Ag Tech Sunday - Challenges of AgTech in Australia: the sheer size of the place
- By: "Farm Tender" News
- Ag Company News
- Sep 29, 2018
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By David Rubie - SmartShepherd
If you have travelled much of Australia, typically it will be in a plane between the major metropolitan centres. Perhaps you've glanced out the window at the unfolding, brown landscape below between looking impatiently at your watch waiting for the flight to end.
If you are selling AgTech, the distance a plane can cover can be deceptive. Want to get to the Eyre Peninsula or Western Australia from the east coast? It's a couple of plane flights and a minor inconvenience (with the notable exception of navigating Perth airport). If you want to drive it...be prepared for a lot of driving. Not a few hours, we are talking days.
SmartShepherd has customers spread over much of Australia - from Tumby Bay in SA to Ongerup in WA, Hamilton in Victoria, Hay in southern NSW, pretty much anywhere there are sheep and forward thinking stud breeders. Servicing these customers we figured would be easy with the rapid advances in technology, surely. A few Zoom video sessions, some mobile phone based hand holding and everybody would be happy. We could not have been more wrong.
Our blindside of course was the mistakes we made rather than our customers. Make a poor software release and suddenly you have put a pile of difficult to contact customers in serious trouble. The internet in rural Australia can only be described as an ongoing disaster, mobile phone coverage a constant source of frustration and the demanding nature of farming will divert attention away from pressing problem #63 (your app is slow) to pressing problem #127 (we have a broken water trough and will be out of phone range for hours). Some of the problems proved incredibly hard to diagnose over a phone call. In the end, it was time to throw a swag into the ute and get dirty in the sheep yards.
I should probably mention that we have some of the best early stage customers we could ever have asked for. Endlessly patient, understanding, willing and able to make constructive suggestions rather than just be critical. Our missteps were communicated as early as we could and this was reciprocated with trust we would sort it out. The logistics of doing so proved daunting (try 35,000km of driving since June last year you might get an idea).
Victorians have it relatively easy - the state is fairly small and towns are numerous and usually well serviced. NSW, SA and WA? Not so much. Vast distances mean that careful planning of where you can stay and where you need to get the next tank of diesel is essential (and yes, I did run low enough at one point I was forced to beg half a tank from a customer, who didn't even bat an eyelid). At one point, in South Australia, I wasn't sure whether to drive home through Mildura or Broken Hill and the 1000's of kilometres that entailed. You gain an empathy for truck drivers very quickly. Driving the infamous Hay plains must be one of the most disorienting experiences available in the modern world - you can see the speedo indicating you are moving and the road disappears under your wheels at the usual rate, but the tree-less view makes it feel like you are standing still.
I spent a lot of time staying with customers when they generously opened their homes, or local pubs (easy to find a feed) or using the swag when necessary. Some of these people I had never had more than a phone conversation with yet they and their families welcomed and fed me without hesitation while we worked. It has been a humbling, incredible experience to be treated that way.
Small town Australian pubs can still be the best, low-cost accommodation option with the bonus of meeting the locals and learning something new. A common theme being the slow, painful withdrawal of essential services that strangles these once vibrant communities and for which I wish I had a good answer for. The old photos of football teams from a once much bigger community always gives me a sense of melancholy. I would like to think the AgTech boom could turn this trend around if we can get the collars, sensors and monitoring equipment to truly become mainstream - it is an industry crying out for a new breed of station hands and local service companies.
The lessons? There is simply no substitute for being on site in the early stages of product deployment. As our first customer pointed out, without the problem being real and in your face, you will not understand why it's a problem. We had throughput problems that I didn't even consider when we started SmartShepherd, but it was abundantly clear in the yards that if we couldn't approach putting collars on 100 animals an hour, we were limiting our market. It took serious amounts of effort, testing by customers and on site debugging to get down to that number but we did it.
Other lessons: Your product is the most important thing to you (obviously) but your customers are trying to fit it in with half a dozen other things they are trying to get done. Their staff might not be keen, or feel like new technology is threatening or too hard to use. Some of those staff have been living on that property for 25 years and their opinions are highly valued so look after them. If you do that respectfully, changes in staff attitudes can be accomplished quickly and successfully. There is nothing quite like feeling part of an established crew, even if it's only for a few hours and your only job is picking up lambs while they work in that efficient way that only comes from being familiar with each other.
The final lesson: If you are fortunate enough to spend time travelling Australia, do stop when you can and contemplate the history, the people and the unique way such a giant, sparsely populated country manages to remain so very Australian. Also, remember to fill up the tank earlier rather than later!
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