Katie Friesen grew up on her family’s farm in Niverville, Manitoba before a volleyball scholarship took her to Miami, Florida where she attended college and began a career in tech and venture capital. Fast forward several years, Friesen returned to Manitoba to help with the administrative aspects of her family’s farm, where she was exposed to the pain points that the farm was experiencing. Friesen recognized that her work and life experiences to that point gave her a unique perspective and skillset, and she set out to create a solution for her family’s farm and others like it. Friesen founded FarmerTitan as a user-friendly option for managing farm operations. Read more about her story below.
Describe your job or product in one sentence.
I am the founder of FarmerTitan, a super simple QR code and mobile app that helps farms save time and money managing their equipment and team.
Where did you grow up? Was it an agriculture or urban environment?
I grew up on a farm in Niverville, Manitoba.
What was your dream job when you were a kid?
When I was a kid I wanted to take part in Doctors Without Borders.
What was your first job in the agriculture or agri-food sector?
Growing up, I worked on my family’s farm during the summer and gathered eggs. Outside of that, my first job in high school was organizing volleyball camps in my town. My first real job was at a startup incubator at my university.
What brought you to your current role?
I went to Miami, Florida on a volleyball scholarship. I worked in venture capital in Miami, and later worked at a Series B Colombian tech company. That company had just raised $58 million and were scaling super fast. I came back to my family’s farm three years ago to help with the finance and office side of the business. I was inspired to launch FarmerTitan after noticing problems on our farm that needed to be solved.
How does digital agriculture or agtech play a role in your current job?
On our farm, digital tools help us make management decisions. FarmerTitan was built out of this need on our side. When I came back to our farm to help on the finance and office side, I needed to figure out how to manage our equipment. We had a combine that was old, and we had to decide whether to keep spending $80,000 to repair it or to buy a new one or a used one, and we had no data set to show us what to do. As a farmer, you need to make a decision – do you keep repairing a machine that has 4,000 or 5,000 hours on it, or do you buy a new one? That could be a million dollar decision based on a subjective gut feeling. On the operations side, farms can have anywhere from 15 to 500 pieces of equipment, and you don’t know if they are actually being taken care of, if parts are being replaced at the right time. With that many pieces of equipment, it doesn’t work anymore to be using a notebook and a spreadsheet – that’s the problem FarmerTitan is trying to solve, to easily give farmers that clarity and peace of mind.
What advice would you give someone considering a career in digital agriculture?
You really have to understand the user that you are building for. Typically, they have worked their whole life with their hands, they didn’t grow up with computers. If you are building agtech software, you should be talking to your user every single week to get feedback. I find with agtech software, if the person building the software hasn’t had on-farm experience, you can build something you think will be helpful but miss the mark on what farmers want and need, so it’s so important to be super close to them.
If you do have an ag background, you might have a better pulse for what to build. It’s easy to get excited about what you can build, but keep it simple. Every time you introduce another layer of complexity, it’s another layer that farm staff need to figure out when rolling out the tech.
What’s your favourite part about working in digital agriculture and agri-food?
There is nothing more satisfying than identifying where there is a real problem and seeing the dollars that are on the table that can be saved. When someone pays you for a product you create from nothing, it’s validation that you add value to their life and their operation. That is the most epic feeling in the world. It’s so fun talking to farmers and visiting farms all day. They are entrepreneurial, humble, and willing to help.
Why do you think digital agriculture is important, now more than ever?
The size and sophistication of farms is becoming too big and too complicated to go without digital agriculture. Farmers are really investors as much as they are farmers, but in order to make good investment decisions you need good information. Digital agriculture plays a role in getting the farmer the information he needs to make good decisions.
What’s the most interesting thing you see happening in digital agriculture right now?
The software world right now is wild. With the development of LLMs it’s pretty incredible how fast you can build software. What’s interesting about software is that there are tools now that are achievable to build which mimic the farmers’ natural behaviour increasing adoption across the farm.
This profile is part of EMILI’s This is Agriculture series, highlighting talented and diverse individuals across the digital agriculture sector. While individuals working in agriculture come from a variety of backgrounds, they share a common interest in growing and strengthening Canadian agriculture to ensure an environmentally and economically sustainable future for generations to come.