Vermont Farmer Mateo Kehler Becomes FarmBot Tech's First Founding Farmer

SAUSALITO, Calif., November 12, 2026 (Newswire.com) - Mateo Kehler has called the cheese he makes in Greensboro, Vermont, a lever for social change in his community. "Profit serves the purpose," Kehler said, "and the purpose is building soil, community and a future for family farms" in their neighborhood. Today FarmBot Tech named Kehler, co-founder of Jasper Hill Farm, its first Founding Farmer.

The Kehler family has spent summers on Caspian Lake in Greensboro for more than a century. In the late 1990s, as dot-com money pushed up real estate prices, Mateo and his brother, Andy, felt themselves being priced out of the place they loved. Kehler was swinging a hammer for local contractors, building second homes on land that struggling dairy farms had left behind, when he and Andy came to see they were part of the problem. They set out to build something that would keep the working landscape working, and in 2003 they started making cheese.

Today Jasper Hill buys milk from neighboring farms and pays a premium for it, which Kehler says is what keeps small herds of around 50 cows in business. Several of those farms have passed from one generation to the next, he says, and depend on that market to function as family businesses.

Kehler has long believed that big problems can be met with practical solutions built at the scale of one community, and that the right technology is part of the answer. That belief drew him to FarmBot Tech, which created a new role to put a farmer like him at the start of the design process. A Founding Farmer is a working farmer who joins FarmBot Tech at the start of product design, before features are built, to shape what the company makes and in what order. Kehler is the first. The idea grows out of a pattern in the company's research: farm technology has too often been built for the operations with the most staff and capital, then handed to everyone else to figure out. FarmBot Tech wants the person who will use the technology in the room when it is imagined.

Kehler's days make a good test. His farm's day begins with milking at 2:30 in the morning and runs close to around the clock, and he will measure FarmBot Tech's farm operations and satellite tools against that reality. He will tell the team where a feature fits and where it falls short, and help decide which features should be prioritized.

He also brings a habit of mind FarmBot Tech values. Kehler calls himself a professional amateur, someone who never trained to make cheese or milk a cow, and says that gives him room to ask questions and probe the edges of what he knows. He already puts machines to work on repetitive, routine tasks, so the people around them can taste cheese, understand customers and stay curious. That is the relationship FarmBot Tech hopes farmers can have with its technology.

Behind the role is a puzzle FarmBot Tech's white paper set out to solve. The share of US farms using precision agriculture fell from 27% to 22% between 2023 and 2025, even as the technology improved and its cost kept falling. Large farms use precision tools at a rate of 68%, small farms at 13%. The paper treats the barriers farmers name most often, including cost, complexity and integration, as product design issues.

Technology is part of how Jasper Hill competes. "Our competition is multinational corporations, highly capitalized enterprises that are standardizing and defining market spaces," Kehler said. "We need to be at the front lines of innovation, in quality and in technology, and we can't get there without good tools."

He sees the role as a chance to expand access to agricultural technology. "Farmers are practical," Kehler said. "Unless something materially changes their experience for the better, it's a hard sell. Understanding what that means takes inquiry, partnership and participation. I'm excited by the chance to build products that work for farmers and to open up technology that has historically been there only for the wealthiest and most resourced, so the advantage doesn't always go to the biggest operations. I'm in it for that reason."

"Designing for trust requires radical inclusivity-putting human experience and dignity ahead of technical assumptions," Williamson said. "True innovation happens when technology adapts seamlessly to human behavior, rather than forcing people to adjust to complex software. Selecting Mateo as our first Founding Farmer is aligned with our mission that FarmBot Tech's platform is rooted in human empathy, rural resilience, and operational equity from the ground up."

Kehler and Williamson's full conversation, recorded in Vermont, is available at The84 Podcast - Episode 1 - In Conversation with Mateo Kehler FarmBot Tech's platform brings satellite data and a voice-first interface to farm operations, with compliance as the primary use case. The white paper, "AI Adoption in Agriculture: Why the Gap Persists and What Must Change," is available at https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0zr8N10.

Media Contact: FarmBot Tech, [email protected]

SOURCE: FarmBot Tech

Source: FarmBot Tech

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