The technology know-how of Silicon Valley is meeting the expertise of today's farmers in a new tech start-up company with Quad-City roots.

Farmers Business Network, or FBN, is a farmer-to-farmer information network founded a year ago in Silicon Valley by a team of technology and agriculture veterans. Using actual field data provided anonymously by farmers, the network offers independent, real world data on input, agronomic and yield performances to the member network of farmers.

"At FBN we take the conversations that farmers are already having at the coffee shop, at the elevator or at the co-op, then take it online and are substantiating it with data," said Charles Baron, the company's co-founder. "Farmers have been advising each other for thousands of years. FBN gives them a platform to do so with real information on a massive scale so they can make the most-informed decisions."

Headquartered in San Carlos, Calif., FBN was founded in April 2014, with its first data collection coming from farmers in the Monmouth and Galesburg, Ill., area, he said. Since then, FBN has expanded to 17 states and opened its Midwest headquarters in the Northwest Bank Tower in Davenport.

FBN will introduce the network to farmers from across the Midwest at a launch party at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the RME's Redstone Room in downtown Davenport.

The launch comes on the heels of FBN's announcement last week that it has raised $15 million in funding, led by Google Ventures, to help take its expansion nationwide. In addition to Google Ventures, the latest investment round includes prior investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DBL Investors. The new round brings total FBN's funding to $28 million, the company reported.

While farming has moved deeper into precision agriculture and machines have become more sophisticated and capable of gathering data, Baron said farmers lacked a means of sharing data and learning from one another. By networking data from thousands of fields, he said they can benefit from a wider base of data.

"If I'm a farmer, effectively, I'm generating data from my machinery — yield maps, harvest information — but I have no way to look beyond my own farm. There is a lot of power to be able to look in your region as well as beyond your region."

Baron, the company's vice president of product, brings his experience at Google to the new technology company. His co-founder and CEO, Amol Deshpande, has worked his entire career in agriculture, spending the past six years as an entrepreneur and investor in ag startup companies.

"It is rare to find a team that bridges the gap between Silicon Valley tech starts and expertise in agricultural markets," said Google Ventures general partner Andy Wheeler, who will join FBN's board of directors. ''Today, there are greater opportunities for farmers to scale their businesses than ever before, and we're excited to work with the FBN team as they build the next wave of productivity in agriculture."

Using the anonymous data supplied by the members, FBN analyzes information from across the country and produces advanced analytics, including yield benchmarking, real world seed performance and matching on more than 490 varieties. The membership fee is $500.

After getting its start in Monmouth, he said FBN "very quickly grew from the first time we met with a handful of farmers." To date, it has collected data from 17 states, analyzing more than 7 million acres of data and all the major row crops.

Baron and Deshpande founded the company with other agriculture and technology veterans. According to Baron, with the big investment by Google, FBN will be expanding its Davenport headquarters as well as spread out over the United States.

"We just hired our second person out of Iowa State, and what's great about our team in Davenport is almost all of them grew up on a farm. One even farms at night," Baron said.

FBN employs 18 in California as well as five employees in both Davenport and Monmouth and about 12 in rural areas across the Midwest. It also has an office in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Since the Google funding was announced, Baron said the company has received "hundreds and hundreds of emails from across the world."

"We have a very personal mission to using this minformation to help farmers and empower farmers," he said. "Farmers deserve access to this information. This is their information, and they deserve access to the combined knowledge of farmers."

Source - http://qctimes.com