Nathan Howell and his family operate Need More Acres Farm near Scottsville, Kentucky, and want to grow its online ordering system database for the crops local farms produce to allow healthcare providers to make referrals and prescribe beneficial foods. Photo furnished
Another six early stage startups are getting $550,000 in challenge grant support along with business mentoring from the Bluegrass AgTech Development Corp., whose intent is growing an agribusiness technology cluster of companies in Greater Lexington.
The latest awardees share an aim to turn innovation benefiting farm operations into successful businesses. The six recipients are the third crop of startups getting backing from BADC, an entity launched in 2022 by ag supplement producer Alltech, the state Department of Agriculture, the UK Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, and Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.
Recipients must match their grants 1:1 and establish at least a two-year presence here. Past recipients have generated 72 jobs, spent $1.5 million with local farmers and leveraged $900,000 in BADC grants into $12 million in investment. Their products all aim to cut costs and earn more money for farm operators.
This year’s grant awardees are developing some cool products:
FarmSense is working to make soil moisture sensors that cost $50-$80 apiece rather than the $200-$600 price of present commercial products. Moisture sensor use cuts water use 40-48%. FarmSense wants to make its product here.
Lepidext is developing new biopesticides to target by species corn earworm and other members of the moth, skipper, butterfly family that in their caterpillar phase pose costly threats to crops. It is making its smart pesticides in a Lexington facility and wants to go national.
Need More Acres Farm helps some 30 Kentucky farms channel locally grown crops through programs such as home delivery networks, Food Is Medicine and Farm To School. It wants to use participant data to allow clinical referrals and even prescriptions to be integrated into online ordering, expand access and give more growers reliable markets.
Pascal Tags is adapting for ag use — where dirt, moisture and handling levels are high — its Barcode 2.0 tracking product that enjoys use currently with clients such as GE Appliances. It hopes to replace paper based records that fail too often with durable, automated tracking for farm equipment, inputs and crop marketing.
Silver Fern is upgrading the greenhouse and nursery management software it provides to 150 U.S. and Canadian clients. The six-year-old Lexington company will apply BADC resources toward adding an AI demand-forecasting module with machine learning to better predict store-level demand in a field that has to target narrow, weather-dependent selling windows.
Sunnyside Egg Co. will scale its lower-cost mobile system for pasture-raised egg production for Kentucky farmers and expects to cut the typical $2 million investment for major operations to $120,000. Sunnyside want to increase production, expand its packing facility, then develop software for getting carbon credits.