Farmhand Ventures builds startups that enable a just transition towards the future of work in agriculture. Producing specialty crops (fruits, vegetables, nuts and horticultural crops) is inherently laborious, with 2.5-3 million people working on today’s US farms. However, there is a growing labor gap, costing an estimated $3.1B in unrealized fresh produce sales, annually, in the US. This shortage is exacerbated by an aging and declining workforce, due to declining birth rates in Mexico, wages increasing faster than farm income, and increasingly dangerous conditions during climate change. Today, the agriculture industry addresses this gap through a very narrow lens: cost minimization, which only results in further extraction of human workers and planetary systems and fails to solve underlying issues.
