Gridtractor launched one year ago today - what have we done and what have we learned?
Launching the company before there was a market to serve required some chutzpah (which, fortunately, we have lots of). Electric tractors were offered only in small numbers and that will remain true for a few more months. That fact has challenged us to make the case to investors, partners, employees, regulators, utilities and customers before there is a real product to sell. But, a kay part of our mission was to break the 'chicken and egg' of agricultural electrification and we have succeeded. All of those stakeholders understand now that the electric farm vehicles will come and are making adjustments to investment plans to account for them. And, for us, being careful with our resources and leveraging our Polaris Energy Services affiliation, we are everywhere that we want to be and positioning ourselves to be the ag charging services leader right out of the gate.
We established partnerships with Monarch Tractor, Rhombus Energy Solutions (now Borg Warner), and others yet to be named (it's always hard to keep exciting things under wraps!). Long-time customers and partners Terranova Ranch and Woolf Farming have provided patient input and let us swim in their data to figure out what it will look like to transition large fleets of tractors to electric using existing electrical infrastructure to build out on-farm charging networks.
There are exciting opportunities for value stacking, providing grid services, cooperative charging networks, etc. but there are also a bunch of challenges just to get basic charging deployed on farms, especially in a scalable way. The "blocking and tackling" of pre-sales engineering, permitting, deployment, commissioning, training and system operations are the first priorities.
We have built an awesome team! Most of us have dual roles with Polaris, which is actually a net positive, and we now have all the pieces in place to hit the gas - I mean the potentiometer - when electric tractors start rolling off the line next year!
