Conservis, an agriculture-technology startup specializing in farm-management software, announced this week that it will partner with Rabo AgriFinance to co-develop new technology that allows crop farmers to connect field data and financial results.
Using Conservis' platform, farmers are currently able to analyze and share data about what they grow. But by teaming up with Rabo, Conservis hopes its users will be able to make faster, more informed financial decisions about their crops, which is crucial to farm management. The new tech will also allow users to communicate these financial plans with their lenders and business partners.
Founded in 2009, Conservis is one of Minnesota’s most prominent ag-tech startups. Last year, the company secured $9.5 million to continue growing its business. It has raised around $45.2 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase, and its investors include Washington, D.C.-based Middleland Capital, Chicago-based Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, and Wisconsin-based Heartland Farms.
Chesterfield, Missouri-based Rabo AgriFinance is a financial services provider for famers and other agribusinesses in the United States. Rabo provides its users with financial services such as loans, insurance and risk management assessments. The business is a subsidiary of Rabobank, a large, international bank that specifically caters to the agricultural industry.
Through their new partnership, Rabo and Conservis said that they hope to merge their fin-tech and ag-tech specialties to develop financial farming advancements such as benchmarking, integrations with accounting software and other new services to improve decision making and profitability.
A report published this month by Pitchbook and ag-tech venture capital firm Finistere Ventures found that the analytics subsector of ag-tech (which Conservis operates in) received the bulk of the industry's attention and investment in 2018.
Within the ag-tech field, there's a growing demand to merge agriculture, technology and finance to translate common risks faced by farmers into measurable and trackable events, the report says. By doing so, agribusinesses will hopefully be able to unlock more capital and credit opportunities while avoiding financial pitfalls.
“Given the economic conditions that farmers are facing, there has never been a more appropriate time to unite ag-tech and fin-tech,” Conservis CEO Sherman Black said in a statement.
