AgTech, FinTech and Tech-Savvy Producers Converge at Conference

If you think about it if you’re running all of your business data in one system those things are derivatives of the same thing.
-Pat Christie, Conservis

From "The Convergence of AgTech and FinTech from a Global Perspective" by Pat Christie, Conservis, and Chris Olson, Rabo AgriFinance:

• McKinsey Global Institute ranked the digitization index for agriculture and hunting at the bottom of the all industries.
  
  
• Of the 6,500 agtech companies, 6,400 are interesting technologies that may never be commercially viable.
  
  
• One that’s kind of interesting are farmer-created systems.  Sometimes they're so specific to that farm's practices they don’t scale to other farms.
  
  
• On the other side are commercially viable technology that doesn’t add much value--invested by Silicon Valley engineers who love science and technology and will show you "how to farm right."
  
  
• One of the hardest things about technology is not necessarily technology but, "How do you properly bring it to the farm?"
  
  
• As you look at where you are and where you’re going this is what you want:  one place where all the different data systems can touch, can be organized, can be synthesized and can at some point at a very simple view take your crop or animal production system, give it an economic value and an accountant-prepared statement that comes out the back side.
  
  
• Production technology, business system, accounting system; those things have to come together at the very fundamental level of the farm.

Watch Convergence video.

From MASA Partner Panel members John McNutt, Brian Watkins, Bernard Peterson, Blake Hollis and Randy Gangwish:

• MASA is a closely held limited liability company that is set up to own and continuously develop a production agricultural oriented enterprise resource planning system (Ag ERP) which will link financial, production and other important information into a common database that will support the accounting and management needs of farms and ranches.
  
  
• You cannot have an ERP if it doesn’t start with your accounting system. That’s, of course, where everything ties out.

• FBS has the strongest general ledger in agriculture with rock-solid functionality.

• FBS has essentially been an ERP for the past 20-30 years.

• FBS software is baked into how we do things.  It’s so tightly integrated into how our operation ticks that it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how it would look like if the world didn’t have FBS.  

• The power of what’s in FBS is fantastic; we need to make sure we can preserve all that to tee it up for a broader marketplace and perform in the new world of cloud computing.

• This is just an effort to modernize what has already been working so well for all of our operations.

• The most powerful facets of MASA are its independence and cooperative approach.  We control the data.

Watch MASA video.

Summit highlights coming next month: 

• Corn/Soybean Cost of Production Benchmarks.
• FBS/MASA Software Preview.
• Those who choose to cruise.