Bryce Everett is not aware of an ancestor who has not been a farmer or rancher. A descendent of two families who settled in Oklahoma during the land run, Everett, a Canadian County Farm Bureau member whose family farm and ranch is located in Kingfisher County, said he knows directly of five generations before him who have farmed, and family ancestry research keeps turning up agriculturalists in the family’s line back into the 1700s.
As long as Everett’s family has been farming, they, like all farmers and ranchers, have hauled their agricultural products to a nearby town, grain elevator or depot to sell livestock, grain and other fruits of their labor.
While this centuries-old sales strategy is widely considered “just the way things work” in agriculture, Everett has his eyes set on widening the scope and reach – along with the price – that individual farmers and ranchers can capture when agricultural producers go to sell their products.
Everett, along with a team of agricultural market experts and technology integrators, has developed URMRKT, an online platform that brings together buyers and sellers of agricultural products and inputs, which is preparing for a full launch.
“What I want people to know is that this is being built for them, as a tool for them, so that they can do business the way they need to do it,” Everett said. “All farmers do business differently, and this platform gives them the ability to buy and sell as they see fit.”
Whether a farmer is buying fertilizer to apply to their fields, a rancher is looking to sell hay or an agricultural producer is wanting to find a better price for their grain, Everett said URMRKT allows buyers and sellers to easily connect using a robust online platform, vastly expanding the circle of available market options for agricultural inputs and products.
Everett and his team are preparing for a statewide roll-out of URMRKT in Oklahoma focusing on seven common agricultural products that the state’s farmers and ranchers buy and sell: corn, wheat, milo, soybeans, fertilizer and off-road diesel.
Everett said URMRKT will allow users to list products that they have for sale in these seven categories and connect them with fellow users looking for the same products. The platform will offer filtering to ensure buyers can refine their search to more easily locate exactly what they need.
The URMRKT team builds in pricing transparency to the platform’s listings, ensuring buyers know exactly how much the delivered cost of the product will be before they make a purchase. Since agricultural products are often sold by the truckload or truckloads, Everett said the ability to know the final, delivered price of bulk agricultural products is a key feature.
With the quantities that farmers, ranchers and agricultural suppliers need to keep their operations running, Everett said building trust into the platform is a central focus to the URMRKT user experience. From user reviews to a built-in payment system where buyers’ money is deposited and then paid out in a stepped process as products make their way to final delivery and inspection, URMRKT works to build trust in the agricultural community.
“We’re doing all we can to instill the trust needed to make the transactions happen,” Everett said. “It’s difficult to change the status quo to a new age. Farmers are very good at adapting, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
As the platform grows, additional agricultural product categories will be added, and the URMRKT team has plans to expand the platform’s presence across the region and even the nation.
Agricultural producers, including Everett and the generations of farmers and ranchers before him, have long conducted business with a handshake and a promise. Everett said that while the local, in-person transaction model may be the tradition, the ability for farmers and ranchers to find new markets for their and new suppliers for their inputs is important to keeping family farms and ranches profitable into the future.
“I’m all about building relationships, but I’m also about running agriculture as a business and getting the margins that are needed to achieve sustainability,” Everett said.
Everett was able to build the online sales platform with input from fellow farmers and ranchers thanks to OKFB’s Oklahoma Grassroots Rural and Ag Business Accelerators program. Everett is a graduate of the program’s AgCelerate Oklahoma agricultural innovation pipeline, and went through the program’s comprehensive business curriculum focused on helping rural innovators succeed.
“You can go through many accelerators – there are various accelerators that people can do – but I don’t think I could go to any of them and find that feeling of, ‘These people genuinely care what’s going on here,’” Everett said of his experience in AgCelerate Oklahoma.
The feedback URMRKT received from fellow farmers and ranchers across the state as part of the accelerator program helped the platform refine and hone in on meeting the needs that agricultural producers have when it comes to selling the products they work hard to bring to market while also buying necessary inputs.
As URMRKT prepares to launch, the platform is offering Farm Bureau members an opportunity to sign up for early access for the platform so they can be added to URMRKT as soon as it launches. With the URMRKT member benefit, OKFB members will receive 10% off the site’s transaction fee along with a referral system.
“We want Farm Bureau members to know that we’re in to help them and create something for them.
“We want to see them do well – I’m a farmer, and farmers are my people.”
