by Matt Wendel of Grand Farm
In May 2022, Grand Farm announced that after nearly a year of searching for the right community to call home, Casselton was selected for its permanent location. With the area’s long history in agriculture and abundant community and industry partners, we decided the Casselton area was a perfect fit for our Innovation Facility, and we couldn’t be more excited to join the community.
Grand Farm enables technology to feed the world by facilitating collaboration on innovations solving some of the world’s largest challenges in agriculture technology. Our approach combines an Ecosystem of relevant stakeholders, AgTech project facilitation through our Program Management Office, and research and development at our future Innovation Facility.
Grand Farm started around a community challenge and has transformed into a global leader in AgTech innovation. A local entrepreneur challenged the Fargo-Moorhead community to define our region’s major - a specialty that attracts innovation and new businesses to the area. What followed was an idea to lean into our community’s heritage of agricultural innovation and create a place where stakeholders across the globe could come together to solve the biggest challenges facing agriculture.
Since our launch in 2019, we’ve facilitated and hosted hundreds of AgTech projects in the field - all on donated acreage south of Fargo, North Dakota. With continual expansion of projects and research, we determined that constructing an Innovation Facility on our own acreage would best allow us to continue our impact in agriculture technology innovation.
While Grand Farm’s current test site has exceeded expectations, we continue to add projects and seek to provide additional capabilities. When we look across the Casselton area, we see a network of established organizations from agriculture to transportation to finance, so we’re really joining as another piece of a deep-rooted ecosystem.
Grand Farm’s Innovation Facility will be intentionally designed to be a continually adapting, demonstration and innovation space that will stay at the forefront of agriculture technology innovation. It will provide expanded acreage for the facilitation of additional AgTech projects, rapid prototyping capabilities, and increased research capacity.
Earlier this year, the North Dakota Department of Commerce announced it had selected Grand Farm as a recipient of the department’s Autonomous Agriculture Technology Matching Grant. The $10 million grant was created with funding from the 67th Legislative Assembly to encourage and support the advancement of autonomous farming technology by awarding a 1:1 match of funding for the deployment of an innovation facility, project management for complex North Dakota-based and global autonomous agricultural concepts, and workforce initiatives to upskill the autonomous agriculture workforce with qualified professionals to ensure advanced farming techniques.
