The number of farmers in the United States is dwindling every single year, and even less than 2% of the entire population is involved in agriculture. Given this alarming statistic, is the future of farming and food production doomed? Mitchell Hora, an 8th-generation farmer and a leader in the agricultural space, turns to regenerative farming practices to address this problem. Joining Doctor Awesome, he discusses how this particular farming method relies not on artificial fertilizers that leave a carbon footprint but on the mimicking of the ways of Mother Nature. Mitchell also explains how family farms can benefit from finding their way back to nature while slowly adjusting to the inevitable integration of machine learning strategies.

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The Future Of Farming – A Conversation With Mitchell Hora

I have Mitchell Hora, who is a CEO and leader in the agricultural space. Thanks so much for joining us. Tell us about yourself. Agriculture is important and integral to our lives. It has many scientific breakthroughs that have changed humanity for the better. We see a lot of different things happening down the pipeline. It’s hard to make sense of it.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re working on right now. Soil, sustainable agriculture, and regenerative agriculture are important to you. We can talk about as many or as little of that as possible. Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing at your company and how that stuff affects us on a day-to-day basis.

Thanks for hanging out here. It’s going to be fun. There are lots of different places we can go to. I’m a farmer myself. I’m the seventh generation on my family’s farm. 2023 was our 150th year of farming in Southeast Iowa. I have lived in Southeast Iowa for several years with my wife. We’ve got two little kids who are the eighth generation on our family farm. When you are in a business that’s multi-generational 150 years, you have to be focused on sustainability and on being not only economically sustainable but environmentally sustainable.

That’s a lot of the root of where my passion for this comes from. In 2015, I started a company called Continuum Ag. We’re a software company that helps to scale regenerative ag and helps farmers improve their profitability via improving their soil health. As this ties to your overall theme, some new numbers came out. We have less farmers in this country than ever. Less than 2% of the population of Americans is involved in agriculture, but we feed everyone else. Less than 2%, feeding the other 98% while at the same time providing renewable fuel, fiber for clothing, feed for animals, and all the different products that come out of agriculture.

As we look to the future, there’s going to be even fewer farmers, more automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Young people like myself are going to have to continue to help lead the charge, bringing more opportunity to farmers. It’s going to change fast. The average age of a farmer is over 60 years old. There’s a lot of change that’s got to occur. A lot is passed down to the next generation, especially when it comes to agricultural land, which is worth an insane amount of money, but it’s got to be passed down to those next generations. Be able to take it over, care for that land, and feed people.

 

 

Exciting stuff is going for the future of ag, where it’s not providing that food, fuel, fiber, and feed but doing it in a manner that has a lower carbon footprint and improved impact on water quality and nutrient density. The quality of the products that we are producing and many of these necessary outcomes have to come out of agriculture, and the future has to be more regenerative. We can’t sustain what we’re doing now and be complacent. We have to continue to do better. I’m excited to dig into how we’re doing that and where I see things going. It’s an exciting time. I’m excited to be a young person in this space, ride the wave, and lead along the way.

When I think about agriculture, I think about the food that comes in. Our food has significantly changed over the past many years. Over the past 500 years, it’s changed a lot. We’ve had these specific mono-crop types of agricultural systems. What I like about regenerative agriculture is that it’s running counter to that.

From my basic understanding, what got me interested in regenerative agriculture was Joe Rogan had a guy. I’m sure you probably know him. He’s my introduction to this whole space. That’s something that I appreciate for a number of reasons. Joe brings on a lot of people that might be, at first glance, something that I would be interested in, but it is something that I’m interested in because of all of this wealth of knowledge.

Looking Back

That’s why I wanted to talk with you. You run your own podcast about soil. You have a business on the soil. You’re an eighth-generation farmer. We’re going to do a deep dive in regards to farming and where it’s going. I wanted to talk specifically about regenerative agriculture because it’s different from what we’ve been doing in the past several years. How did it come about? How did you get involved with it? Why is it better for us?

There’s a wide continuum of regenerative ag. There’s a variety of extremes to regenerative ag. It’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all check the box. On one side, you’ve got the whole principle. The concepts of regenerative ag boils back to mimicking mother nature and the natural system that built up our soils, especially here in the Midwest. We have some of the best soils in the entire world. The reason that they are amazing is because of this system that has been here for thousands of years. That system is the prairie.

In a prairie system, you don’t have a disturbance of the soil. There are constant living roots and plants growing at all times. There’s a lot of diversity in the system of grasses, legumes, and different types of plants. You’ve got animals and livestock roaming across that prairie, being moved in herds and chased by predators. Think of herds of buffalo being chased by wolves across the landscape, where you’ve got hundreds of thousands of buffalo at a time, trampling down the grass but also eating some of it, pooping it back out, stimulating the life in those soils.

A lot of this boils down to the fact that regenerative ag mimics that prairie system. The most important thing that farmers have to do to be more regenerative is to keep living roots in the system. In our agricultural production system, the norm is that we plant our cash crops, usually in the spring. Think of it as corn. We plant corn in April. Here in Iowa, we plant corn in April and harvest it in October. We plant that corn in April. It doesn’t get up and start growing until May. It starts dying in late August and throughout September.

It’s only photosynthesizing from May until August or the 1st of September, meaning it’s only pulling in CO2, sunlight energy, and water to live for a short time out of the year. Through regenerative ag, we know that we have to continue feeding our soil and feeding the trillions of microbes that are in our soil. It takes more photosynthesis to do that.

With sunlight energy being captured, plants take in CO2 as we respire CO2, and plants take in that CO2 and respire back off oxygen that we can utilize. Plants take in that CO2 and convert it to simple sugars, sucrose, and glucose. They can secrete up to 70% of the carbon and sugar that they bring in. They pump upwards of 70% of it back through their roots into the soil to feed the microbes.

With a teaspoon of healthy soil, there are more microbes than there are people on the earth, which is what makes me excited about this whole thing, and pulling back together is in one teaspoon of healthy soil, more than 8 billion more microbes than people on the earth. In a little teaspoon, we can’t see any of them, but with an insane amount of life and activity.

A teaspoon of healthy soil has more microbes than there are people on Earth.

Those microbes are fertilizer packets. Those microbes are decomposing plant residues. They’re eating and pooping each other back out. All they know how to do is eat, reproduce, and try not to get eaten and die. It’s a microbe’s life. When those microbes get eaten, die, or secreted back out, those nutrients become plant-available. As a regenerative farmer, the more I can stimulate the natural biological process, the less I have to rely on inputs that cost a lot of money. Inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides. I don’t need as much of that stuff because the natural microbial system does it on its own.

I related a lot of it back to human health. If you are healthier as a human, you don’t need as much medicine. If you eat right, take care of yourself, have the right diet, and have the right activity, you stay healthier on your own versus being as reliant on medicine. The same thing happens in our agricultural systems. We’ve got a broken system, and we need to mimic Mother Nature better. Regenerative ag boils down to that simple principle of mimicking mother nature.

Microbiome research has expanded relatively in a whole bunch of different fields, like for human beings. We’re beginning to understand the complex interplay between our gut bacteria, oral bacteria, and all of the different bacteria that are on our skin. We’re on the cusp of understanding that. It’s interesting to see that the same thing is happening in agriculture.

Benefits Of Regenerative Agriculture

When it comes to regenerative agriculture, I wanted to know how it is better for us other than carbon capture. It provides “healthier food,” but objectively, I don’t understand why it would be. For somebody who might not be as familiar, what would be some reasons that they would want to be in favor of regenerative agriculture as opposed to agriculture that is still giving them the same product?

I’m a simple farmer. It’s like on the human health side of things, where if you have a good healthy gut microbiome, you’re going to fend off diseases better and pathogens. You are going to get better nutrient cycling. Your body is gonna be able to get the nutrients out of its food more effectively and get you the right nutrients that you need.

The same thing happened in the soil. If we have a good soil microbiome, we’re going to fend off pathogens, issues, and diseases because we’re going to have more good guys to fend off the bad guys. We’re going to get better nutrient cycling and availability of the nutrients that the plant needs. When the plant and the microbes work together in good symbiosis, they’re able to feed off each other like we and our gut. It’s the exact same concept. It’s that our gut microbes are on the inside of our intestines and, for the most part, inside of our gut, whereas in the soil, it’s on the outside of those roots and coating the outside of those roots.

It boils down to the more microbes that we can have, and the more diversity of microbes we can have, the more diverse functions we can generate, including fending off those pathogens and cycling nutrients, and the healthier our plants can be. The healthier our plants can be, the more pathogens they fend off, such as disease and insects. These things are things that we spray pesticides to take care of in conventional agriculture. If the plants can do it on their own, we don’t need to apply pesticides, which, as a regenerative farmer, keeps money in my pocket. It is healthier for the actual food and products that we’re producing.

Are you without pesticides?

Not completely without. There’s a spectrum of this. My family started using no-till in 1978.

What does that mean?

What we do is we plant our corn in April, and we harvest in October. The typical practice is to use a tillage pass, which is when you drag a heavy implement through the field that turns and mixes the soil and residue so that it can break down more easily. You have bare exposed soil on top and the residue left over from the previous crop incorporated, which helps break it down. The soil warms up. The problem is when you disturb the soil, you’re destroying the home for those microbes. You’re releasing carbon and moisture out of the soil. Over time, it leads to degradation. Especially as we farm this ground here in the Midwest for 150 to 200 years over and over, it degrades.

No-till means don’t disturb that soil. Keep it where it is. Keep the residue on top of the surface to protect it against erosion and to keep the soil more in balance in osmosis, as Mother Nature intended in that natural prairie system where it wasn’t disturbed, dug up, and tilled besides by the critters. We’re doing it on a small scale. The worms, beetles, and groundhogs are digging and mixing soil. We’re trying to let the natural system do it.

We’ve been doing that since 1978, where we don’t till the soil. We let Mother Nature do its thing. We try not to disturb the system. We adopted cover cropping in 2013, which is instead of the normal practice of planting the corn in April, harvesting it in October, and waiting until the next April. What we do is we plant a cover crop in October, which is a grass-like cereal rye, when the main cover crops are utilized.

We utilize that cereal rye because it does good in our winters here in Iowa. We get cold. We get snow, typical Midwest winter. We can plant these cover crops that keep the ground covered, keep photosynthetic activity going to capture that carbon from the atmosphere, and put it into the ground to keep feeding those microbes.

After spending time here doing that, we decreased our fertilizer by about 50%. We’ve decreased our pesticides by about 75%. At the same time, building our yield, building more resiliency, and relying less on the government for crop subsidies and things like federal crop insurance. We’re not completely using any of that stuff. Right. Some of these guys, like Joe Rogan, Rick Clark, and Gabe Brown, have pushed this further than we have on our farm.

I believe there’s a broad spectrum to that continuum. You can be down a regenerative path and do good, like in human health. You can be to the extreme, work out every day, only eat good stuff, never drink alcohol, or you can be in the middle. It’s mostly doing okay. You still do some stuff that is not the best for you, but as long as you do more good than bad, you’re at least moving in a positive direction.

Even though you are doing some things that may not be the best for you, it is still all right as long as you do more good than bad.

Democratizing Technology And Data

Another insight I wanted to discuss is that you are an eighth-generation farmer. You have seen in your family the trend from family farms to industrial farms. One of the real benefits of technology is it has the power to democratize anything. If you look at the space race, for example, it was only the government that was allowed to do this or able to do this, and now it’s become a commercial industry where realistically, like any of us, if we were rich enough, can go to space.

On a lower level, even with computational power in our phones. We have the ability to do calculations and set up a website. If I had a barbershop, I could set up a website. If I take online appointments, I would be able to democratize that industry. Maybe only Supercuts or one of these large national chains might be able to have the same marketing dollars that would’ve happened in the past.

A lot of new technologies are happening in the agricultural industry. Everything from robots to different chemical treatments to this whole push for regenerative agriculture. Do you see that being democratized? Have all of these steps that you’ve made on your family farm made you more competitive in comparison to the big guys?

A pushback on the corporate aspect. About 98% of farms in the US are family farms.

I don’t know that because I’m not in the industry. No,

That’s why I appreciate your view that it is the norm. It’s big corporations. It’s part of it. There are some huge corporate operations. By and large, 98% are still family farms and family-run organizations like mine. My family’s farm is also a corporation. My parents’ operation is set up as a corporation. My farm is set up as an LLC. It’s the legal structure, like in any other business.

I have a corporation for my private practice versus my academic practice.

It’s set up as a corporation. Our family farm, in total, is about 700 acres. The average farm is about 400 acres. In my mind, “What does it take to be like the typical farm I see?” The typical farm in my neck of the woods is around 1,000 to 1,500 acres. My family’s farm of 700. That’s my parents out there on the farm full time. It is their main source of income. That is their main job. That typical conventional row crop agriculture farm, you got to be that 700 at the minimum, and a lot of folks are in that 1,000 to 1,500.

With us being only 700, that has prompted us to say, “We do need to decrease those pesticides.” We do need to be more efficient with fertilizer because we’ve got to be competitive. Regenerative agriculture has allowed us to do that. My farm is 40 acres. I bought a 40-acre piece of ground after I graduated from Iowa State. I’ve got degrees in Agronomy and in Ag Systems Technology. I had the opportunity to buy some ground from a neighbor lady. It’s right around the corner from my parents’ main farm.

It’s a once-in-a-generation type of opportunity. You got to jump on it. The land is extremely expensive. It’s hard to get into large-scale row crop agriculture because the land is expensive. To put a number on it, most of the land around here is going around $16,000 an acre. There is plenty of land that’s $20,000 an acre or more. If you’re going to try to buy 1,000 acres to have the typical farm, you’re talking real money. You got to have tractors, a combine, and all this equipment. You’re talking about a couple of million dollars worth of equipment.

That’s what you hear about. You hear about Bill Gates buying up all the farm farmland out there. That’s what trickled down into the public consciousness like myself, somebody who’s not in the industry. It’s nice to hear that people like yourself still have the ability to enter into this industry because you love it.

The regenerative piece allows us to be more competitive and utilize data to work with Mother Nature and not against her like in Big Ag. We’ve been working against Mother Nature, like in human health. In our diets and eating a lot of processed food, that’s working against Mother Nature. It’s the same concept. We can all do better. We’re becoming more aware, especially younger folks becoming more aware that we can do better, but it takes data to do that, like in human health. There’s better data for soil and carbon footprint, and utilizing this information will help us make better decisions that are going to make us more profitable and sustainable.

Regenerative farming allows farmers to be more competitive and utilize data to work better with Mother Nature instead of against her.

The data piece is huge. With 40 acres, you can tightly control that data. When you get to 1,000 acres, it might be more difficult. I feel like there’s this line in academic research, garbage in, garbage out. If you have garbage data in, you’re going to get garbage insights out. One of the things that we tightly try to control is the reliability and robustness of the data. If you have the ability to tightly control it, that would be something that would be a competitive advantage in the 21st century. It wasn’t as important in the 20th century, but data is king now.

That’s where my company came in. We’re helping farmers with data intelligence. That’s the key thing. There is garbage data in and garbage data out. It’s the intelligence. We can have all this data we want, but if you don’t know what to do with it, you’re not going to be able to make the right decision. I see that with a wide array of farms. There’s some truth to what you’re saying. On my small farm, I can go to the nuance of the data and fine-tune it because I’ve got the time and ability to get nuanced.

At Continuum Ag, we’ve got farmers that are 10,000, 15,000, 30,000, and 40,000-acre farms, which are big operations. They’re all family farms and family operations, but they’re huge. They are big business. These guys are good at data. They might not be able to make decisions with detailed nuance, but they are utilizing that data to move in the right direction. They’re making decisions at a larger scale than on my little 40 acres, where I’m dorking around with all kinds of little nitpicky stuff where at scale, you’ve got to make decisions and go.

Have you heard the difference between Bayesian probability and progressivist probability? It’s what you’re talking about. On the clinical side of it, if you’re comparing two drugs, you could give it to 10,000 people and see what shakes out. You could do a tightly controlled evaluation for 40 people, do that same tightly controlled valuation on 40 other people, do that same tightly controlled valuation on 40 other people, and see what shakes out in comparison to all of those three.

The last one is the Bayesian probability. That has been, at least in my world, the statistical analysis. Whether it’s marketing or academic research, it’s something in vogue now. That’s where I see as a competitive advantage for a small, tightly controlled, you know, everything that’s coming in and everything that’s going out. That’s something that I feel is 21st-century thinking.

What I hope for is somebody like yourself to be as competitive or more competitive as we get some of the labor systems to be more democratized. Can you imagine when there are agricultural robots that can do everything a human being can do? I have always been in the spotlight because of politics. I was watching a lot. You guys are working hard as farmers. As hard as we work as surgeons, I’m like, “It’s physical work.”

It’s training those robots to make decisions on the fly. We can take what I can do on my small farm to make nuanced decisions. If we can train machine learning to be able to make those nuanced decisions more repetitively and accurately than what I could do as an individual, we can combine those two together. Large operations can utilize machine learning and technology to make those nuanced decisions like a small operation could. It’s through technology.

 

 

We’re seeing that trend continue to take off, but we have a long way to go. Agriculture is becoming more sexy in terms of venture capital and startup companies. A lot of interesting things are happening in that space to bring more opportunity to ag. There’s a long way to go. We don’t necessarily always like change. We’re keeping the same. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We know that it works. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing. With an aging agricultural population, the need for change and accelerated progress is going to be the trend, and that’s going to cause rapid evolution within agriculture.

It’s becoming in vogue to at least have an idea of agriculture. After the pandemic, when we had all these food shortage potentials, everybody that I talked to was like, “We need to start growing our own food. We need to move to the mountains and start doing that.” I was the one on the bandwagon. I got this farming simulator video game called Star New Valley. I spent over 1,000 hours on a completely virtual farm that will never produce a single crop like that. I felt that this could be interesting.

It’s something that all my friends talked about. We all were like, “We’re going to get a camper. We’re going to outfit it so we could go anywhere.” It’s popular now. I hope that it can be democratized enough that a person like me who hires the right company to set up a farm and the robots are doing it. I can sit back and eat my fresh, regenerative, organic burger that I bite into. That is a dream that everybody would want.

It’s a dream that it’s not from me. Other futurists are also thinking about this. There’s this idea when you’re saying come back to nature that maybe we’ve gotten a little bit too far from where we were meant to go. Let’s scale it back. Still have all of the benefits of technology, but make it to serve humans and human wellbeing. That’s something that I would hope for. What do you see? Do you see it happening?

There is some balance in that. Less than 2% of Americans are directly involved in the production of agricultural space. I don’t think we’re going to go back to it being 50%, whatever it was back when they were settling. Some people are going to be able to do what you were talking about, like having a garden or a little operation, but it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time, depending on where you are.

If you’re growing vegetables in a vegetable garden, if you’ve got winter time, you’re only growing these vegetables for one harvest in a year. How are you going to eat the rest of the year? If you’re eating those fresh fruits and veggies, they’re there for a couple of weeks or months out of the year, depending on when those crops are coming readily available. You have to be able to know how you can them, jar them, and be able to keep them over the wintertime. How do you process some of those things, like that burger? It’s a cow to start with. You have to butcher that thing. You have to know how to handle it. There’s a lot of regulation.

The robots are coming. When we get livestock robots, that’s going to be a big deal for me. That’s when I’m going to move to Iowa and set up my own farm.

It’s coming. There’s virtual fencing and stuff like shock collars that dogs have. You can put up a virtual fence. You can move it on your phone. My vision of where I think this goes is more transparency between farmers and consumers. You might not have to manage, operate, and own a farm, but you’re more connected with the people who do. You may have the ability to be an investor in it or have fractionalized agriculture.

There’s opportunity there. There’s an opportunity around NFTs in this space to track and tokenize land and agricultural products. It’s not that you’ve got your five cows, but you have a fractional interest in a bunch of different cows or in an operation where you understand and have transparency as to how it’s being produced, support that, and get direct connectivity and feedback for the products coming off of that land. That’s where a lot of this will go.

Hydroponics And Vertical Farming

It’s tough to make accurate predictions about the future, but one of the things that I feel is not necessarily the best prediction is there was a huge buzz about vertical farming and completely hydroponic systems. The pandemic got me into this. I bought my own hydroponic system. I was surprised by two things.

Number one, it was difficult. As somebody who was doing it in passing, there was a lot of cleaning that was involved that I wasn’t expecting. The amount of biomass I was able to create from this small little wall was crazy. It was interesting to see the amount of food that I could produce if I wanted to. For whatever reason, it hasn’t shaken out the expenditures for vertical farming and hydroponics. It makes much more sense to use the sun. It’s not even a comparison.

I have been in the early days of this stuff. The sun is the source of energy, and why we have life on this planet altogether. We need to be able to harness that better. There’s some balance to that. Maybe being able to do more rooftop-type stuff or still get the food closer to the consumers, but some balance to it.

The sun is the real source of energy. It is the reason why we have life on this planet together. We need to harness its power better.

The other piece that I wonder is that there’s going to be more than hydroponics and vertical farming. The most important thing in building up that health is the biological component. I worry that when we take those plants that are supposed to grow in soil, there’s that 8 billion microbes in one teaspoon of soil. When we remove that, I wonder if we’re removing that diversity of nutrients to get into those plants.

It ends up being unnatural. We’re looking at more natural food and healthier food. There’s nothing more unnatural. There’s a balance to it. I’ve got buddies in that space. We’re going to get better. It’s those microbes in that microbiome that create the health of those plants and the health of the human. I’ve never seen any data or research on the difference between the nutrient density of those hydroponic crops and that of others. I’m sure they can taste good.

The goal for hydroponics is to have an industrial base for the majority of food agriculture for everything that we eat on a regular basis but to have specialized vegetables or fruits that have a different taste. They use it almost as a scientific experiment because they have these strawberries that are being grown in New Jersey, which are the sweetest strawberries that you’ve ever had. There’s a market for it because these people are paying $25 bucks for six strawberries. It’s a delicacy. It sounds crazy, but it exists.

The guy went from one research lab to 3 or 4, which is not the trend for the majority of these types of spaces. Whatever he is doing is working. It was written up in a few different news article sources. The trend that I see is that it’s going to be more selective. If I want to know what the best blueberry in the world tastes like, it’s going to have to be grown in a lab. If I want excellent blueberries that I’m going to put into a pie or have at the table, that’s where someone like yourself is doing something in the most holistic beneficent way possible. That’s where the majority of the food should be coming from, in my opinion.

There’s balance to it. In the lab, you take Mother Nature out of the equation. In my farming system, that’s all outside. Mother Nature is the number one driver of success by working in Mother Nature’s image and building up the robustness of the microbial community in the soil to make us more resilient to weather. Whether it be too dry, wet, hot, or cold, we’re always subject to whatever Mother Nature throws at us. It’s always going to influence that outcome at the end of the day.

There’s a balance to the whole thing, but it ends up boiling back to the focus on the outcome, quality, and nutrient density and being able to be more regenerative. That’s a good trend that we’re on. It’s got a long, long way to go, but at least it’s picking up speed to set up that set ourselves up for success here in the future.

Robots In Farming

The last topic I wanted to cover is how you feel about robots in the ag space. That’s the next trend that people are hoping to revolutionize the industry. Agriculture was quick to adopt industrial agriculture from an efficiency perspective. Those huge combines and tractors are something that you don’t see the amount of work that is necessary to create something like that. You don’t see a city system. You don’t see a giant excavator that’s the same size as something on an industrial farm. That is a huge machine.

You have more precise and human-oriented robots like Tesla’s Optimus and a bunch of different warehouse types of robots. That’s going to revolutionize a whole number of different industries. When it comes to agriculture, do you see a role for that? Is that something that would democratize the ability to make food?

It’s going to start in more permanent crops and specialty crops like those fruits and vegetables that are going to that end consumer. That’s where a lot of these companies are starting. A lot of the agriculture on the coast and more specialty types of crops. For the Midwest, row crops, corn, soybeans, and wheat are in the middle. I’m sitting in the cab when I’m driving it, but I can hit a button, and it drives itself on a straight line following GPS guidance to the tune of less than one inch of accuracy. It’s accurate. It is efficient to stay one path over from the last path that I made. I’m not overlapping and spreading myself out too much. I’m being efficient.

The biggest thing with large-scale row crop ag where they’re a little bit further out is how do we refill and how do we solve for problems? One of the tasks that a robot will do in agriculture is to plant. When I fill up my corn planter, I can plant a set allotment of acres, and I run out of corn. I have to stop and physically refill it. If a robot is going to completely do that on its own, the refilling process also has to be automated. That’s one of the limitations.

The robots could plant on their own. That’s already happening. A human still has to be there to refill it. You can have one human refilling five robots and be more efficient that way. It’s the case, but that’s one of those limitations of refueling. On the combine, I have to empty out that combine once the tank gets full. I can only harvest so much. If the grain tank gets full, I need to empty that tank into a wagon, and that wagon takes the grain to a grain bin or holds it off of the field where I can store it and sell it.

It’s some of those next steps of how I handle the product that I’m applying or how I handle the product that I am harvesting. When you’re talking about the volumes of corn and soybeans, it’s massive amounts that it takes huge equipment to automate at the scale needed. That’s where I’m more bullish on robots that are already helping in those specialty crops. We’re talking about handling apples, strawberries, or blueberries. We’re talking smaller volumes of allotments and packaging. That’s easier for this type of robotics, but it’s going to continue to come to large-scale agriculture.

Where I see my farm in the future is that there’s going to be less folks that are involved in broad-scale row crop agriculture. Those of us who are involved are going to have to be able to handle more with less people. It’s going to require automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. It has to be there to get that done. I’m ultra-bullish on the trend. We’re going to see it in these specialty crops before broad acre row crops, but we’re already seeing at least a middle ground where it’s GPS guidance. It’s not full automation.

We have done drones on our farm. We’ve experimented with these things. I’ve used small helicopter-type drones that can spread cover crops or apply seeds or fertilizer, but they only hold a payload. At the time, when we were messing with the one, it was holding 35 pounds worth of payload. I was applying a cover crop. In a lot of cases, we apply about 45 pounds to the acre. It has to be refilled more than once an acre.

Even on our small farm of 700 acres, you have to refill the thing more than 700 times, which was running out every 7 to 8 minutes. I can refill my large-scale planter and plant for three hours without stopping versus some of these smaller equipment that we’d have to refill a lot. It boils back to the fact that we have to automate the next step, which would be refilling, refueling, and changing batteries. A lot of these are battery-powered. It’s not fossil fuel.

I grew up in Florida. I’m sure that you’re familiar with it. Florida is a huge agricultural basin. My parents used to take us out to these You-Pick farms where you would go. It was an event. We’re going to pick our own strawberries. This was something that was enjoyable, but it was terrible work. It was difficult. That was me in middle school.

I see that as the natural progression for robots. I would hope that some of these more menial tasks can be offloaded to them. Human beings can be used for things that we get more enjoyment out of. That’s what I hope that technology does in general. Let’s focus on our family and hang out with each other while the robot takes care of the dishes and things I don’t want to do. I hope that’s the future that we have in our house and your farm. That’s something that everybody can look forward to.

 

 

Legacy Building

We are getting close to the end of our time. I did want to finish with the same three questions that I ask all my guests to get an idea of people who are pushing the future forward, like yourself. Where are they coming from? What is it that they’re thinking about? The first one for me is that you can tell behind me that it’s about inspiration.

I get a lot of my inspiration from science fiction when I look at all the different media that are associated with science fiction. Utopian science fiction is something that I look forward to. I would love to live in a world without disease or hunger, where we, as humans, can maximize our own capabilities without experiencing any difficulties. That’s me. What about you? Where do you gain your inspiration from?

A lot of mine comes from that legacy aspect. Being a seventh-generation farmer for 150 years, I’ve got a legacy to uphold. My family and the generation before me that had to do this stuff without this technology and automation had it tough. Luckily, they were able to struggle through and make it to set me up for success. I want to be able to continue to carry that on.

At Continuum Ag, we’re doing it at scale. We’re in 43 states and 20 countries. Our mission is to help a million family farms profit from improving their soil health because regenerative agriculture is the future. You can be more profitable like my small family farm, but we can scale it to get all these positive outcomes. A lot of my inspiration comes from helping those family farms, which is the legacy of my operation.

Regenerative agriculture is the future. You can be more profitable through it and scale it to get all the positive outcomes.

I see that regenerative agriculture is more promising than the ag system we’re in now. Agriculture has one of the highest suicide rates of any industry. That is crazy to think. The reason is in this industrial system, a lot of farmers feel like they’re on the hamster wheel. You’re stuck in this high input system where our margins are terrible margins because it’s open. We’re in a commodity system. Companies that are selling inputs know how much money we’re making. Therefore, they know how much they can charge for those products to help us skimp through and pay down the banker and the operating line.

It’s a heavy debt-financed industry. It’s a hamster wheel system. It’s lonely out here in rural America. A farmer could be out there on their farm all day, 12 to 14-hour days for multiple days on end without any break, besides maybe going to church for a couple of hours on Sunday morning and back at it. That’s the life of a lot of family farms. Hard work day in and day out and not make a whole lot of money at the end of the day. I see a better future where farmers can be more profitable and resilient and invest back in those rural communities, which are the backbone of Middle America.

Go-To Content

I have two other questions, but I wanted to ask you a side question. We’re going to do four for you as opposed to my normal three. When you’re out there, and you’re working twelve hours a day by yourself or with one other person, do you listen to music? Do you listen to podcasts? What content do you listen to or experience to make the day more enjoyable? I can tell you that when I’m in the operating room for ten hours a day, I’m listening to music. I’m not listening to a podcast, but it’s a similar experience. It’s a hardworking job. What content do you consume?

It’s an array of stuff. A lot of the new tractors are all Bluetooth from your phone. It’s all the new radios. Podcasts and plenty of music. The greatest thing that’s happened to me here is that I have YouTube TV on my phone. I can be out there. I’m talking about harvesting stuff and football season. It’s living the dream. I got the tractor going. It’s driving itself. I’m chilling.

That’s not a bad life. You should promote that. I guarantee more people would want to go into agriculture. I can’t watch YouTube while I’m doing surgery.

The problem is for a lot of our rolling landscapes of self-signal and rural broadband availability. There are some of those things that technology still catches up on. It’s an array of different things. What’s fun is when you’re out there on the farm, you’re working with Mother Nature. The days go fast. I’m sure a lot of your days fly by, which you love. That’s the same thing that we’re doing. Farmers farm because they love it and working with Mother Nature and that positive future that we’re talking about.

Future Of Agriculture

I always wonder because we’re all different, but we’re all similar, especially when you hear people doing something that’s similar experience. I want to know how they make the day a little bit better. Next question. Where do you see agriculture in several years? What do you hope to see from agriculture in several years?

This brings up one of the topics I wanted to hit on, which is data-driven agriculture, where we are more connected to the consumer. Consumers are more connected with where the products come from. I see a lot of movement around lowering the carbon footprint of agriculture and carbon intensity. Agriculture is part of every supply chain that’s out there. We’re providing fuel through ethanol. We’re providing food and industrial materials. There is a lot of stuff coming from agriculture.

US agriculture accounts for 10% of the US carbon footprint. It’s energy, transportation, and buildings. Agriculture is a huge part of the carbon footprint, but we’re putting a lot of focus on decarbonizing and quantifying carbon intensity. My farm is carbon-negative. Instead of losing carbon and having a carbon footprint polluting the atmosphere as a result of farming, we are carbon-negative because of these regenerative practices.

The opportunity here in the future is to tell that story. There are some interesting things happening with the Inflation Reduction Act and being able to create low-carbon renewable biofuels. When we’re filling up our gas tanks, we can do it with American-grown regeneratively, producing low carbon fuel rather than using fossil fuel with a high carbon footprint. A lot of opportunity there for connecting with the consumer where I can show them, “Here are the practices, but here are some data about my carbon footprint and biological impact.” That’s where I see things going to tell that story.

Promising Technology

The last question, as alluded to, is technology, which is not associated with my field, but I can’t get enough of it. I’m reading it and excited about it. For me, it’s consumer robots. I cannot wait until I have a robot that can fold my laundry for me. I’m going to be first in line for that robot. That’s something that I’m excited about, but everybody is different.

I was talking with one guy. He was excited about the new Apple Vision Pro, the augmented reality. Another guy was talking about artificial intelligence assistance. It would be great to say, “Siri, get me a barbershop appointment at 2:30.” It does it for you. What about you? What technology that is coming down the pipeline is not agriculturally associated, or it could be, but you can’t get enough of and are excited about?

I enjoyed the robotic-type stuff you’re talking about. Having that Roomba to vacuum is awesome. Where my head went to that I’m bullish on is the NFT blockchain concept, which has a decentralized system for creating contracts for transparency for monitoring carbon footprint. I’m bullish on that. I’ve only dabbled a little bit in NFTs at this point, but it is a new technology. I’m bullish on where that is going to go with tokenizing everything, creating more transparency, and decentralizing that NFT piece. I’ll end up with businesses in that space in the future. I am likely combining some of that technology with agriculture, but I am bullish on that concept.

Closing Words

Thank you so much for being with us. For those of you guys who are joining us regularly, please like and subscribe. It helps me out. It helps people like Mitchell out. Feel free to add me to your normal podcast that you’re listening to on the tractor. Have a great day, everybody. Thanks again, Mitchell, for coming to see us. Thanks.

It’s awesome to hang out.

 

Important Links

• Mitchell Hora – LinkedIn
• Continuum Ag

 

About Mitchell Hora

Mitchell Hora is a visionary leader at the intersection of agriculture and technology, dedicated to revolutionizing the way farmers approach soil health. As the Founder and CEO of Continuum Ag, Mitchell has steered the company to become a prominent soil health data intelligence company, empowering over 1 million farmers to enhance their profitability through sustainable and regenerative practices.

A seventh-generation farmer hailing from Washington, Iowa, Mitchell’s roots run deep in agriculture. His journey began with a focus on agronomy consulting and now Mitchell is inspiring farmers to be proactive in managing their data to create new markets.

Mitchell’s passion for innovation and sustainable farming practices led him to establish Continuum Ag while he was a student at Iowa State University. Graduating with dual degrees in Agronomy and Ag Systems Technology, he has seamlessly blended academic knowledge with practical, on-the-ground experience.

Acknowledged as an Ag Industry Leader and Soil Health Steward, Mitchell has been recognized with prestigious awards. In 2023, he received the IFELA Environmental Excellence Award, underscoring his commitment to environmentally responsible agricultural practices. Mitchell’s foresight and contributions to the industry were also celebrated when he earned a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2021. Additionally, he was recognized as a 30 Under 30 AgGrad honoree in 2020, further solidifying his position as a trailblazer in the agricultural sector.

Mitchell Hora continues to be a driving force in the agricultural community, advocating ways for growers to monetize data by telling their stories and showcasing how they can be part of the solution.