FarmLogs (YC W12) Is Going To Change The Way That Farmers Manage Their Business
forbes.com
forbes.com
The project was a complete, utter, dismal failure. Why? Because when these companies wanted to do a deal, old Uncle Otto from the back office at company A would go and have a nice long lunch with cousin Beppe from company B, then they would shake hands, and that was that. They weren't interested, and they were getting great rates anyway, because these were long-term business relationships, some had been going on for generations!
So I am a bit leery of young hip geeks with soft hands telling honest sons of toil how to improve their businesses...
It's 2013. Are 20 something year old farmers supposed to be wearing suspenders, sucking on wheat, and carrying pitch forks?
Let's be a little more supportive. Advice on how you think a young company can get around these legacy relationships would be more helpful.
Then how do they have time for starting a company?
Depending on what they grow and where they are, farmers can have a lot of time on their hands in the winter.
I don't think farming is what you think it is these days.
A nearly complete takeover by automated machines is already underway with farming. Robots coupled with software are really how software will eat the world..
The reason capitalism works so efficiently is it forces change. The "old boys" may have monopolies today but they won't have those same monopolies tomorrow. Its happening everywhere. So many opportunities.
No-one thought forex trading was like that those days either.
I grew up spending half my childhood on the farm and half in the city. My uncle after surviving Korea, farm-raised fish decades before most, diversified into real estate and finances, had leading edge GPS, radio, sat computers and irrigation gear and sent his sons to college to get an edge in business, biology and computers. The family farm(s) and related enterprises are worth somewhere in the nine figures. (Not to mention the wind and solar power farms which they had been playing with on a smaller scale since the '70s to power pumps...)
It doesn't really matter if the software provides savings and greater yields for the farmers though. Any farmer that refuses to use it will either continue getting the same results as the past years or go out of business due to the majority of farmers using FarmLogs to squeeze out inefficiencies.
Twenty years back I worked with farmers that were tracking sex with horse sex (race horse stud farms, agistment, et al) - it was a million dollar business with bloodlines, top dollar vets, field certified portable top range medical gear, etc.
At about that time I worked with farmers developing advanced laser systems for micron scale measurements of wool fibres.
And yet, all these farmers were and still are very conservative in very particular ways - the questions they would be asking are what does Farm Logs do that we aren't already doing? (answer: not much, they already track field usage and markets) and (more importantly to them) does it work when the internet isn't working? (answer: it seems to be cloud based so I guess if the signal drops out then so does the software).
Who owns the Farm Logs data? Who has access to the cumulative total data across all farms? How are the profits from granting third parties access to pooled data redistributed?
Just For Reference:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Robots-Shearing-Sheep-Science-Publicat...
On a side note there is a great discussion on Econ Talk with an organic farmer, Lisa Turner,
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/12/lisa_turner_on.html
I am a bit leery but you paint a real cynical picture.
This is just not true, or, at least, it's only true where inefficient farming practises are propped up by subsidies and protectionism.
A modern farm is a hot-bed of innovation and my initial thoughts about FarmLog is that they're far far too late to the game. This was already discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118984 but I'll duplicate my comment here:
"So, the problem with the SaaS model is that selling to farmers is a lot like selling to a demanding enterprise customer. They know what they want, they have specific requirements and the benefits of a well-matched solution will pay for itself. That isn't, generally, where you want to be if you're looking to scale out a SaaS platform."
I know of multiple groups (usually extended families) that have microwave radio links between their farms. They use this to monitor each-other's grain bins, crops, and security cameras. Not to mention WiFi To The Tractor for monitoring, IM, etc. There's no cell coverage so they find a way to get connectivity. I'd call that pretty internet tech savvy.
This is a large enough market that there's a company that essentially rebrands Ubiquiti radios, marks them up 100%, and markets them through farm magazines. I suppose in a way that's arbitrage on ignorance BUT it shows that there's a need.
You're saying they are tech savvy, but not internet savvy. If you are right (and I disagree that they're 'not internet savvy') then you've identified an opportunity, not a blocker.
The biggest problem with this startup is that they are going to run into farmers who electronically sign their contracts on company websites that already have other value added services to attract the farmers in the first place. These companies also have local elevators and sales reps who sit in the cafe and have coffee with the farmers or visit them in their fields. Many are staffed by people who have done farm work (hired hand, kid not taking over for the parents).
I would, however, suggest that farmers tend to not care about implementations. The fact that FarmLogs uses the internet is irrelevant. As long as it solves the problem, whatever dependencies come along with that solution are just a fact of doing business.
I've worked with a lot of farmers on cutting edge R&D tech, in their experience the internet is just another point of failure that's more than likely to "down" at exactly the time you need it most. It follows that relying on anything that relies on internet access is lunacy, the same attitude that results in farms having on site power generation, on site water tanks, on site fuel & gas tanks, etc.
Now, a system that functions standalone and can get by with occasional internet access ... now you're talking.
That experience and my occasional trips to the Tulare farm show make me think farmers are generally pretty able to embrace new technology.
The one issue I can think of is that internet access in rural areas can really suck.
Farm accounting is not something I would delineate across more than one system, and it seems the remake is far more profit focused, which is good, but it still does not support a disconnected workflow afaik.
Still think the real money to be made is in the weekend gardener/farmer not the big guys, for a project like this. There is no way to have a partial farm management tool that does not go from nut to bolt, and still convince someone to break an incumbent process.
Funny, I had the opposite reaction. We currently run 350 acres and it really doesn't seem like enough land to lose track of. I could see the farmer with a few thousand acres benefiting from this though. Large enough where accounting for the details starts to become a problem, but small enough to not have all the latest gadgets that automatically record all of the details for you.
With that said, I like the idea of having the data. I'm just not sure I could see myself recording everything. Now, if my cell phone would use its sensors to determine what I'm doing in the field and record the information automatically, that might be rather interesting.
As for the weekend users, I was talking more about a well executed "garden planner" with lots of learning and reference information. The look and feel on farmlogs is already in that space sorta, with the trendy ui. Before I had grown for a couple years, and then moved out to 50 acres, I would have payed and did pay for tools, but they all failed pretty hard below the some form of row crop range.
I did have a look at http://www.growveg.com which was surprisingly good, but still does not tie in the fact that most of the users are going to be novices, that need education with the tools. The suggestion/education/local tie in for a garden planner is a space that is as of yet untapped, and there are a lot more weekend warriors to pay monthly or annual fees than farmers.
Of course there is competition in that space too. John Deere has an integrated management solution on this level built right into their equipment from the factory. It actually looks very slick, reporting all kinds of data that FarmLogs will struggle to access without the same level of integration. I expect it is a little too costly for the average sized farm though, which is where FarmLogs may fit in.
I do think they have hit the mark on grain storage management. While that is not a big problem on my farm, as we send all our grain straight to the elevator, it is a real problem other farms have. It is a request I have heard many farmers make. That is data that is easy to lose track of and one you want to have at your fingertips.
I'm quite keen to watch where they take the company. I think they could use what they have as a good starting point to solve some of the deeper problems in the industry.
...or selling to a conglomerate, said conglomerate being the only consistently viable target for "hi we're revolutionary" software like this.