5,000 year old email?

5,000 years ago, Mesopotamian villagers had a big problem. They had an excess capacity of grains and too few customers in their own community. To expand their clientele beyond their immediate village, many innovations came to life, including containing vessels and a new form of accounting. Cuneiform was one of the earliest forms of writing. Wedge-shaped marks were made on clay tablets, allowing farmers to record their hard work. Now instead of only bringing goods to market, deals could be decided away from the bulky bushels of grain and a new form of trade was developed.



Fast forward to today, we still see agriculture driving human innovation with agtech startups receiving significant funding around the world. In 2018 alone, $16.9 billion were invested in 1,450 agtech startups around the world. Even outside the realm of startups we see significant investment going into adding big data to the agriculture world. DSM’s recent acquisition of the Erber Group is a good example, adding Romer Labs to the company’s portfolio. This purchase gives DSM access to feed and food diagnostic activities, further enhancing the company’s value proposition to its customers.



With so much effort going into the development of better feed, it is truly hard to imagine how the food we will eat in a decade will be produced. While we continue to see a great deal of innovation going into R&D, procurement and sales managers have been left behind. Sometimes it feels that distributors of feed additives need to make do with tools not that more sophisticated than sending a Cuneiform clay slab between villages, now they just call it email…



Glowlit was developed to give buyers and sellers a better tool to use and gain information. Like the farmer 5,000 years ago, Glowlit users are expanding their network and learning of critical pricing events in their industry in a blink of an eye. This leap in innovation is what excites us most at Glowlit about working in the agriculture industry. .