Integrating technology in feed mill automation for a smarter supply chain
Speaker: Jake Joraanstad, CEO, Bushel
Feed mills, livestock managers and transportation companies juggle disconnected tools for inventory, delivery, animal movement and sourcing, creating confusion and delays across the supply chain. This presentation demonstrates how existing systems can work together through shared data and automation to reduce coordination time, improve delivery efficiency and meet growing demands for transparency. Rather than adding another login or dashboard, this session will explore how application programming interfaces (APIs) can connect platforms to enable automated mix-load creation, traceable local grain sourcing, and smoother communication between co-ops, farmers, packers and feed suppliers — transforming fragmented operations into streamlined workflows without additional manual work.
PRESENTATION TRANSCRIPT
Jake Joraanstad, CEO, Bushel: Welcome, and thanks for being here. This is a bigger room than I was expecting, which is exciting, so hopefully, we have lots of questions to follow. Briefly, at Bushel, our mission here is to connect this ecosystem of challenges in the supply chain. When you think about your business, whether you're in the feed space, the grain elevator, you might be a retailer, a processor, there's exactly what we just saw in this last presentation. There's a lot of challenges to tie all those things together. Think about what we solve for as that core application. We think about how some of these tools work with your ERP system, your data systems elsewhere. But in the end, today, I want to share a little bit about how to solve for that problem as it relates to the human interaction with your farmer and your commercial suppliers that you probably source your grain from.
When you think about the facility, you're thinking about the mill, you're thinking about the efficiency of that operation inside of once you've received your grain, once you're producing your product.
We are going to talk about the front of that house and the back of that house today, thinking about how you procure your grain, and thinking about what is required to achieve automation there, which requires humans to do business with each other, probably in a digital way. That's what I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about.
At Bushel, we look at the world like this. We've got your farm operations there on your left. You've got your milling operation in the middle, likely processors or yards you're going out to after that. And then, of course, there's all kinds of other transactions happening. Our dream is to give you the tools to automate that process. But I think today, just in big picture standpoint, let's talk a little bit about some of the efficiencies you can gain by taking these problems head-on, so maybe in a practical sense. I think what we see, we work with almost 260 companies now that do business in this space. This on the left is pretty typical of what you see. We talked a little bit about it in this last presentation on the right. We feel like that's where everybody needs to get.
Thinking about your systems, we talked about disconnected earlier. The administrative workload for your teams, A lot of times, we're seeing one of the big problems with getting more efficient is that your team is literally an administrator. Your team is a person doing lookup and clerical work, where you're constantly hearing a conversation come in, and you're having to turn around and go look up something for a customer, look up something for the farmer. What's the bill? What's the ticket? Tell me what happened to my contract. Those conversations are constant, and at the scale that we operate in trying to be efficient here, it's a big problem. There's a lot of work to be done just in this interaction between your commercial customer you might be buying from or your farmer you're buying from, and how you do business.
Then you've got your reconciliation. We talked about that invoicing and contract problem, and then monitoring the markets. A lot of our customers, and a lot of, I think you, are still trying to figure out how do you go from a manual, centralized trade desk to an automated auto-hedging process where you don't have any slippage, where you don't have any risk. If you're not already there, you need to get there. This idea that, "We'll call in our orders when we have time" is a crazy idea, and we still operate that way in this space quite a bit. The tools are out there for you all to automate your hedging process and get rid of that unnecessary risk, which allows you to have more capital to work with, likely with your lenders and everybody else involved. As it relates to the feed mill process, this is what we see today. most of the time, your grain business, the procurement, the origination teams, things are done pretty manually. There's a lot of facilities out there that we've talked to that still don't have your scale houses and your scales hooked up to your system. If you're still having your operation, have people enter deliveries, grain deliveries into the facility manually, or if it's a batch process, we talked a little bit about delayed data, where you get it maybe every 24 hours, well, then you're making your farmers and your commercial suppliers rely on that paper ticket that was printed at the scale, which flew out of the truck going down the highway out of the coffee tin, and now they're calling you and wondering what that last load was and what contract it was applied to. And so, at the minimum, you got to get your systems to be talking to each other, and there's plenty of solutions to get your scales to talk to your systems. If that's still a core problem at your facility, get there first. But once you've got those capabilities, now things become a lot more efficient, I'm not going to be the feed expert on how you do mixes and such, all your scheduling. There's a lot of technology you'll see at the conference here. That's what they do. That's not what we're going to talk about. And same thing on the animal side.
Here's the next thing. How often are you taking text, phone calls from your customer, from your origination team, from your farmers, from your commercial suppliers to just get, "Hey, what's the price? What's your basis today?" Crazy questions that we ask in 2026. We should completely automate the communication of those tools.
Texting is still the core place in which most, at least in the US, most farms are receiving price information via automated text. That's pretty normal. The problem is long-term, texting en masse is becoming a scam and a problem, Everybody gets these constant texts that aren't things you're interested in. Long-term, you got to get your customers onto some sort of mobile tools where they're getting a push notification. That's the future, where you can make it more interactive. They can take an action on a push notification. They can say, "I want to make an offer today." While on a text, if you send a link in a text, you've maybe seen this before, you get blacklisted, and Verizon shuts you down, you can't send texts anymore for a week. There's all kinds of challenges with just those basic communication tools that I think you can move forward with now with some better solutions.
And then talking about contracts, how many of you are running one of these core ERP systems that he mentioned earlier? You all know what the name of your ERP system is? Raise your hand if you do know what system you're entering your contracts into and whatever it might be. Some of you know it, okay. That system likely is not built for your farmer or your commercial suppliers to go log into. It's just for your team, you got to solve for getting that information back out to your customer.
And then lastly, this is an incredible situation, at least in the US. If you're from outside the US, you might be surprised to hear that 77% of payments in ag are still on paper check. Whether that's the payment to the farmer, and I'm talking a paper check, not check as an ACH process in some other country. Paper check in the mail, likely paid to the farmer, grain settlements that way. And then on your invoicing side, when you're selling feed, whatever else you're selling out of your business, that's also largely paper-check-based. Paper invoice in the mail. Hopefully, your customer, your farmer, thinks about it at the right time and actually sends you a payment on time, but a lot of times you're trying to figure that out. People are making calls. It's very inefficient. These are the problems that we definitely see in the space today.
Now, the good news is there's tools out there, not just ours, that help here, but I do have some stats, I think, to help you understand what the value prop is for moving this direction. How many of you know if your company, if your mill takes grain offers online today? If a farmer or commercial could digitally sell you grain at your price today? Anybody know? Raise your hand if you have this going on. See, next to nobody in the room has this mindset. And I'm not talking about a marketplace. I'm talking about a place where your customer that sells grain to you every year, maybe they'll buy your feed too, has a place to go and say, "I'm ready to sell some corn today. I'm ready to sell some wheat today." That is a core problem that doesn't exist across the space very often. When it happens, you take away that five-minute, and likely half-hour, hour conversation, depending on what's going on in the day and what political developments are happening, and what's going on in the markets, and if E15 got passed or not. You go through this whole set of problems. Or 42 seconds for a farmer to make an offer and for your team to receive that offer, likely hedge that offer automatically so you have zero slippage, and now you've not just procured the grain, but you procured it at a price that you care about, that works for you, and you've hedged it, now you have no risk on the futures front. That’s the move that this whole industry needs to move to, and I'll show you in a second what happens when we get there. But the farmer's ready for this, and I can show you the stats for that.
The last thing is, a lot of companies, at least that we've seen in the US and Canada, if you're a mill, one of your big problems is that you have to supply year-round. Farmers don't have corn year-round, they don't have wheat year-round. They might have enough bins to get somewhere, but it's not the whole time. We’ve got a lot of commercial deliveries going on. We've seen facilities that are in a territory where you could originate grain from the farm directly, and yet you're choosing to go 100% commercial sourcing. You're paying a broker, you're paying fees. We're talking about 15 cents a bushel difference of what you pay a commercial supplier for grain for you, versus if you were directly working with the farmer. We know that you can't automate your way out of getting grain in the middle of January. Or in the fall, when we haven't gotten the crop yet. But we also know that if you could buy every bushel more that you buy from your farmer direct, we'll save you something like 15 cents a bushel. And that might be just a straight-up price difference.
There's also a lot of, if you can do the efficiencies while you also have an opportunity there. What I hear, and what the problem is, is when you have to do business with lots of little farmers, as we say, most of them are getting bigger, but your supply might be a few loads a year. Maybe it's hundreds of loads from that farmer, versus the same commercial supplier doing business the same way all year. You tend to say, "Well, it's easier to do business with the commercial." But over time, if you think about automating away some of those extra tasks that you've got to do, thinking about that interaction with the farmer being a lot easier for them to just self-serve because you probably got one of the best bids in the area because you're buying grain for feed. You have an opportunity to look at that 15 cents a totally different way and say, "Can we move the needle 10, 15 cents a bushel?" That moves a huge needle on the margin. That’s another part that I think we need to get our thinking into, is not everybody can originate all the grain, but where you can, there's a huge opportunity to improve your bottom line. But nobody wants to do it unless it's easy. The automation with that farmer customer is pretty important.
Here's the other thing. Do farmers care? Will they put offers in? Will people put offers in through tools?
Our stats tell you that if a farmer puts in an offer themselves through some sort of digital tool, 58% is the chance that it fills, versus 41% if your team's putting it in over the phone. Not only are you getting a pretty inefficient offer, we don't have to talk to somebody necessarily to get that grain purchased, but the fill rate is almost 20 points higher than doing it through the normal phone call, typing in an offer, and keeping track of it on a spreadsheet, sticky note, or otherwise. When you see fill rates higher from the farmer, you're wondering, "Well, why is that?" And what we found is that when the farmer feels that they can put an offer in with you and have control over that offer, whether it's at 8:00 at night or the first thing in the morning before your team's even in the office to even make that phone call or receive that phone call. The farmer's typically busy in the day. We all know this. We're running around, we're fixing stuff, we're running stuff to town. I finally get home, and I sit on a comfy chair, and I've had dinner, and then I realize that the markets are up today, and I should have sold something. And when you're available to them right on their phone to sell to them, that's when you make the sale. They'll put that offer in, the next morning market's open, and you bought that grain at the price that you wanted to pay. We see a majority of the interactions outside of the normal hours that your team's working, where those phone calls, if they come, they're certainly after hours and your team's dealing with it after the fact and trying to get stuff put in. But in the perfect world, your team never got the call, and yet you bought the grain. That’s I think a pretty important point, is when you're available 24/7 in the sense of at least an interaction, changes the way you think about that overhead with doing business with those guys.
And then again, faster fills is faster turns on grain, and less of your staff dealing with problems. We think that no matter how efficient your facility can get and all the automation that needs to be done there, and I'm sure you're thinking about it and you're investing in it, if you don't figure out that front-of-the-house problem, you're going to have the same problems forever. You got to think about how that interaction shows up with your group you're buying from. Whether it's commercial or the farmer, they can be more efficient than you're doing today, I promise. Here's some interesting, helpful statistics. We conduct a State of the Farm survey every year. We ask over 1,000, 1,500 usually, respondents, all farmers, what they think about-- Not what they're planting, what their intentions are, what their crop rotation is, all the questions they always get, but more so, what's your interest in adopting tools and technology? What are you using on your farm? How many software tools are you paying for? We ask those kinds of questions, and we get a totally different set of responses when you don't have to ask the farmer what they're planting, how much money they're making. They're totally more open to feedback when you're not asking so much about their financial business. On the blue and the yellow there, that's almost 60% of farmers are saying, "Not only am I ready, but I'm willing to adopt and try new things that make sense to me." Whether it's, "Hey, I'm a little skeptical, but I'm interested in trying the next thing as long as it's going to add some value to my life," or, "Absolutely, throw it at me," which is the biggest bucket, that blue one. The farmer is not the resister in technology. I think if you were to ask the average person in ag today, you'd say, "Oh, the farmers are slow to adopt." I think that's an old perception that's no longer. I think that maybe five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, that was true. Our stats suggest 50 is the new 40. Farmers that are 50 years old or younger are absolutely adopting all these technologies and tools, whether it's from your business or for themselves. Don't feel like the reason you shouldn't move the needle to put something in front of them is because they're not going to adopt it, because we believe at this point that adoption curve has tipped, at least with the farmer.
Now, we say the agribusiness is the problem. The agribusiness is the barrier. Your team's lack of ability to adopt technology and give it to your customer to make a more convenient business is the thing keeping us from moving forward. Think about your business as that next needle mover for these guys.
