I've often wanted to look into AgTech (grew up chasing sheep in Canterbury) but people I've talked to in that space say that it's incredibly hard to grow sales, farmers are inherently conservative on new expenses, what was your experience of that?
I can answer this one. I have an AgTech startup that deals with sheep.
The industry is incredibly conservative (which I knew, having worked in it for over a decade) but on top of that, it's also incredibly insular. You get one shot to get something right. You get one short per year due to seasonality.
You better be prepared to travel a lot. In-person training is not negotiable for farmers using a piece of new technology. Often they will be trying to use it well out of any kind of network access, your tech better work off-line and you better be there in person.
Different countries with the same livestock often have wildly different ways of dealing with livestock. You have to be adaptable to the local practices, often whatever you are doing has to fit in with some other thing the farmer wants to do with the sheep, because they don't want to have to get them in the yards unnecessarily. That goes for the availability of labour as well, some places you will be overrun with helpers, sometimes it's just you and the farmer and you need to be able to adapt to that.
The tech has to be rugged. I used off the shelf Android RFID scanners for part of my project and we have broken nearly everything we have tried.
Compared to Australia/NZ, the US market is just about impenetrable for anybody outside of it. I did travel to Silicon Valley looking for investors but got nothing but blank stares and head scratches when it came to things like genetics. Silicon Valley is about the last place I would ever look for funding again as there are too many fools with their hands on the investment funds looking for dogshit fintechs or web3 stupidity rather than actual businesses.
Out of curiosity, did you try approaching any of the Universities with big agricultural programs (Texas A&M as an example)? They'd have alumni willing to invest in Ag.
Texas A&M have some of my gear they are using with goats. Haven't really tried leveraging that as travel to Texas has been off the cards for a few years.
Heh. The cost of the individual animals means that all that dairy tech isn't really useful for sheep which is why I think renting tech in that space is the way to go. Distribution is still a problem for us though.
My commercial knowledge of this is all second hand, but I hear it's driven by a few big customers - essentially people with huge commercial farms who are willing to experiment. The idea of selling an expensive AgTech system to your local farmer at the pub doesn't really happen.
