AgLaunch Engine, LLC
The Southern Appalachian Agri-Food Regional Innovation Cluster is located at the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center in Knoxville, Tennessee and managed by AgLaunch Engine, LLC. a for-profit small business supporting regionally tailored economic development approaches that leverage farmer-led agricultural innovation. The Cluster comprises 240 counties across Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, led by a steering team of representatives from across the region.
AgLaunch Engine is a subsidiary of the non-profit AgLaunch, which leverages its distributed network of farm incubators, entrepreneurial farmers, aligned capital partners, research consortia, technical consulting, and best-in-class accelerator programming to effectively challenge the status quo and thoughtfully create value for farmers and the communities they serve. The AgLaunch vision is a transformed regional agriculture and food economy centered around farmers, innovation, and prosperity. AgLaunch operates through 5 regional clusters located across the United States. These clusters uniquely tailor their offerings to meet the specific needs of their region, but leverage the existing AgLaunch infrastructure to maximize the impact. That infrastructure includes AgLaunch’s renowned AgLaunch365 accelerator program and farm-centric innovation model, access to funding and technical assistance for supply chain, value-added and innovation projects. Tools in development include Data Commons, a shared database to benefit network farmers and entrepreneurs, and the Open Market Consortium, an online market exchange for specialty crops to provide price and attribute transparency.
Our focus areas lay in specialty crops including new grains for beverage and food markets, regenerative and organic agriculture and carbon markets, new uses for forestry products, pasture raised cattle, local value-added products, farm-to-market with novel technologies, bioenergy, controlled environment agriculture, data & traceability, and climate resiliency.