Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

I used to specialize in Agtech as a consultant. It's a weird space.

[Disclaimer, this is my experience of the Australia and NZ scene, not much Silicon Valley involved]

The gap between "people who know ag" and "people who know tech" is just vast. And I sensed no great urgency to bridge the gap. I tried myself - talked to every farmer I could, moved to a working farm, even had a go at weighing cattle and applying treatment [0] (yes I am wearing slacks here!) but I didn't see a lot of people around me really interested in understanding the "other side".

There's also reluctance to address the connectivity issues. For most software developers internet connectivity is an ever present resource and it's a fault if it's gone. That doesn't really apply if you're deploying rurally, but multi-master distributed systems are hard and few people want to accept that's what they're dealing with.

In the end I came to the conclusion that no one appreciated my industry knowledge in AgTech (I must be one of the most experienced livestock identification software professionals on planet earth...) and it wasn't really worth investing my time in. That's not to say I would never work in the field again, but it would be in the capacity of working in offline systems, not my fairly extensive knowledge of cattle identification tags.

[0] https://lewiscampbell.tech/img/CattleTreatment.jpg

As someone involved in ocean tech, I sometimes see a similar attitude, although the number of former naval personnel looking for new opportunities helps to bridge that gap a little bit.

I've had tech people occasionally propose ideas, or ask if something sounds feasible, and one of the first things I often remind them is that the ocean is brutal to most forms of human engineering; something like Murphys Law incarnate. Weird physical stresses, bad wireless comms, corrosion of all sorts, biofouling of all the things, large temperature swings, etc. Sometimes a good day in ocean tech isn't "it worked", it's "it didn't work, but we got our equipment back out of the water." The domain knowledge involved in building or operating even moderately-reliable systems like that is hard to get without first-hand experience. There are lots of important, interesting problems offered by the ocean, but they always come hand-in-hand with these not-so-fun ones, which in my experience tends to dampen tech people's enthusiasm a bit.

I've often wanted to look into AgTech (grew up chasing sheep in Canterbury) but people I've talked to in that space say that it's incredibly hard to grow sales, farmers are inherently conservative on new expenses, what was your experience of that?

Nice, I'm on the west coast surrounded by farms.

My commercial knowledge of this is all second hand, but I hear it's driven by a few big customers - essentially people with huge commercial farms who are willing to experiment. The idea of selling an expensive AgTech system to your local farmer at the pub doesn't really happen.

Ah, I'm jealous! Cheers mate. :)

I can answer this one. I have an AgTech startup that deals with sheep.

The industry is incredibly conservative (which I knew, having worked in it for over a decade) but on top of that, it's also incredibly insular. You get one shot to get something right. You get one short per year due to seasonality.

You better be prepared to travel a lot. In-person training is not negotiable for farmers using a piece of new technology. Often they will be trying to use it well out of any kind of network access, your tech better work off-line and you better be there in person.

Different countries with the same livestock often have wildly different ways of dealing with livestock. You have to be adaptable to the local practices, often whatever you are doing has to fit in with some other thing the farmer wants to do with the sheep, because they don't want to have to get them in the yards unnecessarily. That goes for the availability of labour as well, some places you will be overrun with helpers, sometimes it's just you and the farmer and you need to be able to adapt to that.

The tech has to be rugged. I used off the shelf Android RFID scanners for part of my project and we have broken nearly everything we have tried.

Compared to Australia/NZ, the US market is just about impenetrable for anybody outside of it. I did travel to Silicon Valley looking for investors but got nothing but blank stares and head scratches when it came to things like genetics. Silicon Valley is about the last place I would ever look for funding again as there are too many fools with their hands on the investment funds looking for dogshit fintechs or web3 stupidity rather than actual businesses.

Good to see you here David! Yeah sheep is the last frontier of the last frontier of digitisation. Makes cattle look like the airline industry.

Heh. The cost of the individual animals means that all that dairy tech isn't really useful for sheep which is why I think renting tech in that space is the way to go. Distribution is still a problem for us though.

Out of curiosity, did you try approaching any of the Universities with big agricultural programs (Texas A&M as an example)? They'd have alumni willing to invest in Ag.

Texas A&M have some of my gear they are using with goats. Haven't really tried leveraging that as travel to Texas has been off the cards for a few years.

I recall my father hating technology because the irrigation systems for crop circles would call him when they stop functioning at night. Likely could just wait until morning for a motor or solenoid to be replaced.

RFS[0]: PageDuty for AgTech

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Hey Lewis,

I’m pretty interested in learning from your experience - I’ll email you at the address in your profile, if that’s ok?

No worries :)

I took a sabbatical a while back after a couple of back to back bad contracting gigs that had me thinking maybe it was not them but me.

My plan was to work on software for permaculture, but there were a number of confounding factors that limited that and I ended up abandoning the work. Portable devices were still not great in full light settings. Although that has improved in the interim, the bigger problem was that at least half of the permaculture people I knew were anti technology. More than a few were borderline pastoralists, and I found a group of them having an antivax conversation (pre-Covid, pre-Trump). I can’t recall the last time I was that disappointed.

Connectivity is a big issue as you say, but also the ergonomics are just bad for many settings. Glare is bad, especially when combined with dust. Farming and landscaping is dirty work. Touch screens do not like dirt, especially abrasive dirt. Work gloves prevent blisters and some dirt, but some gets through the gloves. But also getting gloves on and off repeatedly is a huge pain in the butt, which is something I only came to discover more recently when my partner or work would try to message me when I was working in the yard. It takes you out of your flow.

I think we will get there, but it will take OLED or better displays, and many more iterations on scratch resistant coatings (I gouged the shit out of my Apple Watch 5 by wearing it gardening), and I think then the path will still be voice recording, note taking and location tracking as the primary tools to split data collection in the field from copy editing accomplished while sitting at the kitchen table or office desk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com