sustainable-farming
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Roger Byrom and the art of leaving things standing
He led Addison through a change of ownership and spent years questioning changes to Lower Manhattan. On a historic New Jersey farm, Roger Byrom’s preservation work now comes with sheep.
Gabe Sibley Left the Road for the Row
After Mars-yard robots, self-driving cars and sidewalk couriers, Gabe Sibley found a more immediate autonomy problem in a farm field - one weed, one nozzle and one careful shot at a time.
Eijiro Tsukada Put a Stone Mill on the Countertop
After 21 years inside a beverage giant, one crowded cafe and a painful exit, Eijiro Tsukada built the appliance he wished his customers already had.
Kevin Baum Put the Farm’s Whiteboard in a Pocket
A city-raised rower followed a friend to an Australian sheep farm and found a stubbornly useful idea: make livestock software behave like the whiteboard in the shed. A decade later, Kevin Baum’s lesson is still the same - start with the work already happening.
Chris Abbott
Chris Abbott is the Chief Executive Officer of Pivot Bio, a Berkeley-based agricultural biotechnology company pioneering microbial nitrogen solutions that replace synthetic fertilizers. A Minnesota native and University of Minnesota graduate, Abbott built his career at the intersection of agriculture finance and agtech investing - from Wall Street sell-side research at Piper Jaffray to co-leading Continental Grain's Conti Ventures. He joined Pivot Bio's board in 2018, and in August 2023 stepped up as CEO, guiding the company past $100 million in annual revenue while scaling its gene-edited microbes to over 5 million acres. Under his leadership, Pivot Bio achieved 60% year-over-year revenue growth and has helped farmers reduce synthetic nitrogen use by over 129,000 metric tons.