The recent International Women’s Day has provided the opportunity to pause and reflect on women-centric successes. One area of interest is with successful female-led companies. For Digital Journal’s contribution to this subject, we shine a spotlight on Ida Boesen and Julie Koch Fahler.
The two women make important contributions and impact on the climate, agriculture, and technology industry in just a couple of years. The focus for this is agricultural technology (or AgriTech).
Female entrepreneurs Julie Koch Fahler and Ida Boesen stepped into their position as market disruptors with an innovative commodity trading platform for farmers in 2018.
The co-founders have been best friends of 15 years and they combined their experience deeply rooted within the technology (Fahler) and agriculture (Boesen) industries to build a solution that would support Danish farmers in maximising their margins (which are precariously placed in relation to the profit vs loss curve).
Ida Boesen tells Digital Journal: “We were old friends working in different industries, but we always knew we wanted to start something together that would have an impact.”
In 2021 their startup Agreena evolved further. This was by adding a soil carbon certification platform to the ‘techstack’ and the company AgreenaCarbon, was formed.
AgreenaCarbon became one of Europe’s first internationally accredited (against the standard ISO 14064-2) certification programmes in soil carbon sequestration.
Through its works programme, Agreena mints, verifies, and sells third-party verified carbon certificates to the voluntary carbon market for farmers that have transitioned to regenerative agriculture practises with the platform.
This represents an important area since 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions is linked to agriculture. Furthermore, one-third of arable farmland has already degraded due to climate change.
With the topic of female success, the company is operating in 10 countries across the pan-European market and it has supported more than 160 farmers to join the green economy in their transition to sustainable agriculture.
Fahler explains: “We started the company to digitalise and democratise one of the biggest industries in the world. Agriculture is such an integral part of, and costly affair, for our society – and it has so much optimisation potential.” She adds: “We are here to drive actual, large-scale changes and improvements; ensuring better food production with care for the world we live in, and fair and competitive compensation for the farmers.”
