AgriNovus Indiana Tackling On-Farm Issues Through Producer-Led Innovation Challenge
$25,000 was up for grabs last week as part of the Producer-Led Innovation Challenge from AgriNovus Indiana. Geoff Zentz, Senior Director of Innovation for AgriNovus Indiana explains what the Producer-Led Innovation Challenge is all about.
“We started this program in partnership with the Indiana Corn Marketing Council and Indiana Soybean Alliance five years ago, and it’s really to tackle on-farm problems. What’s going on on-farm where technology can uniquely impact and help the return to the farmer. And so, in the past four years, our last four winners, every one of them has gone on post program to raise capital after or be acquired. One of the greatest stories that we’ve got is that they go on to success, and we’re excited about the fifth potentially doing the same.”
Zentz says this year’s winner of the $25,000 grand prize is Gripp, a mobile software startup created by CEO Tracey Wiedmeyer and Chief Product Officer Jenkin Lee.
“They’ve built a platform to help farmers with keeping track of things like maintenance records, preventative maintenance timing, helping with employee management and labor management. And they are able to use something as simple as a QR code that everybody on the farm has access to. They can keep up to date and on track with the labor burden, help with understanding what’s going on on-farm, and eventually that will drive return on value for the farmer.”
This year, Gripp secured over 50 farmer customers across the country in specialty fruits and vegetables, cover and row crops, dairy, pork and beef operations as well as greenhouses.
AgriNovus Indiana had several exciting announcements at their final Quadrant event of 2024 last week, including a new twist to next year’s Producer-Led Innovation Challenge. We’ll have more on that in the days ahead from Hoosier Ag Today.
You can hear from Gripp CEO Tracey Wiedmeyer in the AgBioScience podcast from AgriNovus below.
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