2025 Startups to Watch: Good Oak scales social venture to boost biodiversity in farming, herd ag industry toward change

Editor’s note: Startland News editors selected 10 Kansas City scaling businesses to spotlight for its annual Startups to Watch list. Now in its 10th year, this feature recognizes founders and startups that editors believe will make some of the biggest, most compelling news in the coming 12 months. The following is one of 2025’s companies.

Click here to view the full list of Startups to Watch — presented by Morgan Stanley, and independently produced by Startland News — and see how the companies (including this one) were selected.

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Regenerative agriculture is more than just a buzzword, Jacob Canyon said. He and fellow Good Oak co-founder Dan Krull are on a mission to show that farming and conservation not only can, but should co-exist.

“Generally, people think of farming and conservation as being separate worlds, separate industries, separate approaches,” Canyon explained of the outdated methods that sparked his plans for the social venture.

Before launching Good Oak in 2022, Canyon worked in conservation and prairie restoration for nonprofits and local municipalities, he shared. While working to preserve one prairie in particular, he remembers driving down a road and seeing beautiful prairie on one side and 40 acres of soybeans on the other, reflecting a stark lack of biodiversity.

“The ecosystem is completely destroyed, but someone’s making a living off of it and it’s feeding people,” he continued, weighing the pros and cons of traditional farming. “Of course, the healthy, diverse natural ecosystem has more appeal. But I started to feel like both of these approaches were making the same mistake of saying, ‘We’re going to draw a circle around the part of the earth we think is nice and want to protect and the rest of it we can drive into dust.’”

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• Elevator pitch: Good Oak builds farms that promote biodiversity and rich soil, restoring ecosystems on public and private lands and teaching regenerative agriculture practices. 
• Founders: Jacob Canyon and Dan Krull
• Headquarters location: Kingsville, Missouri
• Founding year: 2022
• Current employee count: 4
• Funding amount raised to date: $402,000
• Noteworthy investors: N/A
• Noteworthy programs/accelerators/incubators completed: LaunchKC’s Social Venture Studio

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Through Good Oak, Canyon and Krull focus on developing new ways to farm and use the landscape in a way that is producing value for people but also preserving biodiversity and the long-term health of the soil, he said.

Dan Krull, Good Oak

In practice, that means rotational grazing and agroforestry. Good Oak uses these practices on its own farm — which sits on 795 acres surrounding Powell Botanical Gardens — and on commissioned habitat restoration projects.

“We raise sheep and cattle and hogs and we have them in a mobile, electric fence that you can move around,” he explained. “They are moving constantly, so that their impact on the landscape can be actually a tool that we use to clear brush and invasives and then it gives the landscape time to recover.”

And then there’s Good Oaks efforts in agroforestry — which used to be called tree cropping — a farming system that uses fruit and nut trees as the primary source for produce, he noted.

“We prioritize native food producing species — like pecan, persimmon, pawpaw, American hybrid chestnut, American hazelnut — that are naturally occurring parts of the ecosystem,” Canyon continued, “so that we can plant at a density that actually works as an agricultural system, while supporting all of the wildlife that are used for those native species.”

Jacob Canyon, Good Oak, discusses 2025 plans for his social venture with Startland News reporter Nikki Overfelt Chifalu at HITIDES Coffee in the East Crossroads; photo by Tommy Felts, Startland News

2024 was a big year for Good Oak, Canyon noted. In January — in partnership with Powell Gardens, the Audubon Society, Lincoln University, and the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service — Good Oak launched the Midwest Center for Regenerative Agriculture (MCRA) to expand and promote regenerative food systems in the region. In the spring, cattle and sheep — including an endangered heritage breed of cattle — started grazing the land and fencing was built, plus the team started a restoration scope for 160 acres of native habitat.

The startup also did a habitat restoration project with the Heartland Conservation Alliance for a woodland area along the Blue River, as well as partnered with the Ecdysis Foundation — an academic research group that studies regenerative agriculture — to build a body of data around the actual impacts of these different regenerative practices.

Jacob Canyon, Good Oak, pitches his company during a demo day event for LaunchKC’s Social Venture Studio; photo by Taylor Wilmore, Startland News

Good Oak also received significant funding from the Matthew Zell Family Foundation out of Chicago — which also set up a matching $250,000 grant — and was chosen as one of seven startups for LaunchKC’s Social Venture Studio. Canyon and Krull also added two new team members.

ICYMI: LaunchKC studio cultivates regenerative look at social challenges; this founder grew his business too

“2024 has been an exciting year,” Canyon added.

Good Oak plans to continue its momentum in 2025 by expanding its agroforestry planting, herd, and the tree nursery at the MCRA, he said. Outside of the center, Canyon and Krull plan to work on restoring several sites along the Blue River, including working with BNIM on a plan for the municipal farm on a city-owned site that was once a prison farm.

“There’s a lot of interesting things in the works,” Canyon noted.

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10 Kansas City Startups to Watch in 2025

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