If success were measured solely by winning awards, Shreveport’s Grant Maslow would be done. But the LSU student and young entrepreneur is just getting started.
In January, Muslow and the FarmMind team won the latest award, the top prize of $100,000, in the American Farm Federation’s Agricultural Innovation Challenge.
Muslow and his business partners created an AI-powered app, an all-in-one farm management program that puts everything farmers need right at their fingertips.
“We recognized that agriculture in general is one of the most difficult and complex fields, and it is not a simple problem that can be approached blindly,” Maslow told the Shreveport-Bossier Advocate.
Screenshot showing property mapping using FarmMind AI.
FarmMind aggregates all your data in one place, from field size and field notes to financial data, geospatial elevation and soil data, pesticides and weather data, and shows you how each impacts the other.
Muslow provides examples of the responses farmers might get from the app. “You shouldn’t spray this pesticide on this soil type. It’s going to rain three days from now.”
“The best part about creating an all-in-one platform is that users don’t have to use AI if they don’t want to. They can just use what we’ve built alongside AI to manage their operations,” Muslow said.
“At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is save agricultural professionals time and money. We started by saving them time, and now we’re completely optimizing their operations so they can get as much yield as possible and save as much money as possible while saving time.”
Farmers have an incredible amount of information at their fingertips, Maslow said. Imagine being able to instantly sift through all 16,000 EPA-approved pesticide labels or 1,000 pages of papers on the best ways to get rid of weeds.
Grant Maslow of FarmMindAI.
The 2020 Caddo Magnet graduates’ work has won prizes from the Nexus Technology Cup, J. Terrell Brown Venture Challenge, Entrepreneurship Pelican Cup Awards, and Farm Bureau. Investors are now paying attention.
“We are currently in the middle of an investment round and are actively looking to close to make this as distributable as possible to get it into the hands of as many people as possible.”
It started with writing code
When he was in high school, Muslow decided he wanted to learn the magic of sending things like texts, so he started writing computer code.
The AI part of the learning curve started during my freshman year of college when COVID-19 hit. Bored and holed up in his dorm, he Googled “How do machines learn?” This led to further research and an AI honors class that taught how the system was relevant to industry.
A class project pointed him in the direction of agricultural support, and he hasn’t looked back.
“What these AI models do is break down the boundaries of data formats,” Maslow said. “We at FarmMind are something of a pioneer in this technology and are looking to leverage it in every way possible to completely streamline the workflow of agricultural professionals.”
The fully functional FarmMind app is available on the Apple and Android App Stores.
Muslow said it will be available as a multi-tiered subscription model. “And we’re moving forward with corporate deals with larger industries and people in areas where we can create custom solutions through apps to meet their needs, which will be the highest cost.”
Along the way, Muslow and his team also created GardenerAI for home gardeners, which he says is still in “baby form.” He said the marketing campaign for GardenerAI has not yet begun and is currently available for free download from the App Store.
In addition to FarmMind, Muslow also has an app for home gardeners called Gardener.AI.
Agriculture is where they want to be.
“We have a lot of smart people and friends who are doing basically the same thing that we’re doing, but also in other fields like healthcare, finance, construction, etc. The thing about this general AI is that it can be applied to basically any industry. Agriculture is already complex enough on its own, so narrowing it down to just agriculture is a good step.”
Maslow said he and his team are also committed to Louisiana. All are LSU graduates, and FarmMind already has a “huge” customer base in Louisiana.
Marketing, hiring new employees, adding new features, sales and an upcoming period of growth will keep the FarmMind team busy, Maslow says.
“At the end of the day, it’s a competition because AI is moving at lightning speed. We have to stay up to date with all the new models and methodologies that are coming out.”
The need for speed is real.
“There’s no question that these big companies are going to do something like what we’ve built, but it’s going to be biased towards (certain) products. It’s going to confuse producers, and it’s going to confuse farmers.” And our mission is to remain independent, act as quickly as possible, and resolve this issue as quickly as possible. ”
Muzlow said it’s important to know and understand AI.
“AI will not replace humans, but the people using AI will replace humans,” he says.
“You create these types of systems and learn them and use them to automate many tasks.” “This technology isn’t going anywhere. Just like the internet didn’t go anywhere, just like the car didn’t go anywhere, and it’s here to stay, so it’s better to start learning now and be left in the dust than to know 20 years from now.”
