Farmers Business Network (FBN) announced July 28 that it has raised $50 million in new funding.

Farmers Business Network (FBN) announced a $50 million funding round to expand its AI-powered platform for ag commerce, financing, and farm intelligence. The company aims to reduce farm operating costs by 20% and has extended nearly $3 billion in financing. FBN launched "Norm," a Large Language Model for agronomy questions, and expanded its product offerings, including crop protection and livestock supplies, while opening its platform to third-party sellers.

The Rarest Rare MetalWhen people think about rare & precious metals, they tend to think of the most common ones, like gold or platinum. Or maybe some of the more industrially useful rare metals, like tungsten , rhodium , gallium , even rhenium. (follow the links for dedicated investment reports on each of these metals).But there is an even rarer mineral in the platinum metal group, in fact one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust: iridium.This ultra-rare metal, much more common in meteorites, is currently used in small amounts in many high-tech applications like aeronautics, medical imaging, and LED screens. It can also be used to generate green hydrogen, although the large-scale deployment of this technology has been hindered by the high price of iridium.What Is Iridium?Iridium is a very rare metal, in the same family as platinum, which is only formed in the most violent cosmic events like supermassive supernovae or the merger of neutron stars. So its relative rarity on Earth is also a reflection of its overall rarity in the whole Universe.When purified, it appears as a silvery metal, although the ore and alloy can often display rainbow colors, from which it derived its name, inspired by Iris, the goddess of the rainbow in Rome.Iridium is the second-densest naturally occurring metal, after osmium. It is also extremely resistant to corrosion, even at temperatures as high as 2,000 °C (3,630 °F), and has a melting point of 2,446 °C (4,434 °F).This extreme density contributes to its rarity in the Earth's crust, as it sank into the planet's core during early planetary formation