AgEmerge Podcast 085 Clint Brauer with Greenfield Robotics

Welcome Clint Brauer, CEO and Founder of Greenfield Robotics. Clint has a great story. He grew up farming in south central Kansas and went to K State where he got into technology. After graduating from college and spending a decade plus in media and technology, in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, Clint decided to return to his roots in Kansas, launching MG Honor Farms on the family farmstead.

Clint began adopting regenerative ag principles but was frustrated with the limitations of current tools and technology for regenerative farming and the dream of organic no-till, so he decided to launch a company where he could use his technology experience to solve the scaling issues of regenerative broadacre systems. Clint and his team are doing some exciting work and he and Monte explore that today.

Clint grew up in Kansas and learned as a child how to train dairy cattle, grow vegetables and farm broadacre crops. After college, he began his career with W3-Design, an early web design agency in Los Angeles, where he managed their top clients. Clint then worked for Universal Music where he helped with the data asset management project for digital distribution of music. In 2003, Clint joined Sony and his role quickly expanded to VP of Marketing, CRM and Operations of Sony Connect, an early cutting-edge video service which blazed a path for mainstream services like Netflix and Hulu.

Clint’s team created one of the first true 360 degree views of customers across ecommerce, email, offline and online campaigns and the call centers. This involved integration of early stage SaaS companies Omniture, RightNow, PostFuture, Pivotlink and an internal ecommerce system. Clint also drove the division toward SEO as a customer acquisition strategy over traditional media deals. His team then successfully launched the Sony eReader and software across North America, both online and at retail, and also worked with book publishers to substantially decrease the cost of ebook conversion.

After a decade plus in media and technology, Clint returned to his roots in Kansas, launching MG Honor Farms on the family farmstead. Clint has grown and marketed over 100+ crops without chemicals outdoors, in traditional greenhouses as well as hydroponic greenhouses. Clint has also advised over 10 farms with their marketing, helping them secure distribution into 35+ grocery stores such as all Kansas City-area Whole Foods and Hy-Vee’s as well as 25+ restaurants and 4 school systems.

In 2015 Clint started Canidae Farms, a regenerative farm network for Canidae Pet Foods (canidae.com/farms), which he continues to operate. In this role he is working with farms to adopt regenerative agriculture practices in return for higher margins. Canidae was acquired by L Catterton in 2018 and the program is now expanding again in 2020 with partner farms in Kansas and Nebraska.

Frustrated with the limitations of current tools and technology for regenerative farming, Clint decided to launch a company to solve the scaling issues of regenerative broadacre systems. He recruited Carl Sutter and Steven Gentner, two talented engineers he met decades ago at W3-design, to co-found Greenfield Robotics. The company has been working for several years on its small, autonomous robots for weed control, and is currently in customer pilots.

https://www.greenfieldrobotics.com/
https://www.facebook.com/greenfieldrobotics/
https://twitter.com/GreenfieldBots
https://www.instagram.com/greenfieldrobotics/
linkedin.com/company/greenfield-robotics/

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