Nathan Rosenberg, the founder of farm automation platform Farmblox, said if there is one thing to know about trying to sell technology to farmers, it’s that you can’t tell them what to do.
“[Farmers] are multigenerational,” Rosenberg told TechCrunch. “It is not a profession, it’s more a community, a way of life, and you need to respect that. You can’t come in as a Silicon Valley tech person and tell them what to do.”
Rosenberg said that’s why his startup Farmblox is approaching agtech a little differently than companies that have come before it. The startup created a solar-powered connected monitor; farmers hook it up to the third-party sensors they are already using, allowing them to track things like soil moisture levels and water waste in a less-manual way. That information is translated back to an AI-powered automation platform that farmers can check from anywhere.
“If you say I can increase your yield with this fancy AI thing, they aren’t going to believe that, but they will believe in not having to go out and check on this specific thing,” Rosenberg said.
The company signed on 55 farms in 18 months, and Rosenberg credits this to the fact that Farmblox gives farmers the control to customize and implement the systems themselves.
“It’s very important for us that the farmer install us themselves,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t do white glove service. Of course we are here if they need it, but they do it all themselves with very little documentation.”
Rosenberg said Farmblox is meant to help solve the biggest issue facing farms right now: labor shortages. Farmblox is meant to help farms reduce the number of people they need to work on a farm at a given time. He said that when he was a teenager, he had a part-time job on an organic farm that involved just walking around constantly to check sensors. It wasn’t efficient. Farmblox looks to automate that.
The company now covers more than 14,000 acres of farm land with Rosenberg using his earnings as a top three developer on Minecraft to bootstrap the startup. Farmblox just raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by Hyperplane with participation from Slow Ventures, MHS Capital and Service Provider Capital.
Vivjan Myrto, the founder and managing partner at Hyperplane, told TechCrunch he got introduced to Farmblox at a startup event held by his Boston-based firm. Hyperplane had backed a handful of other agtech startups and through that, Myrto discovered that a growing problem for farms will be the increasing shortage in water.
While Farmblox isn’t specifically focused on saving water or water waste, it can help farms track that. The fact that the company has already seen the traction, didn’t hurt either. “We were very impressed that this team has basically bootstrapped this from their dorm room to [more than] 50 customers in 18 months,” Myrto said. “In this industry, automating farms has been very costly and very cost prohibitive. What is unique about Farmblox is the bay station is solar powered and very cheap. It has data and sensors that are way ahead of everyone else.”
Farmblox started with high-margin tree-based crops including maple, vineyards and orchards because the sensors can remain on the same trees after a harvest; with other crops like tomatoes, the whole plant is pulled up each season. Rosenberg said he expects the startup will move down into lower-margin crops in the future.
The company will use the seed funding to expand to more farms.
“We are building tools around not just monitoring and giving real-time data to the farmer but really connecting that with automation flows to create new and exciting bundles of solutions that they can deploy on the farm,” Rosenberg said.
