Nathan Rosenberg, founder of agricultural automation platform FarmBlocks, said if there's one thing to know when selling technology to farmers, it's that you can't tell them what to do.
“[Farmers] “The Silicon Valley tech industry is multigenerational,” Rosenberg told TechCrunch. “It's not a profession, it's a community, it's a way of life, and you have to respect that. You can't just be someone who works in Silicon Valley tech and tell them what to do.”
Rosenberg said that's why his startup, FarmBlocks, is approaching agricultural tech a little differently than previous companies. The startup has developed a solar-powered, connected monitor that farmers can connect to third-party sensors they're already using to track things like soil moisture levels and water waste with less manual effort. That information is sent back to an AI-powered automation platform that farmers can view from anywhere.
“If I told them this smart AI could increase their yields, they wouldn't believe it, but they would believe that they don't have to go check out this particular thing,” Rosenberg said.
The company has signed on with 55 farms in 18 months, and Rosenberg believes that's because Farmblox empowers farmers to customize and implement the system themselves.
“It's really important to us that the farmers do the installation themselves,” Rosenberg says. “We don't do a white-glove service. Of course, we'll do that if the farmer needs it, but the farmer does it all themselves with very little paperwork.”
Rosenberg said FarmBlocks helps solve the biggest problem farms face right now: a labor shortage. FarmBlocks aims to help farms cut down on the number of people they need to work at any given time. He said when he was a teenager, he had a part-time job on an organic farm, but he was just walking around all the time checking sensors. It wasn't efficient. FarmBlocks aims to automate that.
The company currently owns over 14,000 acres of farmland, and Rosenberg is using his income as a top 3 Minecraft developer to fund 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, founder and managing partner at Hyperplane, told TechCrunch that he was introduced to Farmblox at a startup event hosted by his Boston-based company. Hyperplane has backed several other agricultural tech startups, and through that, Myrto realized that a growing problem for farms was increasing water scarcity.
Farmblox isn't specifically focused on water conservation or water waste, but it does help farms track it. And it helps that the company is already seeing results. “I'm really impressed with the team that started out of a dorm room and basically bootstrapped it,” said Gregory. [more than] “We've got 50 customers in 18 months,” Myrto says, “In this industry, farm automation is very costly and very expensive. What's unique about Farmblox is that our bay stations are solar-powered and very inexpensive. We have better data and sensors than anyone else.”
FarmBlocks started out with high-margin tree crops like maples, vineyards and orchards because the sensors can remain on the trees after harvest. For other crops, like tomatoes, entire plants are uprooted each season. Rosenberg said he expects the startup will expand into lower-margin crops in the future.
The company plans to use the seed funding to expand to more farms.
“We're building tools that not only monitor farmers and give them real-time data, but also tie that into automation flows to create new and compelling solution bundles that farmers can implement on their farms,” Rosenberg said.