At the Hamm Institute for American Energy, the Oklahoma Farm Bureau hosted a demo day for the Oklahoma Grassroots Rural and Ag Business Accelerators. At the event, members from the Activate Oklahoma cohort and Customized Development had the chance to present and answer questions in front of an audience of rural Oklahoma advocates and investors before receiving their certificates of graduation.
The Oklahoma Grassroots Rural & Ag Business Accelerators program is a collaborative rural development initiative from the Oklahoma Farm Bureau and national and state-level partners developing Oklahoma-based innovators creating ideas, technologies, and products creating economic Opportunities in rural Oklahoma.
Oklahoma Farm Bureau’s rural economic development coordinator, Amarie Bartel, led the event and visited with associate farm editor Reagan Calk about the program’s success.
Bartel said state leadership at OKFB saw a need for rural development through information gathered by the USDA Census of Agriculture.
“The census was coming back to us and letting us know that two-thirds of Oklahoma counties were experiencing a population decline,” Bartel said. “The USDA also started reporting that 96 percent of farm families derive a portion of their income from an off-farm source, and then lastly, through conversations, it was discovered that less than 1 percent of venture capital is deployed in a rural community.”
The program has two pipelines: Cultivate Oklahoma and Activate Oklahoma.
“The first is Cultivate Oklahoma,” Bartel said. “It is an on-farm pre accelerator, so any innovation that applies directly onto the farm; that is the program for you.”
Activate Oklahoma connects rural entrepreneurs and innovators with resources from Oklahoma’s world-class business development community to build an even brighter future for rural Oklahoma. With roots in rural Oklahoma and a mission to help innovators reach new heights, Activate Oklahoma helps local hometown visionaries bring their ideas to life all across our state.
As OKFB began to develop the programs and take in applications, Bartel said they saw an additional need for companies who were slightly more advanced in their progress.
“We had a subset of companies that had already completed at least 60 percent of the work that we would be asking of them,” Bartel said. “We knew being duplicative wouldn’t be a good use of their time, but they were still coming to us needing help.”
For these companies, Bartel said, Customized Development was introduced.
The Customized Development program provided tailored resources and mentorship plans in the form of three or four action items for companies that have already completed at least 60 percent of the work covered by the existing Activate Oklahoma rural development pipeline or Cultivate Oklahoma agricultural innovation pipeline.
“We really try to funnel our curriculum in a way that it is digestible,” Bartel said. “So, we start by hitting everything.”
The curriculum covers topics such as intellectual property, diluted property, non-diluted property, customer discovery, market opportunity, and more.
“If you are going to face it in business, we try to cover it,” Bartel said. “Then, through experiential learning, we try to really take a few of those things and dive in deeper based on things we have heard that founders tend to struggle with. We take a deep dive into customer discovery where they are asked to interview their customers and get real feedback.”
The program also included extensive pitch practices and extensive funding classes.
“We really do try to make it an expansive, all-encompassing program, and then we throw some mentorship on top of it,” Bartel said. “So, hopefully by the end of it, they feel surrounded from all angles with any questions they may have.”
Applications for the 2024 cohorts will open on January 1st and can be accessed on the Oklahoma Farm Bureau website at https://www.okfarmbureau.org/accelerator/.
