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One in Three Farms Is Using FarmLogs
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 11y agoIt's worth noting that FarmLogs is (YC S12).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hooo 11y agoWhat makes that worth noting?
- eachro 11y agoPerhaps it isn't. If the figures are accurate, capturing 1/3 of their desired market in 3 years seems pretty incredible.
- vacri 11y agoThis is YC's forum that helps market the brand, and FarmLogs is a YC success story. "The guys that provide this forum have backed visible winners".
- whalesalad 11y agoWell you are on ycombinator.com
- Mz 11y agoI wonder what their stack is. I can't readily determine that, which might just be a function of working too hard today. I don't have time to search for the info. (I was specifically wondering if they use Hadoop.)
- chrislloyd 11y agoThey're big fans of Clojure (and are sponsoring clojure/conj).
- whalesalad 11y agoMany of us will be there this year and will probably be in our borderline-offensive green shirts so please do say hello!
- rev_bird 11y agoI can't remember seeing them looking for anything other than Postgres, which seems less like "big data" than... regular data. Maybe they don't put their heavy duty stuff in job listings?
- Mz 11y agoThanks. I did see a job listing that noted "familiarity with stuff like Hadoop" (paraphrasing). So it seemed to cast doubt on them using Hadoop, but it neither served to confirm nor deny.
- terravion 11y agoFarming is often in the raster world as opposed to the line/row/text/vector world. Some of things in Postgres might be huge. Farm data sets could easily be only adding a few thousand rows a day, but the objects associated with each row could be several gigabytes. Meaning that the size of the data is bigger than so-called "big data" but the row analysis tool set looks more like your "regular data." However, there's a lot that goes into the raster analysis that's a whole different beast.
- rev_bird 11y agoHuh. Thanks for taking the time to outline this, I don't know why it never occurred to me. I have to admit, I'm unfamiliar with "rasters" in the way you seem to be referencing them. It sounds, though, like the relational bits of the DB are really being used more as a file system than a database, if there are even really distinctions in the first place. If "a couple thousand rows" are basically being used as a metadata store for the rasters, is that an unusual use of the database, or is everybody doing this and I just never had enough data to care?
- wooster 11y agoThis 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 http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html
- Bjorkbat 11y agoYeah, 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.
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- fanquake 11y agoIn 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).
- csirac2 11y agoThe 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?
- tacos 11y ago1) The statistic is utter baloney 2) see "The Climate Corporation" for a real version of this. Founded 2006 by ex-Googlers, real tech, acquired by Monsanto for $1.1B, and best creepy-corp name ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Climate_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Climate_Corporation
- nether 11y agoThis is refreshing. I wonder what other blue collar industries in flyover country are ripe to be optimized by tech.
- enraged_camel 11y agoThank you for not saying "disrupted". :) Also, nice pun.
- gammarator 11y agoMixed reviews from actual farmers: http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=564750&mid=4651068#M4651068 http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=564750&... http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=574159&mid=4735817#M4735817 http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=574159&... http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=544745&mid=4477289#M4477289 http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=544745&...
- nightpool 11y agoA lot of people who really love it, and some people who dislike that their satellite-based rainfall gauge is just an estimate? Am I missing something here? Seems more positive then just "mixed reviews" would imply to me.
- vcarl 11y agoHere's a success story! https://twitter.com/incoherentdrvl/status/625700597841301504 https://twitter.com/incoherentdrvl/status/625700597841301504
- polytap 11y agoThere are more than 2 million "farms" in the U.S. Snag "One in Three" of those as paying customers (at nearly $1k/year) and it's very unlikely you'd need to use TechCrunch as a marketing and PR platform.
- fanquake 11y agoI'd like to get a more comprehensive look at FarmLogs, hopefully they'll be more available in Australia soon. Although until then, after just browsing through the interface, I'd like to make a few points. I should point out I'm from a broad-acre farm of > 10'000acres, and we have single fields nearly 2.5x bigger than the 600acre size mentioned.. There's still seems to be to much of a focus on farmers having to manually enter data. Our machinery already records everything that happens in the paddock, there's no reason why we should have to sit down and manually enter everything we do. Farmlogs should connect to whichever machinery provider we use's API, and pull all the data straight from the machine. It's now possible to do that in real time, and it opens up far more interesting opportunities, (for example optimising variable rate maps in real time) as we can also push data back to the machines. How do I connect and use my local weather station data within FarmLogs? One limitation of our current yield prediction software is that it's weather data feed comes from a BOM station nearly 30km away, that isn't nearly good enough, so we're seeing a transition to on farm weather stations. Ultimately we need to be able to collect weather info on a field by field basis, not only for crop modelling and yield prediction, but to better optimise harvesting/swathing schedules, and make more effective N applications (we can create better application maps based on the yield models + predicted weather). Can I import my all my soil data? We've had extensive EM38 mapping, radio-metrics and soil testing done over the farm to better calibrate our yield models, and improve nutrient application, how do I put that data into FarmLogs? If I can, how do you use it? Can you generate my VR maps based on soil data + predicted weather information? I'm also seeing some features that most farmers I know will never use. We don't need "another" calendar. We don't need to keep a record of all the grain we have stored in silos, or upload information about every piece of machinery we have on farm. What benefit does that give us? It seems like your almost trying to gameify farming with all the graphics.. I think tools like FarmLogs need to move away from just data collection/consolidation and much more towards yield prediction/modelling, and giving recommendations/optimising nutrient applications. We spend more than $500'000 a year on fert/chemicals, so if you can help me make a more precise variable rate map and save me 10% of that figure, thats something I'm going to use. Even if your charging me $5000/10'000/x'000 a year for it.
- gumballhead 11y agoThat's an excellent assessment, and we're actively developing our product in that direction. You can already upload your machine data files to create yield maps in FarmLogs, and this year we released the Flow, a hardware device that passively listens on the CANBus to create yield maps in real time on a FarmLogs account. We will be giving the same treatment to as-applied and as-planted data as well. There are lot of challenges in this area. There are no open data standards and probably most farms in our target market do not have access to that type of equipment. Or if they do, they don't have great records of it. For them we offer a sort of progressive enhancement. We've licensed five years worth of satellite imagery to give us reasonable baselines of precision field performance history. And while we also need management decisions for our models, we can make use of manually entered data as well as machine generated precision data. Over the summer, we piloted some products built from these models with great results, and will be announcing them soon. We're really excited about it.
- whage 11y agoI have been silently following FarmLogs for a long time, it is wonderful to see technology being merged with nature. I often thought about what it would be like working for them but the problem is that I'm from mid europe (Hungary). The majority of our country is farmland, we even have a somewhat similar and quite successful startup here, SmartVineyard who do similar stuff but specifically for grapes. Is it possible for non-US developers to join FarmLogs without relocating?
- kirk21 11y agoCan you comment on how you gained traction? Seems to be a difficult market to tackle.
- random778 11y agoCould you explain what FarmLogs does to someone that a) grew up on a deciduous fruit farm with some cattle, b) studied electronic engineering with computer science, c) works in embedded systems and d) doesn't come from the US?