The Ryzosphere is a new community platform to help farmers navigate the supply chain.

“We have so many great producers across the country using regenerative methods and management, but they have no way to connect to markets that value that,” said founder Joni Kindwall-Moore.

Kindwall-Moore is also the founder of the Snacktivist food innovation company, the North American Millets Alliance and co-founder of CIVC Montana, which focuses on gluten-free grain processing.

She spoke  April 1 during a presentation to various stakeholders.

The platform is for producers, processors, purchases and farmer-focused support services, including agronomists, researchers and agencies.

Many farmers want to do things with a soil or biological system focus, she said, “but the market fundamentally prevents them from transformation. The market will dictate a lot of what farmers can do.”

Kindwall-Moore also pointed to “invisible” supply chains. She gets multiple calls each day from farmers looking to find markets for “stranded commodities” or companies looking for farmers to raise desired commodities. She hopes to help them connect.

“We have no ability to navigate the processing infrastructure, we can’t find where it is, it’s really difficult to access and when you do, there aren’t a lot of industry standards around how to navigate them,” she said. “It’s not set up for innovation.”

There’s no connection between nutrition, soil health and product, she said.

“Food has not embraced the digital consumerism revolution,” she said. “Until we do, we are not ready to adapt to things like declining soil health, the need for increased crop diversity, responding to volatile markets, nutritional needs coming from consumers or water scarcity. This is really putting our whole system at risk.”

Kindwall-Moore envisions the overall food system working as an engine, with coordinated moving parts coordinating for efficient and effective delivery, with a focus on human health, economic resilience and environmental stewardship.

“Unfortunately, our food system only values efficiency and we’ve lost sight of the effectiveness,” she said.

Supporting farmers

Kindwall-Moore was involved in efforts to develop a market for proso millet, as part of the United Nations’ International Year of Millets in 2023.

Farmers were excited and planted millet, and it flattened the market because there was too much supply and too little demand, she said.

She also heard from large companies interested in getting involved, but they wanted a sufficient supply, guaranteed.

“If we start to be better about understanding how we harmonize supply-demand forces, we aren’t putting so much risk on the farmers and the buyers,” she said.

Farmers would like to grow the crop, it’s suited for the region and processing is in place. But only 10% of farmers had agronomy support, she said.

“Should they take the risk to plant this new and novel commodity that they’ve not worked with before, we’re putting them at risk of loss because we’re not providing them with the support they need at an agronomic level,” she said. “We want to bring these pieces of the puzzle together.”

Now launching

Ryzosphere organizers already brought in 4,000 participants after an initial February early launch, Kindwall-Moore said. They hope to bring in a “pioneer, early adopter group” of farmers and ranchers, for a second-phase launch in July/August.

Ryzosphere has identified the Inland Northwest and Colorado as areas for focused beta testing.

The platform is expected to be fully functional in 2026. The platform will be open to participants who apply or are recommended.

“We have unprecedented market disruption coming at us right now, with trade and tariffs, and it’s happening really quickly,” Kindwall-Moore said. “There is a massive rush to reshore a lot of our domestic supply chains, and we are not prepared … Disruptive events can create huge opportunities to re-think how industries operate. This is our chance to run, this is the year we need to run fast.”