FoA 296: Financial Incentives for Sustainable Agriculture with Jayce Hafner of FarmRaise

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">FarmRaise: <a href= "http://www.FarmRaise.com">www.FarmRaise.com</a> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Building a startup in ag? Email me: <a href= "mailto:tim@aggrad.com">tim@aggrad.com</a> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Support this show and join the FoA community: <a href= "http://www.Patreon.com/agriculture">www.Patreon.com/agriculture</a> </span>  </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A point we try to drive home as often as possible here is that innovation on its own doesn’t really get anywhere until it can be implemented. For agriculture, that often means that the ideas we talk about here on this show need to actually work for farmers. So for the future of agriculture to be more data-driven or more technological or more regenerative, the tools and practices will have to be executable. And for farmers to find this out, they will need to experiment with them. Which is very risky.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Luckily there are programs to help absorb some of that risk. A lot of them involve free money in the way of grants, or very cheap loans. But to access these programs requires an often tedious process of seeing if you are eligible then applying then waiting to hear back then keeping up with the ongoing reporting. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lowering these barriers is exactly where FarmRaise comes in. Jayce Hafner is the co-founder and CEO of FarmRaise. What’s interesting about this episode is not only the impact they are having for farmers, nearly 10,000 so far and $9M in funding applications, but also where they hope to take the company. Today, they offer a freemium model where a farmer can check their eligibility on 15 programs for free or pay $25/month to check eligibility on hundreds of programs, apply to them in less than 15 minutes, and get ongoing support. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jayce sees this as just the beginning. This valuable service can grow into many more financial se