It's 2013. Are 20 something year old farmers supposed to be wearing suspenders, sucking on wheat, and carrying pitch forks?
Let's be a little more supportive. Advice on how you think a young company can get around these legacy relationships would be more helpful.
Then how do they have time for starting a company?
Depending on what they grow and where they are, farmers can have a lot of time on their hands in the winter.
I don't think farming is what you think it is these days.
A nearly complete takeover by automated machines is already underway with farming. Robots coupled with software are really how software will eat the world..
The reason capitalism works so efficiently is it forces change. The "old boys" may have monopolies today but they won't have those same monopolies tomorrow. Its happening everywhere. So many opportunities.
No-one thought forex trading was like that those days either.
I grew up spending half my childhood on the farm and half in the city. My uncle after surviving Korea, farm-raised fish decades before most, diversified into real estate and finances, had leading edge GPS, radio, sat computers and irrigation gear and sent his sons to college to get an edge in business, biology and computers. The family farm(s) and related enterprises are worth somewhere in the nine figures. (Not to mention the wind and solar power farms which they had been playing with on a smaller scale since the '70s to power pumps...)
It doesn't really matter if the software provides savings and greater yields for the farmers though. Any farmer that refuses to use it will either continue getting the same results as the past years or go out of business due to the majority of farmers using FarmLogs to squeeze out inefficiencies.
Twenty years back I worked with farmers that were tracking sex with horse sex (race horse stud farms, agistment, et al) - it was a million dollar business with bloodlines, top dollar vets, field certified portable top range medical gear, etc.
At about that time I worked with farmers developing advanced laser systems for micron scale measurements of wool fibres.
And yet, all these farmers were and still are very conservative in very particular ways - the questions they would be asking are what does Farm Logs do that we aren't already doing? (answer: not much, they already track field usage and markets) and (more importantly to them) does it work when the internet isn't working? (answer: it seems to be cloud based so I guess if the signal drops out then so does the software).
Who owns the Farm Logs data? Who has access to the cumulative total data across all farms? How are the profits from granting third parties access to pooled data redistributed?
Just For Reference:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Robots-Shearing-Sheep-Science-Publicat...
On a side note there is a great discussion on Econ Talk with an organic farmer, Lisa Turner,
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/12/lisa_turner_on.html
I am a bit leery but you paint a real cynical picture.
The project was a complete, utter, dismal failure. Why? Because when these companies wanted to do a deal, old Uncle Otto from the back office at company A would go and have a nice long lunch with cousin Beppe from company B, then they would shake hands, and that was that. They weren't interested, and they were getting great rates anyway, because these were long-term business relationships, some had been going on for generations!
So I am a bit leery of young hip geeks with soft hands telling honest sons of toil how to improve their businesses...