Overview

FarmLogs was an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based agricultural software company founded in 2011 by Jesse Vollmar and Brad Koch. Operating from Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch through its acquisition in June 2021, the company built a mobile-first farm management platform that helped row-crop farmers track field activity, monitor crop health via satellite imagery, and eventually market their grain. At its peak, FarmLogs had 110 million acres under management and served roughly one in five U.S. farms — a genuinely remarkable penetration rate for an agricultural software startup.

FarmLogs succeeded at the hardest part of agtech: convincing farmers to adopt software at scale. It failed at the second-hardest part: converting that adoption into a defensible revenue stream before a better-resourced incumbent commoditized the core offering. Climate FieldView, backed by Monsanto's balance sheet and existing farmer relationships through seed and chemical sales, could bundle software with physical product purchases in a way FarmLogs structurally could not match.

Bushel, an independently-owned agricultural software company based in Fargo, North Dakota, acquired FarmLogs on June 16, 2021 for an undisclosed price. All FarmLogs employees joined Bushel, and Vollmar became VP of Farm Strategy — a meaningful role, but a significant step down from founder-CEO. The FarmLogs brand was retired on March 1, 2023, when the product was rebranded as Bushel Farm. The outcome was a soft landing, not a catastrophic failure — but almost certainly a below-expectations exit given the $37.85 million raised, the user scale achieved, and the IPO Vollmar had publicly envisioned.

Founding Story

Jesse Vollmar grew up on a fifth-generation family farm in Michigan's Thumb region, working the fields growing corn, wheat, and other row crops. He graduated from Saginaw Valley State University with a BS in Computer Information Systems — a degree that reflected a dual identity he would carry into entrepreneurship: farmer and technologist.^[1] While still in high school, Vollmar had taught himself to build custom software, an unusual skill set for someone whose summers were spent in the fields.^[2]

Brad Koch, also from a farm family in Michigan's Thumb region and a fellow Saginaw Valley State University alumnus, joined Vollmar as co-founder and CTO.^[3][4] The founding insight was not abstract: both men had watched their families manage billion-dollar agricultural operations on paper ledgers and spreadsheets. The inefficiency was not a theoretical problem — it was a lived one.

FarmLogs was founded in 2011 and entered Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch, receiving seed capital, technology mentorship, and three months of living quarters in Mountain View, California.^[5] The YC experience provided legitimacy and a network, but Vollmar and Koch made a deliberate choice that distinguished them from most YC alumni: they moved back to Michigan. After the batch, the company relocated to Ann Arbor to stay close to their customer base and to recruit from the University of Michigan's computer science programs.^[6] This was not a consolation prize — it was a strategic decision that gave FarmLogs authentic credibility with farmers who were deeply skeptical of Silicon Valley outsiders telling them how to run their operations.