The Blog Is Back!
Let’s address the elephant in the room…our blog has taken a back seat the last few years and that makes us sad. Some of you may or may not have noticed, but it’s something we think is worth explaining. Though challenging, the events that have affected us over the years preventing us from being as active on our blog have become an integral part of who we are as a company and we’d like to share with you what’s been going on. Taking some time to [briefly] share our story should benefit 1.) those of whom noticed the changes over the last few years, namely our long-term customers and 2.) those of you who are just becoming familiarized with ZipGrow. Those who fall in the first category should leave here understanding more clearly why things have changed the way they have and for those who fall in the second category will leave understanding more clearly our story and how we got to where we are. So here we go, let’s dive into it!
A Quick History Lesson
Those of you reading this that have been followers for several years will remember us as Bright Agrotech. While the Bright Agrotech ideas, mission, and even technology run prominently in our DNA, Bright Agrotech was an entirely different company. Bright Agrotech was founded in Laramie, Wyoming with a handful of people back in the early 2010s with the mission of changing how people grow and access food. Over the course of many years, Bright Agrotech [or BA] focused heavily on education through YouTube videos, blog posts, and an online education platform, Upstart University. Throughout this time BA’s technology, thought-leadership and success gained enough attention to warrant expanding partnerships across several countries as distributors, manufacturers, and resellers, the largest of which included France and Canada. The company, ideas, and passion of Bright steadily grew and flourished until 2017 where things really changed for Bright Agrotech as a technology company based out of California began the process of acquiring the company as a means of bringing talented people to help their mission of bringing sustainable food closer to people. As a by-product of the acquisition, Bright Agrotech was left with a difficult decision: either leave everything they had worked for over the years, their customers, and their products to fizzle out and die, or pass on the proverbial torch in hopes of continuing on with the mission. Luckily, the latter of those options was what was decided upon. Over the course of several months—and actually upwards of a year or more—Bright Agrotech handed everything off to us—their manufacturing and distribution partner in Canada—ZipGrow. Our small team was tasked with the exceedingly arduous task of taking over the work of what was being done by nearly 50 employees at Bright Agrotech. As you can imagine, the load was heavy to bear and many of the things that had been built at Bright Agrotech were not able to be sustained by our much smaller team. This meant that to keep the ship afloat our small team was only able to focus on what was most important for the company and our mission to survive which didn’t include much in the way of blogs, videos, or educational materials that Bright had come to be known so well for. Over the years we have been fighting our uphill battle to get to the point where we could start delivering the same value to those most interested in changing the food system as possible.
The Here And Now
Through the many struggles of taking over a highly functioning mission with less than 1/5th the employees, learning to grow scalably, continue making our process more efficient, providing adequate customer support for the large network of farmers and customers that has been built over the years, we’re excited to be back in the swing of publishing meaningful, and hopefully highly informative/useful information. It’s been a long journey getting to this point, and it may seem insignificant to some, but we’re certainly excited and we think you should be too. We have a lot in the works and here’s what you can expect from us.
What’s To Come
There’s a lot to talk about and a lot of noise in the sustainable farming industry and it would be downright silly for us to add to this confusion. Thus, our goals for this blog are to cut through the static, make clear the not important and highlight the important in meaningful ways while, hopefully, also having some fun. Our blog will be different in these ways and here are a few topics you can expect to see here:
- Commercial and hobby farming best practices, things to avoid, etc.
- Home and hobby farming tips and tricks
- Industry news
- ZipGrow news and updates
- Farm/farmer highlights
- Commercial farming case studies
- Crops and crop-management
- And more (have ideas? Send them to [email protected])
