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Comment by wooster | Hacker News Reader

This number ("one in three") is really ambiguous[0], as I haven't seen them state what they consider a farm to be. It could be the Ag Census data (~2.2 million farms), or along some subset (say non-family farms at ~90 thousand), or some farm type (I believe I've previously seen them say "row crop farms").

I'm sure it seems like an impressive stat to throw out there, but it's a lot like saying they're offering a million shares of options to new employees; without the total number of shares we don't know what that means.

[0] http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html

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Happy to clear that up. We don't count hobby farms as they aren't our typical users. We are focusing on the ~280k row crop farms in the US of which over 90k have started using FarmLogs. Most of our customers have between 600 and 10k acres of land each.

Thank you. I think that's a fair representation of your marketshare. When you say 'started', what exactly do you mean? Used trials versions, previously engaged, or full time active members?

Thanks! That's helpful for clarifying what your target market is.

Slightly off-topic but I am dumbstruck by the size of US farms. Where I live it's common for farmers to manage 10 hectares fields and these are considered big fields.

Same here, my father has a ~80 ha (~200 acres) farm in Brittany, and that's a medium sized farm in the area.

Every year we take on workmen/students normally from outside Australia, who need to spend time actually working on a farm to finish their agricultural degrees or similar. It's always interesting to see their reactions after they finish telling us about their "big" farms back home, when they realise we can fit their entire farm + change into a single paddock here.

In some cases you can fit Israel into one of the farms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station

> In some cases you can fit Israel into one of the farms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station

In the US, at least, I believe that particular example would be considered a "ranch" rather than a "farm".

I know in Canada, for the longest time (At least since the 1940s), a large family farm was a 1/2 section - or 320 acres . But nowadays, a large family farm ranges all the way up to 4 sections (1280 acres). 8x improvement in 70 years.

I'd classify that as an "8x increase" instead of "improvement".

I suspect I'm missing something subtle here - are you proposing that a single family, (with a bit of extra help during harvest), being able to farm 8 times more land, isn't a good thing? And, based on what I've seen of the tractors these days (air conditioners, enclosed cabs, hell, little beer cooler to boot!) - the work, while hard, is also somewhat less backbreaking than it would have been in the 1940s as well.

No subtleties; "more" doesn't equal "better". It can, in some ways, but there's no generalized way to make them mean the same thing--it depends entirely on judging criteria for both.

E.g., "good" in what way? That there's less manual labor now? (Not a function of having more land.) "Good" in the sense that ag companies tend to make more money on larger farms? "Good" in the sense that yields are (generally) consistently up? (Also not related to having more land.)

To make "good" meaningful you must strictly define what's "good", realizing that there are almost always other (possibly contradictory) criteria, and that what might be "good" in one sense may be "bad" in another.

In any case, my point was that "improvement" has a solely positive connotation. You could have said "8x improvement in farmed acreage", which sort-of implies an increase in acreage is "good", but why not just be accurate in the first place, and call it precisely what it is, which is an increase in average acreage?

Ah, I see what you are getting at. I guess, you would also say, that storage density hasn't improved 1000x in the last 20 years, but "increased". And that the rate of death from automobile accidents per 1 million miles traveled since 1950 hasn't improved, but, "decreased".

I guess I wanted to combine both an objective and subjective assessment in a single word, which admittedly while not precisely accurate, got across my meaning.

I was actually hoping you were going to give me a traditional marxist response that we should not seek to decrease the amount of labor per unit of production, (that decreasing the amount of work per bushel of wheat is not an improvement) - I had an answer for that!

I actually would say increased/decreased in those situations, but I think most people (myself included) would also say those were improvements--they don't come with any significant costs, whereas large-scale ag does have associated, often negative, side-effects.

Tragically for our "argument" I believe doing less work for the same output is a good thing, at least in general. But even that has associated costs that aren't always "good" given current conditions :/

Still a bit ambiguous as crop farms aren't the only type of farms - there's a large sector of the industry devoted to livestock.

Are you in the Canadian market?

The question isn't how big the farms are. The question is how are those who are "using" Farmlogs, using FarmLogs. Are they active? Are they using just the basic functionality, or are they using more advanced features?

I'm still involved in farming, and the guys I know who are "using" it, just are using the basic functionality.

Unless they have partnerships, FarmLogs is going to have a difficult time competing with Deere, Case/IH, other equipment manufacturers who are developing their own built-in products with similar feature sets and deeper pockets. Not to mention the local cooperative monopolies, seed companies, etc who are also in the game.

Yeah, as a former farmer I'm a little bit skeptical. Last I checked the vast majority of farms out there aren't large operations, but incredibly small family-owned "hobby farms" or market gardens (what most of us would identify as a small vegetable farm).

Having known many farmers over the years, I can only think of one who would really have a use for this. The rest would probably just dismiss it without much thought.

In Australia we've seen nothing but farm getting larger over the last 15-20 years. It's also interesting to compare the size of farm he's talking about to what we have here. On our property we have single fields 2x the size of what they consider a small farm (600acres).

The economics of farming certainly do seem different in the US. Is land really that much cheaper/higher-yielding? Is that why hobby farms in the US can break-even on such small areas? Or is the difference just in the subsidies they get? Or is high/consistent-yielding farmland simply locked away from smaller operators in Australia nowadays? A combination of everything?

Land may be cheaper, but probably not higher yielding. When your buying land your essentially buying rainfall. We could easily find and buy xx'000 acres of really cheap land, but it if only gets 200-300mm of rain every year, your not going to be seeing serious yields. The other thing to remember is that irrigation is impossible for a lot of West Australian farmland.

What crops do you grow? Growing up near the Salinas Valley, I always associated row crops with produce and not grains, so a <600 acre "row crop" farm can generate pretty massive revenue.

Predominately wheat. The rest is lupins and a small amount of canola (~750ha this year).

This number of course applies to only their targeted market, farms of a certain size and then only those growing two or three specific crops, but that's a long ass headline.

Also worth noting that the Ag Census likely overstates the number of farms in the US, so it's not out of line for FarmLogs to come up with their own number for their target market.

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