AN ambitious startup is forging a path to take homegrown agtech to the world stage, tapping local advantages for international opportunities.
Agriwebb is a cloud-based farm management platform, run on a smart device, aimed squarely at the average cockie.
As with most agtech trends, the US leads the way on production management software. But to date, commercial products have veered away from grazing and targeted cropping, with its vast market, relatively uniform production conditions and small range of dominant commodity groups.
US croppers offer attractive economies of scale for prospective developers, and Agriwebb founding chief executive Kevin Baum sees similarities in Australia’s livestock industries.
“Red meat production in the US is very fragmented and is run mostly by small operators,” Mr Baum said.
“There are also a lot of non-uniform production regions, which means lots of management styles and different farm sizes. On top of all that, each states has its own set of regulations.
“Australia is nowhere near as fragmented as the US, and that creates an opportunity where it can excel.”
Founded in 2014, Agriwebb has 1200 subscribers which accommodates multiple users and works offline for in-paddock entries of stock actions and management, paddock treatment, input and inventory records.
The online portal provides production data analytic reports for stocking rates, reconciliations and fertility, feed budgeting as well as inputs and outputs costs.
Mr Baum met co-founding chairman Justin Webb, at Oxford University, where they completed a Masters of Business Administration together.
Mr Baum took a route that most often ends in Silicon Valley, working on a range of technology commercialisation ventures.
But after learning of the opportunity in agtech, and spending several months on Mr Webb’s family property in Queensland, Mr Baum was hooked on the opportunity to “commercialise a business that makes a real difference to real people, not just some new way to share photos on social media”.
Agrwebb’s third founder, sales and marketing head John Fargher, jumped onboard after just one virtual meeting over Skype.
A lawyer by training, Mr Fargher left his in-house role with a London firm and returned to his farming roots, having grown up on a station in northern South Australia.
Mr Fargher observed the hype around agtech’s new offerings lead farmers to think they need “a sexy drone, or remote hardware”.
“That’s not the first step you need to take. Is should be to digitise your records and make some actionable decisions from them,” he said.
Agriwebb’s numbers man, Mr Webb, studied applied mathematics at Harvard University in the US. The management system he saw when he came back from overseas studies to his fifth-generation family farm spurred him into the venture.
“I was amazed a lot of our decisions on farm were being made based on anecdote and experience, rather than cold hard facts and benchmarking projections.”
The platform is pitched at production efficiency, from making data “useful and actionable”.
International opportunities are on the agenda, Mr Webb said.
“We want to fundamentally change the global method of red meat production, and that is a very compelling story for our investors.”
Mr Fargher said in the near future development would focus on complimentary third party services, “where our subscribers can plug the their data into an agronomist, accountant, finance services and so on”.
Data ownership being the hot button issue that it is, Mr Baum points out “we are a subscription service, and farmers own their data. If anything happens to it, it will be because they opt in”.