vollmarj

And https://app.precip.ai

I reference this often! Thanks for writing it.

This is exactly what Precip does. Other apps just show the past forecast which can often be wrong. The Precip app uses radar to measure what actually happened so you'll know if that trail is muddy or not. https://precip.ai

We took a lot of inspiration from darksky and this post when designing the forecast tab in the Precip (YC W24) app. The app started out just as historical weather, but we recently added forecasts if you want to check it out. https://precip.ai

Yes.

Great move by Plaid. Alain, Chris, John and the team at Cognito saw the new internet economy needing easy to implement ID verification and KYC compliance way before others and quietly built the best solution on the market. While others touted their fundraising, Cognito just kept building and growing revenue like crazy. Happy to see their hard work paying off and excited for Plaid to extend its capabilities in this area.

Me too! Could you say more about what kinds of experiments you've been doing and how you are measuring the results? I've been using the Haney Soil Test along with Phospholipid Fatty Acid Analysis (PLFA) to understand how my management practices have been impacting overall soil health and microbe communities. I've been thinking about how I wish I could collaborate more with others on research to help build a dataset that can be used to quantify the effects of regenerative farming.

https://talk.newagtalk.com is where farmers hang out on the web.

I'm curious how they even got this update to their app through the review process. Apple never would have allowed it per the app store rules. I suppose they are using some dynamic tech to push updates out to a build that already cleared the review process?

Many banks were waiting to process the loans until the guidance settled down. Even the application form changed after the program officially launched. Guidance from the Treasury Department on how to apply and underwrite was a moving target for several days into the program launching.

Our bank said they were still doing diligence on all applications upfront before submitting the loans to the SBA even though the bank isn't actually liable for anything. This was causing about a 2 day lag time from starting to process the loan application to submitting it to the SBA. In our case that meant not getting the loan submitted before the funding ran out.

As a longtime segment customer, I am excited to see this exist. Segment's product is fairly good but their pricing model is really bad. We recently ran into an issue where they were billing us for almost 10x the number of users we were actually tracking. It was a nightmare that required a few months of back and forth with their support trying to get it fixed. In the end, they gave us a partial refund for the overages but we had to do a lot of technical work to resolve the issue ourselves.

It would be nice to have an open source alternative that doesn't get you locked into an unpredictable pricing model that you have very little control over.

Can you provide references to the subsidies you mention? I think you will find that this is a common misconception with only some truth to it. I hear often that US agriculture is subsidized, but never hear specifics. I'm genuinely curious where people get this impression.

The majority of ag subsidies are not given to farmers for growing things. Crop insurance is subsidized, but that doesn't necessarily lead to overproduction as is only really kicks in when conditions are very poor. Conservation programs (to NOT farm land) are also subsidized. This again doesn't encourage over production.

There are many things that could be improved in modern agriculture, but my view is that subsidies have little to do with our largest problems.

Like most problems at this scale, this is a complex issue with many causes.

First off, Dicamba is not a new herbicide. We've had it for many years and knew the challenges associated with it. Most farms didn't need to use it because glyphosate (aka Roundup) was just as effective and far easier to use thanks to Monsanto developing the compatible GMO seed over 20 years ago. Since then, two things have changed: roundup is off patent (so Monsanto's profits are being challenged) and many common weeds have developed their own resistance to the glyphosate mode of action.

This leads Monsanto searching for a new product they can sell, and farmers searching for a more effective herbicide they can use. Pressure from both sides.

Monsanto and the other chemical companies have a powerful lobby. They told the EPA that this new formulation of Dicamba was less prone to drift and somehow got that through without much field testing.

The drift issue is a great thing for the chemical/seed companies if they can keep the product approved for use. Here is why: everyone will have to buy their GMO seed. Not even because they want to use the Dicamba product, but because the need the resistant seed as insurance against damage from their neighbor. There is a LOT of profit on the line for Monsanto and Dow/Dupont and unfortunately they have the ears of the regulators and they have great influence over the "independent" farmer lobby (American Farm Bureau).

I'd like to propose that consolidation of farms is not driving this issue, but rather consolidation of seed and chemical companies. We have a massive oligopoly in the seed and chemical industry and it is only getting worse as the "Big 6" are becoming the Big 3 through M&A (Bayer/Monsanto, Dow/Dupont, Syngenta/ChemChina).

About me: My family has been farming for 6 generations, my dad, uncle, and brother all actively farm and I am the founder of FarmLogs (YCW12).

Nowadays when most farms are 10,000+ acres in size and overseen by absentee landlords

I'd like to point out that this is not true. When I first moved from the rural Midwest to Silicon Valley, I quickly discovered this as a common misconception. The average farm is actually closer to 800 acres and still farmed by (in most cases) a single an owner/operator maybe with a brother or an uncle helping.

It is true that a lot of farmland is rented and nearly all of it is owned by someone like your grandpa that is a retired farmer now living off the rent of their land. I've found that this older generation is often the pickiest about how their land gets farmed and they often enforce practices that they prefer to keep their ground in good healthy condition.

About me: My family has been farming for 6 generations, my dad, uncle, and brother all actively farm and I am the founder of FarmLogs (YCW12).

Yeah, we (FarmLogs) did YC in Mountain View and realized that needing to get on a plane every time we wanted to visit a customer was just not worth it. We picked up and moved back to the Midwest after YC to be near our customers.

You can either commit to getting on an airplane often, or find ways to test in simulated environments instead. My guess is you will need some combination of both.

How about this: "Former Sequoia Capital partners believe the Midwest is the future of startups"

Yeah, I just posted with the word for word title that was on venture beat. Thought that was best practice, but I see what you mean.

Happy to clear that up. We don't count hobby farms as they aren't our typical users. We are focusing on the ~280k row crop farms in the US of which over 90k have started using FarmLogs. Most of our customers have between 600 and 10k acres of land each.

It would certainly be worth a conversation. Shoot me an email and we can connect.

Congrats Planet! Now please add more spectral bands to your satellites so they can be useful for agriculture.

Great point. I'm one of the founders of FarmLogs and I can tell you we started this company to help make farmers (like my family) more successful. We don't have ulterior motives with regard to using farmer data. We help them use it to be more profitable and that is all.

That said, it looks like we aren't doing a good enough job making it obvious in our ToS. That page has not been updated in a very long time. I am going to be sure to update it to more accurately reflect our values.

Hey Cryptoz, thanks!

We do make use of weather and climate data in some of our models and visualizations. For instance, we use the gridded precip AHPS dataset from the National Weather Service to determine water accumulation at the field. We also use some large temperature datasets.

In the past, we experimented with using the DarkSky API to alert farmers (while in the field) that rain is coming. We've since dropped that feature.

In any case, we generally make use of remote sensed data and are not deploying sensors on farm.

At FarmLogs (YC w12) we have been able to hire some really amazing people in the "flyover" country. We moved to Ann Arbor from Mountain View to be closer to our customers.

Ann Arbor is an attractive city. People realize that when they come and visit. Much like startup hubs, Ann Arbor has a high density of really smart people (partly because of UofM), and does have its own advantages over the Bay Area.

Ultimately, people don't join us (or not join us) because of location. We hire people that want to be a part of our mission to bring great technology to agriculture. When people get to see what we are working on, who we are, and how much progress we've made, they get really excited. At that point location doesn't matter as much. We are relocating people from all over including the Bay area.

Congrats on the launch guys!

Congrats on the launch!

Thanks!

It is simply that our CTO is mature enough to recognize that process and engineering management isn't his strong suit and that he needs to be able to double down on architecture. A great lead engineer will help stay efficient as we add more amazing people to the team. We already have really great hackers on the team and are looking to add more.

I use the title Growth Hacker in the sense that it is a hacker (programmer) focused on growth (marketing). In this sense, it is simply a term for a marketer that writes code. So then "growth hacking" should simply mean writing code to do marketing for you. This is indeed different than marketing alone.

Congrats!

https://indinero.com