About my week at Tennessee’s AgLaunch Bootcamp!

AgLaunch Bootcamp 2018 company leaders with Tennessee Department of Agriculture Commissioner Jai Templeton.

I recently spent eight intensive days learning about starting an ag tech business, the state of agribusiness and the ornamental horticulture industry.  I have met great people who are passionate about agriculture and building a great future.  I have seen and heard about some amazing technology and even seen technology on the tradeshow floor that I helped research many years ago.   It was exhausting.

I spent a whole week in Tennessee’s AgLaunch Bootcamp on the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) campus.  It is a business startup accelerator program sponsored by the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.   Thanks to AgLaunch for this incredible opportunity!!!  It was a great honor to be selected to participate!

We heard from excellent speakers about venture capital in agriculture, marketing ag, intellectual property protection, current research activities at UTK and the incredible support available for ag tech startups in Tennessee.

The six other companies and I worked all week on presentations to pitch our companies’ solutions for agriculture and gave two minute presentations on Friday.   Best of all for Eden, we gained a stronger understanding of the potential market for our revolutionary precision seeder technology and began additional customer discovery during Bootcamp.  We are strongly considering spinning this technology out into its own company and adding an equity partner to aid in development.  Contact me if you’re interested in joining our team!

We toured the dairies of the Harrison brothers in Monroe County, TN and heard about the implementation of robotic milking machines on one farm.  We heard how UT researchers are working on new ways to manage and use carbon and detect respiratory distress in dairy calves.

As I gathered data for my own pitch, I learned about the huge commercial vegetable industry in the US and the major labor shortages they are facing.

The Brindabella rose is so fragrant you’ll be looking for a machine spraying fragrance into the air!

After the week was over I headed north to attend Cultivate ’18.  It’s the largest ornamental horticulture conference and tradeshow in the US.  With three and half days of educational sessions and eight acres of tradeshow, it is a bit overwhelming.  It’s also the most beautiful conference and tradeshow I have ever attended.  Here, you can literally stop and smell the roses!

I saw a machine that sorts and consolidates transplants automatically using machine vision.  I was a  member of a USDA/UGA team that developed an early version of this technology many years ago.  (See a video of the machine in operation here.) Like so many ideas, it was not commercially viable then.  Now, it’s for sale for over $100,000 and won an award.

Our precision seeder will help address the large shortage of labor in agriculture.   The machines exhibited reinforced the need for technology to help address this issue.  The CEO of a family owned plant farm in New York state was asked about the ROI on a $142,000 piece of equipment he had purchased.  His reply was that it was no longer about ROI.  It was about how to just get it done.   Amazing.

Finally, a Korean company had their robotic seedling grafting machine on display.

Harvest Automation’s robot

The most fun at the tradeshow was watching a robot roll along dutifully following it’s master across the tradeshow.  When we stopped and chatted, it started to follow me as I walked away.  It is trained to follow a person until it gets to the work site and is told to get to work moving plants.  Pretty cool.

Watch the robot in action!

I also attended a workshop on drones and now I want to get my drone pilot’s license (a requirement to use drones commercially).

Now, it’s time to get to work meeting potential customers for our solution, understanding their pain points and insuring our solution can address those.  Without paying customers, we don’t have a business.  We just have a cool science fair project.  I like cool science very much.   I also like to pay the bills!