4 ms·

Damn; I wouldn't have thought farmers would be a good group to target software towards, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Out of curiosity, I wonder how the

Damn; I wouldn't have thought farmers would be a good group to target software towards, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Out of curiosity, I wonder how these guys actually manage to get those millions of dollars in savings. Nice to see a new startup is trying and succeeding to make a positive difference for some pretty critical customers :) Going to keep an eye on this group for sure. Something tells me they'll be around for a while.

hueving 12y ago
>Out of curiosity, I wonder how these guys actually manage to get those millions of dollars in savings. I'm guessing a big chunk of that figure is derived from a boost in crop yield due to optimal placement. So the bottom line cost for the farmer was similar but money went much further.
DrJosiah 12y ago
Reading the app description, more consistent data about fields + better budgeting towards fields would likely do it. As an example, corn and soybeans are commonly rotated to help reduce the usage of nitrogen-based fertilizers in fields (soybeans put nitrogen in the ground, corn takes it out). If you have better data about nitrogen fixation, you can know if/when you should swap, and/or run the math on expected prices for soybeans vs. corn, irrigation costs, etc. Normally this is done in spreadsheets, but in the app you can get estimates and budgets for all of this stuff much faster (at least from what I read). Farming is hard, and better support for data/analytics on farms is awesome.
jcurbo 12y ago
You'd be surprised - a good friend of mine from high school was from a farming family, and they had a PC in the early 90's when hardly anyone had a PC in rural areas except schools and libraries. (I grew up in northeast Arkansas) They used it for accounting and taxes mostly (and we used it for games!) and they wrote the cost of it off each year. The other major early infusion of tech into farming I can think of is the growth of GPS guided precision application in the early 00's. I was in college at the time and my dad worked for a farm services company; they had people that went out and drove around fields with equipment figuring out exactly where to spray the right stuff. I recall it being a big deal because it saved the farmers a lot of money on chemicals.
- gammarator 12y ago
  Likewise--my mother was doing our farm's books on an IBM 8088 back in the mid-80s.

hueving 12y ago

>Out of curiosity, I wonder how these guys actually manage to get those millions of dollars in savings. I'm guessing a big chunk of that figure is derived from a boost in crop yield due to optimal placement. So the bottom line cost for the farmer was similar but money went much further.

DrJosiah 12y ago

Reading the app description, more consistent data about fields + better budgeting towards fields would likely do it. As an example, corn and soybeans are commonly rotated to help reduce the usage of nitrogen-based fertilizers in fields (soybeans put nitrogen in the ground, corn takes it out). If you have better data about nitrogen fixation, you can know if/when you should swap, and/or run the math on expected prices for soybeans vs. corn, irrigation costs, etc. Normally this is done in spreadsheets, but in the app you can get estimates and budgets for all of this stuff much faster (at least from what I read). Farming is hard, and better support for data/analytics on farms is awesome.

jcurbo 12y ago

You'd be surprised - a good friend of mine from high school was from a farming family, and they had a PC in the early 90's when hardly anyone had a PC in rural areas except schools and libraries. (I grew up in northeast Arkansas) They used it for accounting and taxes mostly (and we used it for games!) and they wrote the cost of it off each year. The other major early infusion of tech into farming I can think of is the growth of GPS guided precision application in the early 00's. I was in college at the time and my dad worked for a farm services company; they had people that went out and drove around fields with equipment figuring out exactly where to spray the right stuff. I recall it being a big deal because it saved the farmers a lot of money on chemicals.

gammarator 12y ago
Likewise--my mother was doing our farm's books on an IBM 8088 back in the mid-80s.