When farmers get paid faster, everyone eats; HitchPin brings fintech to ag, good to humanity, founder says

Startland News’ Startup Road Trip series explores innovative and uncommon ideas finding success in rural America and Midwestern startup hubs outside the Kansas City metro. 

The fintech revolution typically overlooks agriculture, Trevor McKeeman said, noting that any move to bring tools — like a payment platform within a digital marketplace — definitely breaks ground for farmers attempting to turn soil, or a profit.

What started as a digital marketplace for hay in 2019 — equally as sexy as Amazon starting with books, McKeeman joked — HitchPin has expanded to equipment, livestock, services, trucking, and now offers instant invoicing.

“It’s not just some sort of niche app that somebody looks at while they’re on the subway,” explained McKeeman, founder and CEO of the Manhattan-based startup. “But you can meaningfully improve the way food production happens. You touch everybody. Everybody on the planet eats.”

“It’s cool,” he added. “We’re working on world class stuff that could be done in Berlin or Palo Alto or anywhere else. And yet, we’ve got a team that’s in Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and Texas.”

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Having a safe and secure modern payment process, McKeeman noted, allows the farmers, ranchers, and rural businesses to not have to put their business on hold while they wait for a check to come in the mail.

“We’re taking that accounts receivable process down from months or weeks to a day or two,” he continued. “As the technology advances and the banking system catches up, that will eventually get down to seconds. So it sounds simple, but it’s a huge deal to these guys.”

“When you think about each one of these other businesses out there, they are essentially their own startups,” he added, “and when they can accelerate their ability to get paid faster, the whole system is healthier.”

Image courtesy of HitchPin Payments

The HitchPin team is now working on a dashboard system that allows users to monitor storefronts, vendors, and payments going in and out, he said, rewriting how transactions take place.

Trevor McKeeman, HitchPin, speaking at drone event in August 2025; courtesy photo

“It sounds simple, but it will change an entire industry,” he continued. “And it’s cool to think that it’s happening in this backyard.”

“The cool part in all this is that it can work for a really large company that’s still doing manual processing,” he added. “But it can also work for smaller and medium sized companies. So you’ve just elevated everybody’s technology level to a place where they can all compete head to head. It’s pretty fun.”

The HitchPin marketplace has more than 66,000 users and has had listings in all 50 states, McKeeman said. And they’ve used the marketplace to get hay and other supplies to farmers and ranchers that lost everything to natural disasters, like fire and tornadoes. 

“The stories that we hear from the businesses that we’re working with are the best part,” he explained. “It’s like, ‘I couldn’t believe how fast that was or that just allowed me to keep the business running, frankly, because of my ability to sell things or my ability to get paid faster.’”

It’s more than just transactions and payments, he noted; there’s a soul behind what they do.

“This is incredibly hard work that people do,” he explained. “It’s incredibly complicated. They’re dealing with genetics and capital management, every sort of challenging part of business you can think of. If you can make that a little bit easier and more robust, then you’re doing something good for humanity.”