The team behind The Modern Acre podcast has launched AgList, a new platform to help farmers discover ag biological products and see what other growers are using and recommending.
There are hundreds of companies manufacturing ag biologicals, a broad category that includes biocontrols, biostimulants, and biofertilizers, to name a few.
To date, however, farmers have lacked a way to determine which products might work best for their operation. Simultaneously, the sheer number of products available makes it difficult for manufacturers to stand out in the crowd.
“It’s an extremely crowded space,” Dr. Pam Marrone said last year during the Salinas Biologicals Summit. “There are opportunities, but often the ones that come in first are the easiest technically and [don’t] necessarily target what growers really need.”
Brothers Tim and Tyler Nuss, best known for hosting The Modern Acre podcast for the last seven or so years, are also family farmers, and knew firsthand the difficulties around ag biological discovery.
“The amount of inbound that we get from biological companies trying to get proof of concept on farm is a little bit overwhelming,” Tim Nuss tells AgFunderNews. “There are thousands of these companies trying to get conversations started with farmers, and it’s really hard for farmers and agronomists to really get those products.”
Building something else atop the Modern Acre platform has always been a goal, he adds.
“We want to start with biologicals because it’s such a emerging part of the market where we think there’s a big opportunity for an independent platform.”
Nuss says AgList plans to expand the platform to other verticals in the future, such as ag robotics.
Removing the guesswork for growers
At its core, AgList is about helping farmers choose the right biological product and work with the right companies by taking much of the guesswork out of the process.
“There is no independent source of truth or platform for these products,” explains Nuss. “There’s no kind of database or directory service to really address this kind of challenge and opportunity.”
AgList does more than simply list products, though. Farmers can endorse products they find helpful, thus boosting those products’ visibility on the site. Nuss calls it “Yelp for agriculture” and likens it to a kind of product ranking done via endorsements.
“We wanted to steer away from reviews, which can just be kind of like a downward spiral of kind of negativity, and wanted to keep the platform more positive,” he says.
“As a grower, what I need to hear is from another grower that I trust that tried something and had a good experience. Usually what I’ll do when one of these [biologicals] companies reaches out is I’ll reach out to other growers in my network and say ‘Have you heard of this company?’ That’s the idea with endorsements, where growers, agronomists, and researchers, can endorse a product that they have a positive experience with.”
Benefits for biologicals manufacturers
For companies manufacturing biologicals, AgList is a potential way to stand out amongst hundreds of other companies vying for farmers’ attention.
Those companies manufacturing one to four products pay $200 per month to list them; the price goes up to $300 per month for five or more products.
“A lot of these companies are one company, one product,” says Nuss. “But there are companies that have 20-plus products, so we have two different pricing levels.”
“The goal is to make it a price point that’s reasonable, where [listing a product] is cheaper than sponsoring a biological summit or a lot of other marketing areas that you could do. If these companies pick up one or two customers a year, that’s probably very positive ROI from their standpoint, if they’re picking up new grower customers.”
“There was really positive feedback [about AgList] from the manufacturer side,” says Nuss. “There is no other independent platform to point people to with an unbiased view of a product. So I think that really resonated with manufacturers.”
At launch, AgList already has numerous big names in biologicals on board, including Corteva, Pivot Bio, Vestaron, Sound Agriculture and Certis, among others.
