From Farms to Incubators

Women Innovators Revolutionizing How Our Food Is Grown

Amy Wu

• Publisher: Craven Street Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781610353816
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

An exciting look at how women entrepreneurs are transforming agriculture through high technology.

Don't take the food you eat for granted. Farmers today face huge challenges in keeping your food supply secure—climate change, precarious water and soil supplies, and a growing global population projected to reach 10 billion people in 2050. Women innovators are tackling these problems to create a secure and sustainable food supply for the future. Using drones, artificial intelligence, sophisticated soil sensors, data analytics, blockchain, and robotics, these women are transforming agriculture into the growing field of agtech, the integration of agriculture and technology.

From Farms to Incubators presents inspiring stories and practical case studies of how women entrepreneurs from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds are leading the agtech revolution. Each agribusiness leader profiled in From Farms to Incubators tells her own story of how she used agtech innovation to solve specific business problems and succeed. The women profiled speak frankly on the advantages and drawbacks of technological solutions to agriculture and offer lessons in making technology productive in real work. These business cases demonstrate the influence of female innovation, the new technologies applied to agribusiness problems, and the career opportunities young women can find in agribusiness.

A must-read book for everyone interested in tech innovation and food security, From Farms to Incubators offers exhilarating role models for young women, a thought-provoking glimpse into the future of food production, and a fascinating investigation of how women leaders are profitably disrupting the world's oldest industry.

OTHER TRAILBLAZERS IN AGTECH

Agtech also crosses over with the burgeoning subsectors of agbio and foodtech, so it was no surprise that during our search for women founders and leaders in agtech we came across dozens upon dozens of inspiring stories of women leaders in the larger arena of the food production industry. These women include a fieldworker turned farmer, a farmer turned banker, and a policy maker and consultant who transformed into an agtech pioneer in her home state.

We are sharing their stories too in the spirit of communicating that agtech is not a sector in a bubble. It includes a vast range of professions and opportunities in food and farming. Everything is connected and interrelated when it comes to the production of food.

ALLISON KOPF

Founder and CEO of Artemis, Brooklyn, New York

Allison Kopf reached a crossroads in 2011. She had been working in the solar industry, but the industry was suffering. Even when an investment bank offered her the opportunity to invest in commercial solar deployments, she realized it wasn’t exciting for her. She had studied physics at Santa Clara University in California and had built a solar-powered home for an international design-build competition, but she was far more interested in technology development than working in finance.

Instead, Kopf joined BrightFarms, an early-stage start-up with a business model that combined the development approach of solar with controlled environment agriculture.

By 2015 Kopf had spent four years working as the real-estate and government relations manager for the company, one of the fastest- growing indoor growers in the US. This experience whetted her appetite to explore other options for working in agriculture. “Originally I fell into it and then I fell in love with it,” Kopf says of agriculture. This was the first time that Kopf, who grew up in the suburbs outside New York City, had worked on a farm.

Farming did not run in the family, but entrepreneurship did. Kopf grew up in Rockland County, New York, where her father worked as the commissioner for finance for the county for thirty years while running his own accounting practice. Her mother is the treasurer for their village and also the founder of a travel blog named The Open Suitcase, which attracts millions of readers.

Upon joining BrightFarms, Kopf says, “I became obsessed with farmers and how they ran their operations.” Moreover, she saw opportunities in the industry, especially when it came to the supply chain and processes from production to distribution. “Agriculture is one of the few industries that isn’t going anywhere, it will always be around, and it has one of the most innovative and yet least innovative supply chains in the world.” The solution to problems, including lack of data, was creativity.

Although many industries were seeing rapid advancements in technology—the self-driving car, for example—“The digital layer was missing in agriculture,” says Kopf. “It’s incredibly similar to manufacturing and other industries, where the introduction of software has led to massive industry transformation. Without software, the industry lags, and it’s incredibly frustrating for the farmer. I was personally frustrated with the lack of agriculture-specific technology available.”

That frustration resulted in her decision to leave BrightFarms and build Artemis (originally named Agrilyst). She teamed up with Jason Camp to launch the company and create its flagship product, the Cultivation Management Platform (CMP). The CMP is an operational software platform for growers to help them gather data and manage their operations. In the beginning the company primarily targeted indoor farmers and greenhouse operators. The endeavor was in many ways a combination of her two passions—technology and agriculture.

Out of the starting gates, the company sought customers by tapping into their own networks and hitting trade shows. Artemis experienced early success on the funding front, including backing from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, which led the company’s seed round of funding. In 2015 Artemis was one of twenty-five startups chosen from a pool of thousands to compete in TechCrunch Disrupt SF, an annual conference that brings together investors and entrepreneurs in technology. They won the event’s competition. The company also participated in the Pearse Lyons Accelerator, run by Alltech.

Allison Kopf is the founder and CEO of Artemis, Photo courtesy of Allison Kopf.

Artemis is subscription-based software that helps specialty crop growers run more efficiently by letting them manage everything from seed through sale, including crop schedules, task management, food and farm safety, labor needs, reporting, metrics tracking, and inventory management. In recent years the customer scope has included cannabis growers too. Although the company’s key markets right now are Canada and the US, the software is available in more than ten countries.

Kopf (right) takes the stage at the Forbes AgTech Summit in Salinas in 2019. Photo provided by Allison Kopf.

Kopf also supports other female founders through XFactor Ventures, which invests in early-stage companies led by women. She feels strongly about paying it forward, and in a 2019 article she wrote for Medium’s Startup Magazine, she asserts that although diversity is critical in hiring, it is equally as important for boards.

“This isn’t just about creating an inclusive team, it’s about choosing partners who value diversity as well. The Artemis board is led by women—75 percent of our directors are women,” she wrote.

In an interview in March 2020, Kopf said, “I am focused on helping the next crop—excuse the agriculture pun—of female entrepreneurs build billion-dollar businesses.”

As of May 2020, Artemis had twenty-seven employees and had raised a total of $11.7 million. Headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, the team has locations across the US and in Canada and Chile.

When not working Kopf spends her time reading and learning about how others built their businesses, as well as working out. “I’ve run two marathons and it’s probably time for another soon,” she says matter-of-factly.

ANDREA CHOW

Senior Vice President of Engineering at Ontera, Santa Cruz, California

Andrea Chow was born in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, and grew up in Hong Kong. When Chow was a teenager her family immigrated to the US and settled in Los Angeles, California, where her father continued to run the Hong Kong bakery and her mother worked as a seamstress. Chow is a chemical engineer by training at the University of Southern California. She later received a PhD at Stanford University. She calls her journey into the biotech and agtech space a “little windy” because of her chemical engineering background.

“I remember when I was in high school, taking a biology class, and the teacher was not at all inspirational, and I told myself I would never work in anything related to biological science. Biology seemed to be a lot of rote memorization, and that was not very easy,” she says, laughing. “Then I did my undergrad and grad schoolwork in chemical engineering. I focused on a field called polymer rheology (polymer material flow and processing), where the applications are broad.”

Andrea Chow of Ontera explains that the sample-to-answer platform called NanoDetector uses a small cartridge (about the size of a smartphone) to automate the laboratory workflow of sample amplification and nanopore measurement. Photo courtesy of Benji Hsu.

She started her professional career in the defense industry and worked as a staff scientist at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto for eight years, but she says she “aspired to a higher goal.” After the NASA project that she was working on—developing a new solid rocket motor—was cut, projects related to building missiles for defense did not fulfill her passion. She wanted to devote her time to endeavors that she viewed could directly make the world a better place.

She fell into biotech when she joined Caliper Technologies Corp., a company based in Palo Alto, California, that focuses on an area called microfluidics, that is, driving fluid at a very small scale in order to automate biochemical analysis for research, drug discovery, and clinical testing. The company was looking for engineers with biotech experience. “They [Caliper] took a chance on me, so that’s how I got into biotech,” she explains. She beefed up her biology background by taking extension courses in molecular biology and cell biology at UC Berkeley. Along the way she found that “the reason I had actively sought to go into biotech was the exciting advances in genetic engineering that were going on at that time. I knew that biotechnology was a very rich area to explore.”

Chow was also entrepreneurial, founding and running her own company, Caerus Molecular Diagnostics, from 2009 to 2013. The company’s goal was to develop low-cost and high-accuracy DNA sequencing technologies. She raised half a million dollars from government grants but later left the start-up, as it was very challenging to raise additional capital during the Great Recession. Next she led the engineering efforts at Promega, first, and then BioElectron Technology Corp. in Silicon Valley.

In February 2019 Chow joined Ontera, a biotechnology company that had just begun expanding into the agtech space. The 13,000-square-foot space in Santa Cruz houses some thirty-five employees. While the company doesn’t disclose details on capital raised, its series A was led by Khosla Ventures. Ontera’s products are based on novel solid-state nanopores, which are sensitive biosensors with nanometer-size pores fabricated in semiconductor materials. The nanopores are capable of counting and classifying single molecules of nucleic acids and proteins. As part of its efforts to expand into the agtech space, in early 2020 Ontera launched the NanoCounter for research applications and is currently developing a sample-to-answer platform called NanoDetector, a point-of-care molecular diagnostic system that can rapidly quantify genetic traits of seeds and plants and detect plant pathogens.

ELIZABETH “BETH” BECHDOL

Formerly president and CEO of AgriNovus in Indianapolis, Indiana

Beth Bechdol hails from the cornbelt of the US. She was born and raised on the family farm in Auburn, a largely rural community of some fifteen thousand in northeastern Indiana. Agriculture is very much a part of her personal history. She comes from a seven-generation family of farmers in Indiana, where the family farm specialized in row crops, including corn, soy beans, and wheat. As expected in many traditional family farms, her father began working on the farm as a boy and later took over managing it.

Beth addresses national FFA students on the FFA blue stage about how they can lead change to feed the world, protect the planet, and improve lives. Photo courtesy of beth bechdol.

Bechdol meets with Indiana governor Eric Holcomb. Photo courtesy of Beth Bechdol.

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