Tanimura & Antle

February 18, 2021 | Customer Stories

Innovation is part of every farmer’s DNA. With ever-evolving challenges, including weather, soil health, changing customer food preferences, success in agriculture means paying attention to today while planning for tomorrow.

No one understands this more than Brian Antle president of PlantTape – a fully automated transplanting system using tape. Looking for ways to improve the growing process, Brian was intrigued by an amazing innovation. “The technology was created in Spain in the early 2000s,” he says. “Our parent company, Tanimura & Antle, is a third-generation, family and employee-owned company started by my grandfather. We acquired the PlantTape technology in 2014 and brought it to the United States for further development, spending three years growing it on our ranches to establish the practices needed for this new type of growing. After 35,000 acres of growing, we were finally ready to share, so in 2017 we launched PlantTape and now we’re selling it all around the world.”

Our parent company, Tanimura & Antle, is a third-generation, family and employee-owned company started by my grandfather.

It’s truly a revolutionary advancement that is, if you’ll pardon the expression, taking root all over the world. Brian explains, “PlantTape allows you to start plants, such as lettuce, in the nursery as opposed to putting the seed directly into the field. This provides better uniformity and better germination. It allows the crop to grow the first three very critical weeks of its life in a controlled nursery environment as opposed to the adverse weather out in the field. Once they are established, we take them from the nursery and transplant them in the field. PlantTape automates the transplant process as opposed to the old way of doing it by hand, which speeds up the efficiencies and increases the acres planted in a day.”

A key element of American AgCredit’s mission is recognizing and supporting innovative ideas such as PlantTape that will improve farmers ability to feed the world. Brian says, “We’ve been partners with American AgCredit for over 20 years and they allow us the flexibility to continue to look for new investments and develop new innovations.”

IT'S A WAY OF LIFE

Brian adds, “I think the next ten years – there’s going to be more changes than in the last 50 years of farming. It’s a pretty exciting time to be part of agriculture.”

And an exciting time for American AgCredit to be part of that story.

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