Key Topic at This Week’s #WIAS24: “The Messy Middle of Agricultural Data”
Podcast by Chrissy Wozniak, North American Ag. Reprinted with permission.
Intro by Michelle Pelletier Marshall, Women in Agribusiness Media (September 24, 2024)
Here’s a peek at what you’re missing if you are not with us at the 13th annual Women in Agribusiness Summit this week in Denver, Colorado….
It’s Camille Grade, chief market officer with Bushel, who is presenting on day three (Thursday, September 26) on “The Messy Middle of Agricultural Data”. Grade will examine the potential of data to help increase efficiency, mitigate risk and drive profitability. “While much focus of software and data is on on-farm activities, investment and innovation into the ‘messy middle’ of the supply chain continues to grow, and while it continues to help agribusinesses streamline operations and better connect to what is happening on the farm, we need to discover what has to be done to collect, standardize and organize data in a way that maximizes productivity and keeps data secure across agribusiness value chains,” noted Grade.
Grade leads the brand and marketing for Bushel, an agribusiness software company based in Fargo, N.D. The company’s agriculture platform is used for more than 45 percent of grain origination in the United States and Canada, resulting in one of the largest technology network effects among farmers and grain buyers in the U.S. Grade oversaw the transformation of the company’s corporate brand transition to being a digital product platform focused on the agriculture industry. She was recently a guest for a podcast with North American Ag, founded by Chrissy Wozniak, where they discussed this and more.
Below are some key Q&As from the interview (edited for length and clarity) from the interview. You can listen to the entire podcast at North American Ag.
1). North American Ag: How did you get to where you are today?
Camille Grade: I grew up on a crop farm in northwest Minnesota, and am currently located in Fargo, North Dakota, and my family's farm is about 30 minutes to the north of us. Agriculture is embedded in my DNA. But in my early career, I was doing nonprofit fundraising and development, which is really the marketing arm of a nonprofit.
I worked a few years at a variety of different businesses and that’s how I met the co-founders of Bushel, Jake Joraanstad and Ryan Raguse. I decided to join them as they were early on in their company’s journey. This was before Bushel was even Bushel. We were still doing custom software development, but it was the early days of mobile first technology, so a lot of businesses were coming up with business models around mobile applications.
We cut our teeth building hundreds of platforms and applications for a variety of industries. We ended up doing a lot of work in agriculture, and I think a part of that was just geography since we are located in Fargo, North Dakota, where agriculture is a big part of the economy. As we were working with these agriculture organizations, we found a need in the market where we thought, ‘perhaps we can build a product and a platform to help serve both the farmer and agribusinesses’.
And that's really where Bushel was born – out of this custom software work.
2). North American Ag: What’s your role now and how has your role evolved?
Camille Grade: I am now chief market officer for Bushel. I oversee our marketing and communications efforts. When I came in, I was a one-person marketing and comms team. We had about 20, 25 people at the time. We now have around 150, 160 team members.
We serve over 3,500 grain and ag retail locations serving 50 percent of the grain industry through our platform.
3). North American Ag: Can you explain this concept of the messy middle of supply chain and why it's crucial for agribusiness?
Camille Grade: When we were getting started, we were looking at the agtech landscape and saw many software or applications or platforms serving the farmer directly at that farm gate of the supply chain. And then we saw a lot of applications and platforms focused on the consumer at the end of the ag supply chain. Where we saw an underserved opportunity was what we called this ‘messy middle’ point in the supply chain.
And why we called it the messy middle is because there were, and still are, a lot of disparate systems across the ag supply chain that are flowing with data and information. Some of them are disparate because they're on prem servers. Some of them are disparate because they're not connected to any other system to allow that data to flow and allow it to be permissioned to other pieces.
So we thought, ‘how can we step in and help unlock some of the value of the data that serves both farmer and agribusiness? And how do we do that in a secure way? And how do we do it in a way that the farmer and the agribusiness are comfortable with allowing the permissioning of those data pieces to help each other, to help their own businesses and to ultimately, drive more revenue for them, increase efficiencies, or decrease some of their expenses.’
We really saw that messy middle as it was just so locked up in siloed systems and the inability for the folks who needed it most – the farmer and the agribusiness – to access it and add value to their business.
4). North American Ag: How do you address the privacy issues?
Camille Grade: We have long believed from the get-go that our mission was to strengthen the relationship between farmer and agribusiness. We had zero interest in being just an intermediator. We wanted to come in and help strengthen the relationship to those things.
So the privacy of it – everything is permission controlled. The farmer is not sharing information with anyone else unless they are hitting that permission button. The agribusiness is not sharing information with anyone else unless they're hitting a permission button. And then Bushel also has undergone rigorous compliance activities.
We went through and got all our systems in compliance with this SOC 2, Type 2 standard. Now we have annual audits to ensure that we're abiding by that – making sure we have the systems, the processes, the people, the controls to protect that privacy and protect that permissioning control across the products that we have in market.
5). North American Ag: How does it how does it work? If a producer wants to get involved or agribusiness, how do they get involved?
Camille Grade: There's a couple of different ways that our products and our workflow solutions serve the farmer and the agribusiness. The most common way, and the first way, that we brought our products into market was through a customer portal.
It was mobile first, and then we ended up adding some web capabilities. It's a subscription business model. Agribusinesses subscribe to getting a branded customer portal to distribute to their farmers. That means that farmer is logging in to their agribusinesses’ customer portal, and then they're seeing the contracts, the scale tickets, the invoices that they have with that particular agribusiness.
That mobile application lives on the app stores, the farmers securely log in, they get access to their information.
From there, we added on additional capabilities. We added a bid offer and hedge management platform for our grain elevator customers. To digitize that process, we added a payments management solution through our Bushel Wallet offering as digital payments are continuing to grow in accessibility in the agriculture supply chain.
We layered that on top of our platform. And again, agribusiness is subscribing to these products and services, and then farmers are using it. We also have some direct-to-farmer offerings as well. We have our Bushel farm management platform and farmers can self-serve by using our farm website.
They can use it for their marketing planning. They can use it for their crop planning. But there is a direct-to-farm, direct-to-farmer subscription as well.
Tune into the entire podcast here where Grade addresses driving adoption of this platform, what some of the newest advances in agtech are, and exactly what the the Bushel Buddy Seat conference is and why it’s important.
If you’d like to learn more about Bushel, you can connect with Grade at cgrade@bushelpowered.com. Also visit North American Ag to check out their list of industry-leading ag podcasts. And join us at the annual Women in Agribusiness Summit – next year we will be in Orlando, Florida, for the first time – September 22-24.
Comments