About
A builder first. A farm for proof.
Grass Ridge R&D is the engineering and testing arm of Grass Ridge Farm. It's run by a farmer who has spent a decade building ag-tech, and backed by a dairy his family has worked for more than a century.
01 The founder
Raised on the farm. Building for it since 2013.
Carl grew up on Grass Ridge Farm and was on a first-place Platinum team at the North American Intercollegiate Dairy Challenge while at UW–Stevens Point.
In 2016 he founded FeedX, operational software for large dairies plus an animal feed marketplace. FeedX grew to customers in almost every US state and went through Techstars.
Since then he's built customer-facing tools and AI agents for farm machine data from John Deere, Case IH, and other equipment, and launched VetVoicemail, voice AI for rural vets.
Grass Ridge R&D brings that together for robotics and hard-tech teams: engineering from someone who has shipped to farmers, and a working farm to deploy on.
Grass Ridge Farm
02 The farm
100+ years. Still a working dairy.
Grass Ridge Farm is a modern American family dairy that has been in the Lippert family for more than a century. Today it milks about 700 cows across roughly 2,000 acres of corn silage, soybeans, alfalfa, clover, and pasture.
- 01 / Cropland & pasture
- 2,000 acres
- 02 / Milking herd
- 700 cows
- 03 / Family-farmed
- 100+ years
- 04 / Real weather
- 4 seasons
That matters for the companies we work with. Advice comes from people who do the work every day, and technology gets tested where it will actually be used: in barns and fields that run on a farm schedule, not a demo schedule, through hard winters included.
03 Writing
How we think about ag & robots
Selected essays from Carl's blog.
- 2024 Back To Atoms Software is now a solved problem. We should go back to working on hardware.
- 2025 Fully Autonomous Luxury Agriculture When humanoid robots will change everything.
- 2021 The Farm Barbell Large farms producing commodities, small farms capturing value, and what startups should build for each.
- 2026 So You Want to Vibe Code an App for Farmers? Vibe coding is awesome. But here be dragons.
- 2018 The Future of Self-Driving Cows Cows could save the planet. Virtual fencing could help.
Next step
Have something that needs to work on a real farm?
Tell us what you're building. You'll get a straight answer on whether we can help, and what it would take.