AUBURN, Ind. — When Ian Harley and his team co-founded Traction Ag Inc. in March 2020, they were hoping to provide a service they didn’t think existed for farmers at the time: agriculture-specific accounting software.

“Traction gives every grower a clear understanding of their costs of production, and their revenue associated with that production so that they clearly understand their margin per unit of production per bushel of crop that they’re producing,” explained Harley, the company’s CEO. “I think there’s a lot of great farmers out there who manage their operations and their agronomy very well and obviously their finances too.

“I think often their financial pieces can be one of the toughest areas and growers who are going to grow and be successful in the future, that financial component is going to be equally important to the other areas of management.”

Traction Ag is a cloud-based platform that allows customers to manage such areas as crop inventory, supply inventory, pre-paids, land agreements and share cropping, and invoice for contract work, he noted.

“There is no direct comparable in modern web application,” Harley said. “There’s some legacy platforms that are installed products that provide similar functionality. It’s a difficult thing to do. Honestly, I’m very lucky with the team we have here at Traction, the expertise in house who understand the uniqueness of farm accounting, essentially working toward that revenue and margin per unit of production, typically bushel, for our typical grower Midwest row crop producer. Ultimately building that out so that you have it reconciled with your balance sheet and income statement. Building that fuel profit analysis. There’s a lot of complexity there.”

Harley and his co-founders – Scott Nusbaum and Brian Stark – had previously worked for Farm Works Software. The company was originally funded by the team and a group of eight grower-investors.

“We set out with the intention of developing a modern web technology for farm accounting,” Harley said. “When Scott was looking to transition his career, we just couldn’t find good technology to manage farm finances effectively, and we thought, well, there’s a great opportunity here to develop that.”

The changing demographics in farming to a younger generation have been a key to Traction’s success, he pointed out. The younger generation is “simply familiar with everything being online. With it being a web application that they can easily pull up on their iPad and iPhone when they’re in the cab, they can get the functionality delivered there.

“It’s about ease of use. You can access Traction on any connected device. It’s fair to say for the younger generations, that’s an absolute expectation for them.”

More mature farmers may have some initial reluctance about the application, but once they test it and see the time savings and the value, they can generally be won over, Harley stated.

“We work with a whole range of growers. We have mid to late 70-year-old growers who have been very successful with our application. I’m respectful of the fact that people adopt technology that’s easy to use and we engineer to make Traction easy to use for any grower.

“Our customer success team is a very core component. The technology’s important but to be able to communicate with the customer, how he gets value and uses our platform, is of equal importance.”

Traction Ag has customers across the country. The company’s target market is broad-acre row crop operations, he said. Those interested can visit the site (www.tractionag.com) and start a 30-day trial with full functionality. They can also call the company and request to view an online demonstration.

The company will profile the grower to be sure he or she will get value from the application, Harley said. Currently, the company is geared toward 2,000-5,000 acre row crop producers. “It’s not going to be appropriate for every grower,” he explained. “As we broaden the functionality of Traction, we’ll be able to manage the larger row crop producers who have possibly full time finance officers and full time operations managers who are working in different areas of the application.”

Pricing ranges from $950 per year for basic cash accounting to $2,850 for the full suite of product options.

Harley said the customer base doubled from 2021 to 2022. “We continue to see great opportunity to grow at that kind of pace. There’s 100,000 commercial farming operations in the Midwest today. We’re not trying to suddenly take every farmer in the country. As we expand our customer base we have to grow the company and we’re going to do that at a controlled pace so that we can maintain our service levels.”

Traction Ag recently announced it had raised $3 million in seed funding, about 75 percent of which will be used for product development, Harley said. They plan to hire more engineers and more product talent, and add members to their grower success team to maintain service levels. The company has about 20 employees.

The funding round included participation from Hageman Group, Allos Ventures and Elevate Ventures, according to Traction Ag. Don Aquilano, co-founder and managing director of Allos Ventures, and Shane Hageman, president of Hageman Investments, will join Traction Ag’s board of directors.