This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again, more Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I Heart's twice as large as the next two combined, learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I Heart. Business and the ways we do it are changing in ways that are both more subtle and more radical than you realize. Welcome to Compound Interest from SEMA4 Business. I'm Liz Hoffman. And I'm Rohan Giswamy. We've been covering the forces behind this revolution. But now we want to talk directly to the people driving that change. Each week, we'll talk to the operators, the experts, and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels to companies that will finance through sushi order. We'll unpack the transformation of how business and consumers engage with our economy and figure out what lies ahead. Listen to Compound Interest from SEMA4 Business, wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] Pushkin. Just a quick note. Today's episode is the last one of 2025. And for 2026, we want to make the show better. We want to make a show that you like more. To that end, it would be extremely helpful to us and hopefully ultimately also helpful to you. If you could take a brief survey that we have put together online. There's a link to the survey in the show notes, and I'll give you the URL. It's tinyurl.com/WypListenerServe. Again, tinyurl.com/Wyp, like what's your problem, listen or survey. Or just click on the link in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening to the show. And thank you in advance for helping us make the show better. Tim Buker grew up on his family's dairy farm in rural Northern California. You know how when you're a kid, you always wait for summer vacation from school. My brother and I, we actually, we hated summer vacation because that meant, you know, 80 hours a week of work out in the open field. So, you know, our friends would always say, "Oh, I can't wait until school's out and we would go." No, I, I, I, I don't, I want to stay in school. Tim went off to college, started out studying agriculture, but switched to computer science. And after he graduated, he founded a string of companies. One of them he sold to Microsoft, another he sold to Apple. But all along, he kept farming on the side. And eventually, his farming life and his tech life came together. As just kind of a weekend side project on the farm, he and a few friends built on autonomous tractor. That weekend side project has now turned into a company powering autonomous tractors across the Western U.S. and parts of Australia. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is what's your problem. The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Tim Buker. He's a longtime farmer and the founder and CEO of Agtonomy. Tim's problem is this. How do you bring autonomous vehicles to specialty crops? Crops like grapes and olives and almonds and apples? There's already lots of autonomous equipment for row crops, like corn, wheat and soybeans. But as you'll hear, specialty crops present a particularly tricky set of challenges. Tim and I talked about the big picture about what autonomy will mean for farming and for food. But to start, I asked him about how he got from farming to computer science in the first place. So you go off to college, study agriculture, Davis as a California farm kid does, right? And did I share you say in another interview that you lost a bet and as a result of losing the bet had to take a computer science class? Yes, you heard right. What was the bet? Let's just say it was at a fraternity party. So it might have involved beer, I don't know. I like that it's a drunken fraternity party that leads you into a career as a computer scientist. Like that is an interesting combination. Yeah, it was the greatest bet I ever lost. But what was interesting though, I, all my friends growing up, their last names were Sigecio, Fapiano, Bouchecalupi, Gallo. These were incredible grape growing and why making families back in the 70s even. And I would always go over to their places to help them because that's what play dates were back then, as you basically went over to your friend's farm and worked with them. And I would learn how to prune grapes and even make wine. And I was fascinated by that industry, like incredibly fascinated by the growing of grapes. So, you know, I went to UC Davis for agriculture and yes, I lost a bet and took a class in a 500 person auditorium. Now, keep in mind, I didn't grow up with any technology. I mean, like tractors, that was about it. But the professor started talking and I'm in the last row and the professor started talking and everything he was saying I understood. And it just kind of hit me. And by the end of that quarter, UC Davis was on the quarter system, I was up front teaching the class. And so I knew something happened. Like I found a passion, like the passion I had for agriculture. And so I had a decision to make is do I go the agriculture route or do I go this computer science route or this high tech route. And I said, you know what, I'm going to do both. I then graduated from Davis and I went on to Stanford and grad school and then started bouncing between Silicon Valley and Sonoma County because when I was 16, I actually bought my first vineyard. Small little two acres and I love farming that and that's kind of what got me to, you know, get my own larger place as I did through the decades, which is now called Tritori Farms Tritori, which means tractor and Italian. Because I wanted to name it after my childhood passion and that's where that's where kind of that whole thing started. The duality or the dual path of agriculture and high tech. You have these sort of parallel lives going for a while, right? You're working for Steve Jobs, you're starting companies. You've got a farm up in Sonoma, you got a little plane, you're flying back and forth, right? And tell me, so tell me about the farm part of your life. Like that's, you know, we're going to bring back the technology in a minute, but you're grown up, you have a real farm. Like what's your farm? Well, it started as a small little vineyard, only two acres. And then through the years, I would do what's called it 1031 tax free exchanging at a bigger, bigger piece of land. And then, you know, I don't know about 25 years ago, I got a much bigger piece of land. Yet two acres, by the way, two acres isn't even a farm, right? Two acres is like a yard. Yeah, pretty much a yard. Good call. But it was French Columbard grapes and Zinfandel grapes. So, so, you know, fast forward to years later as I would kind of get bigger and bigger places, I got this one place which was amazing. Beautiful hill slides, I had a vision for it, but it was just a forest. And I started clearing it for, you know, the intention of growing more grapes. And I encountered these stumps, you know, equidistance throughout the land. And I was like, what is this? And then finally, I uncovered some old olive trees from like the 1800s. And so, did some research and realized, well, this was part of a big, you know, Spanish land grant growing olives back in the 1800s. So, I decided to bring that history back. And that's what got me into olives. So, I grow olives for olive oil and grapes for wine. And I have a winery operation, public tasting room. So, kind of bouncing between two worlds for decades. So, before you started egg tonne of meat, tell me about the way you brought technology to your farm. Like, what did you automate? Yeah, I was unique in that I was a farmer, but I was also an engineer. I had both, you know, electrical engineering background as well as computer science background. So, I could do things like create, you know, automated water recycling plants that, you know, had the flow meters everywhere. And you know, how to inject different microbes to process the wastewater and then inject it back into the irrigation automatically. I had, you know, obviously all kinds of basic things like cameras and whatnot. But even in the fermentation of grapes, the tanks are all computer controlled. So, you know, you know, you can use computer controls, whether to use, you know, active refrigeration, which costs energy. Or if the outside air is cooler than the inside, it automatically switches over and brings that kind of air in. So, you know, everything from fermentation processes to water recycling to irrigation is radically automated. So, I had automated darn near everything I could.
And I didn't know I was actually doing Agtech when I was doing this. Agtech wasn't a word that existed back. You were just like puttering around on the weekends? I was puttering around on the weekends or nighttimes, whatever. I just knew my farm needed technology to automate things because keep in mind, I was also bouncing between Sonoma County and Silicon Valley. And so I needed technology to also be able to monitor things. But there was one area I hadn't automated. And that was the actual work in the orchards and the vineyards. And I was sitting there going, "Well, you know, I automated this. I automated that. Hey, maybe I should try my hand at automating the fieldwork. There's so much money being invested in autonomous passenger vehicles. And there's so much technology that's evolved there. I wonder if I could just apply that to this space and see if I can create an autonomous vehicle that can do these kinds of repetitive tasks like mowing, like spraying, like under-vying cultivation, like seeding, like disking, things of that nature where you're just going back and forth up and down the rows. Just to be clear, there had been a fair bit of automation, but on the big ag row crop, like corn and wheat side, as I understand it, but not so much on the permanent crop kind of fruit and nut side. Is that right? Was that the sort of state of play? Exactly, Jacob. So in row crops or in broad acre farming, the big million-dollar tractors or half million-dollar tractors, there has been automation there for decades. Things called auto-steer. You're on these flat areas, very big fields. You can see the sky, GPS had evolved. So it would be somewhat accurate, a meter, whatever it might be. And so you could just control the vehicles based on that. When you think about permanent crops, which is a huge percentage value wise of our food supply, the permanent crops, you're talking about trees and vines that are very, very expensive. They take many years to develop. And so if you hit them, it's kind of a big deal. It's kind of expensive. And you have to get really close to them. So you're not talking about being in an open field where you can be plus or minus half a meter. You're talking about being one inch away from the trunks of these trees. And if you accidentally move abruptly or don't steer correctly, you're going to hit it. So you can't rely on kind of the things that you can rely on in broad acre farming and the row crop farming. So there needed to be more advanced technology. And thankfully, due to all the attention and investments that were being made in the autonomous passenger vehicle world, that technology started to become available. Call it maybe less than a decade ago. But when I said seven years ago, like, hey, my expenses are continuing to go up at Tatori, I've automated darn near everything. But I haven't automated the fieldwork. Could we take some of that technology and could we create a solution, an autonomous solution that could do these repetitive tasks that you need to do in permanent crops? And so with some friends built a prototype five years ago. And the prototype worked really well. We literally built an all-electric autonomous tractor. What did it look like and what did it do? Didn't look like a traditional tractor. We took out the diesel engine. We put in electric motors and batteries. And we put on cameras. And we had an NVIDIA compute system in it. And we started to create this sensor-based vehicle. It had eight wheels. It articulated. And it could do really steep slopes. And one of the reasons why we did that is because at Tatori, the slopes are very, very steep. By the way, one of the main inspirations for doing this autonomous vehicle came from a documentary I watched. I think it was a National Geographic. It was called Mission to Mars, the story of spirit and opportunity. And these were Mars rovers in the '90s that NASA shot up. And we're hoping would operate for 15 days or a couple of months. And they ended up lasting almost 15 years. And I was watching this documentary before I actually built this prototype. And it reminded me that, hey, there are environments where you can take your time in making decisions. So they had animations of how the rover would approach a rock. And it would just stop. And then it would radio JPL. It would take some time to radio JPL. They would take a week and write some new code. They would then download it. And then the vehicle, the rover, would move to the left. And after that, whenever it encountered a rock, it would move to the left or to the right. And I said to myself, my god, they had autonomous vehicles operating on Mars in the '90s. And they could do it because there wasn't a lot of traffic on Mars, just like agriculture. And that's when my head really exploded. And I said, wait, there are these industrial markets that need automation. And you don't necessarily have to immediately be responsive to the vehicle if it encounters something it can't figure out. Like, oh, there's a tree in front of me. Unlike on a road in traffic. Correct. Correct. So when you build this prototype, you don't even know as a prototype as you're telling it, right? This thing that you're doing with your friends. I mean, it sounds like a lot of the sort of tech stack is basically commodified by that point. I mean, is it a sort of-- you're at this moment where you can be like, oh, we'll buy these sensors. And we'll start with this piece of software. And like, you can almost build an autonomous vehicle from off the shelf parts. Is that sort of the starting point? From a hardware perspective, absolutely. From a software perspective, no. At that time. So no, we were actually building a perception stack. That could do all the-- well, first, you have to localize. So you have to figure out where in the world do you are. And so we did need to see GPS at least once. But then the computer vision technologies and the perception stack could then align to the crop itself. One of the big differences in approach that we took that obviously the roadcrops, the broad acre farms don't need to do, is we actually said, hey, what if we exploit the structure of the crop itself and utilize that structure to navigate safely through it and farm precisely around it? Meaning like, know what a tree is and know what your relationship should be to a tree. Is that what that means? Correct. And in the early days, we said, hey, there's one common characteristic in permanent crops. They all have a trunk. So what if we could be the best detectors of trunks in the world and utilize that for alignment? And as I said, also working around that plant. So that's the key sort of training piece, like you train really hard on trunks? That's right. That's right. We initially labeled trunks. We would drive through. We would get tons of photos. And we would manually label around the trunk area. And then we would take those images and we would tweak them and create synthetic data. And we would label those. And once you get enough of a data set, you can start to do some additional machine learning with that. And what was interesting was we got so good at detecting trunks. We even called it trunk vision. We trademark trunk vision. Not that-- we do a lot more than trunk vision today. But that's how we got it to run through the orchards and run through the vineyards. And what was really interesting is we initially trained on grapes on grapevines and the rootstock, the trunk. And one day my CTOs, he said, hey, let's run it in the olives. And I'm like, oh, but you sure it's going to work? He's like, I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know how well the training will translate. And so we set it off in the olives, and it just worked. Now, it wasn't perfect, but it made us realize, wow, there's a lot of leverage between crops here in these permanent crop areas. It generalizes. It generalizes really well. And of course, he's continued to evolve that. And we now do all kinds of additional training to make sure in a new crop type, we are very, very accurate in exploiting the structure of the crop. Besides driving through trees without hitting them, which I recognize is non-trivial, what else did the tractor do? Did it do work? Yes, it did work. It mode. Initially, the very, very first job we did was mowing, because we have cover crops. Sometimes the cover crop gets like six feet tall. And you chop it up with a flail mower. And then it composts in between the trees or the vines. And even that, like you think mowing-- oh, yeah, you just set it at four miles an hour and you let it go. You cannot do that, right? Because think about what a human does. A human's on a vehicle. It's really funny. I asked my engineers, you know, well, did you ever use a push mower when you were a kid? And they're like, what's a push mower? Anyway, separate topic. But push mower is really hard. It's harder than you think. That was my experience. Push mower means a mower without an engine. It doesn't just mean a gas mower that you put right. Right. Right. And then we got motorized mowers for lawns, right? That you actually had wheels and had them engine on them. But even with those,
If you would go through the grass and if it would bog down as the person operating that lawnmower, you would slow it down in order for the blades to catch up. And so if you think about it, you can't just set a tractor going to mow, you need to get that feedback to understand if it's bogging down. And therefore you need to slow down or increase the RPM in order to do the job properly. So that's something we learned immediately. But we already thought about that because we were all farmers. We had farmer DNA in us and we knew that's how a human operates. So we just, we started to think, okay, how does a human do this? And what are the things we're going to need feedback on like a human has in order to get the job done correctly? So we started with mowing and we became really, really good at it. So you have your prototype and you decide to start a company. What do you have to do to turn your prototype into something you can sell? What's the leap? Yeah, this was a big leap. My mechanical engineering co-founders was like whipping up all kinds of cool ideas. And then I thought about it as a farmer and I said, wait a minute. As a grower, would I trust a startup company for a new tractor? Think about it, right? I'm a farm. I rely upon equipment to get my job done and that job is vital for the livelihood of the business, for the livelihood of the family, if it's a family farm. So why would I trust a startup? Instead, what I need as a grower is I need trusted brands. I need their dealer networks. I need the parts. I need the service. This equipment needs to be operating all the times that I need it for the sustainability of my business. And so I said to my colleagues, I said, you know what? I don't think we should build a tractor. I think that would be rather stupid. And I explained why and they said, oh, that makes sense. And they said, well, how can we work with existing original equipment manufacturers? These incredible equipment manufacturers who've been at it for over 100 years. And they build incredible vehicles that really work well in these harsh environments. And so, you know, at first, investors that I was talking about, hey, we're going to do an OEM model and, you know, original equipment manufacturer. We're going to help accelerate their digital transformation. Because we know where the puck is going, right? We know that this industry too, just like other industries, needs to go through a digital transformation. Every day, there's less and less skilled operators who go into agriculture. So the equipment manufacturers know, you know, they see the writing on the wall. They're not going to sell as much equipment because like there's less people at operating them. So, they know automation is really important. And they know how to build incredible iron, but do they know how to build an AI factory? And that's what I said, you know, we would focus on is that we would build software to make their incredible equipment, incredibly smart and provide the solutions that make them autonomous and give growers ultimately new technologies that can help them save money and get an incredible ROI. It's almost like building equipment that comes with a skilled operator built in that you can turn on and off anytime you want. As a bonus, you don't have to have the crazy capital outlay of building a tractor factory, right? I mean, that's a business. It seems way better. It does, but there's one catch. And investors early on would say, well, I don't think you can get an OEM. And we did an OEM and original equipment manufacturer, a tractor company. Yeah, a tractor company. And we did an incredible company called Bobcat, Duson Bobcat. They make excavators large and small. They make skid steers. They make track loaders. They make tractors, like normal looking tractors, right? And they make a forklift. They make all kinds of things. So, you know, really what we're doing is exactly what I said earlier, which is to accelerate the digital transformation of these companies because they know they have to transform. They know they have to bring autonomy into their equipment and create, you know, autonomy-enabled vehicles, right? So we're not like creating tractors. We're just helping them with the brains of the operation. We'll be back in just a minute. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. So, 844, 844 IHeart to get started. That's 844, 844 IHeart. Welcome to Compound Interest from Sama 4 Business. I'm Liz Hoffman. Each week we'll talk to the operators, the experts, and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. And everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels to companies that will finance through sushi order will unpack the transformation of how business and consumers engage with our economy and figure out what lies ahead. Listen to Compound Interest from Sama 4 Business wherever you get your podcasts. What's out there now? Is your software out in the world now? Driving tractors around orchards? And what do they do? And where are they? And how many of them are there? We have tractors throughout the Western United States. And I'm pleased to say that we also have vehicles in Australia. So we're super excited about the capabilities we've enabled in the state of Washington, for example, where apples are number one in the world. We're doing a lot of spraying and a lot of mowing. And it's really, it's very impactful because you're not just having one vehicle, but our customers have many vehicles. They have a fleet of vehicles, and they're able to operate those with one of their employees that they've upskilled to be able to supervise a fleet. And so it's kind of neat to see a whole fleet of vehicles leaving the main shop, driving on the dirt roads out to the different areas where they need to do work, do the work, and then I'll come back. So it's a very seamless operation for them, our software is also on mobile applications, and that's how the main user experience exists. So think of you having the tablet or even just your smartphone. And the site is mapped out, usually with aerial imagery. And you can just point and say, I want to go in Mo, this, you know, this block of the orchard. And we basically can get close to where the crop is. And then once we're close to the crop, that perception stack I mentioned earlier about detecting, you know, or exploiting the structure of the crop itself. Trunk vision. Trunk vision. And it snaps the vehicle to grid, if you will, right? But now once you have trunk vision and you see in front of you, and you can see the terrain to a very high degree of accuracy, you can take mechanical weaters, for example, and manipulate underneath these trees, you know, these robotic weaters, and navigate while you're doing that, very precisely, all under computer control. Whereas when a human does it, you're, you know, driving a vehicle six miles an hour looking forward, you have your hand on six actuators on the, you know, the weater and behind you, and you're trying to make it all work. And inevitably what happens is you don't get the weeds, so the efficacy is not high, or you hit the tree and take it out. And, you know, that again costs a lot of money. So that's why herbicides have been used so much because it's really easy. It's called strip spray and you just spray it and you're done. But that's, that's kind of a thing that we didn't realize, you know, this kind of autonomous technology would really open up is much more offerings for growers so that they don't have to use very expensive ag inputs or herbicides that they've been doing in the past. All this work that you're describing, is it happening in a like commercial way now? Like are you out of the world getting paid for this? Yes, we are. And what's the business model on that note? Yeah, so, so we've been operating in paid pilots in 2023 and 2024. We never intended to be paid for pilots. What happened was we would have these demo days, we'd invite growers and they would say, I want to buy one. I said, well, they're not for sale. Well, I want to rent one. I'm like, well, maybe we can do that. Would you be interested in doing a pilot? Yes.
I'll pay you. And we're like, okay, so in those original prototypes that we built, we actually rented them. And it was kind of cool because it was a very small company. We didn't actually think we were going to recognize revenue until many years in. And I think our first year we did, you know, it was actually close to a million dollars. But then the second year we did several million dollars. That was in 2024. And this year we went big time and we have units operating from Washington, Oregon, California and now Australia. And so our business model right now is we work with the manufacturers. They manufacture everything. They procure all the parts. They bring it into their manufacturing facilities and they create these very high quality machines that are factory fit. Right? A lot of people think, oh, you do retrofit kits on tractors. We do not do that. We believe it's important to work with the engineers of these OEMs to make the equipment much more reliable, much safer and lower cost, much lower cost when you integrate it in. And then when the farmer buys the machine with your software and with your autonomy package in it, like, is it, is it, are they paying you a subscription? Is the price just embedded in the machine and you get some of the money? So the answer is yes to all of those because in some cases the software fees will be embedded in the machine. In some cases you will pay a monthly fee or an annual fee or one time fee, right? Think of Sirius XM. Sirius XM creates technology. It gets embedded by the OEMs in their manufacturing facilities. Satellite radio just to. Satellite radio, excuse me. And goes to the dealers and then the dealers basically sell to the end customer and there's a free trial that comes. And after the free trial, Sirius XM retains those customers and charges a monthly fee. That's a good metaphor. Satellite radio, but for autonomous tractors for high-value crops. Exactly. There's another twist I'll tell you. By the way, the chairman of our company, the chairman of the board is Jim Meyer. He's the former CEO of Sirius XM. Ah-ha, okay. Yeah. And by the way, he's brilliant at business and he really helped shape this kind of business model. What's the technical thing you haven't figured out yet? I'll give you a small example, but it's kind of important. So three point turns. If you think about permanent crops, you're going down these rows and there's a person has a ranch. Let's call it a thousand acres. There might be a fence around the entire thousand acres to keep deer out or whatever it might be. And they try to maximize the land they have. So they plant the crop pretty close to the edge of the fence, let's say. And so when you turn in the headlands, the headland turn, you might not have a lot of space. So you can't just make a kind of you turn at the end of the row and go down the next route. Correct. Correct. Right now we can do about 80% of farmlands and permanent crops. But imagine if we could do three point turns, we can achieve 100%. But there's a twist, right? Because sometimes you don't have an implement. That's the device you attach to the tractor that does the work. So you have implements you can attach for mowing, for spraying, for weeding, for disking, for all kinds of things. Some of those implements are actually trailers. Uh-huh. Okay. So imagine, you know, being on a slight slope with rocky soil and everything. And you have a trailer and you have to do a three point turn to get into the next row. It's a high skill. That's a high skill moment, right? That's a high skill moment. So know what they're doing. Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, autonomy enabled vehicles have lots of cameras. They have, you know, minimum of eight cameras, including rear facing cameras and side facing cameras. You have to really now start to, you know, do very sophisticated modeling of the, you know, physics of that tractor as well as that implement or trailer. Um, which we, which we do today as we go forward, but now we have to do it going backwards. So we haven't mastered that yet, but we're getting close. And I'm super excited about that, both from a technological achievement perspective, as well as a business need. Um, it's nice when they go together. Yeah. So let's imagine a minute like I'm, I'm, you know, there are other people working on other, um, agricultural technology projects, other ag tech projects, even other autonomous projects. Like when you zoom out and think about farming and technology more generally in the medium term, you know, whatever that means, five years, ten years, like, how's the world going to change? Well, so first of all, there are a lot of others working on similar problems. Um, we all have a slight twist, either in business model or in technology approach. I think that equipment in the future is all going to be autonomous capable. And we see the writing on the wall, right, when it comes to labor challenges that we're having. We have a severe labor gap. Um, if I were to ask you, how many people do you know who, you know, whose kids go into agriculture, the answer is probably going to be not that many. I have three children, Jacob, and none of them are taking over the farm. And then, you know, of course, we have things like, you know, some immigration policy changes that have occurred that are only exacerbating the problem. Even in the absence of a labor shortage at some margin, automation wins, right? Like that's what happened with the tractor and like that's right. That's right. So yes, I'm fully prepared to believe. And yes, I can see how the current politics might be accelerating the shift to automation. But yes, so okay, automation is going to win. I stipulated like, what's that going to mean? What's it going to look like? You know, tell me something about the future based on that fact. Think about roadcrops, right? I believe roadcrops are going to radically change. So here is one big inflection point that I think is going to happen. Right now we have these large, large tractors in roadcrops. They cost a million dollars. Fully autonomous ones cost well over that. And why are there big tractors? It's because these, these farms, you know, want as many acres done per hour by one person. But now if automation comes in, you don't necessarily need these large vehicles that have huge ground combustion. So this, this your trillion dollar play now? You're going to disrupt John's year. Is that where this is going? Yes. So, I mean, think about it, right? If you're a grown. The only reason you need to make the vehicle as big as possible is if you have to have a dude on every one of them. That's what you're saying. It's not necessary. It could be like the way it's like a drone swarm. You could do a drone swarm, but for tractors. Brought acres for me. Exactly right. And that's fun. There's some additional benefits, right? So instead of spending a million dollars, you can do more work with five tractors that cost less than that with their implements as well. And now you have some additional benefits. So you actually get more work done faster. And if one of the tractors breaks down, you have your redundancy, right? If your big million dollar tractor breaks down, you got issues. It's like thousands of dollars a minute that, you know, that it's not running. So I think there's a lot of opportunity in agriculture that we hadn't thought about once automation has achieved. I mean, I just described the herbicide challenge in permanent crops. I believe that is completely, can be completely eliminated with automation and, you know, computer controls, computer vision. Like you just pick the weeds instead. If you have essentially very cheap robots that are very dexterous, you just pick the weeds instead of spraying them. Absolutely. It's already happening in row crops. You know, you look at carbon robotics. They're using lasers to kill weeds, you know, in lettuce fields and other kinds of crops that are spent called specialty crops. That's huge, right? Because before humans would go in there or you'd spray and use ag inputs or herbicides. So I think there's a huge, there is a huge inflection point, but I just, I want to make it clear to your listeners that just the core base of, you know, being able to produce enough food for the population, we need automation for. There are going to be these other benefits, some of which we don't even know yet. So I'm such a big believer in automation and so I brought my two worlds together and so I have really dedicated my life to this mission. And I just, I've never been as excited as I, as I am now in terms of the impact that this company can have, our share of impact. But all of us together, there's so much opportunity here. And, you know, I think the incumbents are the ones that, the incumbent equipment manufacturers are the ones that are really going to make it happen in terms of distribution and support and, you know, getting it out there to the, to the world. So I couldn't be more excited. We'll be back in a minute with the light around. Think again. If you're American's listen to podcast, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHART's twice as large as the next two combined. Plus only IHART can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think IHART. Streaming, radio and podcasting.
Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. I'm Liz Hoffman. And I'm Rohan Ghaswamy. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels to companies that will finance your sushi order. Let's finish with the lightning round. I heard you say on another interview that you are not a big fan of IPOs and that you generally prefer acquisitions. Why? What do you got against IPOs? Well, that's from the old days. I went through a couple of IPOs and just about killed me. So a lot of people think IPOs are glamorous and everything. But the road shows are pretty intense and the pressures are really intense. And I'm not just a fan of acquisitions. I mean, I think you're seeing a lot of differences in the private market than you have in the past. Companies like OpenAI who are raising billions of dollars in the private market and not having to go public. You could just stay private forever. You could just be a company that makes more money than it's banks. You could do that for as long as you want. Exactly. Exactly. So I think the IPO, I mean, just look at the last few years of IPOs or just haven't been that many. And so there are other ways to build incredibly valuable companies. I get asked all the time, what's your exit strategy? And I always have the same answer. I only focus on building value opportunities come. And I think entrepreneurs who build companies for an exit aren't building the company for the right reasons and aren't building really valuable companies either. What's one thing that Steve Jobs told you that stuck with you? I had the pleasure of working for some incredible entrepreneur, Steve Jobs being one of them. And what I did learn is that these incredible entrepreneurs, they each had like a singular mantra. And for Steve, it was all about design. It's all about design. And there were things he would push for that would sit there and scratch our heads and go, wait, that's going to add like $100 cost to this. We would do it and the product would be successful. And we're like, okay, he was right. I learned from Bill Gates that it's all about software. You know what? He was right. I learned from Michael Dell that it's all about costs. And guess what? He was right. So I think, you know, the every entrepreneur that makes serious impact, you know, has these kind of core mantras. So what's yours? I view it as a combination, but there is one thing that I will tell you very, very clearly in your listeners. And I tell my teammates probably every day, if not every week. You know, it's all about show me. Don't tell me. And that particularly applies to these industrial markets. The best way to sell industrial equipment, and this is what dealers do, is, you know, here, Susie Farmer, take this piece of equipment and use it for a day. And she'll take that piece of equipment, use it on her ranch, on her farm, whatever. And inevitably she will buy it because she gets to try, you know, before. So I think, I think the show me mentality is really, really important in this era. And an ag tech in particular, because there've been some companies that have been developed by pure tech people and pure tech people, you know, telling farmers that, you know, we can farm better than you is not a good recipe for success, right? And so by focusing on show me, it's really what resonates with our customers. It's really what our customers need. And it's just how business is done in these industrial worlds. So that's my mantra. Show me. Don't tell me. What's one ridiculous word somebody wants you to describe the wine that you grow? I didn't even know what this, I still don't know what this word means. But ethereal. I'm like, oh my, what does that mean? It doesn't stick around. I don't even know I drank it. Like what does that mean? I don't know. Right. So you get all kinds of feedback. Is that a fancy way of saying easy drinking? Sounds like easy drinking. Probably goes down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you get all kinds of great feedback. And I mean, that's the cool thing about sort of the show me mentality is when you develop products that end users you know, consume or use and you see their reaction and you know, they're you, you please them, you give them something of value. That's what gets me motivated all the time. And that's why, you know, this space is so exciting for me because that impact is felt like really, really quickly when when you do have a solutions at work or when you do make great wine or when you do make great olive oil. Yeah, I don't think autonomous tractors as ethereal. Please don't. Tim Booker is a farmer and the founder and CEO of Agtonami. Please email us at
[email protected]. We are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced by Trinuminino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Alexander Garretton and engineered by Sarah Brugger. I'm Jacob Goldstein. We'll be off for the next few weeks for the holidays. I want to thank you very much for listening to the show this year. It really means tremendous amount to all of us. I hope you have a great holiday, happy new year. And we will be back with more episodes of What's Your Problem in 2026. [Music] Business and the ways we do it are changing in ways that are both more subtle and more radical than you realize. I'm Liz Hoffman. We've been covering the forces behind this revolution but now we want to talk directly to the people driving that change. Each week we'll talk to the operators, the experts and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. Guaranteed Human.
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