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Launching Cultivate & Collaborate: A New Space for Industry‑Changing Conversations
At Cultura Technologies, collaboration is the foundation of how we work alongside our customers, partners, and peers across the Agri‑Food supply chain. Every day, we see the power that emerges when leaders come together to share real challenges, real insights, and real solutions. This belief is at the heart of Cultura, and now it’s at the heart of our newest project: the Cultivate & Collaborate podcast.
The series creates space for open, unfiltered conversations between Cultura leaders and the people shaping agriculture today, from producers and processors to technologists, financiers, and global brands. Each episode spotlights the connections, ideas, and collaborative action needed to build a more transparent, data‑driven, resilient Agri‑Food system.
Episode 1: Building Ecosystems, Not Silos
In our first episode, Cultura President & CEO Rich Reynertson sits down with Jeff Schreiner, SVP of Global Collaboration, to explore what it truly takes to build a connected supply chain in an industry historically defined by fragmentation. Their conversation moves from trade‑show floors and consumer expectations to AI, traceability, and the future of data‑enriched commodities.
But one theme rises above the rest: the importance of bringing industry leaders together.
What Are Circles—and Why Do They Matter?
Rich and Jeff share the story of how Cultura’s “industry circles” emerged. These are small, intentionally diverse groups that bring together producers, processors, technology providers, lenders, auditors, retailers, and even competitors. These circles aren’t about dictated agendas. They’re about creating the opportunity for collaboration to naturally take hold.
Across more than 20 cross‑industry circles over the past two years, Rich and Jeff have seen the same pattern emerge:
When the right people are in the room, talking about real problems and with the permission to be honest, breakthroughs happen.
From ethanol producers aligning on upcoming regulatory challenges and new fuel standards, to cross‑supply‑chain groups tackling transparency in feed and protein production, Circles have become a proven model for solving industry‑wide problems that no single company can solve alone.
Data-Enriched Commodities & the Rise of AI
Rich and Jeff also dive into two accelerating shifts reshaping agriculture:
- The move toward data‑enriched commodities.
Consumers increasingly expect full transparency—from field to factory to fork. This requires data to flow across the supply chain, supported by auditable, trusted systems. - The role of AI in uniting a fragmented industry.
Traditional technology forced every company to fit into shared standards or shared systems. AI is changing that. As Jeff puts it, AI can now learn how different systems speak, helping agriculture unlock connected, end‑to‑end decision-making without forcing every player to change the way they work.
Collaboration as a Responsibility
Rich closes the episode with a powerful reminder:
“This industry is too big to fail. We owe it to our shareholders, our employees, and our customers to get better and better—together.”
That belief is why Cultivate & Collaborate exists. Every conversation in this podcast aims to spark ideas and inspire new partnerships across the Agri‑Food ecosystem.
See the full transcript below:
Transcript
Rich
Hello and welcome to Cultivate and Collaborate, where we sit down with global leaders across Agri-Food and agribusiness, talking about leadership, problem solving, and how to create partnerships that move our industry forward. We’re excited to share trends in Agri-Food software and data, along with growing opportunities for collaboration and innovation across the entire supply chain. It’s all right here on Cultivate and Collaborate. I’m Rich Reynertson, President and CEO of Culture Technologies. And thank you for listening.
Jeff, welcome to Atlanta. You came out of the freezing cold from Omaha.
Jeff
And brought it here. Yes.
Rich
And brought it here. Flight delays got in late last night. I can’t believe you’ve been in agriculture for… how many years?
Jeff
Really my whole life.
Rich
And this is your first visit to IPPE. It used to be called, The Chicken Show.
Jeff
Yes.
Rich
And now it’s moved to outside of just chickens to pork and swine, and feed milling and processing. So, what’d you think? You were there for the first time today, right?
Jeff
Yes, eye-opening on every level. There were booths for acres, and I wore out a pair of shoes walking all the different aisles…
Rich
Even though you’ve been at ConAgra, you’ve been at Arden Mills, you’ve been at Schooler, your farm, your dad owns a trucking business. Eye-opening.
Jeff
Yeah, just eye-opening. I never had a clue on how many hardware manufacturers there are, all the different styles and types and natures of protein production. All the different businesses, I’ve never seen that before.
Rich
Imagine being born a chicken and thinking, someday I could be a McNugget. We can make that happen in like a minute and a half.
Jeff
Right there.
Rich
Without touching. You just drop it in one end and it comes out McNuggets on the other side. And you can see that at IPPE.
Jeff
You really can. Next year it’s going to be egg to McNugget. Yeah. You don’t even have to have the chicken itself.
Rich
So Wall Street probably shouldn’t go or it’ll turn vegan.
Jeff
Maybe so. But the shocking thing was the amount of people that showed up. 50,000 people all over the world. The level of interest in that particular show is off the charts. And I think the other part of that was eye-opening to me was you have integration of feed and protein production, which I think is a great sign for us.
Rich
Yeah, I remember 20 years ago, I was at the show, and The AFIA was a short period afterwards, had a show down in Orlando. And an individual showed up to talk to us from Fagioli’s. Fagioli’s is a fast food Italian restaurant, pasta, showed up to American Feed Industry Association show. I was like, what is this guy doing? And he looked at us back then and he said, you know, from the time someone shows up at my order to the window to get to a soccer game, If I don’t deliver a hot meal to them for less than $5 in a minute and a half, my sales drop 20%.
Now, if you’ve got 1,500 stores, imagine what it takes to make that happen. And that includes the pasta, the cream, the chicken that goes on it, the whole thing. And you look at the audience and you guys are a key part of it. And back then, how is that possible? We keep hearing that we’re just one step back, one step forward. That’s changing in the industry. It’s not just where I got it, where I send it, and what I did with it in between. It’s about what the consumer wants to know from start to finish as to what happened. But we live in a very disconnected world.
Have you had any conversations about that?
Jeff
Yeah, the thing about a show like that, it’s just protein processing. But not just for food. So they’ve started the process of saying everything from production must be fed. Everything that has to be fed needs to be treated. Everything is treated, must be processed, and then out the door. And that show is built so that hose parts of that supply chain are actually have to talk. And they’re in the same show, and they have conjoined discussions at the same time. So they’re starting to realize it’s better if we have those big parts of the industry that at one time were super siloed, get together, have those conversations together, and find out things like the consumer wants something in five minutes. Oh, well, that’s different. Why did that, how did that happen? Well, the reason is… and then they figured that out.
But if they didn’t have that discussion at all, you know, they go on doing the same things they think they should be doing, and it may just be a miss. What’s ultimately impressive on something like that is they listen to the consumer. They have a consumer guy, like somebody who’s, you know, not the buyer or the Krogers of the world or any of the big chains. They have people who are consumers talk about those requirements, and they’re of different age groups too. So you can go into the track and hear a consumer talk about, I want, you know, cage free, all the different new requirements that in that audience mean something to that group. They’re like, okay, well, we didn’t realize it. We had all that information and the consumer really wanted that information.
Rich
Yeah, it used to be that when you picked up something at a grocery store, all of the expensive stuff is around the outside of the aisle. And it’s the fresh stuff. It’s where you find the fruit, the vegetables, the milk, and the cheese. The inside is the stuff that can stay on the shelf for a long period of time, the oatmeal, the canned soups. and all that stuff, and then they started this little section off to the side that was the expensive section… the natural food section.
So people think, I’m gonna go in the natural food section, but maybe if I don’t have that big of a budget, I’m not going to buy protein-enriched oatmeal in the special section, I’m still just going to get my Quaker Oats in the middle aisles. But today the consumer’s starting to read, they’re trying to take a look at the label, so if it says natural, they want to know what natural means. It’s not just a marketing ploy.
Jeff
Or healthy.
Rich
But what does that mean? Why does there have to be a label that explains organic or 100%?
Jeff
I think we’re getting there. I think even the recent news today where you’d say they inverted the food triangle. So if that’s the consumer’s guidance, this is what healthy means. Are you eating that ratio? And I think that, that changes the game. I mean, I grew up thinking it was the other way around. Eat a lot of bread, eat a lot. Now, they’re going to invert it and say, nope, eggs, steak, big heavy things. And I think the consumer, in your example where you were using the, a little tiny section that was kind of exclusive to a certain audience that was really into health.
That section that you’re talking about is 3 times the size now than it was five years ago. It kind of took over a whole corner of the store where they have their own freezers. And when does the consumer actually turn over the label? I think they’ve gotten even more sophisticated than reading the label. You know, they go out and they download apps and they scan the barcode like this app. This label doesn’t meet your requirements that you’ve profiled. I think the consumer is getting that sophisticated these days.
Rich
Well, we’ve seen some of that in other parts of the world, right? So I saw a demonstration of a woman in Singapore looking at a chicken breast and scanning the barcode and seeing a picture of the driver that brought the meat or the warehouse where it was stored. or the farm where it was raised, or the factory where it was processed, right outside of it. But here in the west, those are all very disconnected parts. So are you seeing more collaboration between all those disconnected parts to be able to bring that to the table without someone having to actually acquire the entire back end of the channel?
Jeff
I would say in certain spaces, you see dramatic growth. Think about Driscoll’s strawberries. I can scan a Driscoll’s product and it’ll tell me exactly what farm and field it came from and the exact day that it was harvested and where it was processed. So they’re getting there in certain spaces and Driscoll’s, in that one experiment that happened four, five, six years ago, they’ve seen a dramatic increase in their product quality expectations, and their consumer expectations. If that expectation worked there, it should work other places.
So, I’m starting to see it tip over, but it must be the volume food, the volume of foods too. And that’s where I think your example in the other parts of the world, it’s just, you know, they set the railroad up and now everything gets tracked. You’re enriching that foods storyline to the consumer, with data, tying the data into the product. And that’s the signal. If you start seeing it’s not just guidance or an expectation, but the consumer just expects that to be there. The whole industry must align around it.
Rich
Well, the consumer expects it. I think you and I talked previously, because I think being you and I are veterans of providing services in the industry. When you get into the business complications, it’s easy on a spreadsheet or maybe in a PowerPoint presentation or developing a workflow, what might happen. But some of the impediments we’ve seen is, okay, so you’re telling me I’ve got a way to maximize the value of what I get from the DDGs coming out of an ethanol plant or wheat mitts coming out of a flour mill or a particular way I grow something or a particular supplier that I use. And then the question becomes, if that creates extra value, which part of the value chain gets that value? Is it way at the front end? Is it the back end? Is there a way to distribute that?
I think last year you co-authored an article with US Greens about digitally enhanced commodities. And so it’s not just weights and grades that people care about. It’s weights and grades, how it was grown, what was used to grow it, when you’re talking about meat, milk, egg, or produce, or row crops, or tree That tree-grown commodities, how do you see that playing out in the future?
Jeff
I think that data enrichment process is very similar to other is working this very similar way in other industries. You know, those extra attributes that you tie to the commodity, they have to be shared. The value of creating that new commodity has to be shared all the way up and down the supply chain. Because if one part of the supply chain breaks, it doesn’t come out the end. So you have to have that incentive fly all the way back.
Rich
Shared, but shared in an auditable way, right?
Jeff
Very provable.
Rich
Some parts of the world call it an attestation, which is a funny way of saying it’s been audited. And some third party agrees that this is what happened and you can trust us.
Jeff
Right.
Rich
And there’s some teeth behind that, right?
Jeff
There has to be something that’s tied it into the actual financial exchange. The buyer, the seller, have to agree that it’s going to be a bulletproof evidence that you’re going to provide, or it breaks down at some point in time. That’s what that article was all about. It was, can you do that? First and foremost, Common sense would say you can.
Everything today collects data, everything. Why would you use that data to enrich the product that you’re producing and then share that upstream? Why did you just keep it in silos? It made no sense when you have all those things going that can go to the slide, so you’ve got food, feed, fiber. And I think fuel also, you think, what’s the supplier of fuel want? Well, what they want is lower energy produced for fuel that they can gather. And agriculture’s given recent announcements here that says our new customer in a certain space for corn is going to be fuel, a new fuel buyer. Ethanol’s been produced really in volume since the 80s, but they’re going to ratchet that up big time by having the blender have that fuel and then being able to trace where they got the fuel from adds value to them. So it applies to lots of spaces.
Rich
Well, and having a testable might be like nirvana. We’ve seen some technology plays that said, okay, this is what we have to do and who has to do it and the farmer has to do this in order to get benefit out of it. But we’ve also seen where there’s enough financial incentive where if it’s not like 100% accurate or attestable, some insurance companies are saying, well, if you actually do this and provide this data, and it’s not bulletproof, we’ll sell, there’s enough value here that we’ll create an insurance policy to limit your risk. The more accurate it becomes, the less insurance you have to buy. Am I dreaming that up or have we seen that?
Jeff
We’ve absolutely seen that, yeah. You’re creating spreads and margins in places in the value chain that you couldn’t before. A basic commodity is sold for minimal quality attributes 20, 30 years ago. But if your insurance company and your banker look at… look at the way that you’re producing your output and saying, you’re doing a whole bunch of things right. We know that this is going to be valued by the consumer.
I can underwrite a better insurance policy for you because I know you’re thinking ahead and you’re forward-looking at all the way out to the consumer. I’m seeing that the bank lending facilities say, hey, I believe that you’re going to create new spread in that marketplace. Those things are also being seen, especially when it comes to a lot of the growers. It kind of started with organics, but it’s hard to prove. They had organic requirements and it would take you three years.
Rich
Not just organic grower, there’s a certain portion of the UK consumer that will pay a little bit more for milk on the shelf. If there’s a claim that cow is a bit happier, defined as spending at least X number of days in the field versus just sitting in a parlor, which has nothing to do with the weight and grade quality scientifically of what is on the shelf.
Jeff
People see that as super unique. I don’t see that as unique. If you have a restaurant that produces really, really good food using fresher value and you go to that restaurant, they’re high-end and you pay more, that’s the same principle. It’s just being applied at the end where the consumer says, I know you use the freshest product and this is the best. And you have some, you trust it. The trust element has to be along with the data enrichment element, has to be along with the commitment. And then the financials all have to kind of come into play. It’s that all those things are happening.
Even the market price makers are starting to recognize that there can be a difference between just basic quality grade stuff that goes into a commodity and comes out the other end. you’re saying, Hey, I do think we’re going to we’re going to see that’s price spread happen in different spaces, and you talk to some financial person or somebody who’s been in agriculture a long time and they you’ll see an eyebrow raise and they’re like, Oh, this doesn’t sound right, but in all honesty, the rationale is there and the consumer trends are going to demand it for all forms of agricultural production.
Rich
You and I don’t think heavily about just the farm. No, we have customers from the people that service the farm, the people that acquire things from the farm, those that process things from the farm, those that create distribution channels, primary and secondary processing pieces, all the way out to food service. Right, not just in North America, but in Europe. And we think about all those different supply chains and the data that has to flow. Something’s happened in the last couple of years. It’s been around since the late ’40s, but now it’s exploded. And not just in agriculture, but globally, and that’s this thing called AI, like artificial intelligence.
People have been claiming I’m artificially intelligent for a long time, but that’s another story. If it’s artificial, why would you listen to it? Anyways, this whole kind of supply chain piece. And as us technologists, we’ve been talking, oh, you’ve got to rewrite the software every three years, or we have to enforce standards to make it easy to collect, which has bothered me for years. It’s like, why should we enforce our standards on someone who doesn’t want to change systems? But AI now has the ability, with some learning, to help pull together data that before would have taken massive amounts of time and energy to make happen. So where do you see that heading into the future? Is that going to be part of agriculture, outside of agriculture, trying to help solve some of the needs we have about a more flexible, robust, resilient, and transparent supply chain as we think about it?
Jeff
Yeah, I think if you just set the technology which is impressive aside, and say, what is the business problem that you’re trying to solve? And what could it solve? The biggest challenge, I think, in agriculture, where it sticks, is agriculture is a fragmented world. You have lots and lots of players and a very long supply chain. And they all use their own systems and their own data. And up until this point, it is extremely complicated to weave disparate things together and try to create better decision making. what AI does and machine learning, it allows you to take away all those problems. It can learn how those systems talk in their own language, and then it can translate between different systems without having something like our career, which was building something that translated and having business rules, this capability.
Rich
Primarily, you and I, we spent two, three decades building systems of record. Right, to allow our customers to get information into a central part that they can use, whether it be financial or on grain contracts or ticketing or whatever that deal is, and now that data has to be lit up across a chain, and we didn’t transaction-alize everything there’s still spreadsheets and PDFs and Word documents. the verbal conversations and agreements that go up and down the supply chain. And you’re saying that AI, instead of having that to now continue to build transaction systems and enforce standards on everybody. AI has the propensity or at least the hope that they could ease that flow up and down. But along with that comes some security risks or perceived security risks as these big transactional systems, people try to hold on and protect that data versus having it converse with the other pools.
You think about, I know when we revitalized the Cultura brand two years ago, we said we want to keep but made us strong independent businesses focusing on parts of the supply chain, but acting more collaboratively across the supply chain with our customers. And so you came on board and forming industry circles. And part of the premise behind that was, I can’t teach 13 businesses how to be collaborative and business entrepreneurs and all that fun stuff. They’re all over the planet. So how would we do that?
And there was a CEO group in Atlanta that I was sharing this issue with. And the guy looked at me and he said, well, Rich, maybe what you should do is create opportunities for people to do that. To do what? He says, rather than teaching it, maybe create opportunities for that to happen. And so we started internally and said, we should form community groups among people with like interests. that can share their issues and problems and seek resolution among the 13 businesses that we have. And then we expanded that out across other businesses that we have as part of our large corporate structure. And then you join that started forming this thing we call industry circles. And there was little guidance I gave you, other than, hey Jeff, go make a mess. And out of that, ideas should come.
So talk to me a little bit about that journey that you went in the last two years. And then what’s happening specifically in 2026 that causes you to kind of go, I can’t wait to hit today because this is fun.
Jeff
Well, I’ll restate a little bit of that, say that the thing that was the most compelling mission of Cultura was the two-fold mission itself. One is we fundamentally believe that collaboration works. It’s the biggest issue. And in agriculture, if we could solve that problem, we solve massive industry problems. So collaboration as a concept means you need to get people who are at most related, but at worst, they’ve never worked together at all.
Rich
We believe that not only would that create opportunity, even if it didn’t create financial opportunities for us, it’s the right thing to do.
Jeff
Right.
Rich
It’s like the absolute right thing to do is to get parts of the industry groups together to focus on things that together they could solve or independently they can’t solve.
Jeff
If you’re working on the most important industry in the world and you’re feeding people, if you solve problems, they make big differences. That’s the key, that was a key, that was a key point. So… The mess that I started a couple of years ago was, how do you get people, what premise do you give them to say, why do I want to work with others in either in my space, maybe they’re my competitors, or outside of my space, maybe they’re my supply partners. Naturally, you want to say, I’m resistant to that because maybe I’m going to give away something I don’t want to give away, or I just naturally just don’t have time and energy to kind of get somebody together.
Rich
We probably had a few meetings where people showed up and their arms were crossed. Why am I here? Maybe I should be here because I might miss out on something because everybody else showed up at me.
Jeff
The reality is in agriculture, we believe that you can get a small influential group together and they can solve big problems. And if you set the table right, you don’t necessarily have to edict an agenda. You just say, we’re going to talk, we’re going to put you in a room because you’re an influential party and with, you know, a loose topic example being “We really think that transparency in animal feed is healthy because of a premise there”, we’d say it’s a tough life to be in that business. Let’s get some people together and have them orchestrate what their biggest problems are. And you’d think, when we first got into this, we kind of realized you don’t know what you’re going to get until you get in there and you’re not trying to tell them what either. You want to give them an answer, and you just want them to share their biggest problems.
What has happened is agriculture, while being some, you know, while the siloed and a lot of fragmentation, if you get people in the room, it’s a gracious culture for the most part, and they will share their problems. And what I’ve experienced is they’ll align around the top five problems. And they’ll say, okay, I’ve got five or six or eight of the most important people in this part of the supply chain. What do you think the problem is? And they’ve been open to sharing those things. Even if it doesn’t belong to the technologist, me sitting in the room trying to get them to talk about, they’re at least getting together and they see this as a forum. It’s a little different than going into a big giant conference.
This is a personal influential group and we call it a circle. The circles are It’s really a process and a system to get people to get together and share their problems. Another example, and I think this is another telling example, is you put people that are not necessarily in the same part of the vertical. So you put producer with an elevator with a processor and you put them in the same room and you say, what is the biggest issue and their issue? And the producer might say, well, you know, I never get guidance until it’s too late for me to do anything about. the guidance that I’m receiving. You need something from me, I don’t really hear it from you until it’s too late, or I get squeezed on my pricing or whatever those things are. And then the elevator would say, well, it’s… it would be really nice if the producer would talk to me and tell me what their expectations are for the coming year. I chase them down. Sometimes they will tell me, sometimes they won’t. And the processor says, I want constant flow. I can’t run out. I need it this way and this year it’s going to be, my customer is going to be very strict on something or protein spread or whatever those things are. And so that was the net effect.
We had 22 circles going over the last two years in those kinds of spaces. We talked specifically about the essence of the industry problem that they would see, and those they’d like to see addressed. Even if it doesn’t belong to technology, even if it has, you know, only a loose connection to things that we do, there’s still goodness out of that. So, what’s coming out of it? And I think this is, this is what’s key. You got new, new you know, you’ve got an increasing consumer visibility, a demand signal. Well, and you’ve got this increasing ability for us to weave together data, enriching the product that the consumer ultimately wants. And you’ve got market trendsetters that are starting to realize that is where the market’s going to go in the future.
No matter what the part of the supply chain that we’re in, we’re getting answers. And even somebody who is a competitor to country culture, if they’re the right player, we bring them into the mix. Because ultimately, the mission is about putting our industry, agriculture, in the best position to win and to serve its customers. Great example from the fuel space is that we had a whole bunch of ethanol producers get together. really came out of those discussions with a very prioritized list of what’s going to, what they’re facing into in terms of a changing regulatory environment and the degree of difficulty it is for them to produce it and an opportunity to take advantage of some upcoming trends. Plus, E15 standards and some 45Z incentives that are going to flow into that industry. And we feel really good that we have a healthy set of collaborators that are going to help that industry really achieve success, and it all started two years ago.
Rich
It started with there was large farmer involved. Yeah. That was technology proficient. We had a couple of ethanol producers. There was a representative of the industry. There was a representative of an audit group. A banker, and that’s now expanded to buyers of credits. And building some small prototypes that went around, that kind of expanded into, hey, wait a minute, don’t forget about the retailer. And then that expanded, but wait a minute, don’t abandon this person. It all seemed to come together this last year.
Jeff
We were getting taken into those discussions. Don’t forget on the other side, I’ve got the DDGs that need to go, that are now valuable because of the production’s going up. Now I got a DDGs market. The big ethanol, the big fuel blenders are going to take that new fuel and put it into their system. They also get an incentive. So, what started as, let’s talk to a very specific part of the marketplace, which we have good saturation around in the ethanol production side, turned into farm, producer, input, retailer, and then fuel blenders, DDGs, and all the buyer, the potential tax credit offset buyers.
All of that was started with a single conversation in a single room with eight people. It ended up over 2 years becoming this really a network of guidance that came out and a set of people that got comfortable enough to not to realize it’s probably better if they don’t go it alone and they all try to go and hire their own teams and get 8 answers. Instead of getting any answers, they’re all kind of aligning around, for the most part, a framework of a good answer for what they feel is an industry contribution.
Rich, I want to thank you very much for having the conversation today. This is fun in a lot of ways. We’re going to do a few more of these in the future, and I really look forward to telling more stories like the ones we did today.
Rich
Yeah, I know. I mean, Jeff, you and I have a lot of these conversations in private. It feels like we’re now having the conversation in public. We hope other people take the lead. They walk away with something they can use in their own business, they create their own circles, they drive the business forward, because again, this industry is too big to fail. We owe it to our shareholders, our employees, our customers, to get better and better at what we do for the benefit of what we do from industry, creating value, offering opportunities, and if people can learn from these conversations, then so be it. So if you got something out of this, please hit subscribe, and we’ll see you on the next one.
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