connie
As the founding general partner of Farmhand Ventures, Connie Bowen is redefining what it means to build meaningful solutions in agriculture. While her work relates to venture capital, it is also rooted in dignity, economic mobility, and a belief that the future of ag‑tech must be shaped with, not just for, the people who power the food system.
Bowen is a native of New Jersey, where she grew up in the suburbs. Her family roots include ancestors who farmed in Iowa. Her early love of food nearly led her to restaurant work. She spent time in kitchens as a pastry chef and seriously considered pursuing the culinary world full‑time. “I almost did the restaurant thing instead of college. I worked as a pastry chef and a little bit in kitchens,” she said.
This experience sharpened her awareness of the challenges that workers can face in the service industry including long hours and low pay. But she was also deeply concerned about climate change and drawn to engineering and ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Swarthmore College. There, she blended both passions, building “food computers,” early countertop vertical farms that introduced her to the emerging world of agtech.
Her career accelerated through Venture for America, a now defunct fellowship that fostered entrepreneurship, and then The Yield Lab, one of the early agtech accelerators. But it was her decision to leave the world of financing, and manage farmland in rural Oregon that reshaped her purpose. Living on site and working closely with farmworkers exposed her to the realities of agricultural labor.
“I had colleagues collecting water bottles to buy their kids’ shoes. That’s unacceptable to me,” she said.
That experience became the foundation for Farmhand Ventures, which she launched in 2022. Bowen invests in early startups companies that focus on providing solutions for farming’s labor challenges. Her portfolio includes L5 Automation, which is rethinking strawberry harvesting with robotics co‑designed alongside farmworkers, and New West Genetics, a novel crop company developing scalable, low‑input hemp varieties.
Bowen rejects the idea of technology as a silver bullet, emphasizing instead that solutions must integrate seamlessly with the people who use them. “Stuff doesn’t work if it doesn’t work for workers,” she said.
Farmhand Ventures also works closely with the University of California’s Agriculture and Natural Resources division, including the statewide commercialization initiative known as The VINE, which helps translate research into real‑world tools for growers while elevating underrepresented founders across the ag‑tech ecosystem.
Outside of investing, Bowen is a prolific writer and advocate for human‑centered innovation. Her newsletter, Agriculture Is for People, explores the future of work in agriculture through a lens of equity, practicality, and care.
As she puts it in the interview’s closing moments, she’s committed to staying in the work, even when the industry faces “stormy seas.” Her north star remains clear: building an agricultural future where innovation and humanity move together.
Click here to listen to Connie's interview on Women Innovators in Food and Farming.
Lauryl Gonzalez is pursuing her bachelor of science degree at California State University Monterey Bay, (CSUMB), in Business Administration concentrating in marketing, and minoring in Spanish. Lauryl is an intern at From Farms to Incubators.