2022 Year in Review

eSign

“Love the people and the knowledge they possess. Improvements are happening all the time! Excited about every bit of it!” -A happy Bushel agribusiness customer

In 2022, we put effort toward customer-requested enhancements to the eSign functionality. With these enhancements, admin teams can identify and subsequently reach out to farmers who opened a contract but did not sign it. This further led to the addition of automated emails sent to admin teams whenever a producer signs a contract.

We saw an 85.3% increase in the number of contracts signed and returned via the eSign feature from 2021 to 2022. In addition, the turnaround time of eSign contracts decreased significantly. On average today, farmers sign eSign contracts within two days of receiving them from their local grain facility. Just last quarter, the average time to sign the eSign contract was 9 days – a marked increase in response time from farmers in just one quarter.

Bushel Wallet and Bushel Payments 

“The guys who have used Payments are tickled to death using it.” -A Bushel agribusiness customer who launched Payments to their farmers in 2022

In June, the launch of Bushel Wallet was announced at the first annual Bushel Customer Conference. Since then, several Bushel customers have gone live with Bushel Payments. Bushel Payments allows elevators the option to electronically process payments to and from their farmers using the elevators’ Bushel-powered app and web portal. As the list of customers onboarding with Payments grows, money movement within the industry can be done more quickly and efficiently in 2023. 

Bushel Mobile (Mobile and Desktop)

“I don’t care much for technology except for my autosteer…and Bushel.” -A Bushel-powered farmer talking about technology pain and delight

Within one month of launching the Bushel Mobile desktop (aka the web portal), over 8,000 farmers successfully logged in. That number continues to grow month over month. The value of the web portal’s desktop experience continues to grow as we see these numbers increase with newly added features. Bushel’s customer success team works hand-in-hand with our customers to drive the adoption of farmers getting onboarded to new Bushel offerings. As one customer said about a Bushel Customer Success Manager, “Matthias is a great teacher and cheerleader, he wants everyone to exceed their expectations. He is on top of any concerns or issues that may arise.”

Bushel Trade

“This is the future, this is what we need to be on. As we move forward, this will be standard.” -A Bushel customer talking about deploying Bushel Trade at their grain operation

Bushel Trade experienced exponential growth and usage in 2022. We saw 25% of our Bushel customers deploy Bushel Trade within their grain operation throughout 2022 – and this number continues to grow in early 2023. We continue to see high growth in the deployment and usage of Bushel Trade for both agribusinesses and farmers. We saw tens of thousands of offers submitted, equating to hundreds of millions of bushels contracted through Bushel Trade. 

Bushel Fulfillment 

“It [Bushel Fulfillment] shows everything you really need in one place for all your contracts instead of having to dig around and look through all the different accounts in my system.” -A Bushel-powered grain merchandiser

Bushel Fulfillment launched the development of a new web portal that will give grain companies access to near real-time scale tickets associated with their commercial grain sales. Development of the new portal is in addition to Bushel Fulfillment’s existing solution for grain settlement teams, which provides digital files of scale tickets that can be imported into grain accounting systems, thereby improving grain sale visibility and simplifying ticket entry. Users of the new portal will have the ability to set thresholds for grade factors and receive customized notifications when delivered truckloads fall outside of those thresholds. Visibility of destination weights and grades within minutes of delivery empowers grain teams to make timely decisions if changes are needed to meet their sales contract specs. This next year is an exciting one for Fulfillment with the portal launching to pilot customers.

FarmLogs Powered by Bushel

“With FarmLogs, I know what my costs are down to the field level. No more educated guesses. And that helps me do a better job of managing our farm.” -Alex G., Minnesota farmer and FarmLogs customer

After acquiring FarmLogs in the summer of 2021, we continued to focus on building new tools to improve the FarmLogs experience and make it easier for farmers to make the best operational and financial decisions for their farms. In 2022, FarmLogs integrated with John Deere Operations Center and Climate FieldView, allowing farmers using those systems to automatically import their field activities and input data into FarmLogs – no manual entry required! 

Additionally, we made it easier for farmers to determine their eligibility and/or enroll in sustainability programs, allowing them to permission specific FarmLogs data to flow digitally to Nori and Cargill RegenConnect programs. We also launched a new Field Attachments feature that allows farmers to attach and manage digital files that they want at their fingertips when viewing field records in FarmLogs. In the coming year, we’re looking forward to continuing our conversations about FarmLogs with our Bushel agribusiness customers who want to strengthen their relationships with their farmers. We can’t wait to share more about our plans to bring more functionality to the Marketing feature of FarmLogs, leveraging the value of Bushel and its network. 

Be sure to check out the 2022 State of Farm Report and watch for the launch of the 2023 report in early March.

And That’s a Wrap!

Bushel’s product development is not possible without radically engaged customers and partners who are willing to share their day-to-day operational issues so that we can work to streamline them, as well as work through beta and product pilot programs as we experiment and implement the best solutions. None of this is possible without you all—thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.

While 2022 was an exciting time of growth, our team has already begun making headway on ambitious goals for the new year. Thanks to all of our customers, partners, and supporters for being part of this incredible community.