St. Pete tech entrepreneur uses AI to help save family farms

Sarah Martello grew up on a farm outside Wichita, Kansas, where she was primed to be the fifth generation in her family to go into agriculture. “Everyone in my family was a farmer,” she says. “That’s all anyone in my family has ever known.”

That includes her grandfather, Flay Mahan, who owned a 10,000-acre cattle farm in Southwest Missouri that bled a bit into Northwest Arkansas. Her four uncles were all farmers and her father, Glen Mahan, had a small farm, in Kansas. But by the 1980s and 1990s, when Martello was a young girl and teenager, her dad couldn’t make enough off the farm to survive, she says. So he went into other lines of work, including running a used car dealership. 

Martello worked the family farms growing up, where she often thought of ways to not be a farmer. She recalls baling hay, with asthma and allergies, and the baler belt sometimes disguising whether she was about to lift a 30 pound sack or a 90 pound sack. The positive side? All the farm work made “me a better athlete,” Martello says, and she used the training regimen to earn a volleyball scholarship to Wichita State. Later she went to law school, became a tax attorney, in Gainsville, and built and sold her own law firm.

Now 45 and some 25 years later, Martello is actually in the agriculture industry. 

Only it’s with software, not soil. And she cultivates AI tools, not air seeders.

A company Martello co-founded in 2021, St. Petersburg-based AgWise, has developed a unique platform that includes one element each of soil science, tax law and AI-led blockchain, to, it says, measure, verify, and predict outcomes to drive productivity, efficiency, profitability and “put real dollars back in farmers' hands.” (Martello co-founded AgWise, initially named Transparency Wise, with her husband Bill O’Neill, a food industry veteran and self-described “meathead.” The pair combined forces after initially meeting at a St. Petersburg running club.) 

AgWise, run out of spARK Labs by Ark Invest in St. Pete, does its work through three core software services it offers agriculture clients, with its proprietary blockchain platform as the lynchpin: Nutrient tax deductions; R&D tax credits; and an advanced plant and soil analysis tool called Foliar Scripts, which AgWise created with a partner and is patent-pending. 

AgWise has five full-time employees and O’Neill projects it will hit about $2.3 million in revenue in 2026. They invested about $750,000, on their own, in startup costs and have so far resisted equity funding. “It doesn’t make sense at the current rates to dilute your business like that,” says Martello, who is CEO of the company.

Taken in total, the promise and potential of AgWise is Martello’s innovative way of contributing to, and being part of, the agriculture industry, which, she says, will always have a piece of heart. Her father had encouraged her to further her education after high school and not go into farming, and Martello, with her Wichita State degree, became the first in her family to graduate from college. She then earned a law degree from Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas and a masters of law degree from the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

“The ability to provide farmers with tools and platforms to help them make better decisions is such a gamechanger,” she says. “I get chills just talking about it.”

Blended approach

The crux of both how AgWise works and what it does for farmers lies mostly in its sales pitch: it often meets with farmers too busy farming to know, say, the new benefits of IRS Section 180, which allows farmers to deduct, not capitalize, a host of costs used to “condition, neutralize, or enrich agricultural land,” according to the tax code. Or changes to the tax code that allow farmers to file retroactive claims, up to three years, to qualify for federal R&D tax credits for, AgWise says on its website, the “innovation happening in your fields, barns and feed mills.”

Photo by Mark Wemple

And then there’s AgWise's main innovation — Foliar Scripts. It begins with a soil test of a given farm which then, AgWise says in a LinkedIn post, “removes the guess work in nutrient application by providing farmers with precision recommendations” on how to get more output, faster. A farmer helped create the Foliar Scripts formula, says Martello, and “we made a digital version of the program and then we commercialized it.” In some early examples, Martello said on a January 2025 episode of the Slice of Agriculture podcast, Foliar Scripts saved farmers $200 an acre.

Going deeper, a May report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, says “AgWise’s fertilizer recommendation is a sophisticated, data-driven and site-specific agronomy decision-support system designed to provide precise fertilizer advice for farmers and extension services. Functioning as a fertilizer ‘prescription engine,’ it generates tailored recommendations for nutrient rates and blends.”

“The innovation at the heart of AgWise lies in its evidence-based approach, which stands in stark contrast to traditional, often inefficient, blanket regional recommendations,” the report adds. “Its advice is grounded in extensive response-to-fertilizer datasets that are rigorously analyzed and incorporated into calibrated agronomic models, frequently leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms.”

O’Neill, who oversees sales for AgWise, simplifies that by telling prospective clients the company’s AI, blockchain platform and software “helps with the unknowns in the decision-making” of running a farm. “Part of our pitch to farmers is that any business that’s not changing is going out of business,” says O’Neill. “They just haven’t put the going out of business sign up yet.”

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One of the biggest challenges, the AgWise leaders say, is customer education. That includes proving to a skeptical customer base the technology really works. O’Neill and Martello say they have learned several times that farmers would rather talk about bush hogs than blockchain.

Another challenge is timing. Industry research, the company says, projects 44 million acres of farmland will change hands in the next three years for a host of reasons, including aging farmers, economic pressures and consolidation. That sense of urgency has Martello exploring major funding opportunities for the first time, to accelerate growth, and also working with UF on some AI partnerships, to accelerate the technology side of the business.

That window both startles and motivates Martello. And while she has no plans to bale hay again anytime soon, she is focused on the future of farms. “Unless agriculture becomes innovative and drives change,” she says, “then the industry will be left behind and all we will be left with is the big commercial farms.”