
One in Three Farms Is Using FarmLogs - rodly
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/one-in-three-farms-are-using-farmlogs-to-power-their-yields-with-big-data/
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wooster
This 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)

~~~
vollmarj
Happy to clear that up. We don't count hobby farms as they aren't our typical
users. We are focusing on the ~280k row crop farms in the US of which over 90k
have started using FarmLogs. Most of our customers have between 600 and 10k
acres of land each.

~~~
johnchristopher
Slightly off-topic but I am dumbstruck by the size of US farms. Where I live
it's common for farmers to manage 10 hectares fields and these are considered
big fields.

~~~
fanquake
Every year we take on workmen/students normally from outside Australia, who
need to spend time actually working on a farm to finish their agricultural
degrees or similar. It's always interesting to see their reactions after they
finish telling us about their "big" farms back home, when they realise we can
fit their entire farm + change into a single paddock here.

~~~
gadders
In some cases you can fit Israel into one of the farms:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station)

~~~
privong
> In some cases you can fit Israel into one of the farms:
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station)

In the US, at least, I believe that particular example would be considered a
"ranch" rather than a "farm".

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gammarator
Mixed reviews from actual farmers:

[http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-
view.asp?tid=564750&...](http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-
view.asp?tid=564750&mid=4651068#M4651068)
[http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-
view.asp?tid=574159&...](http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-
view.asp?tid=574159&mid=4735817#M4735817)
[http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-
view.asp?tid=544745&...](http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-
view.asp?tid=544745&mid=4477289#M4477289)

~~~
nightpool
A 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.

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polytap
There 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.

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fanquake
I'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
That'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.

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minimaxir
It's worth noting that FarmLogs is (YC S12).

~~~
hooo
What makes that worth noting?

~~~
whalesalad
Well you _are_ on ycombinator.com

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Mz
I 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.)

~~~
rev_bird
I 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?

~~~
terravion
Farming 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
Huh. 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?

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tacos
1) 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)

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whage
I 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?

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random778
Could 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?

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kirk21
Can you comment on how you gained traction? Seems to be a difficult market to
tackle.

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nether
This is refreshing. I wonder what other blue collar industries in flyover
country are ripe to be optimized by tech.

~~~
enraged_camel
Thank you for not saying "disrupted". :)

Also, nice pun.

