Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

When they first started their company, three University of Florida alums said they “had nothing.”

Now, thanks to the all-important customer discovery process and meetings with hundreds of Agronomists, they have officially launched their company named Cultra with its first product today in Chattanooga. It is part of the latest cohort of Brickyard, the initiative that allows around 20 start-ups at a time to work to break the $1 million in revenue figure in 18 to 24 months or go out of business.

Jack Washburn, the company’s Chief Executive Office, says the three Co-Founders met at Florida and, although they graduated a year apart, they shared a passion for helping farmers be more productive and profitable through the use of data. Washburn earned his bachelor’s degree in Horticulture Science.

The other Co-Founders are:

1. Ethan Poliner, Chief Operating Officer, who earned both his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Finance; and
2. Cooper Martin, Chief Technology Officer, who earned his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science.

Their target market is independent crop consultants, who are also known as Agronomists.

“The economics for farmers is deteriorating,” Poliner says, and the three Co-Founders genuinely believe that Cultra can change that picture.

In a recent blog post, Cultra noted that many agronomic recommendations today are still generated through standardizations of lab and extension services. Soil and tissue samples are processed, values are compared to fixed sufficiency ranges, and generalized fertilizer suggestions are produced, typically one nutrient at a time.

While this process has served agriculture for decades, it is not always responsive to additional sources of insight, such as tissue tests, biological activity, or microbial indicators, that can clarify nutrient availability, timing, and uptake limitations. As a result, recommendations can sometimes remain unchanged despite evolving conditions.

As more data becomes available and expectations rise for precision and efficiency, there is growing interest in more dynamic decision support systems. While the term AI (artificial intelligence) is often used, most of what exists today are rule-based engines or logic-driven platforms that help interpret soil and tissue data in more structured ways. These tools are beginning to bridge the gap between lab numbers and actionable field insights. But they come with their own limitations.

The future of nutrient analytics is not automation. It is augmentation. Agronomic software should help experts work faster and with greater clarity, not replace their judgment. The next generation of tools will surface issues across soil, tissue, and biological datasets, show the reasoning behind each flag, and allow agronomists to apply their own expertise to finalize the response. The role of software is to structure the complexity, not simplify it away.

That’s exactly what Cultra plans to do with its new software that is available starting today.

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