Video by Influence Media.
The agricultural industry is ripe for disruption and Will Dunn, the Northallerton based founder of Ag-Drive, is part of the effort to bring farming into the future.
It’s an industry that can sometimes be forgotten about when we’re tucking into a Sunday roast. But there’s lots of hard work that goes on in the background.
For UK farmers however, the odds are increasingly stacked against them. Those in the profession face challenges such as rising costs and huge changes in regulations on the way.
Dunn believes the only way forward is to embrace ag-tech (agricultural technology). The sector has attracted interest from investors in recent years and certain ideas such as vertical farming, have been at the forefront of that. But funding has slowed down partly due to most of those companies failing to prove long term viability.
The most important thing is that ag-tech companies are solving real problems in the day-to-day life of farmers and as someone who’s been in farming his whole life, he hopes he has something different to offer.
We spoke to Dunn at C4DI Northallerton, to find out more about Ag-Drive, the state of farming and the future of ag-tech.
Modernising the farming profession
Like many in the trade, Dunn was born into farming. He began working more closely with his farming contractor father after university and it was here that he saw shortcomings in the administration of the business. "What I wanted to do,” Dunn says. “Is streamline that whole process of recording jobs and invoicing and go paperless.”
In the process of working on a solution during the covid-19 pandemic they realised the product could be scaled. They now have an app that is used by contractors in the UK and as far away as New Zealand. It’s exciting progress for an idea that ultimately came out of a frustration with outdated processes in the industry.
“I want to eliminate all paperwork for agricultural contracting and farm businesses. Essentially, I'm fed up with scraggly bits of paper. We are so far behind other industries, and we're probably technophobes to be honest. We've got thousands of pounds worth of machinery sat in the yard and yet we're still invoicing off the back of a fag packet. There's an opportunity to make the whole industry paperless, improve health and safety, and improve the way we invoice for work.”
The challenge of course is convincing ageing farmers who are renowned for their technophobia that it’s time for a change. “The average age of farmers is around 59 in the UK and in New Zealand and Australia, it's about 50.”
Of course, there’s a need to get younger people into the industry but in the short term, they have to get those already running the business on board. “We provide a set up service for those contractors who are probably not that tech savvy.” Dunn says it doesn’t matter how convincing the product is when you’re changing processes and habits that have been in place for 30+ years. So there is a certain amount of walking through the app that needs to be done, which they partly do through webinars and YouTube tutorials.
Agriculture in crisis?
There’s no two ways about it, agricultural businesses are feeling the pinch right now. “Fuel has almost doubled in price, fertiliser prices are rising, the cost of inputs are significant. These are overheads that we now can't carry as contracted businesses. So that's why it's very important that we get invoices out as a business.”
Ag-Drive could help and they’re “finding a lot of businesses are reducing their time spent invoicing by up to 95%. It used to take one or two days or a week, whereas we've reduced that time to a couple of hours. These contractors are very busy people. So, we're significantly improving cash flow for contracting businesses.”
What we don’t want to be doing, Dunn says, is subsidising farmers. For the industry to be sustainable in the future they need to find other ways to cut costs, because subsidies which have propped up farmers for some time, are coming to an end. He thinks the UK could learn a lot from similar markets on the other side of the world.
“New Zealand is ahead of us on tech adoption. They have a different perception of ag-tech, because there are no farmers subsidies over there, so they want efficiency all the time.”
He’s understandably vocal about eliminating subsidies and getting a fair price for local produce. Without dwelling on the politics – this is a tech blog after all! – the problem he sees is consumers have gotten used to cheap animal products. Then there’s the frustration at the hypocrisy of those who claim to care about the planet and then enjoy imported animal products for dinner. “That cow out there that we can milk,” he says. “Has no air miles on it whatsoever.”
But even if more people wanted to buy local produce, there are concerns that Brexit and free trade deals have allowed cheap imports to undercut UK farmers.
“More and more land is getting taken out of production. And we’re feeding an ever-growing population. As we saw with the Ukraine and Russia conflict, [the supply] can soon get turned off. It’s a mistake to think food security can just be imported. Hopefully now the government has realised we need to start looking after our UK farms.”
It's possible that tech may be able to help.
Disrupting the industry for the future
“We're going to need more efficiency. And that's going to be driven by ag-tech.” As it stands, existing methods aren’t good enough.
“Even the DEFRA web dashboard for submitting the BPS payment is outdated… we've got tractors that can drive themselves for example, yet we're all still having to fill in paperwork for a farm insurance audit. It should all be there online, recorded on an app.”
This is of course, what Ag-Drive is trying to solve. ‘Automating the administration of agriculture and professionalising agricultural contracting and farm businesses.’
Of course, it’s not just a case of throwing ideas at the wall and hoping they stick. In a specialist industry like this it’s important that the solutions come from within. “There are a lot of ag-tech companies who don't have the necessary experience within the industry.” Fortunately, there are grants and funding out there to support home grown businesses like Dunn’s, some of which he’s benefited from.
Communities like C4DI are also there to support something like Ag-Drive. In fact, it was MD, John Connolly, who gave Dunn the first initial push to give it a go. The site in Northallerton has also helped with “facilitating spaces for hosting webinars. For example, we have very poor internet on the farm at the moment, so we're using that for uploading all of our video content.”
They’ve exhibited at events hosted by C4DI, including the Future Farming series, and Dunn has made important connections through its network and the Barclays Eagle Labs agri-tech incubator.
Some screenshots of the Ag-Drive app.
Going global
And there’s clearly demand for what they do. They’ve now gone global.
Dunn says, “most of our contractors are based in the UK and Ireland as well as a lot in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, America and in parts of Europe as well.” So far they’ve sold to English speaking markets that function in a similar way, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used in other territories and they’re planning to add more languages to the platform in the coming months.
There’s an Ag-Drive team now too, with himself and sales reps in the UK, Ireland as well as Down Under. They partnered with a software development team in York for the product, another area where C4DI was able to provide a steer in the early stages. And it’s all coming together nicely.
We ask what excites Dunn about the potential of the app. He talks about the “light bulb moment” going off when contractors realise the difference Ag-Drive could make. “When you're getting people ringing you up saying, 'this has absolutely transformed our cash flow', that gives you a warm feeling inside. Sometimes you wake up in the morning, and I see we've had another three contractors sign up.”
And there’s a snowball effect that will inevitably help grow the business, due to the close-knit community that is farming. He says, “contractors are promoting us to others, saying, 'we've been using this app for doing our job records. We don't need to use paperwork anymore.'
Sign-ups have rocketed recently and they’re getting recognition from the industry too with a ‘Best Innovation’ award at LAMMA, the main agricultural machinery and tech show in the UK.
If British farming is going to move forward, they’ll need apps like Ag-Drive, so watch this space.