Farming Startup FarmLogs (YC W12) Triples Market Share in Last Six Months
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
A second problem is web-/app-based farm management solutions place at loggerheads two qualities of good farmers: 1) progressive use of technology to increase profitability; and 2)the natural resistance to tell anyone what they've paid for inputs (land, machinery, seed, fertilizer) and what they're being paid for outputs.
Farming is a business, and by giving out too much information, farmers risk being out-maneuvered by their competition. Whether the competition be another farmer discovering what's being paid for cash rent and offering $5/acre more, or a hedge-fund gathering up real-time planting and yield information to play the CBOT/CME.
On a personal note, I've been involved in farming for 45+ years. My dad 80+ years. When explaining taking the information about the farm and crops and giving it to a company, my dad--who's never used a computer in his life--just stopped me and said: "That information is a new commodity they'd be getting for free to take and sell, and we'll never see a penny of it. "
Something for farmers to consider.
And farmers just are supposed to give this commodity away for free? An action which--whether done for free or for profit--might have some short-term benefits, but may run counter to their interests in the long-term?
Yeah, right.
They say you don't have to go check rain gauges. That using government weather station data and some sort of calculations, it is possible to show how much rain fell on a field.
Now this may very well be possible. But if it is I wonder how it's done (yes, I know they explain it...but I still wonder). And I wonder how accurate it is. Maybe it's accurate enough. But I'd love to see some side by sides with actual rain gauges. Government weather stations are not that close together and rainfall can vary even hundreds of yards apart. It would really suck to claim X inches of rain fell on a field so no water is necessary, when in reality it didn't happen. It seems like this could cause claims of reduced crop yields for which the provider is responsible. But maybe this works exactly as claimed. I don't know. If it does work as claimed it's an amazing feature.
It's a cool project for sure. One downside I see is that they are basically asking farmers to hand over their budgetary and production data (to be fair, Farmlogs says this data won't be sold). Having known some farmers, I see this being an issue with many and there will be a significant portion that will never use the product for this reason. On the other hand, many apparently will, so good for Farmlogs.
They may be at 15% of some undefined subset of farms (e.g. wheat, corn, or soybean farms larger than n acres) or something like that.
(Now you know where the farmer message board is...)
Basically, I'm guessing they are hoping that Monsanto or John Deere or some other giant AG company buys them for however many millions of dollars.
This might be a valid strategy, but it sucks for the farmer because they don't have an incentive to build a truly valuable product that people will pay for. There is a huge difference when you build something people pay for vs something they use because it's free.
When you build a free product, the end user is not a customer, they are the product. I wonder how many farmers like being the product and not the customer.
Just because its free doesn't mean people will use it regularly...
If the 15% number is real, that would mean they have 330,000 farms under management by the 2.2 million farms number. Otherwise, if you take the 187,000 that account for 60% of crop sales, then 15% of that number is A LOT lower in terms of user count, more like 30,000 farms.
I've totally written software that was used by that many people. I've also written software that is as complicated as Farm Logs. My point was not to get in a pissing contest over who has the most users or who writes the most complicated software.
My point is they are giving away their software in a market where farmers routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment, seed, land, rent, fuel, etc. and they are charging $0 for it.
It's sort of the equivalent of giving away enterprise software. I'm not sure what the long term vision is, but I don't think free is going to be great for the farmers long term and I don't think their free sales model aligns FarmLog's goals with the farmers' goals.
Generic comments alone may be low-substance, but at least don't poison the atmosphere. Dissing based on specific knowledge may be negative, but at least adds information. Put the two together, though, and you have a shallow dismissal. We don't want that in discussions here.
I've worked with people who worked on similar or even competing products and I know firsthand that when you are selling a product and charging money that your perspective and priorities change A LOT.
In my mind a free product for farmers feels like applying the silicon valley mindset to a Midwestern business and that it really feels like a misunderstanding of the market and the customers.
There is HUGE opportunity in farm software and technology, it's incredibly terrible, but I don't feel like FarmLogs' approach is sustainable long term. That is just my perspective as a tech geek in Nebraska.
The more concrete discussions like this can be, the more grounded and informative they are. It's the comments that dismiss others' work for generic reasons, after apparently shallow consideration, that are jarring.
It's true that "middlebrow" is pejorative. We should find a neutral term. I'm thinking "generic dismissal", but if anyone has a suggestion I'd like to hear it.
> without having to actually address their arguments
I think there's a misunderstanding here that goes back to the nature of generic dismissals. "Addressing arguments" does not always raise the signal/noise level.
That particular comment's argument was that there is no value in getting people to use a free product. That claim isn't just generic, it's trivially false: if a product had no value, no one would use it. The trouble with generic dismissals is that "addressing their arguments" usually makes the discussion worse, not better. "Free products can too have value" isn't headed anywhere substantive or on-topic.
Moreover, once a discussion has gone completely generic—the semantic heat death of internet threads—any such response will produce several more such replies. Why? Because everybody has an opinion about the generic thing. This is how low-substance discussions proliferate.
By contrast, we can't all have an opinion about agricultural software, because we're mostly aware that we know squat about it. Had that comment read (say), "I've worked in the farm space and we've found that it's easy to get farmers to adopt new software but hard to get them to pay for it, so 15% of the market doesn't mean much," that might or might not have been a good comment, or a true one, but it wouldn't have been a generic dismissal. That's why programminggeek's follow-up comment was much better.
Careful because the other extreme has its own problems: my company only has paid customers who prepay for the entire year. While this has helped us pay the bills and cover cost, it has been detrimental to building a great product because we aren't getting as much feedback as we would if we had 10x users. I'm finally reaching a stage where I may take up a job just so we can give away free trials and not have to rely as much on near term revenue to pay the bills.