How Beanstalk is tackling the most urgent climate challenges facing Australia’s agriculture industry

Welcome to a transcript of Founder Stories, an impactable.news podcast!

I recently spent five days dog-sitting at my mate’s house. Grant Gilmour is a director and co-founder of Beanstalk Ag, a leading food and agriculture innovation powerhouse that is working to unleash ag’s potential to be a force for good.

From launching the world’s first Drought Venture Studio, assembling Australia’s largest agtech-focused team and providing transformational support to almost 50 innovators 2024 was a year of growth and learning. 

Today, you'll hear all about Grant's professional journey, learn why his focus is agtech, and be inspired by Beanstalk's big plans for 2025. 

Simon Crerar
Hi Grant, long time no speak, how are you doing today?

Grant Gilmour
Hey Simon, yeah very long time. Doing very well thank you. Lovely cooler weather down here in Lutruwita / Tasmania in the Huon Valley.

Simon Crerar
We’ve had a hot few weeks, haven't we?

Grant Gilmour
We have, the grass is drying out and the hay is cut and yeah, enjoying the variabilities and vicissitudes of Tasmania's weather.

Simon Crerar
Totally. Today I'm up in Hobart / Nipaluna, and you're down in a place that we both live, which is, where's that?

Grant Gilmour
In Gardners Bay, just outside of Cygnet in Tasmania.

Simon Crerar
So Grant and I are mates, our kids go to the same school, and I was very lucky indeed to house-sit for Grant this week when he was away on holiday with his family. 

It was a really nice place for me to spend the first working week of Impact&ble's journey. So thanks, Grant, for that.

Grant Gilmour
No, I think it's us who should be thanking you, looking after the doggo.

Simon Crerar
Yes it was dog sitting really, wasn't it? More than house sitting: the house came as a bonus for me! So Grant, if you could maybe tell us a little bit about who you are. What's your professional journey and how have you ended up where you are today?

Grant Gilmour
I'm a recovering management consultant, having spent six years with the Boston Consulting Group, working around the world. After that I had a stint in banking.

But my roots in agriculture go all the way back to Zimbabwe where I grew up on a cattle with a large herd of Brahmin. I have so many memories of spending time on the farm with my Grandpa pointing out the various characteristics of the animals, and what their lineage was, and how to look after land. 

In fact, I have this distinct memory of a visitor coming to the farm for a few years. Barefoot, kind of footy shorts on, a large hat. And for my eighth birthday, he gave me a book called Holistic Land Resource Management Volume One.  This was Allan Savoy practicing his techniques on our property.

As an eight year old, it was about the worst book I could ever get. It was all black and white on this cheap paper, you know, with that kind of ink rubbed off on your fingers. 

But it's one of my biggest regrets today that I didn't actually keep that book when I moved to Australia. I have a background in law and finance, but at some stage I really wanted to stop making PowerPoint slides and do something meaningful.

And I looked at what was out there and I saw a few areas that I could have a meaningful impact on in my career. One was energy: we need to produce a lot more energy a lot more cleanly with a growing population around the world. 

Another was media. We needed people more informed, more educated who understood what was actually going on around the world and you know a more informed population I think leads to better decisions at a local and national and international level. And I felt like we didn't quite have that right. It was impacting our world and I wanted to do something about it. 

The other was agriculture. Over my lifetime, there's going to be a boom in population that we're already feeling. We need to produce a lot more food. And if we didn't do that right, it will have negative consequences for many other species on the planet.

Simon Crerar
Where were you when you were kind of having these realisations?

Grant Gilmour
I was in Perth in Western Australia. I was with the Boston Consulting Group, working for a large resources company and therefore, you know, the existential questions that you ask yourself are ever more present in that situation. I had one little boy, and another on the way. And I kind of thought: that’s enough in management consulting.

Simon Crerar
So at this point, you're kind of thinking, right, I want to do something that's more purposeful in my life. So how did Beanstalk Ag come to life?

Grant Gilmour
So I got a call one day, this was before joining the bank, and it was from my very good friend Calum Archibald. He said, “mate, I'm going to start up a company.”

“It's called Beanstalk and this is the mission. Are you in?” And I looked at my wife. We'd just had our second son and we'd had no sleep. And I said: “Cal, I'm in.” 

Cal and I had a history. We’d founded a company together at university, a hiking and exploration company. And we took tours of people to Nepal to do treks, circuits, even some trekking peaks. So we'd done that quite successfully for a couple of years through our time at university together. I knew we worked together really well. 

We launched in Melbourne in 2018. We saw the need to produce a lot more food. But we also saw tech companies coming in and pitching to farmers, and they spoke completely different languages.

I remember having a session in the early years [where we figured out] how we talk about ourselves. We would say something like, you know, if you understand the space, we'd talk about the need for increased food production, we'd talk about productivity and efficiency on farms, and we'd talk about tech and innovation as a way to solve that.

But at the most simplistic, how are we going to explain ourselves to our grandmothers? So we said: “we help tech companies and food producers and processors be friends.” 

We saw there was a need for essentially an advisory firm in the middle there to match good proven technology with good adopters on the other side in order to produce food more sustainably, in a more resilient and more profitable way.

Simon Crerar
So Beanstalk’s team, as I understand it, is really geographically spread. Obviously, the agricultural industry in Australia is not everywhere because there's a big part of the country where nothing is growing. How does Beanstalk work as a business? 

Grant Gilmour
I think it's fair to say we roughly follow the population spread of Australia and Singapore. So we have a couple people in Perth, a whole bunch of people in New South Wales, the same in Melbourne. We have a few in, I think it's four now in Queensland and we had three in Tassie, probably overrepresented to be honest. It's now just two in Tassie and we have three in Singapore as well. So I think we roughly follow the thread.

We stay connected. We have weekly team meetings together. That's an investment we choose to make where we talk about gratitude, something we learnt, business updates, project updates. We have gaming sessions once a month that someone hosts. Honestly, it's important for our client base because they're spread around Australia. But in this day and age when you're attracting the best people, almost one of the prerequisites for some of the best people in their field is that I want to work from where I want to live. 

And so being able to enable that is critical for us for attracting and maintaining the best talent in the industry, which we've been able to do. And it looks like people taking six weeks and working from Greece so they can be with their family. It looks like people working from the Netherlands at the moment, Nairobi next week. So being able to work remotely has been something that's evolved. We didn't expect it, but it's evolved into an important part of our business model.

Simon Crerar
If we imagine what our careers might have looked like when our parents were the same kind of age, there's just no opportunity [to WFH]. The technology that supports this kind of work just didn’t exist. But also in Australia, which is so geographically big but population-wise small, that ability for you as an employer to attract the very best talent absolutely anywhere is so valuable. If you're good and you fit the bill and you've got the right value set, you can join the business. I think that that is important, particularly when in your business, when your customers, the people you're working with, they can be anywhere, right? Can you give us a sense of that kind of spread? Who do Beanstalk actually work with? There are farmers, there are innovators, who are they?

Who do Beanstalk actually work with?

Grant Gilmour
In my most simplistic model, I think there's four key stakeholders in the agricultural industry that will help us achieve our mission, which is to unlock the power of ag to be a force for good. You have the producers of food. They range from small and medium size farmers, to massive agri-corporates funded by pension funds. And asset managers with 20 or 30 properties, and half of million animals under their banner. So you have the producers and processors of food. They're the on the ground ones. 

Then you have the tech companies that provide solutions, innovative solutions. So the farmers need tech companies to help them become more resilient and more profitable and more sustainable. The tech companies need access to the farmers to trial their solutions and refine them, but they also need funding. 

Then you have the investors, the family offices, the big corporate venture capitals, the funds, the foundations, etc. We work with that group. That's the third. 

So we think about the processes, the producers and processors of food, the innovators that supply innovation, the funders that supply capital. And then you have this fourth overarching group, which is the government: state, national and international bodies, including large groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, ACIA, these very, very large donor companies that set policies, provide a heap of finance and de-risking to all groups in the industry. 

And so we work with them as well, ranging from the state government of Western Australia through to the government of Indonesia where we're setting their digital agriculture strategy and now implementing that for them. 

Simon Crerar
Our political system moves fast and we have a federal election this year. The federal government may change, we don't know, but you've been a major beneficiary. Beanstalk's Drought Venture Studio is a huge initiative that's supported by the federal government, right? Can you tell me a little bit about how that works?

Grant Gilmour 
Absolutely, so our Venture Studio was a breakthrough moment for us, a recognition of the work that we've been doing in the industry. We received $10 million in funding from  the Australian federal Department of Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries and Food. They've funded our pilot program where we help [startups] commercialise. 

How does the Drought Venture Studio work?

The Venture Studio: think of it as a one-stop shop. It's like a pre-accelerator, getting good people, good founders, good ideas out of the research phase to the point where they’re ready for an accelerator. So it looks like venture builder support, eight of our team have built, scaled and exited venture. It’s about supporting ideas out of universities, finding ideas out of RDCs (regional development corporations), building the business case around them, building their first financial model, building their marketing plan, IP support from lawyers, pitch support. I was on a pitch meeting this morning giving feedback on pitches. We'll put 92 startups through the venture studio over two years, commercialising 24 of them.

The $10m was announced twelve months ago and it runs for another twelve months. So we're halfway through.

Simon Crerar
Fantastic, so that's a quick cycle. I've been in the federal budget lockups many times and many of these things are pushed out over four or five years. So that's excellent. 

Grant Gilmour
It's extremely fast.

Why is Australia a great place for agricultural innovation?

Simon Crerar
The weather on our planet is becoming more extreme. We've seen terrible fires, terrible floods in Australia. We've seen fires in LA very recently. Even things that would have historically given us certainty like La Niña and El Niños, seem to be weird even within those well established patterns. You talked about how the thing really motivating you is that the planet is growing exponentially, obviously, and there's a growing population and that there's therefore a need to find innovative new solutions to be able to do that, as it is likely the droughts increase and intensify. Aussies understand that we live in a sunburnt country, but why is Australia particularly well placed to develop these things?

Grant Gilmour
So I'll come back to the first part, our mission.I mentioned I wanted to work on something that I could actually have a practical impact.

Now, the world population is close to eight billion now. It will grow for another 60 years until it hits 10.3 billion in the medium case scenario. And then it will start to decline.. We can't predict, but we know that broadly over the next 60 years, by the time we hit 2084, it should stabilize and then start to decline.

That will lead to, by our calculations, a 60–70 % increase in food production needed, depending on how much animal protein this growing population consumes. Less animal protein, 60% increase in food production, more animal protein, 70% increase. 

Similar for water that we need to use, how much water we'll need to use. Agriculture accounts for something like 78% of the world's freshwater use..

So it is a key resource that we have. Now, what's in that is I'm not going to be working in 60 years time. That's a little bit beyond what I plan to do. But really by 2054, when I might still be working, the population will hit 9.7. We're pretty much there. The biggest population growth will occur in the next 10 years driven by India and Nigeria.

So that's the demand side. The food, imagine, look at our land now. I mean, a lot of people argue we're at peak acreage. We're using all the arable land we can. Now look at that and say in the next essentially 30 years, our working life, we need to produce 60%, probably 70% more food. We need to use 70% more water as well.

So you can understand the scale of the challenge. And if you are any other species other than a homo sapien, this is very bad news for you. You know, if you're a bird or if you're a reptile or an insect, agriculture has historically been the singular most destructive force on the planet for any other species other than us, really. 

And so if we are going to produce that food, that's almost a given. The baseline is there. If we don't, that's how revolutions start. And if we don't do something good about that and we don't invest serious thought, time, energy, capital and innovation, we're going to really destroy the lives of many other species other than us.

When actually we need to use more of that land to sink carbon through trees. It's the most effective way we know how yet to sink carbon. There's actually competition for that land and there's competition for that land from housing and population growth.

So you can see there's a supply and demand challenge here. And our mission is not a silver bullet, it is that we deeply believe that technology and innovation can help us produce more sustainable, waste-less food, and improve how agriculture impacts the planet. So that's the heart of our mission, to enable that.

What’s Beanstalk’s elevator pitch to founders?

Simon Crerar
Why do founders bring their idea to Beanstalk rather than go out there on their own? What's your elevator pitch to early stage founders?

Grant Gilmour
We're the world's first drought venture studio. So at the moment, we're only focused on drought and water. If your idea can improve drought and water, we are the only ones in the world dedicated to that. There are accelerators and incubators out there, many of them very, very good. But the level of support we can provide you is unparalleled because of the support provided to us by the federal government.

How do you build resilience?

Simon Crerar
The world is warming fast. We are both parents. How do you stay positive? How do you bring resilience to yourself and your family – but also professionally?

Grant Gilmour
How does it make me feel as a parent, as a human? Honestly scared because you knew it was coming, but when you start to actually see it happening, it can be really scary. And you know, every parent wants the best for their kids and you look into the future and you do wonder what type of future they'll be living in. The scarcity or the abundance they'll have. How does that compare to what we have? 

In terms of the business, it makes me feel extremely motivated to build a better business, if that makes sense. You know, we've got a lot of expertise and networks. So we need to start really ramping up how we leverage capital. There's a lot of downsides to the capitalist world we live in, but there's a lot of positives that we can leverage and it's extremely powerful. So how do we leverage capital and how do we leverage products and build products that don't need us to push them to be doing good. So really motivated to be sharp on that.

My strategy for resilience is this. I try not to worry about things I can’t actually do anything about. The war in Gaza is a tough thing, but I'm not personally able to have as much impact there as I am in solving the climate aspect in agriculture. So I keep reminding myself, this is something I can do something about. So to dedicate my energies to spaces that I can actually have an influence on.

Book recommendations

Simon Crerar
Can you recommend a book? This is an idea that I've robbed off Ezra Klein, who does a great podcast for the New York Times. At the end he asked people to recommend a book or a couple of books if you've got more than one, and a podcast that you think listeners of this impactable.news pod might enjoy. Anything you want.

Grant Gilmour
I've got three books that I'm currently listening to at the moment. One is a Noam Chomsky special The Consequences of Capitalism. It helps me understand how we got here and probably where we're going, and therefore how we can work within that system to make change or leverage the power of that system to remedy some of the negative consequences and externalities caused by it. 

I’m also listening to Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, which is about how we tell stories. 

You know the business will probably outlive me – I hope it does and grow – but what will certainly outlive me are my kids, and so being a great Dad and being a good father and a good parent so I'm listening to a great book just five minutes a day little almost parables, almost stories called What Young Children Need You To Know by Bridget Miller. And I found that to be an amazing, little, almost like a mantra that I have every day and I listen to that. And I take a moment to reflect on my fatherhood journey.

Visit beanstalkagtech.com to learn more about Grant (and Beanstalk’s) mission