundred, will have access to all of this information appended to this NFT.”

Jennings also said financial functionality could be derived from a cow NFT.

“You could use an NFT record to collateralize the animals with a bank,” said Jennings. “You could use them to track movement. You can use them to do an e-brand inspection and interstate movement.”

Jennings says that transferring ownership via an NFT at cattle auctions will expedite fund transfer for the cow. Funds transfer nearly immediately, compared to the days or weeks through the traditional financial reconciliation process.

The way CattleProof’s technology works is the rancher creates an account via the company’s website, which creates a digital wallet. Next, the rancher tags the cow via a Bluetooth sensor or an EID (an embedded tag that goes into the cow’s ear), and then uses the CattleProof app to scan the EID for each animal. Next, they enter the data (photo, weight, breed, etc) and, once all the information is entered, the rancher “hits a big red button” and mints an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

From there, the owner of the NFT controls who can see the data and is the only one that can enter new data (past data can’t be changed). If the animal is sold, ownership of the NFT – and all control rights to the data and the animal – are passed onto the new owner.

His company has already run a successful trial of the collaboration with Wilson Ranch in December. The company helped Wilson Ranch create NFTs for 20 steers that were sold through the website of Wilson’s distribution partner, Flying Diamond Beef. The company has plans to expand trials to more ranches in the coming months.

CattleProof has filed for a provisional patent and is currently working to develop a USDA process that the agency can recognize as an approved process flow for a verified claim utilizing blockchain technology.

“It’s exciting,” said Jennings. “I grew up in Wyoming. I like the Western way of life. I want to help producers connect more directly with consumers and democratize the marketplace.”

Barn2Door Raises $6M for Platform that Connects Farms and Consumers

Barn2Door, an online platform that lets farms sell directly to consumers, has raised a $6 million Series A round of funding. Geekwire was first to report the news, writing that Bullpen Ventures led the round with participation from Quiet Capital, RAINE Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, Global Founders Capital, Sugar Mountain Capital, and others. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Barn2Door to $11.6 million.

Barn2Door’s software helps independent farms through just about every step of the e-commerce process: inventory, fulfillment, packing, invoicing and support. A Barn2Door software subscription costs anywhere from $59 to $149 a month, depending on the scale of the farm operations.

This is certainly an opportune time for Barn2Door to raise additional capital. The COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent shuttering of dine in restaurants and general stay-at-home suggestions, has spurred people to adopt online grocery shopping in record numbers. This rising tide has lifted a number independent farm-related boats including a spike in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) memberships, and an increase in sales for sites like CrowdCow and Grass Roots, both of which sells craft meats.

Barn2Door’s tool is also helping usher in a new wave of direct-to-consumer sales. Big brands like Pepsi and Impossible Foods each launched D2C channels this year. Chipotle launched a service allowing consumers to buy direct from its farm suppliers like Niman Ranch and McKaskle Family Farm. And smaller players like regional restaurant suppliers and startup CPG snack brands like Pig Out! and Renewal Mill are selling direct to consumers.

As this pandemic continues here in the U.S., there’s a good chance that buying direct from more sources will become the new normal for people, creating more opportunity for software services like Bar2Door’s.

At Portland’s MilkRun, Groceries Get Dropped Off by a Farmer to Your Table

Running a farm is hard. Even once you’ve produced your cherries/chicken/cheese, you still have the go through the struggle of finding customers — and figuring out how to get your products to them.

Julie Niiro, CEO of the online farm-to-table marketplace MilkRun, knew all about this issue. She became a farmer about five years ago and was surprised by how difficult it was to find customers or even staff a farmers market. “There was a clear challenge of distribution,” she told me over the phone.

Two years ago she founded MilkRun to connect farmers and people who want farm-fresh food. The startup, which operates exclusively in Portland, OR, works with about 90 different producers making everything from baked goods to meat to vegetables. Customers can fill up a virtual “basket” on the MilkRun webpage (they’re working on an app), then select delivery for Tuesday or Thursday. Once the order window closes, farmers bring the goods to a micro-depot. There, MilkRun staff aggregates the products to fulfill customers orders.

Here’s where things get a little wacky: the delivery is done not by Milkrun staff or third party delivery drivers, but by the farmers themselves.

Photo: Julia Niiro, CEO of MilkRun.

“We didn’t want to put more trucks on the road, and we also wanted to figure out more ways to pay farmers,” explained Niiro.

Basically, farmers already on their way out of the city after dropping off at the micro-hub will get loaded up with already packed orders and to deliver on their way back to the farm. MilkRun built its own software to manage micro-hub inventory and determine farmers’ delivery routes. Milkrun also provides a navigation app to farmers to let them know exactly where to drop off which orders, sort of like Uber or Lyft.

Unlike Uber or Lyft, though, the delivery window is not exactly…exact. Delivery occurs sometime between 7am and 3pm on the designated day (only Tuesday or Thursday for now), though as Niiro told me: “things do happen.” Understandable, but that wide of a gap — plus unintended delays — could make scheduling a time to be home for the delivery sort of a hassle.

Though MilkRun certainly lacks the near-instant gratification of Instacart or AmazonFresh delivery, it has no delivery fee and requires no subscription. It currently serves around 3,000 people and 11 restaurants and is in the middle of raising a seed round.

Though it’s only available in Portland for now, Niiro hopes to be piloting MilkRun in Seattle by the end of this year before eventually expanding into Austin and Denver. The company’s technology platform — which manages customers’ orders, farmer inventory, and delivery routes — should be able to scale fairly easily. The bigger question is whether Niiro and her team can build relationships with farmers in each new territory, and get enough on board to help with deliveries.

Price-wise, Niiro says that they try to be on par with what you’d find in retail. Maybe that’s true if you’re shopping somewhere upscale like Whole Foods, but the budget grocery shopper would likely balk at some of the prices ($1.50 for one blood orange or $7 for a dozen eggs). Which makes sense, since MilkRun doesn’t charge a delivery fee and needs to charge a higher rate in order to pay farmers a fair wage, plus some extra coin for doing the deliveries. Admittedly the goods on MilkRun’s site are a clear cut above what you’d find in an average supermarket, but still — it’s not really accessible to those on a tight budget.

Other companies have already proven that there’s a demand for services that deliver farmed goods directly to the consumer. In the U.K., high-end grocery delivery service FarmDrop gives consumers the option to have farm products shipped to their door. Closer to home, Grubmarket, which helps farmers sell their goods directly to consumers or corporations, just raised $25 million. Though it only operates within California, GoodEggs also offers a similarly curated grocery delivery service.

Niiro thinks that MilkRun can distinguish itself by controlling the whole distribution process from when it leaves the farm until when it touches down on a customer’s doorstep. The question will be if it can offer something new that its competitors can’t. The delivery-by-farmer piece seems to be Milkrun’s biggest value add since it reduces the need for staff and incentivizes more farmers to join up.

Then again, I don’t think farm-to-table delivery is a zero-sum game. Consumers are demanding healthier, more sustainable foods, and are willing to pay more for them. We’ll have to see if MilkRun’s value add of end-to-end delivery control is enough to make it stand out from the competition.

Augean Robotics Raises $1.5M to Build Out Its Burro Platform

Augean Robotics, creators of the “Burro” robot that hauls stuff around farms, announced earlier this week that it had raised $1.5 million seed round. The round was led by ffVC, with participation from S2G Ventures, Radicle Growth, and several others.

The Burro is a squat, rugged, flatbed robot that can autonomously carry 500 pounds of gear or food (or whatever) around working farms. The three levels of autonomy built into Burro allow it to either follow a human around, automatically recognize rows of crops and travel up and down them , or act as a virtual conveyor belt learning and following a path to take materials back and forth (like harvested grapes from pickers to packers).

Augean is on its fifth generation Burro and Augean CEO, Charlie Andersen told me earlier this year that it is currently in trials with four of the nation’s largest growers.

We often cover how the rise of robots and automation will bring with it a cost in human jobs, but the agriculture sector is already facing a human labor shortage, and farm work itself is hard work. Robots can actually be a big help to agriculture, as Andersen explained during our Spoon Slack Chat last month:

Robots can carry out some tasks more safely than a human could. For instance, the Augean Burro can carry 150-plus pounds of grapes for hours in 110 degree weather without getting heat stroke or dehydrated. But in addition to labor changes, robots can also push farms towards more organic production because [robots] can also reduce the amount of chemicals needed and the overall environmental intensity needed for fruit and vegetable production.

Burro in Table Grapes

Ultimately, Andersen said that the Burro is a platform that can be adapted to more than just carrying things. Augean has raised $1.8 million to date and according to the press announcement, plans to use the new funds to “accelerate the commercialization of Burro and to develop the proprietary datasets needed to enable further autonomy.”

This further autonomy, Andersen told me during our conversation, is expanding the Burro’s capabilities to targeting weed spraying, yield mapping, as well as picking and pruning.

If you’re interested in the future of robots in the food chain, you should definitely come to our ArticulATE summit on April 16 in San Francisco. We’ll be discussing robot autonomy, human/robot relations and much much more. Get your ticket today!

Ganaz Wins $250,000 to Become the Glassdoor for Farms

A combination of aging farmworkers, immigration crackdowns, and the dangerous, backbreaking work of farming have created a labor crisis in U.S. agriculture. Which means that more than ever, the industry needs tools to help find and retain reliable workers.

To help uncover solutions to this labor shortage, Radicle Growth, an agtech accelerator fund, and the Western Growers Association held the Radicle Automation Challenge. Last night in Salinas, CA, Ganaz was named one of the winners of that challenge and was awarded $250,000 in seed investment.

Ganaz (pronounced “GAH-nahz”), is a year-old, Seattle-based startup that aims to be the “Glassdoor for Farms.” It’s a mobile app that lets farms advertise jobs and communicate with its workers.

I met Ganaz Co-Founder Sri Artham at the Food IT conference in San Francisco yesterday. He explained to me that there are a ton of digital services like Glassdoor and Linkedin if you are looking for a white collar job, but if you’re a farm worker, there really aren’t those same tools.

“There could be a job on a farm just 30 miles away from you, and you’d never know,” said Artham.

Ganaz works to connect workers with those open jobs and help farms communicate more effectively with its workforce. Farms list job openings on the app in both English and Spanish, and workers can scroll through listings and apply for them. Once on the job, Ganaz facilitates communication with the workers by letting farms send work-related updates (e.g. show up to a particular field the next morning) via the app or SMS. Communications written by farms on Ganaz are automatically translated into Spanish.

Right now Ganaz is available in Washington, Oregon, California and Baja, Mexico, and the platform is used by 4,000 people weekly. Ganaz currently makes money by charging a fee for job postings as well as a subscription fee for ongoing communications with workers.

Eventually, the Ganaz platform will also incorporate more robust in-app communication features, a way for workers to rate farms, and potentially a way for farm workers to find off-season, non-farm work. But first, Artham said that if Ganaz accepts the Radicle seed funding award (terms of the investment still need to be worked through), the money will go towards building out the engineering team and adding people to help interact and support farms on the platform. The total amount raised by the company at that point will be just over one million dollars.

Ganaz is among a wave of startups that are using networks to connect and improve farming operations. Farmers Business Network allows farms to share data analytics and input purchase pricing, and WeFarm helps farmers share knowledge with one another through text messages.

And these startups could not have come at a better time. With the current administration circulating the idea of limiting visas for temporary agricultural workers, farms are going to need all the help finding all the help they can get.

Augean Robotics’ Autonomous “Burro” Follows Farm Workers to Haul Stuff

As Augean Robotics Co-Founder and CEO Charles Andersen explains it, when you work on a farm, you do a lot of high dexterity activity—like picking fruit. But you also spend a lot of time just running stuff like harvested fruit or equipment back and forth. He should know: Anderson grew up on a 100-plus acre farm in Pennsylvania.

To help with the repetitive drudgery of hauling items to and fro, Andersen’s company has developed Burro, an autonomous, rugged cart robot that can follow a person around and haul things for them.

The Burro has a 26-inch by 48-inch chassis and comes with a two-wheel and a four-wheel drive option. The two-wheel Burro can carry 300 pounds and the four-wheel drive up to 450 pounds. Burros are powered by sealed lead acid batteries, have a top speed of five miles per hour, and can travel up to 15 miles on a charge.

Using sensors and machine learning algorithms, the Burro can lock on to you as you approach it. From there it will follow you around without the need for you to hold a remote or a beacon. Its following capability, however, isn’t perfect. It can be likened to a dog; if someone else walks in between you and the Burro, it can get distracted. It will stop and wait for you to come back, or for someone else to come within its range.

The Burro can also create an automated route by following a person. For example, if blueberries are being harvested, it can follow a farmer who walks around a particular row of plants. The Burro then learns this route and can go around on its own. Each picker on that row can then set their harvested baskets of berries on the Burro as it passes by on its route.

The goal is to create a robot that collaborates with, rather than replaces, human workers. Farm workers can stick to high dexterity tasks like picking fruit while the nimble Burro navigates its way around people and crops to move stuff around where it needs to go. To achieve that, Andersen wants to keep Burro small, so farms can have many of them just running around all the time carrying fruit, tools, or whatever needs to be moved.

Each Burro costs between $9,000 and $10,000, though Andersen says that half of that cost goes towards one sensor that’s key to making the robot autonomous. He claims the price of that should come down in the future, making Burros a lot less expensive. Augean’s ultimate plan is to make the Burro a platform, and offer expansion kits that allow the robot to do more tasks.

Based in Phoenixville, PA, Augean is currently bootstrapped and has five people working on the product. It uses Anderson’s 191 acre farm for testing purposes, and hopes to have field trials with big growers this summer.

If it takes off, farmhands could soon get a big hand from a bunch of small robots.

Teralytic Sensors Help Farmers Manage Their Fertilizing

“Nanofabrication” is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of farming or agriculture. But it’s how Teralytic builds a wireless sensor that detects nitrogen, phosphate and potassium (NPK) levels in soil to help farmers reduce waste and improve their yields.

The Teralytic sensor is a battery-powered, meter long device that farmers stick in the ground. Packed inside are 26 different sensors that measure the surrounding soil’s NPK levels, pH levels, soil moisture, temperature, and aeration, as well as the temperature and humidity above ground.

Once set, the sensors take a snapshot of soil conditions every fifteen minutes and use LoRa wireless technology to broadcast data back to a base station and through to an online analytics dashboard. Teralytic Founder and CEO Steven Ridder notes that technology has provided farmers with tons of data, and “The challenge for farmers is that too much information has confused them more than helped them.” Ridder says Teralytic’s stripped down dashboard has a more “farmer friendly interface.”

Armed with this data, farmers can be more efficient with their inputs (like fertilizer) and generate better crop yields. Optimizing fertilizer can also help farmers reduce cost and avoid over-fertilization, thus reducing excess fertilizer runoff and greenhouse gas release.

Teralytic sensors also measure soil moisture levels, which can help farmers with water management and prevent overwatering. Ridder says this improved moisture data can also help farmers make better-informed sales decisions. As he describes it, non-irrigated Midwest crops are planted in May and farmers typically check their soils in July. During that check, farmers may note that surface soil is dry. Historically, they wouldn’t be able to see that, down by the roots, moisture levels were actually fine. But because they didn’t have accurate data, Ridder says farmers had a tendency to panic about crop yields and settle for a lower locked in price before the harvest.

Each Teralytic sensor costs $100, plus a per acre charge. The number of sensors required depends on the type of crop grown. Ridder told me “Strawberries and avocados will need a sensor every 2.5 – 10 acres. Most grain crops will need a sensor every 30 – 50 acres. Cotton and canola need one every 50 – 70 acres.” The company has an online tool to help farmers determine the number of sensors needed.

Teralytic isn’t alone in bringing robust data to farms. Arable has developed the Mark sensor, which includes acoustic and spectrometer measuring, and can be sent placed in fields to assist with crop management.

What sets Teralytic apart, says Ridder, is his company’s focus on soil measurements and NPK. Teralytics says it offers “the world’s first wireless NPK sensor.” The company has eight Ph.D.’s developing the product, split between New York City and the UC Berkeley nanofabrication lab, who are creating the proprietary chipset that powers Teralytic’s sensors. They’re so secret that Ridder wouldn’t talk about them.

Teralytic launched a year and a half ago and raised a $2.25 million seed round in August of last year. It has conducted pilot projects in California and Ridder says they have 150 additional clients that want to conduct their own pilot programs starting in April. The company will officially debut on March 20th.

SomaDetect Uses AI to Help Dairy Farmers Improve their Milk

There is a milk glut in the U.S.. Technology has allowed dairy farmers to produce more milk than ever, but all this abundance has caused milk prices to plummet. It’s getting so bad that some farmers face selling off their cows.

While technology helped create this crisis, perhaps SomaDetect‘s technology can help struggling dairy farmers get out of it.

SomaDetect uses a combination of optical sensors and machine learning to help dairy farmers analyze the milk each cow produces to determine its quality. As SomaDetect CEO Bethany Deshpande explained it to me, farmers attach a small sensor box to the milking hose, which shines a light through the milk as it flows. Based on the scatter pattern of that light coming through, SomaDetect’s software can analyze what’s in the milk.

The company measures fat and protein as well the reproductive status of a cow and any residual antibiotics. More importantly, SomaDetect can look at somatic cells to detect Mastitis, a serious bacterial infection of the udder that is the most common disease among dairy cows and the number one cause of their early death. By quickly identifying cows with high somatic cell counts, farmers can better target treatment and to help prevent the spread of Mastitis.

Additionally, one cow can throw off somatic counts for an entire batch of product. By removing high-somatic cows, the farmer can lower the overall somatic counts of their milk and earn more money: “Farmers with low somatic cell counts get a bonus from the milk processor,” said Deshpande.

This type of deep inspection of milk has only recently become possible. According to Deshpande, the optical technology has “been around for a hundred years,” but advances in computer vision and machine learning means SomaDetect’s software can analyze vast sums of information in ways that were not possible even five years ago.

SomaDetect isn’t the only company using light to help dairy farmers. EIO Diagnostics uses multispectral imaging for Somatic cell counting, and Consumer Physics is putting its handheld SCiO device to use on farms to detect levels of dry matter in cow feed, which can also impact milk production.

SomaDetect was founded in 2016 in New Brunswick, Canada. The company won a 43North startup competition, earning them $1 million in funding and office space in Buffalo, NY. SomaDetect makes money by selling the equipment to farmers and charging $5 per month per cow for the software. The company is currently running pilot programs and is searching for seed funding as it looks to expand into New York state.

Deshpande says she came from the dairy side of the industry and wants SomaDetect to work closely with farmers. With milk prices expected to stay low throughout this year, dairy farmers could use all the help they can get.

You can hear about SomaDetect in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill.