If you’re familiar with pest management industry vet and CropWalk Founder Charlie McKenzie, you may be familiar with his agriculture innovation podcast CropTalk. This year, at AmericanHort’s Cultivate conference and expo, McKenzie sat down with Artemis Founder and CEO Allison Kopf about what Cultivation Management Platforms can do for growers and their supply chain.

Now an Artemis partner, McKenzie summarizes his first thought after an introduction to Artemis as, “this is what I’ve been looking for.” Listen to the podcast to see why he sees Cultivation Management Platforms as more than just a replacement for Excel spreadsheets. 

Don’t have time to listen to the recording? That’s okay, we’ve listed some important takeaways below. 

What is the big picture mission behind the Artemis CMP?

We are using technology to create a world that sustains itself. We are determined to create a more profitable, more productive, and safer agricultural supply chain. We believe that no one should ever get sick from consuming plants, farmers should make a good living, farmworkers should be treated with dignity, and profitability is the key to scaling our agriculture system. Data informs us; people inspire us. 

Our team is focused on enabling the world to sustain itself, both in terms of agricultural supply security and product safety. We make risk management a focal point of our solutions for our customers. 

How can a CMP optimize a grower’s business? 

A Cultivation Management Platform helps a grower look at what they’re already doing and find ways to improve and de-risk their SOPs and protocols already in place. To help growers widen their profit margin, we streamline a variety of processes, across different departments and system integrations. 

Whatever our customers’ priorities may be—plant traceability, product safety, bio-controls, task scheduling, etc.—we match 1:1 solutions. When you can automate processes around production planning, you liberate your team to spend more time growing and less time preparing to grow.

What makes pen and paper so risky?

Scrap paper gets lost. Clipboard notes get wet. Whiteboards get erased. Data loss is inevitable when your business runs on paper. Without a central database, knowledge about production becomes tribal—which means that if someone leaves your team their knowledge leaves with them. 

Of course, growers who track information on paper and in Excel are ahead of the game in comparison to growers who don’t prioritize or maintain data records. However, if you’re not storing and analyzing your data, you’re missing out on an opportunity to streamline and stabilize your business—your people, your plants, your process and your compliance. 

“My life goal is to kill the binder.” – Allison Kopf  

What kind of operation needs a CMP most? 

Enterprise growers with many acres, multiple sites and vast labor resources. If you’re a grower or an owner thinking about production as the core element of your business and you have the resources to invest in new technology, a Cultivation Management Platform is exactly what you need to optimize for scale and profitability. 

Listen to the podcast in full here.