Sign Up For OPN Connect
Jeff Froikin-Gordon, Ph.D. and Giulia Stellari, Ph.D. met at Cornell University during grad school, both studying agriculture at the time. The two shared a passion for food, farming and sustainability and their plant breeding research led them from smallholder farms in West Africa to complex farm businesses in California.
Back in the mid-2000s, Froikin-Gordon was running an on-farm field trial with over 100 smallholder growers around West Africa, trialing virus-resistant tomato varieties. Because the farmers were spread out in areas the size of the United States, and connected by dirt roads, it wasn’t possible for him to be on-site at all locations.
Jeff Froikin-Gordon, Ph.D., Founder, AgSquared
“I needed to rely on the growers to do a lot of the heavy lifting and plant breeders are particularly obsessive about their record keeping,” he said. “We needed to teach these growers to keep proper records.”
Froikin-Gordon learned that this was harder than expected. Even in the United States, the best option available was to write records down on paper, and at the end of the week, month or year, collect everything and transcribe it into one spreadsheet or other means of organization.
“Farmers who were not organic were barely keeping and records at all, and those that were organic, were keeping the basic records, but they were not well organized and couldn’t be used for anything other than demonstrating that the farms were abiding by organic practices,” he said. “We found recording data was a chore, and since it rarely yielded results, it was rarely given priority.”
Giulia Stellari, Ph.D., Founder, AgSquared
That realization was the genesis behind the two creating AgSquared, farm management software that helps growers be more productive, profitable, sustainable and transparent.
“It was clear to Giulia and me, that a combination of mobile devices and the cloud could create a new ecosystem for how to move information around that could be really suitable for the farming environment,” Froikin-Gordon said. “We built our platform to empower employees at the farm to gather information about what they were doing, and get that information to the cloud. Then when you needed that information, it was at your fingertips.”
AgSquared lives in the field, in the board room and everywhere in between, connecting farm workers, field managers, agronomists, sales teams, and business decision-makers, and helping them manage and document their work and make well-informed decisions.
Farm Management Software AgSquared helps growers become more productive, profitable, sustainable and transparent
“When we started, we decided to focus on an initial target market of small, diversified produce growers; the folks growing 40 different crops on 10 acres or less and selling at farmers markets and through CSAs,” Froikin-Gordon said. “Those farming operations are extremely complex - we knew if we could make it work for them, it would work for anyone.”
The majority of these small farms are organic growers, who needed to have important information and documentation at the ready.
“As an organic farmer, one compelling reason to work with a platform like AgSquared is you’re going to have to keep these records anyway to achieve your organic certification,” Froikin-Gordon said. “What AgSquared does is creates a single point of entry, but once you’ve gathered your information, that same information can be used for many different outcomes.”
AgSquared creates a single point of entry but uses the data for numerous business outcomes
Today, farmers of all scales use AgSquared for running their payroll, documenting chemical safety, calculating cost for production analysis, tracking inventory, tracking maintenance and produce documentation for traceability, among other things.
Recently, AgSquared extended its reach to consumers, allowing farms and food businesses to package up their production data into accessible stories that help consumers learn about where their food comes from and how it is grown.
In early 2020, its customer base is double what it was at the same time last year, and Froikin-Gordon expects the number to double again over the next 12 months.
“We are so excited to be on the cutting edge of helping innovative farmers and food companies use day-to-day farm records as a tool for greater transparency around food safety and sustainability,” Froikin-Gordon said. “We’ve built our business in such a way that our success is directly tied to our customers’ success. My hope is that every year they are getting more out of the platform than they did the year before.”
