Ag Tech - Talk to the Farmers first

By: "Farm Tender" News
Ag Company News
May 16, 2018
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by Andrew Lai and April Heasley, SproutX

"Necessity is the mother of invention”, and the more you understand your customer's problems and needs, the higher your chances are of developing a successful new product.

Steve Jobs, one of the most celebrated tech entrepreneurs of our age made a famous quote about corporate innovation, which is often cited by those who believe that technology is the key driver of innovation. Steve Jobs famously remarked, “It isn’t the customer’s job to know what they want.”

The danger for companies, particularly in AgTech, who choose to follow this advice is that they miss out on the enormous advantage of understanding what problem the customer needs solved. In the growing world of AgTech, a startup’s primary customer is generally the farmer. And it is no secret that farmers, much like entrepreneurs themselves are extremely busy, risk-taking people. Thus, with regards to the agricultural industry, developing innovative solutions that address their genuine needs in an accessible manner is one of the keys to success. But how can this be achieved? By getting out there, talking, and trialling tech with such customers.

On top of coming up with a product design that meets the customers’ needs, this involvement also strengthens the company’s relationship with its customers and increases their brand loyalty. People gravitate to where they are listened to and like knowing that their opinions are taken seriously.

Amongst recent discussion online in the AgTech community and via social media, such as during the most recent AgChat Oz session, one of the most prevalent points raised was the importance of talking to farmers when developing technology. And in the world of AgTech product development, this couldn’t be more accurate. In order to solve a legitimate customer problem and ultimately reach success, founders need to find out exactly what those problems actually are.

Why are you innovating in the first place?

If innovation for the sake of innovation is your company’s only goal, then by all means go ahead and live by the two famous quotes above. Look to technology for opportunities to disrupt the current playing field. However, if you are also aiming for business success in the Ag industry, align your innovation with a critical farmer problem that no one has yet solved. And if you’re wondering what that problem is, ask your customers. If you’re searching for the next big thing for your business, be it an improved product, such as a farm management software platform, or a brand new one, chances are your customers have most of the answers you are looking for.

A key example of this concept in action can be seen through the founders of Blue River Technologies. The founders came from an engineering background outside of AgTech, and after graduating from Stanford, they wanted to apply their tech/knowledge to agriculture. They started out with what seemed like a very innovative idea, an autonomous lawn mower, but after speaking to farmers, landscape services, and other relevant customers, they discovered that there wasn’t a need for such a device in the Ag community.

Instead, whilst talking to lettuce and small crop farmers, they discovered that one of the problems in the industry was the tedious process of having to bring in “bus loads” of workers and pay for labour for the manual removal of weeds and lettuce thinning. They then went out and ran trials with an early version of an artificially intelligent precision weed sprayer with farmers, from which they were able to determine which aspects of the robots worked and didn’t from the customer perspective.

They then went on to become successful enough to be acquired by John Deere for roughly US $300 million. Their success came from solving a customer problem. They could only have discovered what that problem was by talking to their customers.

Pay attention early on

An earlier example is that of Supriya and Jay Nair, the founders of OutofBox Solutions. They were originally from a tech and urban background outside of farming and were looking to somehow combine artificial intelligence and IoT with agriculture. Their initial tech idea was an artificial intelligence camera system for smart inspection of sheep feet to detect foot rot. However, after speaking to farmers, they discovered that there was a greater problem that farmers were interested in solving: Inefficient feral animal trapping and the countless hours wasted checking animal traps for what was often not an animal that posed a threat in the trap, such a possum or even the farmer’s sheep dog.

Due to having spoken with customers and solving an industry problem, they were then able to develop their now successful smart animal trap, Alfie, which uses artificial intelligence to determine whether or not to trap an animal based on if it is a fox, or an animal which poses no threat to the farm and livestock.

Conclusion

It’s also important to understand your customers' business goals, and the strategy they intend to use as they aim to achieve them. Aligning your product development objectives with your customers' goals and strategy such that your new product or service can help them to achieve them will greatly improve the chances of your new product succeeding in the market.

Aligning your product development objectives with your customers' goals and strategy depends on the situation. If your customers are aiming for market leadership via innovation, figure out how your new product development can deliver that innovative edge. If your customers are looking to succeed via competitive pricing, help them reduce their overall costs by developing more cost-effective products.

This was SproutX’s main motivation for launching the Pioneers program, creating an organised platform and database in which startups can access farmers and vice versa for trialling and feedback, to ensure their products are effectively addressing one of the most important aspects of AgTech in a user friendly manner. A legitimate customer problem.