Innovative technology streamlines farms and makes them more sustainable.

AgLaunch, a catalyst for new farming technology, helps support agriculture startups and gets new technology to farmers who need it. AgLaunch supports business development, mentors new talent, and discovers novel approaches to farming.

At the recent 68th Annual Mid-South Farm and Gin Show in Memphis, Tenn., an AgLaunch showcase featured four startup businesses that provide new technology to improve farm management.

"We've been working with Continuum Ag, Lepidext, Nexyst360, and Nori for several months," said Margaret Oldham, business development for AgLaunch. "These four startups were selected by farmers and a group of investors as technologies that could improve current farm practices. AgLaunch is farmer-centric and our model focuses on accelerating new technologies and approaches that will make farmers more efficient or profitable.”

Continuum Ag

Mitchell Hora, a seventh-generation farmer from Iowa, used his knowledge of soil health and regenerative agriculture principles to start his company, Continuum Ag.

Continuum Ag’s goal is to help farmers, crop consultants, and landowners implant their soil data into an online platform that offers guidance for improving soil health.

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"You upload field information and monitor data in an easy to use, web-based platform," said Hora, CEO and president of Continuum Ag. "You can evaluate your farm’s soil health and run comparisons against our aggregated dataset to see what helped others improve soil health.

"For example, say I want to compare my farm to others in southeast Iowa who are no-till with cover crops and do not use manure. I can view how I stack up to other farms like mine and, as we get more data, we'll be even more specific. The point is to showcase the soil health of our farms and tell the story of soil health over time.

"We're putting soil data into one place to track changes over time. Data privacy is a huge concern, and it is for my farm also,” Hora said. “All of your data in TopSoil are your data, we just help you profit from it."

Continuum Ag works with farmers to implement soil health systems such as increasing sustainability by minimizing soil disturbance, keeping a living root in the ground always through plants like cover crops, and implementing diversity of cover.

To learn more, go to https://continuumagllc.com/.

Lepidext

Bruce Webb, founder and president, discussed Lepidext, an insect pest control company built to control corn earworms (cotton bollworms) without conventional pesticides. Instead, the company developed a biopesticide containing a species-specific, sexually transmitted virus called Vanesco₄₅ to control the pest.

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"If you get to the moth before she lays eggs, you're way ahead of the game," Webb said. "A single moth can lay 1,500 eggs. In two generations, you can have 625,000 caterpillars from a single moth. Our approach is to sterilize these pest insects by mating to sterile Vanesco₄₅ moths before they lay eggs on your crop."

It's hard to control the corn earworm with insecticides.

"This insect is metabolically designed to become resistant to insecticides because it eats so many different crops," Webb said. "This pest insect feeds on more than 45 crops and encounters many different natural chemicals. When it encounters a new insecticide, the insect has defense systems to metabolize it. That's why we see resistance developing so quickly, and resistance development drives farmers to use more pesticides."

Lepidext's solution is based upon a virus that's already in the field.

"We have surveyed across the United States and about 20% of the corn earworm moths already have this virus," Webb said. "The problem is the virus only works part of the time, so in the lab, we selected a viral strain. This is not genetically engineered or a GMO. It is a natural mutation. The strain sterilizes over 95% of the moths that become infected."

Those virus-infected insects then infect the next generation.

"When virus-infected animals are mating with other virus-infected animals, you see a dramatic population decline," he said. "Forty-five days from introducing the virus into our lab experiment, we see populations collapse. What we're proposing to do is effective, safe, and easy."

To learn more, go to https://lepidext.com/.

Nexyst 360

Melinda Dittmer, COO of Nexyst 360, introduced a new way to store grain in a climate-controlled container called the NexBox, which is a part of the Nexyst 360 platform to bring farmers and buyers together to increase market access.

"Our NexBox is a smart box that is 6 feet 4 inches tall and 40 feet long," Dittmer said. "We load the crop in the field directly to preserve traceability back to the farm. Also, we have the data on how the crop was raised using a QR code on the box. When we scan the code, we'll be able to tell the buyer the production data and quality specs for that crop.

"Also, we're creating a closed loop between farmers and buyers, and backhauls to create efficiencies within the supply chain. This creates profitability back at the farm level. The farmers will rent the boxes for a time, so they don't have to invest in infrastructure like grain bins.

"If a farmer wants to expand to an organic crop, which today would mean he would need to build a separate grain bin to hold a specialty crop, this might be a solution," she said.

"We're not trying to replace all grain bins, but we want farmers to have an alternative, which also helps to preserve the crops by reducing handling and removing oxygen when the box is sealed."

To find out more, go to https://bit.ly/2TR50sU.

Nori

Christophe Jospe, founder and chief development officer of Nori, built a platform to help farmers get paid for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in their soils.

"Carbon markets are tricky to manage for agriculture," Jospe said, "mainly because in traditional markets it's hard to go farm by farm and field by field to see how to even sell it. And then if you sell it, how do you connect directly to a buyer?

"There are people who want to pay farmers for the carbon in their soils, but without an easy way to estimate the impacts from additional practices, it's difficult to make it work. How do we go about doing this? We’ve taken a software approach that allows us to creatively use USDA tools and standards that can correlate the adoption of conservation practices with an increase in soil carbon."

Farmers can submit claims through our platform on the practices they’ve adopted to add carbon to their soils. Then verifiers, independent third parties, assure that the data the farmers submit are accurate. Nori’s software platform does the heavy lift to lower verification costs and provide free estimates for carbon drawdown from adopting conservation practices as well as connecting farmers to buyers of the credits.

"The whole mission is to reverse climate change," Jospe said, "by creating a way for farmers to get paid for removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

To learn more, go to https://nori.com/.

These are just a few of the businesses AgLaunch supports. To find out more, go to http://aglaunch.com/.