Friday, April 23, 2021
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Ideas: ‘Every farm is an internationally competitive small business’
Continued from Page 1
region’s high-value agriculture.
Farmers here grow more than 170
different crops — everything from
grass seed to winegrapes, berries
and hazelnuts — which are pro-
cessed locally and shipped to con-
sumers around the world.
“Every farm is an internation-
ally competitive small business,”
Paraskevas said.
According to SEDCOR, agricul-
ture, food and beverage companies
employ 16,332 people in the three
counties, with an annual payroll of
nearly $543 million.
By bridging the divide between
rural farms and high-tech opera-
tions in Portland and elsewhere,
Paraskevas believes the Willa-
mette Valley can become fertile
ground for agricultural technology
designed to help growers increase
yields and efficiency.
SEDCOR last year received a
$469,150 grant from the U.S. Eco-
nomic Development Administra-
tion to launch the Hub. With the
money, Paraskevas said they will
hold regular events aimed at build-
ing those relationships.
Eventually, he said the goal is to
establish a network of farmers that
will host field trials and aid in the
development of future tech start-
ups, creating more jobs in the farm
sector.
“We want to be sort of the pipe-
line and the funnel for startups, pair-
ing them with farmers,” Paraskevas
said.
Flipping the script
Last year’s grant award was the
culmination of years of work that
started in the small city of Indepen-
dence, Ore., about 15 miles west of
Salem.
Shawn Irvine, the city’s eco-
nomic development director, saw
the potential for developing agri-
cultural technology in 2006 after
a municipal partnership with the
nearby city of Monmouth led to the
creation of MINET, providing high-
speed internet to every home and
business in those cities.
“This was an investment by the
two cities to make sure our commu-
nities would be able to access the
digital economy and keep pace in
the digital age,” Irvine said.
Irvine said he felt Independence
could be a place where people come
from all around to develop and
test new broadband technologies.
Given its agriculture-rich profile, he
said it made sense for the commu-
nity to promote itself as an interface
between urban tech and rural farms.
“Frankly, I think it’s an oppor-
tunity to flip the script on rural,”
Irvine said. “Smart agriculture is a
way to show what rural is really all
about.”
About five years ago, Irvine
began holding regular agricul-
tural technology meet-ups in Inde-
pendence, inviting growers, entre-
preneurs, university researchers,
tech companies and local govern-
Courtesy of Pete Nelson
Courtesy of Justin Kuntz
A web-based app, called Hay, was designed by a Eugene tech devel-
oper as part of the five-day design sprint challenge for farmers to
quickly and easily analyze microclimate data.
Shawn
Irvine
Alex
Paraskevas
ment officials to sit
down in the same
room and begin the
conversation.
Those meetings
generated
some
early trials around
the
Mid-Willa-
mette Valley. Intel,
the tech giant with
a large footprint
near Portland, part-
nered with Rogue
Ales, using remote
sensors to track
shipments of fresh
hops from a farm
near Independence
to the brewery in
Newport on the
coast.
Intel later took the same con-
cept and applied it to tracking blue-
berries from farm to processor.
Along the way, sensors kept track
of environmental conditions such
as light, temperature and humidity,
and uploaded the data directly to a
blockchain — a digital ledger that
tracks every transaction.
As interest grew, Irvine said he
could no longer handle the initia-
tive by himself. He applied for a
grant from the Ford Family Foun-
dation to hire a new position, which
Paraskevas at SEDCOR now holds.
“Now we have an actual proj-
ect,” Irvine said. “We have a thing
that we’re doing, and all these part-
ners want to help us.”
Sprinting toward solutions
Cara Turano, chief operating
officer for the Technology Asso-
ciation of Oregon, said she was
intrigued by the potential mar-
riage of farms and tech to drive
innovations.
The association, known by the
initials TAO, is a business league
dedicated to the tech sector and
includes 500 companies in Oregon
and southwest Washington.
One way TAO promotes net-
working and industry development,
Turano said, is by hosting “design
sprints” where teams have only five
days to come up
with a creative new
product intended to
solve a particular
business challenge.
In 2019, Tur-
ano met Irvine, and
they brainstormed a
Justin
design sprint aimed
Kuntz
at agriculture.
Turano, Irvine
and others spent six
months touring and
talking to farm-
ers in Marion, Polk
and Yamhill coun-
ties, she said.
”We listened to
Cara
what
kind of prob-
Turano
lems they had, and
how we could engage folks in our
tech community to come up with
solutions to their problems.”
The first Agricultural Innovation
Design Sprint Challenge was in
April 2020. A second was in June,
and a third just wrapped up last
month.
Winners have included the wine
goggles, as well as a web-based app
for tracking microclimate data.
”What we’re doing with these
design sprints is really about eco-
system building,” Turano said.
“How can we as a statewide tech
association provide the infrastruc-
ture, capital and workforce to help
with this industry that’s poised for
digitization and expansion moving
forward?”
Looking ahead, Turano said
she hopes to see the Hub become
an incubator for startups, turning
potential into measurable economic
growth.
“The hope is that this creates
some businesses in the Mid-Wil-
lamette Valley, and they grow and
employ lots of people,” she said.
Making HAY
Justin Kuntz, owner of Cre-
ative Soapbox LLC, led the
team that designed the microcli-
mate data app which they named
“HAY,” or “Help Analyzing
Yields.”
Scott Fullen, left, of Mid-South Family Farms and Paul Kennedy,
director of Farmer Field Trials at AgLaunch survey irrigated cotton
field while field testing TerreSentia robot. Mid-South Family Farms
produces corn, soybeans and cotton across 17,000 acres in Tennes-
see and Mississippi and has field tested and helped scale several
innovations in the AgLaunch portfolio.
The app was created to aggre-
gate data from a variety of
sources, Kuntz said, such as
weather stations, soil moisture
monitors and geographic infor-
mation systems that are available
through the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
Farmers can check for con-
ditions in their fields, or even
portions of a field, and make
management decisions based
on temperature, precipitation,
dew point and frost.
“It would help them plan and
understand when they might
need to pool up resources to
do certain management activi-
ties on the crop,” Kuntz said.
“What we recognized quickly
is we weren’t just developing
a microclimate app. We were
developing a platform that
would help growers understand
the bigger picture.”
Kuntz, who lives in Eugene,
came to Oregon from south-
ern Idaho, where he grew up
on his family’s 40-acre farm.
He established Creative Soap-
box in 2005, finding his
niche in creating web-based
applications.
For the March design sprint
with TAO, Kuntz rallied a team
of six members. With HAY still
in its early development, Kuntz
said the team feels it has struck
upon a product that could gain
traction in the industry.
In the past, Kuntz said,
startup companies have been
derailed by venture capitalists
driving the final product. Instead
of focusing on solving the prob-
lem, he said developers become
obsessed with satisfying inves-
tors, which only serves to muddy
the water for potential users.
The Northwest Ag Innovation
Hub is different, he said, because
it involves growers from the start.
“I’m all about validating
ideas with real users,” he said.
“In agricultural technology, that
is one of the only ways to move
forward.”
Model for success
A similar model for agricultural
innovation is already succeeding in
Tennessee, providing a glimpse at
what may be in store for the North-
west Ag Innovation Hub.
AgLaunch, based in Memphis,
got its start in 2015 before becoming
a nonprofit in 2018. Like the NW Ag
Innovation Hub, AgLaunch is culti-
vating a network of farmers willing
to work with technologists, screen-
ing products and assisting in field
trials.
Pete Nelson, executive direc-
tor of AgLaunch, said the group has
26 grower-members in its network.
Roughly 36 startups have already
accelerated through AgLaunch —
including three within the last 10
months alone.
One of those companies, called
SwineTech, is based in Iowa and
has created a digital platform for hog
farmers that allows them to adjust
their on-farm activities remotely,
reducing labor costs and animal
mortality.
Another, called Stony Creek Col-
ors in Tennessee, makes indigo dyes
for blue jeans, creating a market
for indigo as an alternative crop for
tobacco farmers.
Now, Nelson said AgLaunch is
working to build a national network
of like-minded organizations. That
includes partnering with the North-
west Ag Innovation Hub.
At a formal kickoff meeting for
the Hub last month, Paraskevas,
with SEDCOR, said they are still 3-5
years away from getting where they
want to go.
But, he said, the momentum is
building.
“We’re trying to build both sides
of this marketplace to make the Wil-
lamette Valley as competitive in agri-
culture as possible,” Paraskevas said.
Nelson, who also spoke at the
kickoff, said the possibilities are
mouth-watering, given Oregon’s
array of specialty crops and supply
chains.
”I just literally drool when you
guys talk about some of the opportu-
nities you all have,” he said.
Organics: Certifiers continue to predict more farms will go organic
Continued from Page 1
“But I also think people are just really
tuned into health right now,” she said.
Moving into the second quarter of 2021,
as pandemic closures ease up and restaurants
reopen, the Organic Produce Network report
said it’s not yet clear how quickly consum-
ers will return to pre-pandemic purchasing
behaviors.
“Once again, sales of organic fresh pro-
duce continue to be a major growth oppor-
tunity for retailers across the country,” Matt
Seeley, CEO of Organic Produce Network,
said in a statement. “At the same time, as the
country enters a post-COVID environment,
with restaurants reopening and other food-
service options available, it appears the dou-
ble-digit growth rate will be slowing.”
Some experts say it may be easier to
predict continued high sales in the direct
farm-to-consumers space, where consum-
ers often have longer-term contracts or sub-
scriptions to farms.
The past two months, for example, sev-
eral organic farms running Community Sup-
ported Agriculture programs have told the
Capital Press they expect even more CSA
shares to be sold this year than in 2020.
Organic certifiers continue to predict
more farms will enter the organic space,
and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told
the Capital Press in an interview last week
USDA will be looking at ways to make the
transition from conventional to organic pro-
duction easier.
Sierra Dawn McClain
Capital Press
Organic
produce sales
continue strong
through the
first quarter of
2021.
Shipping: ‘We had not been
preparing for a demand surge in 2020’
Continued from Page 1
“So this is part of the
challenge that we’re fac-
ing from an export perspec-
tive in the dairy industry,”
he said.
In addition, there’s been
a moderate slowdown in
shipping capacity, with
world trade flattening in
2017 and 2018, he said.
“We had not been pre-
paring for a demand surge
in 2020,” he said.
“It’s not only the boats,
shipping containers are in
extremely short supply,” he
said.
The situation has con-
sequences for U.S. dairy
exports. About 41% of the
value of all U.S. dairy sales
in 2020 went to Asia. The
challenge recently is suppli-
ers, who have product and
at good prices, have been
forced to tell interested
Asian buyers they have a
hard time getting it to them
in a timely fashion due to
the container shortage and
shipping delays, he said.
“When people talk
about the freight issue and
exports, that’s where the
rubber is meeting the road,”
he said.
Looking ahead, another
$1.9 trillion stimulus bill
and the relative health of the
U.S. economy will continue
to buoy import demand.
And the economic incentive
to ship empty containers out
of the U.S. will probably
persist into the second half
of the year, he said.
On the positive side, vac-
cinations, improving safety
and rising wages should
help boost staffing levels at
U.S. ports, and companies
are racing to add container
capacity, he said.
“So the bottom line, as
we see it, time and money
will solve this problem.
But it’s not really going to
loosen up much until later
in 2021 or early 2022,” he
said.
More workers at the
ports and more containers
are going to become avail-
able because economics and
markets work, but it’s not
going to happen by May or
June, he said.