Jun 17, 2026 · 43 min · 9 segments
Oxrow.ai Loftus Ranches: https://www.loftusranches.com/ Patrick Smith is a fourth-generation farmer and the CEO of Loftus Ranches, a Yakima…
Patrick SmithGuest
Tim HamrichHost
The Smith family's farm includes hops alongside apples, pears, peppers and some other crops as well.
He focuses on long term strategy, capital allocation and stakeholder relationships, balancing operational discipline with financial rigor.
He also founded Oxrow.ai, an analytics platform that we're going to talk a lot more about here today that helps farms and agribusinesses pull together fragmented operational and financial data into decision ready insight.
The platform grew out of direct experience running complex businesses with messy data where the cost of getting things wrong is high.
In 2013, Patrick co-founded Bale Breaker Brewing Company, extending the family's hop farming roots into a consumer brand built at the source.
He serves on the board of Yakima Chief Hops and has held leadership roles across hop industry organizations.
Prior to rejoining the family business in 2009, Patrick spent five years in the financial industry, most recently as an analyst with Bank of America Merrill Lynch in their public finance group.
He holds a master of science in ag economics from Purdue and an MBA from the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University, as well as a master of science in business analytics from the Stern School of Business at New York University.
As some of you might know, hops are an incredibly fascinating and very unique crop.
We could easily just do a whole episode on growing hops, and maybe we will, perhaps for a round three here with Patrick.
But because quality is such an important factor to that crop, there's a lot of complexity into both growing and also marketing hops.
And so I think it's a unique crop that lends itself to building a tool like Oxro.
But as you'll also hear in today's episode, the uses of Oxro and AI in general on the farm and in agribusinesses stretch far beyond just hops.
The Smith family's farm includes hops alongside apples, pears, peppers and some other crops as well.
He focuses on long term strategy, capital allocation and stakeholder relationships, balancing operational discipline with financial rigor.
He also founded Oxrow.ai, an analytics platform that we're going to talk a lot more about here today that helps farms and agribusinesses pull together fragmented operational and financial data into decision ready insight.
The platform grew out of direct experience running complex businesses with messy data where the cost of getting things wrong is high.
In 2013, Patrick co-founded Bale Breaker Brewing Company, extending the family's hop farming roots into a consumer brand built at the source.
He serves on the board of Yakima Chief Hops and has held leadership roles across hop industry organizations.
Prior to rejoining the family business in 2009, Patrick spent five years in the financial industry, most recently as an analyst with Bank of America Merrill Lynch in their public finance group.
He holds a master of science in ag economics from Purdue and an MBA from the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University, as well as a master of science in business analytics from the Stern School of Business at New York University.
As some of you might know, hops are an incredibly fascinating and very unique crop.
We could easily just do a whole episode on growing hops, and maybe we will, perhaps for a round three here with Patrick.
But because quality is such an important factor to that crop, there's a lot of complexity into both growing and also marketing hops.
And so I think it's a unique crop that lends itself to building a tool like Oxro.
But as you'll also hear in today's episode, the uses of Oxro and AI in general on the farm and in agribusinesses stretch far beyond just hops.
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