In this episode of What Farmers Want, Tayab Soomro of PathoScan pitches his disease-detection tech to a panel of straight-shooting Prairie producers. Will it pass the farmer test—or get sent back to the lab?
Most fungicide decisions on a Prairie farm still come down to a feeling, weather, a neighbor's spray record, a sales call, rather than a measurement of what is actually happening in the crop.
Tayeb Soomro, founder of PathoScan, pitches an in-field device built to close that gap: a portable DNA-based test built to flag diseases like Sclerotinia and Fusarium in a crop before the damage shows. He presents it live to a panel of working producers and agronomists, Matt Wallington, Kris Mayerle, Janel Delage, and Scott Maurer, in the Shark Tank-style format Growing the Future Productions built for this series, with Doug Jones of Cornerstone Credit Union rounding out the panel.
What's Inside
- Why fungicide timing decisions are still driven more by instinct than data on most farms
- How an in-field DNA test differs from sending a sample to a lab
- What a working panel of agronomists and producers actually pushes back on when a founder pitches new ag-tech live
- Cornerstone Credit Union's Rural Tech Activation program, and why a credit union is involved in vetting ag-tech at all
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