7 ms·

FarmLogs

444 points by clschnei 12y ago

pzxc 12y ago
Typo: FarmLogs is only tree years old A very punny one, though :)
- LimitedTime 12y ago
  For anyone who doesn't know FarmLogs has their HQ in Ann Arbor aka 'tree town'
  - douglasss 12y ago
    I'd say just as many tree's here as any college town really. PS hi chris.
    - thoughtpalette 12y ago
      Yea, Always related Ann Arbor with U of M, not trees :}
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        I lived there for 4 years and was aware of "tree town" but never heard anyone call it that. I know it as A2.
    - cossatot 12y ago
      I think it has to do with the name 'Arbor' [1] than the town itself, which has a fair amount of trees in the older neighborhoods but isn't excessively forested. [1]: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/arbor#arbor-2 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...
acbart 12y ago
Do these guys have an open data for academic/research purposes?
mbesto 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  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.
  - chris_va 12y ago
    I agree with your argument, but I do want to point out (since I think people here sometimes forget this) that the "5 other teams" thing starts to break down once you leave the traditional Silicon Valley product domains. When working in VC, it was refreshing to talk with someone not doing social/mobile/local/consumer. Once you branch out to industries like Mining, Oil&Gas, Agriculture, Automotive, Manufacturing, Logistics, Insurance, etc. just having 2 bright software engineers working on a problem at all was often enough to provide an edge. Insurance is a good example. That industry move $2T every year in the US, which makes the US ad industry look tiny. However, it only sees maybe 1/20th the number of SV teams.
  - rsp1984 12y ago
    > 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.
briholt 12y ago
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 12y ago
  @briholt, thanks for noticing that. We really appreciate you telling us about it. We have noted it and our designer is looking into it.
AGuyWhoCoeds 12y ago
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.
nowarninglabel 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Climate didn't have this service available until recently. Anyway, they're probably using the same rainfall data (URD and/or AHPS)
- randomdata 12y ago
  As another farmer and programmer, who isn't based in the US, I have found all of the most desirable features (like rainfall data) are not available. I have tried it out, but there is nothing that keeps me coming back. 20% of American row crop farmers is still fairly impressive, but it will be interesting to see how they try to approach the rest of world.
Mz 12y ago
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.
ganjianwei 12y ago
Incredible. How do they do distribution? Quite a feat to reach so many farmers in 3 years.
- notatoad 12y ago
  farmers talk to each other, a lot. Ideas spread very quickly, word of mouth is huge.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    Heck, just look up how combines travel from south to north during harvest. Farmers are connected and talkative.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- logicallee 12y ago
  that second one [edit] isn't a con. it doesn't even (reading literally) imply that the hours are bad, just that they start at 10 or 11/noon. It doesn't make your point at all, but just says schedule is flexible, with a bias toward working late. great.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - mayankag 12y ago
      @sshykes, as an employee at Farmlogs I can attest that people here work long hours, if at all, out of their own will. In addition, I have worked at other startups before and I don't think I work super long hours here. There are 5 stars on Glassdoor for a reason. Most of us start late and stay late and love the flexibility in the work hours. Overall, the team really believes that we are building something world changing and cannot make it happen fast enough.
      - ryanSrich 12y ago
        Are you guys at least given the opportunity to work remotely?
        BSousa 12y ago
        Don't work there but applied a while ago. There was interest from FarmLogs until I mentioned I couldn't move there at least for a while. After that email I got radio-silence, so I assume they don't. ps: not bashing them for that, just giving you a data point
- dang 12y ago
  I see a lot of drive-by slanders on Hacker News, but this takes the cake, and I'm not letting it stand. You went through an anonymous internet forum looking for dirt, and the worst you could come up with are things like everyone has given it 5 stars and benefits could be better? That's evidence for the opposite of what you say. Anonymous employees at a sweatshop would dish out stronger sauce than that. Something tells me they might not all give their employer perfect scores, either. So I got curious and followed your link. The site has three reviews of FarmLogs. Here are their titles: One of the best engineering jobs I have had in my career! An Exciting and Fulfilling Job Mission-driven culture, fun work environment, lots of autonomy, cool technology Wow. How did you manage to pull dark insinuations out of that? It turns out you did it by doctoring quotes. Where one reviewer suggested that "benefits could be slightly better", you took out slightly. Where an "Advice to Management" section said "promote more work-life balance", you turned that into "doesn't promote more work-life balance". The same reviewer's advice said "Make sure that you seek out feedback". You stuck a doesn't onto that as well, and then added "passive management", a phrase that appears nowhere in any review. You then referred to your doctored version as "the core gist". But the core gist is just what you eliminated. Find me a founder of any fast-growing startup whose heart wouldn't swell with pride to see their anonymous employees, despite all the inevitable growing pains, talk about their company that positively.
hammock 12y ago
Does FarmLogs work for aquaculture?
shawn-butler 12y ago
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?
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
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.
cpursley 12y ago
There's similar project that's focused on cattle: farmeron.com
jmspring 12y ago
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.
kfcm 12y ago
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 12y ago
  "... 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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      > 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!
andrewcamel 12y ago
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?
- ecesena 12y ago
  Co-founder(s) with domain expertise?
- hemantv 12y ago
  There is no free lunch.
- raquo 12y ago
  * Your hobbies and interest groups * Your job (harder if it's just building tools for web developers) * Your family members and friends' jobs & hobbies * Basically anyone willing to talk about their problems with you
- jamesjyu 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
bguthrie 12y ago
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.
spydum 12y ago
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 12y ago
  This is already reality for decent sized ag setups - measuring things like soil moisture, pH levels etc and reporting back.
syntern 12y ago
Is there similar data and service available for European farmers?
- MrBlu 12y ago
  Take a look at https://www.365farmnet.com/ https://www.365farmnet.com/
veryluckyxyz 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  I remember it without the parentheses, too.
cfontes 12y ago
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 12y ago
  It's Clojure not Closure. Why don't you like it?
  - vorg 12y ago
    > 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 12y ago
      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.

FarmLogs

444 points by clschnei 12y ago

pzxc 12y ago

Typo: FarmLogs is only tree years old A very punny one, though :)

LimitedTime 12y ago
For anyone who doesn't know FarmLogs has their HQ in Ann Arbor aka 'tree town'
- douglasss 12y ago
  I'd say just as many tree's here as any college town really. PS hi chris.
  - thoughtpalette 12y ago
    Yea, Always related Ann Arbor with U of M, not trees :}
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      I lived there for 4 years and was aware of "tree town" but never heard anyone call it that. I know it as A2.
  - cossatot 12y ago
    I think it has to do with the name 'Arbor' [1] than the town itself, which has a fair amount of trees in the older neighborhoods but isn't excessively forested. [1]: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/arbor#arbor-2 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...

acbart 12y ago

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

mbesto 12y ago

> 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 12y ago
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.
- chris_va 12y ago
  I agree with your argument, but I do want to point out (since I think people here sometimes forget this) that the "5 other teams" thing starts to break down once you leave the traditional Silicon Valley product domains. When working in VC, it was refreshing to talk with someone not doing social/mobile/local/consumer. Once you branch out to industries like Mining, Oil&Gas, Agriculture, Automotive, Manufacturing, Logistics, Insurance, etc. just having 2 bright software engineers working on a problem at all was often enough to provide an edge. Insurance is a good example. That industry move $2T every year in the US, which makes the US ad industry look tiny. However, it only sees maybe 1/20th the number of SV teams.
- rsp1984 12y ago
  > 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.

briholt 12y ago

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 12y ago
@briholt, thanks for noticing that. We really appreciate you telling us about it. We have noted it and our designer is looking into it.

AGuyWhoCoeds 12y ago

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.

nowarninglabel 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Climate didn't have this service available until recently. Anyway, they're probably using the same rainfall data (URD and/or AHPS)
randomdata 12y ago
As another farmer and programmer, who isn't based in the US, I have found all of the most desirable features (like rainfall data) are not available. I have tried it out, but there is nothing that keeps me coming back. 20% of American row crop farmers is still fairly impressive, but it will be interesting to see how they try to approach the rest of world.

Mz 12y ago

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.

ganjianwei 12y ago

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

notatoad 12y ago
farmers talk to each other, a lot. Ideas spread very quickly, word of mouth is huge.
- protomyth 12y ago
  Heck, just look up how combines travel from south to north during harvest. Farmers are connected and talkative.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

logicallee 12y ago
that second one [edit] isn't a con. it doesn't even (reading literally) imply that the hours are bad, just that they start at 10 or 11/noon. It doesn't make your point at all, but just says schedule is flexible, with a bias toward working late. great.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - mayankag 12y ago
    @sshykes, as an employee at Farmlogs I can attest that people here work long hours, if at all, out of their own will. In addition, I have worked at other startups before and I don't think I work super long hours here. There are 5 stars on Glassdoor for a reason. Most of us start late and stay late and love the flexibility in the work hours. Overall, the team really believes that we are building something world changing and cannot make it happen fast enough.
    - ryanSrich 12y ago
      Are you guys at least given the opportunity to work remotely?
      - BSousa 12y ago
        Don't work there but applied a while ago. There was interest from FarmLogs until I mentioned I couldn't move there at least for a while. After that email I got radio-silence, so I assume they don't. ps: not bashing them for that, just giving you a data point
dang 12y ago
I see a lot of drive-by slanders on Hacker News, but this takes the cake, and I'm not letting it stand. You went through an anonymous internet forum looking for dirt, and the worst you could come up with are things like everyone has given it 5 stars and benefits could be better? That's evidence for the opposite of what you say. Anonymous employees at a sweatshop would dish out stronger sauce than that. Something tells me they might not all give their employer perfect scores, either. So I got curious and followed your link. The site has three reviews of FarmLogs. Here are their titles: One of the best engineering jobs I have had in my career! An Exciting and Fulfilling Job Mission-driven culture, fun work environment, lots of autonomy, cool technology Wow. How did you manage to pull dark insinuations out of that? It turns out you did it by doctoring quotes. Where one reviewer suggested that "benefits could be slightly better", you took out slightly. Where an "Advice to Management" section said "promote more work-life balance", you turned that into "doesn't promote more work-life balance". The same reviewer's advice said "Make sure that you seek out feedback". You stuck a doesn't onto that as well, and then added "passive management", a phrase that appears nowhere in any review. You then referred to your doctored version as "the core gist". But the core gist is just what you eliminated. Find me a founder of any fast-growing startup whose heart wouldn't swell with pride to see their anonymous employees, despite all the inevitable growing pains, talk about their company that positively.

hammock 12y ago

Does FarmLogs work for aquaculture?

shawn-butler 12y ago

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?

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

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.

cpursley 12y ago

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

jmspring 12y ago

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.

kfcm 12y ago

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 12y ago
"... 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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    > 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!

andrewcamel 12y ago

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?

ecesena 12y ago
Co-founder(s) with domain expertise?
hemantv 12y ago
There is no free lunch.
raquo 12y ago
* Your hobbies and interest groups * Your job (harder if it's just building tools for web developers) * Your family members and friends' jobs & hobbies * Basically anyone willing to talk about their problems with you
jamesjyu 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

bguthrie 12y ago

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.

spydum 12y ago

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 12y ago
This is already reality for decent sized ag setups - measuring things like soil moisture, pH levels etc and reporting back.

syntern 12y ago

Is there similar data and service available for European farmers?

MrBlu 12y ago
Take a look at https://www.365farmnet.com/ https://www.365farmnet.com/

veryluckyxyz 12y ago

> 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 12y ago
I remember it without the parentheses, too.

cfontes 12y ago

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 12y ago
It's Clojure not Closure. Why don't you like it?
- vorg 12y ago
  > 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 12y ago
    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.