The problem with the 15% number is how many are actually using it to manage their farm versus just on checking it out or using the weather/markets features? The guys (dozen or so) I've spoken to about it are just using it for weather/markets.
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. "
Agriculture is a practice affected by loads of variables that are often not well understood. Farmers could definitely benefit from products that could be created by applying data science to all the information collected from other farmers, the government, remote sensing, etc.
The problem is, ag data is a commodity. People/organizations can gather, mine, and create new products with it. It's always been that way, except the past few years have seen the types and amount of data being gathered, and the speed at which it can be analyzed growing rapidly.
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?
The thing I wonder about is their rainfall accumulation feature (I haven't tried it so don't know the details).
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.
Good point. Also, "15% of the total number of farms in the US" is not the same as "15% of the total farmed area of the US", since farms can obviously have widely varying acreage.
This is not a huge accomplishment, they've become a totally free app and are VC backed, so basically instead of having real paying customers, they are getting farmers onboard by not charging anything.
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.
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.
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.
This comment counts as a shallow dismissal, I think. The tell-tale sign is the combination of generic boilerplate and dissing.
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 live in Nebraska and I've worked on ag related software previously. I've not heard great things about FarmLogs from farmers who used it when it was a paid product. I've never used it so I can't personally say if it's good or bad.
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.
This is a much better comment because it refers to your actual experience. It would be even better if you shared some of what you've learned about the farm domain and that kind of software, or some of what specifically you find wanting in FarmLogs' approach, or what specifically a better approach would require.
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.
Can we stop with this 'middlebrow dismissal' crap? It's a meaningless phrase that is just brought out to bludgeon people you disagree with without having to actually address their arguments. The fact that it wasn't even true in this case just shows what a worthless concept it is.
Bludgeon? I hope not. I try not to be personally critical.
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.
I'm curious how they are counting 15% of farms. If they have $11 billion worth of crops under management, I'm not sure how that is 15% of the market. According to the USDA, the total US crop value is like $166 billion in 2013. Simple math would indicate that they have closer to 6% of the market under management. That's assuming 2013 numbers, 2011 and 2012 numbers were higher and I don't know what 2014 were. I'm not sure that 15% number adds up.
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.
As a farmer myself, I've come across a handful of apps trying to similar things. FarmLogs seems to be the most successful on the marketing side of things though.
I agree. John Deere or possibly Cargill feel like natural fits. If they really do get a huge market share, some company will buy them just for all the customer relationships, not the software.
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.