
FarmLogs - clschnei
http://blog.samaltman.com/farmlogs
======
kfcm
The problem with FarmLogs is the same problem with anyone wanting to provide
cloud-based services to agriculture: who owns the data? And specifically,
FarmLogs Terms of Service clause 7 "Content" does not leave one feeling warm
and fuzzy on this topic.

This has become more of an issue with farmers over the past year, as they
realize their data is a commodity just like what they raise--whether crops or
livestock. How much of an issue? Two examples.

First, the Iowa Power Farming show was last week. One of the largest ag shows
in the nation, and the back of the program had an advertisement from Ag Leader
which started with the line: "Settling for a precision farming partner that
wants control of your data just doesn't cut it." Additionally, several vendors
in the precision ag and sensor/drone areas were stating similar lines. Whether
BS or not, they wouldn't be saying it if there wasn't a need for them to.

Second, the January 17, 2015, edition of Iowa Farmer Today also addressed this
issue in their editorial page article "Who own precision technology data?".

It's not that I'm against using technology for ag. It's I'm against others
using my data about my farming operations AND MY LAND and making money off of
it without cutting me in--or selling/providing it (raw or as a "derivative
work") to other entities I may not want to have it.

~~~
bootload
_"... This has become more of an issue with farmers over the past year, as
they realize their data is a commodity just like what they raise--whether
crops or livestock. ..."_

What is stopping a local server/you own the data solution? Is it the cloud
solution is the only one on offer or is it too hard to get the
hardware/software to the gate?

~~~
untog
Couldn't you say that about most tech solutions available today?

Particular as a farmer I imagine you have little time to be screwing around
with a local server that's prone to failure. A company looking after that for
you is probably quite tempting.

~~~
kordless
> you have little time to be screwing around with a local server that's prone
> to failure

While I agree with the fact you shouldn't be screwing around with a server,
that doesn't mean running your own server with your own data on it isn't a
good idea. It's just we're not quite there yet!

------
mbesto
> _And importantly, they started out doing something that any two programmers
> could have done._

Which is funny because many VCs in SV ask the question (explicitly or
implicitly) "is this something two Stanford CS students can do?" If the answer
is yes, they move along.

I want more FarmLogs stories to exist.

~~~
coffeemug
This is a silly question to ask, and I don't think most people ask it (or at
least, not in this way). For almost anything any team can do, you have to
assume there will be five other teams, just as good or better, doing the same
exact thing.

So the right question to ask is "what is the distribution edge of _this_
particular team?" For example, if you're first to market and have incredibly
high growth, there is a good chance it will be impossible for other teams to
catch up.

Product complexity is almost never a competitive advantage, and I think most
VCs understand this much better than you give them credit for.

~~~
rsp1984
> For almost anything any team can do, you have to assume there will be five
> other teams, just as good or better, doing the same exact thing.

That may be true for your typical cloud / SaaS / consumer internet / AirBnb
for XYZ -kind of startup but there is many many fields in technology where
killer teams are exceptionally rare.

Most of these technology fields are not as sexy as building the next Dropbox
but very often all the more sophisticated in their core tech. Think about bio-
tech, energy, nanotech, lasers, (space) flight, AI, etc. It is never bad for a
startup to assume that there is competition and to research it but it is very
possible for the right people in a particular field to team up and be the
best.

~~~
coffeemug
_> Think about bio-tech, energy, nanotech, lasers, (space) flight, AI, etc._

I'm not sure. I tend to assume the market is efficient and I found that far
more often than not, the assumption proves correct. I don't know very much
about most of the fields you mentioned, but think of space flight -- multiple
space flight companies were founded around the same time as SpaceX (including
John Carmack's now defunct space company, Virgin Galactic, Orbital Sciences,
Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, and probably many others I'm missing).

I think that as a rule of thumb, the startup market is much more efficient
than it originally seems, even in very deeply technical, capital intensive
fields.

~~~
sjg007
I don't think this is true at all which is why you have more startups. Also
you can have multiple startups doing the same thing across say different
geographies.

------
nowarninglabel
As an early user of FarmLogs (and as a programmer), I found it really useful.
All I wanted to do was find out average rainfall on my land and make a way to
denote the prime spots for crop planting on the land (purely as a hobby). It
was super useful and intuitive for that, something that I couldn't get to make
happen easily trying all sorts of things with Google Maps, various mapping
APIs, and Google Earth.

~~~
shawn-butler
Just curious, did you try ClimateBasic from Monsanto/ClimateCorp and compare
some data for "ground truth"?

[http://climate.com/products/climate-
basic/](http://climate.com/products/climate-basic/)

~~~
yablak
Climate didn't have this service available until recently. Anyway, they're
probably using the same rainfall data (URD and/or AHPS)

------
ganjianwei
Incredible. How do they do distribution? Quite a feat to reach so many farmers
in 3 years.

~~~
notatoad
farmers talk to each other, a lot. Ideas spread very quickly, word of mouth is
_huge_.

~~~
protomyth
Heck, just look up how combines travel from south to north during harvest.
Farmers are connected and talkative.

------
AGuyWhoCoeds
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.

~~~
jcurbo
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
Likewise--my mother was doing our farm's books on an IBM 8088 back in the
mid-80s.

------
shawn-butler
I have my doubts about the figure quoted "20% of row crop farms." I wonder how
this number was presented / justified with what data at the meeting?

Maybe something like 20% of row crop farms of acreage greater than X where X
is fairly large?

------
Mz
_The software revolution is making it possible to create world-changing
companies relatively quickly and with relatively modest resources._

I wish there were a bit more meat as to HOW they did this. Or a link to a
meatier write-up of the path they took from idea to present.

------
jmspring
I've chatted with Jesse on a couple of occasions. The direction the company is
going with big data and analytics really is quite interesting and they are
taking an interesting approach to a real world problem.

It's interesting to read updates about them as they pop up.

------
cfontes
I worked on a sugarcane farm management company a while ago and also built a
backbone.js frontend site that tracked sugar cane harvesters and estimated the
"outcome" to send trucks to offload it on demand with some colleagues (closed
source unfortunately) in resume I like this area very much.

When I saw this post I went running to the Jobs page, and there my heart got
smashed when I saw Clojure on backend positions... I am a plain Java dev with
learning skills (worked with Groovy/Python/JS a while ago) but I definitely
don't like Clojure.

Good luck guys

~~~
afandian
It's Clojure not Closure. Why don't you like it?

~~~
vorg
> I am a plain Java dev with learning skills (worked with Groovy/Python/JS a
> while ago)

Perhaps he's promoting some other JVM language -- he did mention Java and
Groovy. If you type "Groovy" into HN search, you'll notice more than the usual
amount of Groovy stories being submitted over the past week, and the recent
comments mentioning "Groovy" are scattered around different submissions rather
than clustered as usual. Groovy has more than doubled its percentage on Tiobe
between January and February (if you get what I mean), and its project manager
has just finished running a campaign among his Twitter followers to double its
Github stars from under 600 a month ago. Because the Groovy and Grails project
managers are now competing for their funding, expect to see more comments of
that nature.

~~~
afandian
I think that's cynical (if I read it correctly), but maybe true? When money
gets involved all kinds of weird things happen.

Rich Hickey is on the record as saying that he doesn't want to promote
Clojure, and if people like it they like it. He'd rather have people who came
to it voluntarily than who were marketed to.

I would like to know real answers to why people don't like it. I've used a
(normal) number of languages over the years but I think Clojure is by far the
best for all kinds of reasons.

It's interesting to talk to people who have gone as far as trying it but found
they preferred something else. I can understand you might be put off from a
distance by the parens, or the immutability or whatever, but opinions change
(or don't) once you actually try something.

~~~
vorg
I used Clojure a lot as a hobbyist language for 2 years, then changed to
another one. I found I missed the immutability the most, even though I hardly
wrote multi-threaded code. Once I was thinking "concurrently", going back to
having to think about whether a list or map was in the right state took some
getting used to.

As for what I couldn't get used to in Clojure, even after 2 years the
circumfix parentheses still seemed unnatural, even though I know they're
necessary for macros. I guess using f(x,y) notation in school and one's first
programming language is a bond too hard to break.

------
andrewcamel
This type of story is so motivating to build vertical software, but for people
like me who are trying to identify a vertical software opportunity, it's
discouraging that these developers needed to spend a couple years in the
industry to truly understand the pain point behind FarmLogs.

Does anyone have thoughts / strategies around identifying these opportunities,
ideally without the need to spend years in the target industry?

~~~
jamesjyu
Unfortunately, you need to gain a lot of tacit knowledge about an industry to
really solve the _right_ problems for it. That takes time and dedication.

There are some ways to speed it up by talking to lots of experienced people,
reading analyst papers, researching, or even shadowing a person in the
industry for a week. However, nothing beats first hand knowledge.

~~~
andrewcamel
I think you get at a great point that the onky way to solve the right problems
is to be committed to learning about an industry through all available
information channels. To be comfortable spending that much time on one
specific industry though I think means you need to come in with a thesis to
begin with, which to avoid circular idea justification means you probably need
to come into it with a broader, more abstract thesis independent of industry
knowledge.

------
briholt
The company seems very cool. One off topic thing that I can't help but note -
just loading their homepage requires 113 HTTP requests. It's crazy heavy with
tracking and designy tags.

[http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ZMQov/https://farmlogs.com/](http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ZMQov/https://farmlogs.com/)

~~~
mayankag
@briholt, thanks for noticing that. We really appreciate you telling us about
it. We have noted it and our designer is looking into it.

------
pzxc
Typo: FarmLogs is only tree years old

A very punny one, though :)

~~~
LimitedTime
For anyone who doesn't know FarmLogs has their HQ in Ann Arbor aka 'tree town'

~~~
douglasss
I'd say just as many tree's here as any college town really.

PS hi chris.

~~~
maxerickson
I never heard it called tree town. The wayback machine page for the Wikipedia
citation only says "Tree City USA", which is a thing the Arbor Foundation does
for lots of towns.

So either the citation is out of step with the original page or a goofball put
that in Wikipedia.

~~~
tptacek
I lived there for 4 years and was aware of "tree town" but never heard anyone
call it that. I know it as A2.

------
spydum
Cool to see tech creeping its way into agriculture.

My in-laws run a vineyard & winery. For many years, I was convinced I would
build a sensor-net and on-premises app with some automation capability
(toggling servos for irrigation, "fertigation" type system, tanks, timers,
etc). Never really made it out of idea stage as my priorities took a different
turn, but glad to see some other folks tackling the problems.

Seems like the super low cost of sensors now makes this really attractive
(heck, a small farm of couple acres could be wired up to a handful of
strategically placed rasberyPi's in a weatherproof case).

~~~
windowsworkstoo
This is already reality for decent sized ag setups - measuring things like
soil moisture, pH levels etc and reporting back.

------
lifeisstillgood
This is interesting because there must be a small window between all this data
just lying around (cf NSA) and most sectors having the data transformed and
pipelined into their decision making.

Sam Altman is right - this is the sort of thing that two software devs can
pull off - but like everything the door must be closing.

I'm tempted to make a spreadsheet of all the novel data sources I can find
(ONS, satellite, travel, weather etc) and plot against SEC codes - I am pretty
sure that will allow me to procrastinate long enough for the enthusiasm to
wear off.

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veryluckyxyz
> And importantly, they started out doing something that any two programmers
> (with domain expertise in their market) could have done.

I somehow remember the original text to be

> And importantly, they started out doing something that any two programmers
> could have done.

There is nothing on the wayback machine either. Am I misremembering the
original text?

~~~
unwind
I remember it without the parentheses, too.

------
acbart
Do these guys have an open data for academic/research purposes?

------
bguthrie
I remember working out of the same office as these guys back when they were
just getting started, and their success and impact has been truly amazing.
Recognition well deserved.

------
hammock
Does FarmLogs work for aquaculture?

------
cpursley
There's similar project that's focused on cattle: farmeron.com

------
syntern
Is there similar data and service available for European farmers?

~~~
MrBlu
Take a look at [https://www.365farmnet.com/](https://www.365farmnet.com/)

