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Using Data to Power Ranches with AgriWebb
335 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we sit down with Kevin Baum, the CEO and Founder of AgriWebb. AgriWebb is a livestock management app that helps Farmers and Ranchers uncover insights, map Farm property, and drive profits while enhancing sustainability and streamlining operations. Listen as Barn2Door COO James Maiocco and Kevin discuss how Ranchers can use data to make informed business decisions and power the growth of their operations.
agriwebb.com
barn2door.com/resources
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Transcript
Introduction to Direct Farm Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the go-to resource for farms across the US looking to grow and manage their business. Tune in weekly to hear tips and tactics from our most successful farmers on how to increase sales, access more customers, and save time and money. We'll also speak with industry experts, business leaders, and partners to share the latest farm business trends selling direct to market.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hey,
Episode Overview with Kevin Baum
00:00:27
Speaker
welcome everyone to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm James, your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with the CEO of AgriWeb, Kevin Baum. AgriWeb is the all-in-one livestock management app that helps farmers and ranchers stay connected, map their farm, uncover insights, and drive profit while enhancing sustainability and streamlining the operations.
AgriWeb's Global Presence
00:00:50
Speaker
They've got farmers all across the globe, particularly in the US and in Australia and Canada now, I believe true. Kevin is one of the founders of AgriWeb and serves as its CEO today. We're going to learn more from him. Kevin, welcome aboard. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I'm really excited for this. And to clarify, we actually, we have customers in 17 countries and offices in three. So we're primarily in the UK, the US and Australia, but looking to keep expanding globally. It's a global problem.
00:01:19
Speaker
That's huge. Where are your offices located, Kevin? We're in Sydney, London, and then here where I am in Denver, Colorado. Wow. That mimics where we're going next. I'm really excited about this partnership. Yeah, excellent. Perfect. You're a little bit ahead of us in terms of your global expansion. Barnador is just US based at this time, but I would say particularly the UK and Australia are easily our number two and number three countries that we get inbound requests from farmers to go to market.
00:01:46
Speaker
So not in the too distant future, we'll be there with you.
Kevin Baum's Background
00:01:50
Speaker
Well, let's talk about AgriWeb because this is all about AgriWeb today. I'd love to help farmers that we work with all across the United States, better understand more about your product, what it can do for them. But before we dive into AgriWeb specifically, let's dive into yourself and your background. What were you doing before AgriWeb, before you became CEO? Tell us about your background.
00:02:08
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess the start of my story was probably going to the university back in the Cretaceous period. And I was in California. I was in Silicon Valley. It was tech, tech, tech innovation everywhere. And I think initially for me, that was quite exciting seeing what technology could do.
00:02:27
Speaker
What was a little disheartening was around the time I graduated, how much brain power went off to make the world addicted to clicks on the internet. It was sort of the founding days of Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and all that stuff. And to me, I didn't get it. I wouldn't say I understood why and maybe some of the problems that have shown up in recent years weren't quite clear to me at the time, but I knew that it didn't
00:02:50
Speaker
quite makes sense to me so i ended up moving back east and working in the energy space a lot of renewable energy tech some more traditional energy tech and i worked across the spectrum i had huge multi-year contracts with ford and honeywell but i also worked with startups and entrepreneurs and innovators and it was really that was what was most exciting to me was seeing people
00:03:10
Speaker
taking something from zero to one and applying that same brain power and that same interest in technology to an industry that fundamentally impacts the world in a major way. In 500 years, I don't think we'll be on TikTok, but we will need energy and food and medicine and water and infrastructure. And these things to me are like the pillars of society. So that was far more inspiring to me, but I was a consultant.
Founding AgriWeb
00:03:33
Speaker
at the end of the day i was watching people do really interesting stuff and i was then going and writing a long report on it so i went to graduate school and i met my original co-founder there's three co-founders in the business from justin webb and his background was also in the business space he had built and sold a few finance businesses was a similar inflection point of his career wondering is this the right space that i want to be
00:03:55
Speaker
applying myself to helping rich people get a little richer. But his father grew up in the land and he came from five generations of sheep and cattle production down in Australia. As he started to get more engaged with the family property, applying his finance and his math lens to it, he started thinking about data and how can we better use data to run a business. At the end of the day, that's what this is, it's a business. The conditions, the environment in which farming operates continues to get more and more challenging. He started thinking,
00:04:25
Speaker
Where can I find tools to digitize my business and use that data to make it better? And what he found was a lot of desktop software, a lot of legacy systems, and they weren't getting used. And so when he came to me about this, I said, I'm a city boy. I'll admit, I don't know a whole ton about farming, but.
00:04:43
Speaker
You know, I wanted to be in technology. I wanted to be doing something impactful and what's more impactful than food. And so I flew down to Australia and I stayed on his farm for a few months and met the neighbors and followed the manager around and asked a bunch of dumb questions and then came up the learning curve and just fell in love for the industry and feeling like, here's a way that I can take what I've learned in my career and apply that to the original industry, the most important industry in the world and try and bring that together. And so ended up moving down to Australia in 2014 to kick off Agra.
00:05:13
Speaker
And then not long after, we met our third co-founder, John Fager, who grew up properly in the Outback on a sheep and cattle station, 400,000 acres of red dirt and stones and a few cows and sheep. And the three of us together kicked off Agra, but it's been a wild ride since then.
Digital Innovation in Farming
00:05:29
Speaker
Wow, what an incredible story. By the way, I can also relate to many of your experiences as well, coming from a non-farming background myself to also being a tech. It's amazing to see the absence of innovation really in this industry and the need for things like AgriWeb to help, again, bring farmers into the next generation.
00:05:48
Speaker
Because I agree 100% with your sentiment, right? Will TikTok really be here in 100 years? I doubt it. And to your point, look at Maslow's hierarchy needs. What's at the very bottom of it? Food, shelter, and sex. That's what society has to have in order to operate. And arguably, you know, we could get by without sex, at least for one generation.
00:06:07
Speaker
And you could even be homeless, but you cannot live without food. Food is the absolute epitome at the bottom, the most pinnacle, important of the hierarchy of needs because you need a meal three times a day and we're going to need farmers and ranchers in perpetuity. So I just really relate to tackling a big problem in a long-term need.
00:06:27
Speaker
And I think particularly your point, it's around digital innovation. You know, I think farming, you go back to the history books, middle school social studies, the first thing you learn about is farming innovation and the physical tools that have been created. I think farming continues to innovate and push in that direction, but
00:06:42
Speaker
where it's lacked is on the digital side. And I think part of that is the structural impediments, the historical lack of good internet coverage. But also, I think the lack of companies doing a good job, frankly. Farmers don't want to work with tools that are clunky and hard to use. And a lot of those tools were. They weren't built with farmers in mind. They were built offshore. And coming with a farmer-first approach is incredibly important to bring tools that actually work and actually add value.
00:07:09
Speaker
That's a great point. And a little bit of Silicon Valley swagger because candidly, farmers are consumers too. They use other consumer applications. And so we all have an expectation about how these applications should work. And like you said, you can't just do this haphazard. You really have to invest big time.
00:07:25
Speaker
So let's dive into the Origins AgriWeb.
AgriWeb's Development Journey
00:07:27
Speaker
You go down to Australia, you spend a few months, like you said, you're walking around interviewing the neighbors, talking with your other co-founders. What led to you guys to actually found AgriWeb and say, wow, we know this is a big problem, but what made you commit your time, energy, and your resources to say, hey, let's build a company around it?
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah. Again, like it started as solving a personal problem, you know, I was looking at Justin's farm and what can be done with this. And I think actually in the early days, we probably didn't back ourselves enough. We were worried that purely having a data tool, a digital tool, wasn't going to be quite enough. And we looked at, you know, other things that might be quicker wins to get farmers engaged into a digital
00:08:11
Speaker
We briefly messed around with looking at sensors that could be put on farm as something that was a little bit more narrow and explicit. But I think that what we realized is that
00:08:20
Speaker
For most farmers, there's a lot of great point solutions out there, but without the broader context of what's going on across the farm, those point solutions are not as effective as they could be. And when we actually sort of realized people were yearning for a good digital solution, they wanted a good user experience. They wanted it to be mobile. They wanted it to be cloud-based. All these things that hadn't existed in farm software when we started were exciting enough. And we didn't need to have these hooks. We didn't need to have a sensor.
00:08:50
Speaker
and actually those things we've seen with some partners sometimes they can struggle to get adoption not because they're not good technology they're fantastic technology but because they need to be embedded into the broader management of the farm and so that's the approach we've taken is let's try and get very broad
00:09:05
Speaker
think the way the producer thinks and take what they're already doing offline and just bring it into a digital world and bring it onto the cloud. A lot of our early feature development, the way we looked at user experience and user interface was, what are they already doing? What's going to resonate with that? So as an example, still to this day, eight years later,
00:09:27
Speaker
One of the things that farmers love when they first see Agrub is the visual nature of the map and seeing the pastures on a map and seeing, you know, their herds as icons. And all that came from was driving around Western Victoria, meeting with the dozens of ranchers and noticing that every one of them had a whiteboard in their shed.
00:09:46
Speaker
whiteboard, they had drawn their farm map and a lot of them had magnets that they were moving around. And we said, that's a great idea. Let's make that digital. It has to start with the farmer and what they're looking for. And so we, you know, made plenty of mistakes as all early stage companies do, but we kept listening to the producer and we kept trying to make their experience better and that.
00:10:04
Speaker
one thing led to another and then we were off to the races. It can be a long challenging road and it has been at times, but I think that staying true to the concept of how is the farmer thinking about it and how is the producer thinking about it, but then also how can we solve problems with the skills that we have that may not always be obvious to them. So understand their perspective, understand their problems, but then work sometimes outside of that to provide the solution where we can bring different expertise to the table that may not be aware of what's
Benefits of Using AgriWeb
00:10:34
Speaker
even possible.
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. Sometimes farmers can't necessarily articulate perhaps what could be done because they're just trying to solve a problem that's in front of them today. You have the advantage of looking across lots of farms and then asking yourself, hey, what could we do with this data if we did digitize it? So let's talk about your core value proposition. You mentioned the map. So how do you pitch, how do you position AgriWeb, for instance, with a farmer who today, when you walk into the barn or at their ranch and you see the whiteboard,
00:11:02
Speaker
Like what is the value prop to them other than just translating the whiteboard to something on their phone? What's the motivation for them to say, Hey, yeah. Okay. I see how this can help me. What's that kind of core essence that helps them dip their toe in the water. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of very individual narrow value props that I could walk through, but I think the umbrella.
00:11:19
Speaker
around it all is shifting the thinking from looking backwards to looking forwards. And how can we help producers optimize for the future? The difference between an analog and a digital solution is analog tends to be around record keeping, it tends to be around looking at what's happened.
00:11:37
Speaker
But it's not very helpful, trying to parse that, trying to dig through that and draw conclusions about what do we do next season? What do we do next year? And where are the core problems? Where are the underperforming paddocks, the underperforming breeding animals, the underperforming workers and laborers?
00:11:54
Speaker
understanding what changes we can make now that are going to improve us in the future. I think that's the core of what we're trying to explain and where we can add a ton of value. And that takes many different forms to give some examples. Many farmers struggle to know their basic cost of production and what it is that they're putting into the animals because they don't necessarily have that real-time visibility. So we had one producer, one of our first customers here in the US,
00:12:20
Speaker
who, you know, every year they had been winter feeding their animals because it's Colorado, it's cold, there's snow on the ground and that's what they've been doing for generations. After using agrib for a couple of weeks, they realized they actually did have enough feed on the ground already and they didn't need to be doing that. And it was an $80,000 a year expense. So right away, looking at next season, looking at the future, hey, let's cut $80,000 out of our cost of production.
00:12:44
Speaker
And in a low margin business, that's what you control. That's what's meaningful. You don't control the weather. You don't control what the prices are or what's happening with inflation. There's so much that's a challenge that's out of the farmer's hand. They do control the cost of production and that's what drives margin. And that's one example. And there's lots of other examples of people who are able to identify underperforming breeders and cut that out of their farm and massively increase their productivity the next year.
00:13:10
Speaker
And so you can go through different sides of the business, but it's all about giving visibility in a way that allows you to make the future focus decisions. That's a great point, right? It's moving from record keeping to actually planning ahead. And that's the beauty of making things digital, as you said, right? Once you have a digital, now all of a sudden you can use that data to perhaps interpolate or to forecast some changes, like you said, to make changes next year based on productivity.
00:13:34
Speaker
And particularly for obviously many of the farmers and ranchers that both AgriWeb and Barnadore work with, many of them are not just sustainable. They really focus on being regenerative farmers, really investing in soil health and making sure that they're not only great stewards, but they're also regenerating the health of the land that they're supporting and the health of those animals. But if you're not measuring it, it's hard to improve it. So that's what I really love about what you're doing today.
00:13:58
Speaker
measuring it and making it accessible. You can write it down, but how easy is it to pull that up? How easy is it to cross compare? It's the flexibility of that data that allows you to look forward. And I 100% agree with what you said. That's a great point. So let's talk about one of the challenges we were discussing before we got on this podcast, which is the caution farmers often exhibit about adopting new technologies.
00:14:21
Speaker
What are some of the common objections that you're seeing from farmers with respect to shifting
Overcoming Farmer Hesitance
00:14:26
Speaker
to AgriWeb? They hear your pitch. They hear this, hey, that makes a lot of sense. I love the idea. I love this pretty app, et cetera. But I'm not sure it's quite the right time for me to make this investment.
00:14:36
Speaker
You nailed one of them on the head. I think the two most common things we hear are, oh, it's a bad time. Come back to me in a year. Come back to me when it's a better time. And so that's number one. And I think number two is, oh, look, I run a small operation. I'm not one of these big corporate sophisticated guys. It seems like it's overkill for me.
00:14:56
Speaker
You know, I obviously clearly bias, but I reject both of those. I think that one, in terms of time, one of the reasons people don't have enough time is because they're operating in an analog way. Next season is next season. And we know that using data and using some of our tools, we can improve that bottom line next season.
00:15:14
Speaker
But you don't have to wait for a year to get value. And one of our simplest value propositions is we can save you time immediately managing your farm, managing your staff, rather than having to do double entry. You know, a lot of farmers, they may write in a notebook and they have to go home and sit in front of the computer and plug it into Excel, record it in the pasture in the moment, and then you're done with it. One way to save yourself time is to adopt some of these digital tools and to adopt more automation. But secondly, it's always going to be a tough time. There's to me, like,
00:15:43
Speaker
How can you not have time to improve your business? How can you not have time to make more money next year and to run a more efficient farm and to solve some of those problems you're talking about? How do I improve my soil health? How do I improve my drought resistance? By the time you get to those moments when you're having a hard season, it's too late. You've got to start in advance. To me, it's so important
00:16:03
Speaker
I don't care if it's our tool or anyone else's tool. I really don't. I think the most important thing is that this industry embraces the good things that are out there that can help them. And I think those that are going to thrive and really be successful in the next generation are going to be those that are those adopters that get onto this early. And you've seen that in every other industry in the world.
00:16:23
Speaker
And farming, I don't think is any different. I think that those that push the innovation create resiliency that allows them to weather a bad season, a bad crop, all the macro factors that are hitting farmers every day, changing consumer requirements, changing what the packers are doing, what the retailers are doing. The only way to thrive through all that is to create resilience. And I think that investing now is the best way to do that.
00:16:49
Speaker
It's a hard one, right? We talked to literally thousands of farms every month and we've never met a farmer or a rancher who has extra time on their hands. It doesn't exist. But to your point, you have to be willing to slow down to speed up, right? If you don't set aside time to actually work on the business, your business isn't going to improve. So if you're just working in the business, but don't work on the business, it's really hard to improve that.
00:17:12
Speaker
And you make a really good point too, that I love Kevin, which is every other industry has gone through this same digital transformation. I think I was sharing with you before I used to be an executive at a company called Zero, which you're obviously your customers in Australia, the UK will know here in the US, that's analogous to QuickBooks. But we saw the same thing with accountants trying to make this transformation. And nine years ago, when I was working with them, the accountants who moved online and moved their clients online,
00:17:39
Speaker
immediately are not only immediately attracted more clients, but more importantly, those are the biggest accounting firms down, right? Because everything moved to digital world and moved to an avenue where their advisors and others around them could then support them because all that information is available digitally.
00:17:56
Speaker
But if you've got everything in an analog world, it's really hard to involve your other advisors in your business to give you advice or give you feedback or to combine that data with other assets, et cetera, where you can make more intelligent decisions. What have you guys done to help the steps to get started for these farmers easier who have this ambivalence or concern about moving into a digital world?
00:18:17
Speaker
No, it's a great point and it's a great analogy. And I think we talked about the first complaint of I don't know at the time, the second being, oh, I'm not sophisticated enough. You don't have to be the world's most sophisticated. You don't have to use every single feature that's available. Start somewhere and everyone starts somewhere. You start and you build. You know, when we look at a customer lifecycle, we don't see it as
00:18:37
Speaker
Okay, they come on, they get started, they onboard and then three weeks later, they're up and running. We see it as a multi-year journey of how you layer on different levels of sophistication that are right for your business. So the first step for us is, we have different packages geared towards those different problems that are, what's happening at the large corporate who owns 50 ranches and has a head office is very different from what's happening to the small producer has a hundred head out back.
00:19:04
Speaker
And so we design packages that are suited to that, but also we can help take people on a journey and move them up that adoption curve and, you know, get them using things, you know, more and more as they gain sophistication. As an example, many producers use Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Excel has 7,000 features. I consider myself a power user and I probably use 2% of it.
00:19:26
Speaker
And that's okay. It's still adding value. I don't need to be writing macros every day. I can use the basics of Excel and it can still add value. And then as I get better.
00:19:36
Speaker
I can take on more of it. So to answer your question, the way we operate is we want to let the user drive how they want their onboarding experience to look like. Some people are really self-serve. They just want to be able to get in, play around with it themselves. We offer a 14 day free trial where people can get in and play around with the functionality, set up a few pastures and a few words and understand what it's about.
00:20:00
Speaker
It used to actually be longer, but we found that, you know, people only need typically a couple of days to understand it. And if you give them 45 days, they'll look at it for three days at the end. You give them three days, they'll look at it for three days. It doesn't change. So we settled on 14. We have a lot of tutorials that are built in the product itself. There's videos you can watch. There's walkthroughs. People like doing it that way, sort of a more hands-on experience. We also have
00:20:27
Speaker
have an extensive help center set up. We have people available on chat who can walk through that with you. And then we also offer a more tailored services to any of our customers. If they say, Hey, I want someone to come and really help me set up even at the highest level, come out to my farm and walk through with me. We want to make sure that.
00:20:46
Speaker
Not everyone learns the same way. Not everyone can engage with technology the same way. So we have all the options on the table to get people up and running. And then I think it's just about a start at the basics, start at the most simple thing you want to do. And like I said, you don't have to do it all at once to start to build that sophistication over time.
00:21:04
Speaker
That's fantastic. So you guys are servicing not only small family on ranches, but larger scale based or enterprise operations as well have much more sophisticated types of management across multiple ranches and herds.
AgriWeb's Versatility for Different Scales
00:21:18
Speaker
Exactly. And we've got customers that have 15 head of sheep and we have one customer who has 500,000 mixed sheep and cattle. And so, you know, both ends of the barbell and.
00:21:28
Speaker
For them, they're willing to pay and require dedicated account managers who focus on them, but at the smaller side, some people, that's overkill. They don't need that much. So we try to tailor it to what works for the individual. And then that gets back to my point around, oh, I'm not sophisticated enough. It's great. We can tailor to that. If you want to be all bells and whistles, go over here. If you want to be, I just need this simple first stage and first step into the digital world, come over here.
00:21:55
Speaker
So if I'm a farmer or rancher listening today, I can go on to the Apple App Store or onto the Google Play Store. I can just type in AgriWeb. That's A-G-R-I-W-E-B-B. Type that into the search. It'll pull up AgriWeb. I can just hit download and I can get started 14 days completely free and just play around and see what's there.
00:22:16
Speaker
Absolutely, you can do it on your mobile phone or you can do it on a website. Some people prefer doing setup on a computer and again in both scenarios, you want to set up a call with our team or if you want to have someone walk you through it, we can do that. Otherwise, we've got tons of materials for people to self help. Super.
00:22:33
Speaker
What's one of the more recent innovations or improvements that AgriWeb has debuted in the last year or so that you're most excited about? Because like you said, you're always talking, you're always listening, you're engaging farmers, right? They're the ones who oftentimes are giving you great ideas. What's one of those ideas that you guys have heard and you've brought to market now?
00:22:50
Speaker
Well, I don't want to, I'm probably a little bit jumping the gun and our chief product officer will kill me for this, but it's always a rolling release. I think the thing that I'm most excited about now, because it gets back to the core of what we started out is like, how do we remain broad enough?
00:23:07
Speaker
to handle all the different scenarios that someone can find so that they can actually manage their business, not just one portion of it. And that's what we internally are working on around what we call unification. Now, again, I'm jumping the gun because we're not there yet. It's an ongoing project, but we have two ways that one can manage their farm. One is at an individual level, an individual animal level, and one is at a herd or in Australia, a mob basically.
00:23:31
Speaker
level. And that is how livestock management software has always existed. People have chosen one and you either manage or hurt you either manage an individual and their software companies that do each of those individually. We're the first one to ever do both. And we can support both use cases. And now we're in the process of bringing those two use cases together under one roof. So you can manage at a herd level and at an individual level on the same farm. And so it's something that's work in progress. But as we bring
00:24:01
Speaker
different features together, we get to release all this new improvements and exciting functionality that the individual system basically, I won't get too deep in the weeds, but the individual system enables us to make some massive usability and improvements and some things we've always wanted to do on the herd system. And so each feature that comes together, we get to release this whole suite of new exciting functionality while taking a big step towards the world's first unified system.
00:24:29
Speaker
Well, that's impressive. Essentially, if I was just to break it down, you're effectively going to be able to take the information at the herd level, but you'd still be able to get down to the data at the individual animal level. Is that correct? Exactly. Exactly. Because that's what happens. You bring animals into the yard, you run them through the shoot or the crush, and you can track individuals. You can track what's going on. You can break them out into management groups, get on that. But then when you put them back out there,
00:24:54
Speaker
You're managing at a herd level. And so again, how do we align with the way producers want to run their business? And it's technically very challenging to do this. And that's why no company's ever even attempted it before, but we believe it'll be a huge paradigm shift. Let's talk about the paradigm shift that is happening in arming and ranching generally. Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on the role that data plays in ranching.
00:25:17
Speaker
What can be learned or improved with farming and ranching as we think about the power this data could offer, not just in terms of unification for your own platform, and just in terms of helping farmers make better business decisions overall.
Future of Farm Management
00:25:30
Speaker
Yeah, so I think there's two things. One is what we've talked about a bunch today, which is let's actually combine the data from different parts of my farm and look at how we can improve this as a business and really thinking about as a business and looking at the bottom line, understanding cost of production, understanding fertility performance, understanding weight gain.
00:25:49
Speaker
Understanding pasture performance a lot of livestock producers we talked to say I don't grow cattle I grow grass and how that grass is performing is going to trickle through to the bottom line and make business successful and so I think there's a lot that data can do at that individual farm level.
00:26:06
Speaker
Moving one step out, quick point of clarity in our system, every producer owns their data. Every producer has, we do not share data with anyone unless a producer wants it to be shared. But if they do, to use your zero and accounting example, there's a huge amount of value that can be gained.
00:26:25
Speaker
You know, if you're working with a nutritionist that you trust, if you're working with an accountant that you trust, if you're working with an advisor, the ability to give them real time access to what's going on enables them to give you a whole ton of value, more tailored advice, more real time advice.
00:26:41
Speaker
they don't have to drive out to the farm every time they want to talk to you about something. So by making the farmer have the ability to share the bits of data they want with the people they want, they can now supercharge their business in terms of that digital relationship, which has historically been very hard to come by. So I think that's a second tier value. And looking ahead into the future, you know, I think there's also an element of the shared learning
00:27:07
Speaker
that can come between producers ultimately producers are all in this together they're not competing with each other they're all battling the same challenges.
00:27:14
Speaker
that we talked about earlier, what's happening with consumers, what's happening in the markets, what's happening in weather, in the environment. And we've seen a lot of producer groups come together and share what they're doing, what they're learning through the data collected in AgriWeb, so they can all work on their businesses as a whole. And we'd love to see a point where we can, with purely anonymous data and de-identified data, we can start to see trends in, hey,
00:27:41
Speaker
this seems to be a thing that's really improving life for producers in your area, you should consider it and see if we can help that way. So I think there's sort of, I see three levels of where data can play. Yeah, aggregated data is super powerful. There's no question about it. And we certainly see in the consumer world with just basic recommendations all the time, right? It's not like there's a bunch of monkeys in the background trying to assemble recommendations on Amazon for the next product to purchase, right? They're using AI behind the scenes to look at like people's purchase history, what they've done to then make a recommendation.
00:28:10
Speaker
No reason that we couldn't be doing those same things in farming. But to your point, the big thing here is we have to have the data in a digital format in order to be able to apply these types of powerful tools to give farmers better insights. And that's a really exciting vision that you have. But I think making sure that they also lead that, you know, yes, data privacy gets abused, and it gets abused a lot in technology. And that's why we made it clear in our terms and conditions that you own the data as a farmer, you decide where and how that gets used.
00:28:38
Speaker
And I think that's important because otherwise it can get weaponized. And one thing we've been abundantly clear about our whole history is we will never enable data to be weaponized.
Data Ownership and Privacy
00:28:48
Speaker
It is the tool that can bring value to the farmer. And that's what we want to preach to all the producers out there is that data is your friend. Data is not something to hide from. It can add so much value to your business. There's been too many companies and there's too much going on in the media where data gets weaponized. And so it's so critical to avoid that.
00:29:05
Speaker
That's a great point. And I'm sure many farmers and ranchers who are listening right now sympathize with your view on that. I know I certainly hear that as well. We also have that same kind of level of expectation in terms of privacy and security around people's data. Farmers always should own and retain their rights to their own data and information. Well, let's talk about what the future holds for AgriWeb. You guys have been around since 2014. It's great to see, like you said, you're now in 17 countries with offices in the UK, the US and Australia.
00:29:33
Speaker
Where's AgriWeb going to be in five years? Yeah, there's a couple of things that I see in the future.
AgriWeb's Future Plans
00:29:39
Speaker
I think one is we want to continue that global expansion. We are very deliberate in it. We've gotten pulled into basically 14 of those 17 countries. We deliberately entered three, and that's where we keep our focus, but we want to be able to add more and more countries on because
00:29:56
Speaker
Food production is a global thing and it's a global problem. And also there's global learnings. You know, we learn things in one country that can have value and apply to another. So we want to make sure that we continue to expand and continue to be the dominant player when it comes to software on livestock farms.
00:30:12
Speaker
The second thing is, is the platform. It's the relationships. It's why we're here having this conversation today. We are not, you know, Adam Newman enough to think that we can do it all. It requires a robust ecosystem. It requires all the different players that are making
00:30:27
Speaker
making amazing technology, hardware, software, sensors, satellites, marketplaces, everything, coming together and working together because that's what creates the best experience for the producer. And that's what they want. They don't want to have 50 different logins to software that's not working together or not talking to each other. And we feel really passionately about coming together with all the best in class businesses and providing a really seamless ecosystem for the farmer to get access to. And whether their primary tool of use is
00:30:57
Speaker
is this one or this one doesn't really matter as long as things are working together to make that life easier. And I think that's critical for digitization in agriculture becoming as mainstream as it is in every other industry. If you look at, I don't know, HubSpot and Salesforce are two massive competitors and yet every one of their products integrates with each other because that's just what you have to do. So I think that needs to happen in agriculture. I think that's something that we want to be on the forefront of pushing and working with other companies on.
00:31:24
Speaker
And the third one is suddenly there's all this noise and all this buzz around sustainability. And I think it's poorly defined. And I think that we talked earlier about regenerative practices. A lot of these are practices that farmers are already utilizing. There's no clear definition of what regenerative agriculture is.
00:31:43
Speaker
But I think that where this matters is how is this creating bottom line value to the farmers? We believe in environmental sustainability, but one of the main things about that is the sustainability of one's land, their ability to grow more grass, their ability to have better water retention, to be drought resilient.
00:32:01
Speaker
And so, you know, how do we get out of a lot of the kind of buzz and noise that's meaningless? Carbon, for example, carbon credits occupy so much oxygen in this conversation and there's a place for those and there's value that farmers can get out of it. But there's so much more to it than that. And it starts with how do you make them people more profitable? And if you can make them more profitable and they can make their farm more resilient for the future,
00:32:24
Speaker
Everyone from every angle is winning in this. And so I think approaching it from that lens is very important to us and figuring out how we can work with partners on this, how we can help farmers improve their grazing management so they can prove the sustainability of their land first, and then all the downstream impacts that will have. So those are probably three things I see as being big in the future.
Collaboration with Barnador
00:32:43
Speaker
Well, it's a great vision for AgriWeb and we're really thrilled at Barnador to be partnered with you and continue to support your efforts to help farmers and ranchers alike. Leverage tools like AgriWeb to, again, better manage their livestock and manage, like you said, manage their grass, ultimately, particularly if they're managing large herds and large swaths of land. We're really delighted to be working more closely with you and excited to see what the future holds. We share a lot of the same sentiments and ultimately, like you, we want to see farmers win. Ultimately,
00:33:13
Speaker
digital transformation offers a huge opportunity to improve efficiency and again make things more visible and transparent so farmers and ranchers can ultimately make the best business decisions to support their livelihood. So thank you so much. I want to extend my thanks to Kevin for joining us this week on the Direct Farm podcast.
00:33:32
Speaker
Here at Barnard Door, we're humbled to serve thousands of farms all across the United States and we're honored to get the opportunity to learn from many of our most successful farmers who share the same tactics, resources, and tools that they use to grow and manage their farm business using tools like
Call to Action: Try AgriWeb
00:33:45
Speaker
AgriWeb. For more information on AgriWeb, we would encourage you to check out their website at agriweb.com. That's A-G-R-I-W-E-B-B.com.
00:33:54
Speaker
Or you could also just go straight to the App Store, either the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store and just simply download AgriWeb directly on your phone and try a free two-week trial. You can also follow them on social media at AgriWeb. So thank you so much for everyone's time. We look forward to seeing you next week again on the Direct Farm Podcast. Take care and have a wonderful day.
00:34:17
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in. For more free farm resources, tips, and tactics that are most successful farms use to grow and manage their business, visit barnadore.com slash resources. Also don't forget to subscribe to the Direct Farm podcast to automatically download our weekly episodes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.