I could see myself dedicating my life to making software to help farmers organize their farm data and sell it. Anyone know of companies that do this?
edit: I'm a full-stack application developer with a lot of experience working with non-techy business owners and proven success as a problem-solver. I'm interested in getting into this industry as a technical project manager. Email me if you're looking for such a person (it's in my profile). I'll be in contact with the companies in the comments below, too. Thanks!
Yes, FarmersEdge (disclosure: I know the CTO) is a big player. I think, in a roundabout way, Monsanto is one of their competitors through acquisitions, though I'm not sure of their market placement wrt FE.
I think ag is an underrated software industry. It's ripe for disruption, but you need to do it in a way that makes sense to farmers, which can be tricky for at least a couple of reasons!
It is a commodity business with very thin margins. Farmers for the most part have zero pricing power for their commodities. Whatever you propose must "pencil out", as farmers say, and it needs to be a clear benefit. It should reduce or option-away risk, not add to risk.
Professional farm management companies might be a good place to start, because they have business analysts that have the time to understand your product and can deploy at scale across multiple clients.
Hertz farm management (Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska) is one example. Typical client is the children that inherited dad's farm but don't have the time and expertise to manage the land, which is typically leased to farmer-operators.
Most of the software on market is basically data collecting apps (be it manual or automatic data entry). What you get out of those apps is just another piece of (already abundant) information. You might get good insights out of it, but most farms are seriously understaffed and there might not be enough time left for doing another data entry job or analysing it.
I run small web app for farmers (http://vitipad.com english website is not really up to date as I am active mostly on Czech market at the moment.
I am not selling the data, the app is used for storing their data and generating the reports for various govt agencies.
Selling to farmers is not easy, they don't have much time for administrative tasks, they are usually older and not really into new stuff anymore. Most of the software on market was created in 90s and there was quite a lot of acquisitions lately (mostly to wipe the market).
I can't wait to see new crop of tools entering the market, but mixing correct set of features will be hard.
Check out Agrible. agrible.com and morning farm report which is our flagship delivery platform. Instead of focusing on data collection/organization (a digital farm notebook) we are focused on predictive analytics which is essentially decision support for the grower. We combine high res weather / soil / field info and have a built a model that literally is growing virtual crops and we are using our model to predict yields at the end of the growing season!
FarmersEdge is definitely big in at least exploiting the data for higher yield through several techniques including avoiding disease, rotating crops, weather preduction, etc...
Really interesting work, and in a domain that is just opening up to the idea of using data. They're definitely recruiting and open to remote work if you're serious. I used to work for a startup they acquired.
There's loads of opportunity in helping farmers gleen new insights.
Look at Quantified Ag, making fit bits for cows. http://quantifiedag.com/ Groundbreaking stuff, which came about from a simple discussion. It seems boring on the surface, but there's some cool stuff going on in the sector.
Check out our startup Pycno. We do a smart sensor for farmers, since getting the data out of the farm is the first problem. On the software side we have a lot of analytics and predictions that the farmer can benefit from. We are in HAX, here in Shenzhen!
edit: I'm a full-stack application developer with a lot of experience working with non-techy business owners and proven success as a problem-solver. I'm interested in getting into this industry as a technical project manager. Email me if you're looking for such a person (it's in my profile). I'll be in contact with the companies in the comments below, too. Thanks!