Bushel releases new product suite to help facilitate payments for the ag industry

By Andrew Weeks

Bushel, an independently-owned software technology company that develops digital tools for the ag industry, hosted its first customer conference in early July.

It was an impressive event with positive feedback from clients and customers, according to Jake Joraanstad, the company’s co-founder and CEO. The other co-founder is Ryan Raguse, who serves as company president.

Bushel, which livestreamed the event, unveiled a new platform during the conference – a three-pronged network, really, that addresses the challenges of facilitating payments for nearly 90% of a $200 billion industry through paper checks.

Bushel’s platform allows agricultural producers and agribusinesses to move money in real time across the agriculture supply chain, eliminating the need for paper checks and making money transfers more efficient. Primarily, the platform will facilitate those working in the grain supply chain.

The three platforms – or Bushel’s product suite, all trademarked –include:

• Bushel Payments, a money movement facilitator between growers and agribusinesses already on the Bushel platform;

• Bushel Wallet, which the company describes as the first-ever digital wallet created specifically for the complexity and scale of agri business and available for farmers to download from the app stores; and

• Bushel Wallet Link, an API that allows any agribusiness to embed payments in their application or web environment and connect to Bushel Wallet’s network to move money.

Joraanstad, in a follow-up interview with Prairie Business, said the ag industry has definitely been challenged in recent years.

“This was a core problem we set out to solve – helping remove the amount of paperwork and manual labor put into the buying and selling of grain,” he said. “Everything’s paper checks, paper contracts, and paper settlements. Everything’s kind of in the mail. It was very inefficient.”

He said his company’s focus is to help create efficiencies for ag companies, many of which have challenges around labor shortages, “whether it’s making it easier for them to get a contract signed or not having to print as many checks.”

Farmers can submit offers, sign contracts, and sell their grain right on their phone. About 90% of industry payments are by checks, Joraanstad said. Contrast that with Australia and some other countries, which primarily use digital means to transfer money.

“We’re way behind in the digital curve of for farms,” he said, noting his company seeks to change that. One of the tools, Bushel Payments, allows the farmer to simply enroll in the network electronically and, once enrolled, it is “really easy for the farmer and the facility to do business together and get paid.”

The company has spent the past five years building its digital infrastructure for the ag industry, something for which Joraanstad takes great pride.

Bushel was founded in 2011 and continues to evolve in the marketplace. He said one of the things that prompted him to start his business was witnessing the digital front with mobile technology.

“I was excited about software, particularly mobile technology. The iPhone and the Android coming out was what I thought was a really big deal and would probably change how we thought about business,” he said. “And so that’s why we started the company back in 2011. We realized throughout those years of building the software for these different companies that we really understood agriculture better than most in the software industry. We were really excited about what that would look like, to focus on agriculture as our core. We started doing that and launched the Bushel product.”

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Well, not quite.

Joraanstad said this year’s customer conference may have been the first for the company, but it won’t be the last. Look for more in the future.

Also, “In the next six months, we’re going to make announcements with some partners that are participating in the payments network that we’re building for agriculture,” he said. “And there’s more to come with our tools that will help our facilities do business with each other. … Those tools we’re building next, called Bushel Fulfillment, are going to be pretty powerful and help make it more efficient to do business.”