April 25, 2019

By Michelle Pelletier Marshall

Growers Edge Financial of Johnston, Iowa, just named Dan Cosgrove as chief strategy officer. Tasked with having the strategic insight to take the company to “the next level”, Cosgrove has his sights on two massive challenges: how a grower manages risk and gains access to capital.

With decades of experience as an ag industry business leader and creative dealmaker, Cosgrove most recently was the global leader of corporate development and licensing at Corteva Agriscience, where he also had previously served as the vice president of business development and held various legal roles (at DuPont Pioneer, which is now part of Corteva Agriscience). He also is an active venture partner at Radicle Growth and a licensed attorney.

Cosgrove will draw upon this and his executive leadership skills to advance the mission of Growers Edge to put grower profits first by delivering grower income assurance through data-driven financial technology products, solutions, and tools for the agricultural sector.

GAI News caught up with Cosgrove as he got settled in at the Iowa office.

1.) You have been tasked with accelerating the company’s growth by building out its financial business line. What first steps will this entail?

With any company of our size, a lot of the first steps involve talent. So we certainly need to actively recruit and hire good data scientists and folks that can help us build out the technical side. This is a data analytics effort and that’s a skillset that is high demand. Building out our team is priority number one.

We also plan to spend a lot of time reaching out to other agribusinesses to partner, invest, and drive interest in what we do. A good deal of our efforts will be working with other companies – whether it be input providers or technology providers – and reaching out to those companies will take precedence – to cultivate those relationships so we can fully develop our data-driven product line.

2.) As far as your responsibility for leading joint development activities, what fintech projects are on the horizon to help speed the adoption of machine-learning and digital ag technologies in the farming community?

We don’t make the technology products – like the sensors, chemicals, or seeds. We work with companies that have developed those technologies and figure out ways to create economic incentives for people to adopt those technologies. The farm economy is under stress these days because of world trade and economics, and farmer profitability has really suffered quite a bit. As a result, growers are less likely to take a risk on new technology. To counter this, we develop a warranty or a guarantee that says if you follow the steps that we prescribe, which may include adopting a new technology or package of products, you will get a guaranteed output. There is a financial data-driven effort to create that package.

We collaborate with the technology providers on the guaranteed product to incent adoption, then we, or others, work to sell that to the growers. It’s all about trying to mitigate the risk for the farmers. Farmers work very hard and unfortunately have to take on much of the risk. Our goal is to provide a way to financially incent them to try some of this new technology in a way that they are not hurt or penalized, and in the end, see a greater return on their investment.

We develop financial tools to enable farmers to increase profitability.

3.) Growers Edge specializes in using machine learning to take the risk out of agtech adoption for farmers – how will you advance this process in regard to sustainability and transparency?

We take data from a number of sources – some public and some proprietary — and then we model, or project, how well that technology is going to perform on a particular grower’s farm. In any machine learning or AI effort, the more data you have, the better, and each iteration helps the machine learn a little more about what is optimal with the technology and inputs from the farm. We are partnering with a number of third parties to promote their products to growers, and we go to each farm to learn how each farm has done historically, what their practices are – all the things that would go into a financial incentive that would allow us to back a novel technology.

We have relationships with over 50,000 farms – both through our web portal and selling them actual products.

Certainly, with programs that advance sustainability, one big question from growers is “will I stay profitable?” with the change. We have been working with parties who want to promote sustainable farming practices so we also create the economic or financial incentives to take the steps necessary to be more sustainable with the backing of a guarantee.

We have not yet worked with anyone on a transparency-related product that I am aware of, but any type of behavior that you’d like to incent, or risk that you’d like to mitigate, can be promoted with these financial products. We can guarantee that if the farmer takes the steps in our prescription, they won’t suffer yield loss, or they will see a yield increase. Any type of risk can be mitigated through this type of data-driven analytics.

4.) Just last month, Growers Edge introduced a solutions platform called Growers Analytic Prediction System (GAPS). Can you explain how this AI platform will propel growers to the next level?

GAPS is the artificial intelligence platform that compiles the data that we get, ingests it into its algorithm, compares it to all the other data we have, and iterates the data to provide a prescription for the grower. If they follow those steps, they should see positive results. If not, there is a built-in guarantee. 

5.) Do most of the growers have their own unique prescription/product?

Certainly we can individualize down to the grower level, but that is a very time consuming challenge. The strength of the model is that it is able to predict the chance of success across all of the users who might be buying that technology. Then we are able to use the analytics to sell a product based on that chance of success. Overall, the farmer will either succeed because he or she followed the prescription and it resulted in a positive increase, or if they didn’t, then they have a warranty behind their product and they get paid back according to the terms of the warranty.

6.) Do you see this area of agriculture exploding with the different needs of the growers and the fact that we have to dramatically increase our food supply over the coming decades?

 There is a lot of effort that needs to be directed to ag because feeding the world is an important charge. What I saw in the industry over the past few years was that there were not many addressing or bringing these modern financial tools and analytical techniques on the side of mitigating risk for the grower or providing them access to capital – the financial side of the business. There’s a lot of people bringing new technologies to sell to farmers; what we do is create incentives for anyone selling the technologies, and mitigate the risk for the farmer to adopt them.

7.) How will your position as a venture partner with Radicle Growth influence your ability to bring about positive change and increased access to capital for the farmer partners at Growers Edge?

Radicle Growth is a venture group run by Kirk Haney out of California. As a venture partner I have been able to see many of the great ideas that come through the door. We see some that are obvious to invest in and we see others, such as for a new seed product or farming practice, which are equally important but create a degree of risk toward adoption. Failure of some products could be catastrophic for the farmer. A warranty or guarantee product would be wonderful here. I do see the very front end of the funnel of innovation, which keeps me plugged into the technology space with early knowledge of what is coming down the pike.

-Michelle Pelletier Marshall is managing editor for Global AgInvesting’s quarterly GAI Gazette magazine and a regular contributor to GAI News. She can be reached at mmarshall@globalaginvesting.com.