Developed for almost a year by brothers Tim and Tyler Nuss, the goal is to create a space where farmers can share their experiences with biological products and help others make informed decisions.
While agricultural biologicals very often offer significant environmental and economic benefits, overcoming scepticism, cost barriers, performance variability, and distribution challenges is seen as crucial for their widespread adoption.
The Aglist launch aims to fill a gap in the agricultural technology market by providing a dedicated platform for biological product reviews and endorsements that can enable knowledge sharing among farmers about the effectiveness of various biological products.
The hope is that this can support the growth and adoption of biological products in agriculture, which aligns with the broader trend towards sustainable and regenerative farming practices.
Industry support
The creators worked with several launch partners who provided crucial feedback during the development process, including Pivot Bio, Vestaron, Groundwork BioAg, Kula Bio, Certis Biologicals, Corteva Agriscience, Sound Ag, and Indigo.
“We wanted to solve a real problem in the ag industry,” says Tyler Nuss on the launch of the platform. “Biologicals represent one of the largest opportunities in agriculture, but also lack transparency and discoverability. It was the obvious best place to start. There are no other independent platforms for biologicals.”
The end goal is to build ‘the Yelp for all of agriculture’, he adds, so that growers can “find products and services for their specific operation and context and lean on other farmers' endorsements of those solutions”.
What’s more important: innovation or adoption?
There’s a need for both better products and a better way of selling the benefits of biologicals to overcome farmer hesitancy, Nuss agrees. “I think both are happening in parallel and it takes adoption and platforms like AgList to be able to filter out the noise and snake oil. I think there are definitely technological advancements happening right now that are making certain products more effective. I think it’s also important to understand that biologicals may respond differently in different environments and use cases.”
The brothers plan to include other ‘hot sectors’ on the list such as, robotics, precision ag and agtechfintech. “We plan to expand this year and are exploring other categories as well. We want to ensure we don’t expand too quickly. There are thousands of biological companies and tens of thousands of products.”
AgList is a global platform. Products have country availability included, and users can search by their location. “Europe is often ahead of the US in terms of sustainable adoption,” Nuss says. “We have several products on the platform with penetration in Europe.”
