How Farmers Can Use Data to Push Back Against Big Ag

Farmers Business Network is announcing a $15 million round of funding led by Google Ventures. According to Andy Wheeler, a partner at the search giant’s investment arm, data is becoming ever more important to agriculture. That’s one reason why the firm also invested in a company called Climate Corporation, which uses weather data to provide insurance to farmers and eventually was acquired by Monsanto. “Agriculture has gone through waves of productivity increases in the past,” says Wheeler, who comes from a family of farmers in Iowa. “Now we’re entering the period of data being one of the primary drivers of that increase.” Among its 37 employees, Farmers Business Network has plenty of farmers on staff, but its founders, Amol Deshpande and Charles Baron, are straight out of Silicon Valley. Before launching the Network, Deshpande was a partner at Kleiner Perkins, while Baron was working as a product manager at Google. Baron says he always has been fascinated by his brother-in-law, who grows corn and wheat in Nebraska, and the sheer number of variables that went into his job. And yet, as a proud Googler, Baron says he couldn’t get over the fact that all of this information was siloed, inaccessible to other farmers.