What led you and Conservis towards the agriculture industry, given the company’s carbon trading background?
Conservis did indeed start as a carbon-trade business, but some of our co-founders had an agribusiness background. While at a conference on carbon, a group of farmers approached us with the desire to benefit from the technological advancements that are available to other sectors. After observing this heightened interest, we spent one year across 30 different farming operations in North America and we whiteboarded the entire business cycle, from land ownership to inventory. Farming is typically a low-margin/capital-intensive activity, so if farmers are given the chance to use technology and systems, their financial outcome will undergo a generous boost.
Traditionally, farms are not equipped to capture data for reporting activities and many farmers do not actively seek to invest in software solutions. Therefore, when, five years ago, some of our clients started to deliver financial reports to their banking partner, Rabobank, we managed to stand out from the crowd and developed a relationship with this bank. Rabobank has a network of 20,000 direct farm clients around the world. By linking these communities with our capabilities we found ourselves in a win-win situation.
What is the main added value of software solutions in agriculture?
Farmers need to be able to thrive in order to feed the rest of the world. The main value that we bring is linked to the control over the cost of production.
Because it is impossible to improve what we cannot measure, getting data organized helps us methodically understand how crops perform. Delivering the produce in time is vital for the sustenance of a business and we are able to forecast and control both the harvesting and the commercialization processes from start to end.
By simply recording all the small details, farmers are able to obtain a more optimized revenue.
What is the geographic footprint of these solutions, and the overall appetite for adoption?
The majority of our client portfolio spreads across North America and Australia, but we are also present in Canada, South America and Africa. On the one hand, we are serving family farms whose owners want to run their business in a modern fashion, where they can log into their systems remotely and forgo all the paperwork. On the other hand, there are the corporate clients - which can still be family owned but operate at a much larger scale and are backed up by pension funds or publicly traded companies. Ultimately, it is the same system but a different value proposition.
Can your product and its homologues bring about cybersecurity and data privacy concerns?
Because farmers are sitting in the cash crunch between the retailers that are selling them fertilizers and the clients that are buying the wholesale goods, they are very sensitive about their data being potentially used against them. Price speculations from both sides are a real possibility and this is why data property trumps over cybersecurity concerns. Moreover, the U.S. Homeland Security Act restricts any public information about farms and fields so the risk of having your systems hacked is quite low.
What is the purpose behind your partnership with John Deere and other equipment manufacturers?
Our partnerships with the likes of John Deere Operations Center or Bayer are meant to streamline the collection, correction and completion of data sets. Since many areas of the farm business are still paper-based, it is sometimes challenging to bring all the information together so the more agtech partners we have, the better. Being able to collect all of the machine records they create is the cornerstone of our software services. In this way, we can synchronize and connect the information gathered to the complete yield record in order to find out how much inventory and fuel was utilized. All these data inputs can offer an updated view on the costs of production.
What are your key objectives for the next couple of years for Conservis?
Over the next decade, our goal is to continue to automate data collection for high quality decision making. Besides helping farmers do more with less, we are also interested in supporting them to get access to new market opportunities like carbon, traceability from the farm gate or geographic dispersion. In a market characterized by increased interest rates and volatility, our ultimate goal is to give farmers all the tools necessary to be prepared for the future.
