The company received $5 million for product development
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
An ag tech company received a multimillion dollar investment to help bring its automation products to producers.
Iowa’s Stine Seed presented Smart Ag Inc. with $5 million to help the company advance product development and automation.
The investment demonstrates that other organizations believe Smart Ag is creating products farmers need, said Colin Hurd, founder and CEO of Smart Ag.
“Our goals here focuses on how to better serve our customers, and our customers are farmers,” he told Farms.com today. “Us and Stine have some mutual customers and to be able to work with a company like Stine is an excellent opportunity.”
Smart Ag will use the investment in two main ways, Hurd said.
The first will be to bring its AutoCart to more producers through full commercialization. AutoCart‘s plug-and-play usability allows a farmer to automate their grain cart tractors.
The funds will also be used to tackle other labor challenges farmers face.
“Labor scarcity isn’t just a grain cart problem, it can be an operational problem,” Hurd said. “If we can find other ways to apply to our technology, whether it be planting, tillage or spraying, that’s something we’re going to explore.”
Stine Seed’s decision to invest in the Iowa start-up centered on the idea of innovation, Harry Stine, founder of the company, said.
“Agriculture has always been about the development and application of new ideas. We are pleased to be on the forefront of this and see the value in the technology for our own seed production and farming operations,” he said in a statement, the Des Moines Register reports.