Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Let me tell you a story: just over 10 years ago, I worked on a project to create a foreign exchange trading tool for small and medium sized businesses in Europe. My company (well the company that employed me, you know what I mean) had been commissioned to write a custom version of our existing trading software for it, and some other company (a big consultancy) was doing the, err, consulting bit of it, systems integration, branding, whatever you want to call it. The technology was great, worked perfectly, easy to use, got the best quotes from major banks, yadda yadda.

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...

The founders are farmers. Their families have ties to many other farmers in the Midwest. The company is based in Ann Harbor to leverage this legacy network. During YC, they made deals with farms in California and expanded their network.

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.

> The founders are farmers.

Then how do they have time for starting a company?

My grandpa was a farmer, and my co-founder Jesse's dad and brother are farmers. Our first office was here: http://goo.gl/maps/oAOk4

Farmers in the high plains have a lot of downtime. The farmers in the area I grew up in often spent winters coaching hockey, or if their kids were out of school, lived in Florida. Might be different in places where there's a year round growing season.

I know a family of farmers from South Dakota. They spent half the year farming there, the other half living in Southern California.

Depending on what they grow and where they are, farmers can have a lot of time on their hands in the winter.

Think about it this way: how would you pitch to programmers to replace whiteboards and post-it notes with software?

Hmmm... I grew up in Iowa and the "old" farmers I knew used GPS units that measured fertilizer distribution to the square foot so they could compare it to yield in that square foot and adjust the flow on that micro level next spray to even out yield.

I don't think farming is what you think it is these days.

Its not the same at all, do a search for "farming robots" on Google. Factor in the age of a lot of US farmers, and price of farmland, and things really start looking like they are about to undergo a significant change.

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.

Not to take away the point from the first line, but I'm pretty sure robots are coupled with some sort of software to make them work.

I don't think farming is what you think it is these days.

No-one thought forex trading was like that those days either.

Good farmers aren't Luddites.

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...)

I am the co-founder of a cash-positive company that provides services to the crane industry, and while we do encounter a few problems with the older generation for the most part they are very receptive. I think that the older generation is losing that distrust for young innovation, and they actually enjoy and appreciate youthful interest.

> So I am a bit leery of young hip geeks with soft hands telling honest sons of toil how to improve their businesses...

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.

This is obviously anecdotal, but the farmers that I know are very conservative. I can't imagine any of them paying $200/month to a couple of kids in hoodies for software. This hip, trendy, presentation of FarmLogs is not how you sell to conservative farmers. Look at the About page on their website.

Thirty years back I worked with farmers working with engineers to make sheep shearing robots, they made a couple of generations of actual working robots which are in the agricultural museum not far away from where I am now.

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...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM

Yes that's exactly the type of the conservative I was suggesting. Farmers aren't stupid, and it's very very difficult to earn their respect.

I come from a family of farmers. They are very practical and have no problems embracing technology, as long as the technology works.

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

This is the most defeatist post Ive ever seen on HN. Your experience doesn't transpire to be the truth for all other similar situations.

I am a bit leery but you paint a real cynical picture.

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