Agrilyst founder explains why farming is ripe for analytics

Agrilyst posted a conversation about the company with its founder, Allison Kopf, along with Andrew Blume and Chris Powers of the Association for Vertical Farming.
Agrilyst is one of the higher-profile companies in the Brooklyn tech world. An analytics-for-agriculture startup, the company won TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015 and was the MC for this year’s startup battlefield. In May it raised $1 million, in a seed round led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.
“We know the distance between where food is grown and where it’s eaten needs to shrink,” Charlie O’Donnell, founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, explained at the time. “We can’t keep shipping these long distances.”

Another of his considerations in funding was climate change. The frequency of once-in-a-century storms and temperature swings have wreaked havoc on outdoor farming, O’Donnell said. He sees therefore a greater move toward greenhouses and indoor farming. It’s a trend Technical.ly has recently documented in Philly and Baltimore.

In the conversation Agrilyst posted on Medium, Kopf explained that the value the company creates is bringing data to industries where data is not currently used, and doing so in a way that people in that field can understand.

“Farms have a vast amount of production data, and, unfortunately, the information exists in fragmented, independent systems,” Kopf said. “As a result, growers are spending time and money creating optimization plans while still performing in a sub-optimal state. Farms are leaving revenue on the table. Our goal with the Agrilyst platform is to turn a burden for growers, data management, into their most useful tool.”

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