He runs the company building robots to do the worst job on any farm. The pay-off is a map of every rock, weed, and acre you own.
The operator in the field. A fourth-generation farm kid who left for the Ivy League and the MIT MBA, then came back to point cameras and machinery at the dirt he grew up on.
Most CEOs inherit a flattering problem. Devin Lammers inherited boulders. In August 2024 he took over TerraClear, a company near Seattle whose entire pitch is automating the single chore every farmer despises: hauling rocks out of fields before they wreck a planter or a combine. The machinery has been described, not unkindly, as rock-eating velociraptors. He says yes to that.
He did not found it. Brent Frei started TerraClear in 2017 and stayed on as board chair. Lammers was brought in for a different reason - to turn a clever machine into a real business. "I was looking for a company with a good core technology and tech team but also a product that worked, one with an interesting entry point to the marketplace," he told Global AgInvesting. Rocks, it turns out, are an interesting entry point. Nobody else wants them.
The genius is in the unglamour. Drones and robots scout a field, AI pinpoints every hidden stone by size and location, and a map tells crews exactly where to send the machinery. It is dull work made precise, and precision is the whole game. "Agtech is the intersection of technology meeting the physical world," Lammers says. "Delivering automation through core technology is extremely important for the economy."
He is, by background, the rare executive who can read both a balance sheet and a soil map. Lammers comes from a multi-generational farming and ranching family in South Dakota. He left for a B.A. at Dartmouth and an MBA at MIT Sloan, cut his teeth as a principal at the consultancy Parthenon-EY, then spent seven years at Farmers Business Network building the parts of agriculture that don't photograph well: finance, grain marketing, operations.
At FBN he founded and ran two businesses as president - FBN Financial and Gradable - and climbed to chief revenue officer, chief operating officer, and interim CEO, overseeing a network of more than 50,000 members and 17,000 farmer customers. That is a long way of saying he has already done the hard part once: getting actual farmers to pay for software-shaped things.
Now he is doing it again, with hardware that gets muddy. The ambition is not subtle. "Our ambitions are substantial," he says. "We're looking to grow this concept into something much bigger than it is today." Rocks are the wedge. The platform is the point.
"Agtech is the intersection of technology meeting the physical world."
In early 2026, TerraClear under Lammers launched TerraScout - a fully autonomous field-scouting robot that pushed the company well past its founding chore. The thesis: the camera and AI stack built to find rocks can find almost anything.
"TerraScout will scout entire fields in almost any condition and convert that intelligence to precise action for existing crews and equipment," he says. "Today we focus that output on rock and weed management, but the future applications for this platform are vast."
The economics matter more than the optics. "Very few companies are taking true full field imagery, and almost nobody is at the level of resolution we're doing for the cost that we can deploy," Lammers says. The robot runs roughly six hours without refueling, sampling billions of images per acre - data dense enough to guide a sprayer or a rock crew down to the spot.
Get the service into paying growers' hands. "It's early days... lots of runway left."
Build the strategic relationships that turn a niche tool into infrastructure.
Extend one tech stack from rocks and weeds to plant health, pests, and nutrition.
"The core market for us today is the United States. Canada is an easily adjacent market."
"I was looking for a company with a good core technology and tech team but also a product that worked, one with an interesting entry point to the marketplace."
"The whole name of the game for row crops is productivity at low cost and high scale. If you can't do that, you're sunk."
"We find ourselves in a fairly unique sort of place where we can do multiple things, but also with an ROI that just already makes sense to growers."
"The company's technological capabilities, vertically integrated service model, and relatively uncontested market entry point present a tremendous opportunity."
"Today we focus that output on rock and weed management, but the future applications for this platform are vast."
"Our ambitions are substantial. We're looking to grow this concept into something much bigger than it is today."
He leads a company whose flagship product automates what TerraClear itself calls "the worst job on any farm."
The machinery has been compared to "rock-eating velociraptors." He leans into it.
Before robots, he built a bank-shaped business for farmers - FBN Financial - and a grain-marketing platform, Gradable.
TerraClear is headquartered near Seattle, in Issaquah, Washington. Lammers runs it from Boulder, Colorado.
Four generations of his family farmed and ranched in South Dakota before he picked up a Dartmouth degree and an MIT MBA.
One TerraScout pass can collect more than 4 billion image samples per acre - then turn that into a to-do list a crew can act on.
The wedge is rocks. The destination is a full-field intelligence platform - weeds, plant health, pests, nutrition - all from one stack.