AI in Agronomy & Agricultural Advisory : A Interview by AgTechNews.com with PropelMapper CEO Mark Donne

Mark Donne: The insight didn’t come from looking at broken technology. It came from watching great documentation work.

My co-founder Reghardt’s uncle, Dr. Osterhoff, is an agricultural advisor in Germany who keeps meticulous brown folders for every client — detailed notes from every visit, nothing left to chance. The advisors who adopted his process consistently produced better sales results. The connection was clear: advisors who documented with discipline built stronger relationships and won more business.

But most advisors couldn’t maintain that level of diligence manually. Not because they didn’t care, but because the process demanded too much time. Voice memos on one device, photos on another, forms on the tailgate, then hours that evening trying to connect it all in spreadsheets. The longer the gap between seeing and writing, the more critical detail disappeared.

What we saw was that the industry had already proven documentation discipline drives results. The tools hadn’t caught up. What made us believe the timing was right was the maturation of speech-to-text and large language models — for the first time, you could take a two-minute voice note recorded while walking a field and turn it into a structured report instantly. The technology to make that discipline effortless finally existed.

Mark Donne: It means you pull up your phone, tap a client name, and listen to an audio briefing that summarizes everything you need to know before you walk in — recent observations, what you discussed last visit, any follow-ups you committed to, weather data, and field history. You show up prepared without doing prep.

When you get to the field, you hit record and talk through what you’re seeing while walking crop rows or driving between sites. Take photos or video. When you’re done, PropelMapper structures everything into a complete field report — tagged to the correct farm and location by GPS — that you can edit and send to your client before you’ve even started driving to the next visit.

Back at your desk, it’s all there: past visits, team comments, reminders, weather data, a full timeline for each location. For managers, it’s visibility into team activity without chasing for updates.

The “operating system” part means it’s not another tool to add to the stack. It’s the one place where field intelligence is captured, structured, and accessible — from the individual visit level all the way up to team-wide institutional knowledge.

Mark Donne: The common thread across our customers is simple: they all care about producing high-quality results, and they all care about relationships. Dole cares about producing high-quality produce. Peoples Company focuses on delivering the best possible outcomes for their farm owners. But for all of them, the bottom line isn’t the only part of the equation. The relationships they have with their growers and customers matter to them.

The right customer is any agricultural advisory organization where field teams are spending 4+ hours a week on documentation — crop consultants, livestock nutritionists, quality control teams, trial managers, agronomists. They’re typically using some combination of notebooks, voice memos, spreadsheets, and a CRM that nobody loves updating.

Most customers find us through referrals from other advisors or through industry events. We’re at the stage where word-of-mouth from people who use it daily is our strongest channel. When one advisor on a team starts using PropelMapper, the others notice the reports.

Mark Donne: Honestly, the behavioral shift is smaller than people expect. Most advisors are already recording voice memos — they’re talking into their phones between visits to capture what they just saw. The difference is those recordings used to go nowhere. Now they become structured reports.

One of our users described it perfectly: he records audio while driving between visits using his iPad and AirPods, then parks, reviews the report that’s been generated, makes a quick edit, and sends it to the client. The workflow fit naturally into what he was already doing.

For most advisors, it clicks within the first few real field visits. One farm manager at Peoples Company called it “spot on” after his first visit using the mobile app. The moment they see a two-minute voice note become a full report — formatted, GPS-tagged, linked to the right client — and realize they can send it before they’ve started driving to the next farm, that’s when notebooks stay in the truck.

Mark Donne: Your best advisors already document well. Your challenge is making every advisor on the team operate at that level without burning them out. PropelMapper makes the diligence that wins relationships available to everyone, without the burden it currently requires.

The practical implication: when an advisor leaves, the institutional knowledge they’ve built doesn’t walk out the door with them. Every observation, every client preference, every field history is captured and accessible to whoever picks up that territory. That’s the thing most operations heads don’t have today — and it’s the thing that keeps them up at night.

Mark Donne: Everything about the platform is designed for the realities of fieldwork, not a desk. Advisors record while walking fields or driving between clients — even offline. When you’re in a corn field in rural Iowa with no cell signal, PropelMapper captures everything locally and syncs when you’re back in range.

Voice-first wasn’t a marketing decision. It was a practical one. You can’t type notes while walking through crop rows. You can’t fill out forms when it’s raining or you’re wearing gloves. You can talk. That’s it. So we built around that constraint.

We focused on precision AI designed specifically for agricultural fieldwork, not general tools. The platform understands agricultural terminology, crop stages, pest pressures, nutrient observations. When an advisor says “I’m seeing some septoria on the lower leaves in the northwest corner,” that gets structured correctly — not interpreted as generic dictation.

Mark Donne: Here’s what it looks like in practice. One of our contacts at Peoples Company described doing 27 farm visits in a single day. He then spent an additional week manually entering those notes into Salesforce. Now imagine that person leaves the company. All those relationships, all that context — what a farmer’s kid is doing at school, which fields had drainage issues three seasons ago, which producer prefers to be called in the morning — it’s gone. The new advisor starts from zero.

With PropelMapper, every visit builds on the last. When a new team member takes over a territory, they can listen to an audio briefing that draws on the full history of every visit, every observation, every detail the previous advisor captured. They don’t show up cold. They show up knowing the operation almost as well as the person who left.

That’s the shift we’re making possible. Not from paper to digital. From isolated observations to institutional knowledge that the company owns and retains regardless of who’s on the team.

Mark Donne: We’ve maintained strong retention across our customer base, with all customers on month-to-month contracts continuing to renew.

The “can’t work without this” moment is different for different roles. For field advisors, it’s when they realize they can capture a full visit report in the time it takes to drive to the next farm. For managers, it’s when they can see team activity without chasing people for updates. For the company, it’s when they realize they’ve built a compounding record of field intelligence that didn’t exist before.

One of our contacts at Dole put it bluntly: he said they’d “go back to having nothing” if PropelMapper didn’t exist. And he specifically pointed to crisis situations — when you need to trace what happened, when, and where — as the moment the tool becomes indispensable.

Mark Donne: Without naming specifics beyond what’s public: Dole’s field agents and pack house staff document quality checks using PropelMapper, tracking the journey from farm through packing to shipping. When a port dispute arose around shipping quality, the structured, timestamped, GPS-tagged records provided the documentation they needed to defend their position and pinpoint where in the pipeline the issue occurred. That saved them significantly — in money and in the relationship with the buyer.

That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t happen with notebooks. You can’t pull up timestamped, geotagged evidence from a voice memo you recorded three weeks ago. But with PropelMapper, that entire trail exists automatically.

Mark Donne: The difference between a voice capture and a handwritten note isn’t 10% more detail. It’s a fundamentally different kind of documentation. When an advisor talks through what they’re seeing while standing in the field, they capture the context — not just “pest pressure observed” but which part of the field, what stage the crop was in, what the weather conditions were, and what they recommended.

For the producer, that extra detail means their advisor can walk into a meeting and reference specific observations from three visits ago. It means when disease pressure starts developing, the advisor can look back across the season and spot the pattern. It means the advisor’s recommendations are grounded in a complete, searchable record — not fragments of memory.

Mark Donne: We’re in the final stages of testing our v1 native app for iOS and Android. Our early progressive web app (PWA) worked well, but the feedback from the field was consistent: advisors need something that launches instantly, works fully offline without thinking about it, and feels as fast as opening the camera app. That’s what we’re building toward — a true offline-first mobile experience designed for how advisors actually work between visits.

The broader area we’re continuously improving is the intelligence layer. Every customer’s operation is different — a macadamia consultant in South Africa structures observations differently from a quality control team at Dole. Making the AI precise enough to handle that variability while still being effortless for the advisor is the ongoing challenge.

Mark Donne: This is something we think about constantly. The best agricultural technology should feel invisible. It should work in the background so advisors can do what they do best: walk the fields, build trust with producers, and show up knowing their clients better than anyone.

PropelMapper doesn’t tell advisors what to recommend. It doesn’t replace their judgment. What it does is make sure they show up to every meeting with full context — so they can spend their time advising, not scrambling to remember what they saw last time or what they promised to follow up on.

Mark Donne: In 2025, we were selected as one of six startups in Africa to receive the Meta Llama Impact Grant for applying AI to real-world problems in agriculture. The grant supports our work using Meta’s Llama models for satellite imagery analysis and earth observation — giving advisors visibility into what’s happening on farms between visits.

For readers who don’t follow AI closely: the significance is that Meta’s team validated our technical approach and the problem we’re solving. We’re not using AI as a buzzword. We’re using specific language models and image processing models to do things that weren’t possible two years ago — turning unstructured voice observations into structured field intelligence, and combining that with satellite data to give advisors a more complete picture of what’s happening across their territory.

Mark Donne: Before heading to a client, an advisor taps “prepare” on their phone and gets an audio briefing. It pulls together recent observations from past visits, any follow-ups that were committed to, relevant weather data, and field history — and delivers it as a short, listen-on-the-drive summary. Customizable by focus area.

The difference is simple: your advisor shows up prepared without doing prep. They’re not flipping through notes in the parking lot or trying to remember what they promised last time. They walk in with full context and can spend 100% of the meeting doing what they’re good at — advising.

We haven’t seen this elsewhere in agtech either. Most tools focus on what happens after the visit (reporting). We realized the moments before the visit are where relationships are won or lost. If an advisor walks in and references something specific from three visits ago, the producer notices. Trust deepens. That’s what the audio briefing enables.

Mark Donne, CEO & Co-Founder: “What drives me are the people behind the food we eat. They’re the reason we have the comfort and security in our lives that we do — real human beings working behind the scenes, many unnoticed, ensuring the food quality is there, the yields are coming in, and the farmers can feed their families. If we can make their lives slightly easier — saving them time, saving them a missed note or a missed insight, keeping everyone on the team in sync — then I know the impact we’ll have in agriculture will be meaningful. We’ll help people spot disease pressures before they spread. We’ll help agronomists know what’s going on across their team without having to think about it. These people have a challenging job. They have to know so much. They deserve tools that make it a little bit easier.”