Five of Nine Agtech Startups Landed Farmers in Year One of Nebraska's Spur Ventures

Five of the nine startups that pitched at last year's Farmers Tech Adoption Challenge left with commitments from Nebraska farmers to deploy their technology on real farms. That 56% conversion rate is the number Ankit Chandra cites as proof that Spur Ventures, the agtech support initiative he launched one year ago at the inaugural Spur AgConverge conference, has found a working formula. The second edition runs Nov. 17-18 and, for the first time, spans two days instead of one.

Chandra's day job is director and lecturer of entrepreneurship at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Department of Biological Systems Engineering. On top of that, in Spur's first year he helped farmers and startups work through new technology adoption, brought international agtech startups to Nebraska to validate their technologies, and built an agtech ecosystem map. The initiative is now in growth mode: Chandra will soon hire two full-time staff plus interns.

What makes AgConverge different from a pitch competition?

Chandra draws a hard line between his event and the standard conference circuit. "AgConverge is not just another set of events where you're networking or meeting with people or presenting your research and pitching," Chandra said. "We try to make it an agenda (about) technology adoption and commercialization as one of the biggest ways (startups) can move forward and make progress and make an impact."

The centerpiece, the Farmers Tech Adoption Challenge (FTAC), inverts the usual format. Startups present to farmers, and farmers then question them in a roundtable setting. Money is set aside for farmers to test startup technologies — but only if the conversations convince them the tools fit their operations. In plain terms, the farmers hold both the questions and the checkbook.

The first-year results exceeded expectations. "We were not expecting that so many startups will move to on-farm deployment," Chandra said. "That was a big success for us. And that really gets me emotional because that was the whole intention."

Why did Chandra build Spur in the first place?

Nebraska's agtech scene has accelerated in recent years, driven by The Combine, a startup incubator, and Grit Road Partners, an agtech venture capital firm. Chandra still saw gaps. UNL's curriculum covered traditional agricultural business, but few resources existed at the intersection of engineering and entrepreneurship in agtech.

"That's a really different ball game because you can think of agribusinesses, you can think of general businesses and rural communities — there are (academic) courses for that, education for that," Chandra said.

He identified two missing pieces. First, independent academic research could test startup claims about their technologies, making pitches to farmers and investors more credible. Second, farmers face no shortage of new tools; the real bottleneck is adoption. "You go to field demonstrations … farmers, they will chat with each other, 'Okay, this technology was really good, maybe we can do something with that.' Or, 'It wasn't really meant for our operations,'" Chandra said. Formal channels for farmers to tell startups what they need, or critique their ideas, barely existed. The takeaway: Spur was built to fix a feedback loop, not to add another demo day.

What is on the agenda for Nov. 17-18?

The program looks back before it looks forward. A "Founder x Farmer Fireside Chat" will review what did and did not work over the past year of FTAC technology adoption for one startup and one Nebraska farmer.

Federal money takes a prominent slot. The joint Iowa-Nebraska NSF RuralSTAMINA Biomanufacturing Engine positions the region for up to $160 million in federal investment, and Chandra plans conversations around it. One panel brings together NSF engines from Tennessee, Colorado, North Dakota and RuralSTAMINA to discuss how federal dollars commercialize more agtech. A related panel examines the state of Nebraska's bioeconomy industry, which RuralSTAMINA aims to boost.

Marking the International Year of the Women Farmer, a "Women in Midwest Agtech" panel will feature a startup founder, a farmer and staff from agtech support organizations.

The measurable test of this year's event is straightforward: whether more farmers walk away with funding and a startup partnership to trial new technology on their farms — a repeat, or better, of the five-for-nine record that made year one.