The Ames-based autonomous farming platform Smart Ag has been acquired by Raven Industries, a Sioux Falls-based industrial company with the precision agriculture division Raven Applied Technology. The acquisition falls under the newly-established Raven Autonomy, the company’s strategic growth platform for autonomous agriculture solutions announced on Oct. 28. Smart Ag launched in 2015 and is most […]

SwineTech, a Cedar Rapids-based agtech startup designing products to protect piglets from accidental crushing by their mothers, received October’s Business of the Month award by America’s SBDC Iowa. SwineTech has won multiple awards from MIT, the American Farm Bureau and the Investors Hall of Fame; co-founders Matthew Rooda and Abraham Espinoza have also been recognized […]

The Iowa AgriTech Accelerator will host its third Demonstration Day at the Des Moines Embassy Club Oct. 15 in conjunction with the World Food Prize and 2019 Borlaug Dialogue and International Symposium. Doors open at 5 p.m. and presentations will begin at 5:30 p.m. More than 120 volunteer mentors worked with the accelerator’s four agtech […]

Nadilia Gomez will join the Iowa AgriTech Accelerator as executive director beginning on Aug. 1, the accelerator announced. Gomez joins the accelerator from  Corteva Agriscience, where she served as a senior research scientist in Predictive Ag, and a digital pillar leader of the Disruptive Business Innovation Portfolio. At Corteva, Gomez was responsible for tactical and […]

Global regulatory portfolio lead – soybeans, Corteva Agriscience Tiny seeds link Iowa’s past to the cutting-edge work at Corteva AgriScience, Agriculture Division of DowDuPont. The story began in the 1920s when Henry A. Wallace started Hi-Bred Corn Co., later known as Pioneer Hi-Bred, working on seed genetics. In the late 1990s, Dow would come to […]

Five agtech startups have been selected to the 2019 cohort of the Iowa AgriTech Accelerator, the accelerator announced this week. The program will run from June 3 to Aug. 30 in the East Village, with final Demonstration Day pitches during the World Food Prize in October. Participants are Otrafy (Vancouver, Canada); droneSAR (Des Moines); Vitalgia (Heerlen, […]