Key Takeaways
- Innov8.ag has launched Harvest Replay, a service the company describes as the first operational intelligence platform for agriculture that analyzes labor tracking in real time against environmental, agronomic, and market factors.
- The platform is currently available to existing Innov8.ag customers, with a broader rollout to new growers planned for 2027.
- Labor costs represent up to 60% or more of farm operating expenses, with apple growers in some cases seeing 100% of labor costs mapped to wholesale prices — a challenge Innov8.ag says Harvest Replay is designed to help address.
- Innov8.ag's data approach relies on payroll-grade data, which the company argues is more accurate than aggregated weather models or satellite imagery because workers are paid based on it.
- Steve Mantle's 2035 vision for Innov8.ag involves the company being embedded in the data infrastructure of the global food system, spanning genomics and breeding research through to autonomous harvest operations.
From Silicon Valley to the Orchard Floor: Steve Mantle on the Future of Farm Intelligence
When Steve Mantle recalls sitting down with a 70-year-old farm manager in The Dalles, Oregon, and watching the man's reaction as he reviewed Harvest Replay for the first time — “I've never seen anything like that. It's a whole new way of looking at things” — he uses it to illustrate what the product is trying to solve. It is the kind of moment Mantle says has shaped Innov8.ag's direction since the beginning: a career that started on sheep farms in rural Australia, continued through Microsoft's mergers and acquisitions division, and eventually led him to Eastern Washington state, where he founded Innov8.ag around one core idea — empowering growers with data.
That idea now underpins Harvest Replay, Innov8.ag's newly launched service. According to Mantle, it is the product of years spent working alongside growers, university researchers, and extension agents, and it is intended to address a persistent gap between the volume of data that modern farms generate and what growers can realistically act on day to day.
The Labor Problem Innov8.ag Is Trying to Solve
The agricultural labor challenge in the United States is well documented. What Harvest Replay attempts to do differently is bring greater analytical precision to it.
“Sixty percent of costs or more — in some cases, for apple growers, 100% of their labor costs — maps to wholesale prices,” Steve Mantle said. “That shows how bad the state of things is.”
Unlike existing HR tools or standalone labor tracking software, Innov8.ag says Harvest Replay cross-references labor data in real time against environmental variables — air quality index, heat forecasts, bee flight windows, and block ripeness — to surface insights that would otherwise be difficult to quantify.
The analogy Steve Mantle uses is a sports game-day replay film. Harvest Replay is designed to give farm owners, area managers, and crew leads a structured review of their farm day — with data contextualized and delivered in a format suited to each group's role and schedule.
That distinction is practically significant. Crew leads are often on the farm at 3 a.m., may not speak English, and are unlikely to engage with a dashboard built for a CFO. Farm managers typically arrive at 5 or 6 a.m. Ownership often checks in later in the morning. Innov8.ag pushes daily audio briefings — formatted as a two-host podcast exchange — to each group, covering the same operational data but framed for each audience's context and, where possible, language.
“We're talking to them in their own language about their own farm,” Steve Mantle said. “And so the relatability piece — they listen to it.”
Steve Mantle on Data Quality in an AI-Driven Industry
With most agriculture software companies now incorporating AI into their offerings, the quality of the data those models are trained on has become a central question — one that does not always receive straightforward answers.
Innov8.ag's approach is built on what Steve Mantle calls payroll-grade data. Rather than data collected purely for research or monitoring purposes, the information flowing through Innov8.ag's Fair Pick and Fair Track hardware is used directly to calculate worker pay. Workers can print a running tally of what they have picked during the day using a thermal receipt printer attached to the device. Mantle's argument is that this creates an accuracy floor that aggregated weather models or satellite imagery cannot match.
“It doesn't get better than data that's being used to run payroll,” Steve Mantle said. “That is gold-level data because it's highly defensible.”
The historical dataset it brought, however, is central to the benchmarking Harvest Replay relies on — comparing farms against their own year-over-year performance, block by block and variety by variety, as well as against anonymized peer data segmented by farm size and crop type.
Steve Mantle also acknowledged a limitation that affects AI-driven farm tools broadly: contextual information that algorithms have no way of knowing — a disease event that removed trees from a block, a shift to machine harvest on certain varieties — can affect the accuracy of recommendations without any visible signal. Innov8.ag is addressing this by introducing a verbal interview agent that gathers this context from growers directly before Harvest Replay produces its analysis.
On data governance, Mantle said the company is working toward data transparency certification and has put agreements in place with upstream partners to ensure grower data is not used to train AI models without explicit consent — a topic he described as a priority given the sensitivity growers have around how their operational data is handled.
University Partnerships Behind Harvest Replay
Harvest Replay draws on a body of applied research that Innov8.ag has built up over several years through partnerships with land grant universities across the United States.
The Smart Orchard Program, developed with Washington State University and the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission, served as a field laboratory for testing precision agriculture technologies — soil sensors, canopy imaging, microclimate weather stations — under real farm conditions. Steve Mantle credits these collaborations with helping Innov8.ag develop data collection practices grounded in agronomic research rather than purely commercial assumptions.
The Berry Smart Fields program followed, commissioned by the US Highbush Blueberry Council to apply a similar model to the blueberry industry. The program operates across sites affiliated with Washington State University, Oregon State University, Rutgers University, and the University of Florida, combining field days, sensor networks, robotics demonstrations, and crop phenology research.
“It's about unlocking that potent combo of extension, peer-reviewed research, sensors, and the practicality of technology,” Steve Mantle said.
The relevance to Harvest Replay is direct. Innov8.ag is integrating crop ripening curves, growing degree day models, and machine harvest data flows into the platform. Research developed through Berry Smart Fields — including work on the relationship between growing degree days and berry ripening stages — is feeding into the scheduling and labor optimization outputs that growers receive through Harvest Replay.
Steve Mantle's View on Where Innov8.ag Is Headed
Looking ahead to 2035, Steve Mantle is candid that predicting the next nine years in any detail is difficult. What he does point to is a set of structural conditions that he believes will shape the direction of the industry.
Farm labor budgets in the United States are projected to grow by roughly 1% over the coming decade, according to figures Mantle heard cited by the USDA at World Agri-Tech 2025. The available labor pool, he argues, is effectively capped — a condition that is pushing growers toward greater automation regardless of preference.
Innov8.ag's stated position is in the data layer between raw sensor inputs and autonomous farm operations — providing context and analysis that supports human decision-making rather than replacing it. The company has an existing working relationship with autonomy-focused partners, the details of which had not been publicly announced at the time of this interview.
Steve Mantle referenced a paper by Neil Carter, CEO of Okanogan Specialty Fruits, on the concept of an “orchard of the future” — one that moves away from assumptions about full automation and focuses instead on redesigning farm environments to work practically alongside both human workers and autonomous equipment, with data as the connective tissue throughout.
“It all comes back to data,” Steve Mantle said, “all the way back into the genomics and thinking about the varieties and the research. Where is Innov8.ag? Right in the heart of the data centricity of our food system.”
