We're Proterra Ag.
Sometimes there are trips that are so long in duration, you forget you’re on the road to a destination. While it is easy to go through each day as if the journey is the point, startups must wrestle through the chaos to finally arrive at the destination the set out for so many years prior. Today is such a day — the culmination of a journey started decades ago. From the idea in the head of an aspiring, young engineer, to a company that is focused on solving some of the world’s more difficult and pressing challenges in agriculture.
We’re Proterra Ag. A team of dedicated engineers, scientists and farmers that believe we can help agriculture become clean, sustainable and more profitable.
It’s hard to believe that something as positive as growing plants can be the leading cause of climate change and environmental degradation, yet that is what modern agriculture has done. Initially providing benefit to growers around the world, modern, technology-driven agriculture has made the difficult job of growing food more challenging, less profitable and shockingly unsustainable.
We’re here to help.
In the next few decades, the world needs to produce nearly 100% more food than it does today, yet we already use roughly 75% of the world’s fresh water in agriculture. How can we achieve this?
While Proterra Ag seeks to make all areas of agriculture more sustainable, we exceed at reducing water use in agriculture. We pride ourselves on developing technology that helps farmers increase yields, increase reliability of those yields, lower their costs and become environmentally sustainable while doing so. Certainly, that’s a bold agenda. Something only a group of optimists with a knack for never giving up in the face of adversity would say. But that’s us. We’re a group of dedicated and smart people that relentlessly never give up. And while it has taken us a long time to get here, we’re just getting started.
We’re excited to finally begin to tell our story, as well as launch our first product - HYPERroots. HYPERroots is a sustainable, water-based substrate made entirely of “natural organic materials”. Things like natural, plant-based polymers and bacteria. All good stuff, nothing bad. It enables growers to increase their yield propagating plants without the use of chemicals, while dramatically reducing their water use doing so. It’s preparation free, naturally pest and pathogen resistant and forgiving to variable conditions. More money, less cost and it helps the planet along the way.
But that’s just the beginning. Being the crazy group of can-doers that we are, we’ve got more coming soon. Real soon. From water management that enables hydroponic farmers to re-use their water indefinitely (no more dumping), to aeroponic systems that grow untold amounts of food using only the water that ends up as plant mass, we’ve got more on the way.
We hope you’ll follow our progress. Better yet, we hope you’ll help us deliver on this promise. We need help, support and ideas, so don’t be shy.