Barn Talk - Data Driven Farming.. The Future Of Agriculture? w/Michael Hansen

Episode Date: November 7, 2021

Welcome To Barn Talk! In today’s episode, we have Michael Hansen on the show to discuss data based farming, how he got the idea to start his company “Barn Tools”, the challenges he’s faced starting a tech company, the future of hog farming & much, much more. Special Thanks To Barn Tools The BarnTalk alarm starter kit is $150 OFF! Optimize your barn environment today! http://TDF-BarnTalk.BarnTools.com SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c SUBSCRIBE TO BARN TALK CLIPS ➱ https://bit.ly/3BlZnqq LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY ITUNES ➱ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barn-talk/id1574395049 ADD US ON: INSTAGRAM ➱ https://bit.ly/3gaobdN TIKTOK ➱ https://bit.ly/3eJfftr ------------------------------- ***PLEASE NOTE*** Barn Talk is a significant break from the typical content viewers have come to expect from This’ll Do Farm. Please be advised that we will be exploring a wide variety of topics (some adult-themed) and our younger viewers (and their parents) should be advised that some topics will be for mature audiences only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Countertop wipes and fly traps Hey fruit flies your baby boom ends here Save the Everyday with Amazon All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms farms are different in type in size and even in name welcome to barn talk what happens at the barn stays at the barn until now we're going to let it all out for you guys today we have a special episode we're going to solve some problems and talk about some opportunities to solve some more problems as you all know we

love technology and disruption and we love agriculture and we're going to talk about those two things those three things today. Our guest today embodies both of these qualities and is using them to change of livestock, livestock industry for the better. So dad's got the market update, but before he gets into that, all I ask for you guys is to pay the fee

and share the show, share it out to your friends, share it out to your family, shared out to your coworkers. We're trying to grow this thing, trying to do some good in this world, and it's just kind of a value exchange. So share the show for us. We'd really appreciate it.

We do appreciate that. I'm not getting any younger, so we've got to get this thing going. So harvest is winding down in southeast Isle. We're just about done. We've got about one day left. We're going to actually try to finish up today and tomorrow, and then we'll have everything done. Yields around here have been excellent.

I raised the best corn on corn this year that I ever have. And so you should feel real good about that, and I've even sold some corn, thanks to the plethora of hog feeders. in Washington County. The basis has been excellent, so I've been selling as I go a little bit. But there is a lot of uncertainty. If you've heard, nitrogen is about a dollar a unit right now. And so this is not financial advice, but I sure as hell would not prepay my nitrogen because you have no advantage of doing that. The last time this happened, it broke in the spring and went down. So if you prepaid, you kind of got screwed. So basically, I'm planning.

on not prepaying any nitrogen and then hoping that it's lower in the spring. Thank God for hog manure. Yes, hog manure is like gold this year. So we just had the conversation if we were going to plant any beans. Because we actually let some of our manure go down the road to neighbors that haul it. And I told Sawyer, maybe we should just plant corn on corn on everything and just use all that manure. We're hoping that all you guys have got to pay for nitrogen, just plant beans because you don't want to spend that much money. and then the corn price will just be just as good as this year.

Yeah, and I'm sure what will happen is that price will collapse in the spring and then we'll have half a bunch of corn. We'll be like, damn it, we should have planted beans. But anyway, we'll figure it out one way or another. So your market update today, and this is the close yesterday. And so last I checked, corn and beans were still down a little bit, but they very well, they were getting narrower when I saw them. So this is courtesy of cats grain in Washington, Iowa.

This is their cash prices. Corns 524 and 552. That was local in 552 at ADM and Cedar Rapids if you want to go fight that fight. Soybeans 1228, and that's at Cedar Rapids or Quincy. And Hogg 76, Cattle 125. I keep giving you a cattle price. It never changes 125. Bitcoin, though, holy mother Mary.

So a Bitcoin ETF came out this week, and apparently people like it. Last I checked, Bitcoin was right around 65,000. To the moon. So if you're Tesla and you caught a bunch of shade for buying Bitcoin, they're up about a billion and a half dollars. And a micro-sailer from micro-stratagees, he decided he was going to take his company treasury

and just buy Bitcoin exclusively. How long ago? About a year and a half, two years ago. Yeah, I think he started when it was about, I want to say maybe 12,000, 15,000, something like that. And I think it probably, I don't know if it, dipped any time that he bought. But anyway, they've been converting it ever since.

They're up like... Two billion dollars. They're like up two billion dollars. I think he's bought it like $4 billion. He bought two point something and it's worth four point something. So yeah, he's feeling pretty smart right now. Ethereum's $4,200. So it's kind of tagging along.

Tesla had earnings yesterday. So any of you that are new to the show, Tesla's kind of near and dear to my heart. That has a boner for Tesla. I was kind of brag on. them. They had earnings yesterday and they crushed it. Their gross margin without regulatory credits because they get some free money for all the people that are air quotes polluting the planet and they have to buy carbon credits. Everyone always, I always see comments. Government bailed Elon out. Let's the only way they make money. And hey, you know what? If I could get

some of Sleepy Joe's money to bail me out, I'd get it because I'm not sure if he'd remember tomorrow. They gave it to me. So I'm all about getting it. That's the farmer talking. That's right. You know why farmers fold the bill on their hat? It's so that when they go to the mailbox and the sunshine and it cuts the glare so you can see all the way to the back, make sure you didn't miss any government checks that are in there. It takes the shade out. Never heard that one. Yep, that's what it's for. Anyway, their gross margin was about 29%, which is crazy for the auto business. They got about $16 billion in cash, and they paid off $1.8 billion in debt. I think they only have about $2 billion in debt and they're sitting on 16 billion.

For all of those that think that they're going to go tits up, I don't think it's going to happen. I think they're going to make it. Anyway, that was the long and short of it because it's cold. If you notice, it's a little chilly in the barn. We're bundled up today. We're bundled up and if our guest

at any point, we'll try to fix it in post-production. But if he looks blue, he's really not, he doesn't have a circulation problem. It's just cold in the barn is what it comes down to. He's not nervous either if he's shivering. He's just cold. Well, he's excited. Yeah, he's excited. So we're, we've had it, we've had some really good guests on lately, and this one falls right in there because this is kind of a unique relationship. I think we always say it was faith that we met because, so Michael Hanson is our guest today, and he, he is with a company, he started a company called Barn Tools, and one of their products is actually Barn Talk. And ironic.

Ironic. It wasn't planned. Was not planned. So we were just totally out there. We hatched this idea that we were going to do this podcast. Right around the time we started, maybe we had like one episode out. Yeah. We got an email.

We got a LinkedIn message, I think. Yep. And that is kind of how we started down the road. And even more ironic was that they're actually in a business that is definitely tailored to a problem that we have and that we had. and we actually solve that problem using their product. So we have, we've been going back and forth for quite a while, and Michael's a really interesting guy, and he is, he's kind of at the forefront of what I would say is the transition

in the animal agriculture business to data in the cloud, and we'll get into this, but the way we've traditionally managed sites and managed barns, and managed barns, and the way we're headed to, we're kind of at a crossroads. And so we're going to get into that. And it should be a good conversation. So welcome, Michael. Welcome, Michael. Welcome to Barn Talk. Thank you for having me. I like it. I mean, first time at the barn. Yep. I got a rack of all sorts of whiskey staring at me. Yep. Yes. A little early or? Well, it depends. I'm not going to tell you what's in my Tumblr.

I'll probably crack a beer here sometime. I know we shoot these in the morning. We'd like to shoot them at night sometime. We could always say we're shooting at night right now. Yeah, that's right. We're going to get a bar eventually. We just got to get a few more subscribers. We were going to vinyl wrap the barn in blue just for your arrival.

But we just ran out of time. We thought it would really look good, wrapped in blue. It said barn talk on it. We can paint the roof. You're finishing barns too. I feel like. Free advertising. Right.

Well, don't put it past us because, you know, we're anything for a, anything for some sponsorship money. So anyway. So to start, you, you, like us, you've grown up in animal agriculture. And so this isn't your only endeavor as far as being involved in livestock industry. why don't you give us a little 10,000 foot view of how you got involved in the livestock business and more importantly, what was the evolution of thought that brought to starting barn tools? Well, that's a wide open one. Yeah, oh boy.

Sure. So where to begin? So my dad is a fifth generation farmer, I believe, grew up in North San Francisco. central Iowa and raised hogs, beans, corn, et cetera. And started, I thought, hey, you know, this hog business, something's happening here and started building equipment and then eventually got into raising hogs. And that took off and we're now the largest hog producer in Iowa. And so I've just grown up watching him being around kind of just by osmosis of some

absorbing. Absorning info, yeah. But yet he's still old school and a farmer, so I've done my time in the trenches, you know, worked on the farms, managed Sal Farm, got my hands dirty because that's his way. But I can appreciate that because now I can sit here and know what the hell's going on and what people are talking about. So I've just, that's, you know, that's been my life. My domain experience has been, it's really been swine, right?

Right. And I've seen it from, you know, from ground level all the way high up. And so, but I've always had a passion for technology too. Okay. So you got this passion and this domain experience. And growing up with the internet, I had a computer, I want to say in like first grade, watched a little AOL guy try to make it to the third box across the screen and, and had my buddy list. And, you know, technology was, the internet was just taking. off. And so the timing was there. And these two paths are finally converging. A quick side story, just with technology. When I was in sixth grade, my sister was a ninth. Her boyfriend broke up with her. I thought it was a dick. I could say on the record. That's a good brother.

Yeah. And so I put a Trojan virus on his computer. Now, being a sixth grade. I wasn't smart enough to wait. So, I mean, I had to sell the story to get them to take the file, right? But like a minute and a half later, I was already, you know, pressing button, screwing with stuff. And completely wiped his computer. And it wasn't hard to figure out. I opened a file in a minute later. Everything's haywire. I probably should have gave it a week. Yep. Yeah. You learn. You hadn't learned your tactfulness yet at that point. I still don't have patience, but... That's a good brother right there. Yeah, it cost me.

Or she was, she was older than you. She was. So you weren't, you weren't, you weren't ready to square up with them yet. So you had to get, you had to use your wits. I got height, but man, I never got muscles. So, yeah, I, that one cost me, but okay. So, so there's always, I don't know, that's just, I've always loved computers technology. And, and now it's coming together.

I think any kid that grew up, uh, and this is true for anybody, whether your dad raised cattle, or chickens or whatever. But for me, when you were out there and you were in the sow unit or you were loading pigs or you were doing whatever, we all have the thought. I still have this thought today. I know Sawyer has this thought. You're like, gosh, dang, there's got to be a better way.

There's got to be a better way. And I feel like adoption, part of the reason I feel like that farmers are as productive as they are is because so much of what they do that is labor-driven, they all have that, they all have that thought where they're standing there in the thick of it

and they're like, man, there's got to be a better way until you're in your combine and everything goes to hell because a mouse ate one wire, then you're not so sold on technology right up to there,

you're like, man, there's got to be a better way. Right. And the labor challenges are only getting worse. Exactly, exactly. I mean, it's hard to, labor's terrible.

I mean, and then you look and there's, I mean, recently, maybe it's COVID related. I don't know, but now there's a daycare shortage and it just seems to compound, right? So you were, so you were kind of working in South farms doing that whole thing under your dad's kind of deal, learning the ropes and everything, getting the hog business. So when did you kind of say, I'm ready to go after this tech thing and do something? Yeah, so his, to do something different. So his, I think maybe his idea was learning all aspects of the business or all

phases of production. Yeah. And so I did that. I, man, I might go off on a couple bunny trails here. You're fine. So then progressed out of production and worked in construction and spent some time there. And I got to say, another skill set that's been pretty valuable. Absolutely. I could tell you the workings of a hog barn, you know.

I could build you a hog barn to this day. And that was a whole, I've, I've always watched, like, you got, you got the guys who are the production guys. You got the maintenance guys and all that. I mean, Torque, you worked at PSI, right? And if you, if you can have both man, it, it arms. You're ahead of the game. Yeah, it arms you real well.

Not only that, but if you can work on a construction crew, the cultural, the cultural side of that, I always said that when I was doing, when I was doing actual construction, I would have worked there for free just for the stories. because the people that you meet, the guys that do that, kudos to them, because that's a tough job. But I'll tell you what, there's some life experiences there that you're not going to get in corporate America. And trying to balance two contractors point fingers at each other. You know, you got the framer piss, the slats aren't set, and the slats aren't set because the concrete's not cured or even poor. The wall's crooked. Yeah, yeah.

That wall's crooked. And then I've even seen it get down too well, I'll hang the heater, but you're plumbing it, but I'm only, I'll hook up the bottom part and you got to, yeah, I'm not touching that. I'm not touching that. That's a change order. They always blame it on the guy that did the job before they came. Oh, yeah, 100%. Concrete guy brings, blames a dirt guy. Yeah, carfingers blame the carpenters blame the concrete guy. How am I supposed to frame on this? This is crooked. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it goes. So, so to answer your question, you know, how did, how did. this whole tech thing come about. Well, I got to tell you that before the tech thing and this construction happened out of Chinese foreign exchange student live with me in high school. He's 6'6 like I am. So I'm like scratching my head. Okay. Did my dad ever go to China? This is weird. And so we became great friends ever since and then started to import hog gates and then build hog gates eventually in China and to anyone out there watching, don't ever do that

because building hog gates is shitty margins and it's just a race to the bottom. And so it did that for a couple years, imported quite a bit of manufactured hog equipment that we made ourselves. I still do a little bit of that today, but it was looking like there's got to be a pivot here too. And so the technology piece, well,

it was maybe when I talked to customers I don't give them the whole background but here we are so the technology piece probably was spurred by just being in

the shitty hog equipment business and tired of it too and custom and okay it's galvanized but I'm really not going to pay you that much more for galvanized equipment blah blah it's like fight and the fight you gotta know what you want to do

by doing a bunch of stuff you don't want to do yeah I didn't want to build hoggates Yeah, forever. Figured that out. But I think, you know, so we experienced, I guess, a pivotal moment was we experienced some alarm calls that didn't go well, should have called, I should say, lack of alarm calls, some death loss and so on. And you look at these barns and they're built with closed circuit controllers.

They're not talking out. I mean, even if we put a $30,000 controller in, majority of them aren't connected. And so these barns are like archaic, yet I'm controlling my nest thermostat from my house on my phone while I'm at work. And so those catastrophic events or those times we experienced those alarm calls made me scratch my head and say, there's got to be a better way. And so, you know, leveraging the supply chain we had in Asia and some of that, you know, electronics are, made all over so all over asian so we've we used those um strengths that we had with the supply chain uh looked at let's what is something we can give the farmer today in their hand because i

can sit here i can sit here and talk big data AI all the cool sexy things yeah but i'm actually go to a farmer and say hey if we could put a hundred fifty thousand dollar you know equipment whatever sass product yeah you can pipe data to if you can get the data to it and do some predictive analytics. And all he heard was $150,000 and I got to be, I got some place I need to be. It's got to be affordable. It's got to be easy to use. Got to be easy to set up. I feel like that's in our marketing. I should ask Greg about that. That's that's in our marketing. Sometimes we say farmer affordable. And so we focused on a niche. Just something, not try to be everything, be good at one thing. That took a little self-convincing

because I'm like, we can do it all. But we focused on the alarm system and said, okay, we can improve this greatly. But at doing so, we realized that, man, this is so much more than an alarm system. This could be the vehicle to take data out of the farm. And it's like, you have back to those closed circuit controllers and no connectivity. and if we provide an alarm system that has has connectivity embedded, right? It's self-contained, talks to the Internet by itself. If we could start with the alarm and focus,

because that's something tangible in the farmer's hands. And the most important. I mean, that's the most important aspect of a farm, as you know, because protect your inventory, etc. And so, but it's like the beginning or the platform to start collecting and connecting these farms and sending data. Yeah, and I feel like that right there, and we've talked about this before,

I feel that like that's a pivotal spot where we are today, at least in the swine business, because we have been marketed to the idea. So years ago we had a control, which was nothing more than a thermostat. All it did was your fans, your heaters, everything was hooked up to a glorified thermostat. If it got this far above, it turned it on. If it got this far below, it turned it off. And then we made the transition because people,

the link between animal health and environment got stronger. And so people wanted more information as far as what was the high and what was the low and what was the humidity and how long it was, and what time a day did we hit the high, and how much water we were using and all that. But the issue was, and it still is today, we have gone the way of what, for lack of a better word, we'll say, smart controls. And that's heavily marketed,

where we have a controller within the barn that accumulates a bunch of data. It is getting that. But the mechanism to get that data to where you can actually use it is not very good. And I'll give you an example. Well, it's not even there because you can't, you can't even see what's on the controller unless you're there.

There's no interface between that smart control and where you can physically see it instantaneously. And I'll give an example of how the infancy of that worked. So a lot of production companies, they would want a smart control, but then they would have the grower hand-record information off of that control. What was the high? What was the low? Still have. And still have. And then those paper forms were collected by a fieldman and sent back to the office.

And I'll be honest, I bet you a lot of systems, they went in a file and nobody even used that data. However, we were collecting it. Some of them did use it, but then they're paying somebody to take a paper form and convert it back to digital data. when the digital data is there, we just couldn't get it. So today, and this is where I feel like you guys are right in the midst of it, and it can be so much more in the fact that the data on your system is collected at the barn, but I can see it instantaneously, and I can use that data right off my handheld device, and that's a different from where we have been. Did you always, so when you started,

you said that your alarms or your focus. Did you like, that was your why and that's what you wanted to do. And then once you did it, then did you realize, wow, this could be so much more than just an alarm system. Or did you kind of have that like in the back of your mind when you first started it? Yeah, I would say like, so I don't know if I ever said alarms or my, like, I didn't go, oh, let's focus on alarms. But we knew we had to focus somewhere.

I think the precursor to that was something around, like, let's make these barns into smart barns. At the very least, let's bring some visibility to the barns and do so by, you know, bringing data out, show some real, even if it's just real time temperature, you know, reading water every 20 minutes, just seeing what's going on, put eyes on the barn. And so then where do you start? Well, I'm not going to build a $40,000 controller. Second, I don't want to mess with wiring, right? And why I put all this money into this hardware, you mount on your wall for it to collect data and then go nowhere? So back to what you were saying, with all this data and filing high, low temps on a piece of paper that goes in a file cabinet and dies, it's like, So if we can get the data, there's the foundation, right?

But then we can build logic behind that on the cloud without the expensive hardware and all that. So we can take the data and then we could say, okay, let's look for deviations and water usage. And then let's trigger alarms. And that seems alarm related, excuse me. And then it just grows from there. Okay, so if we're doing that, what else can we do? and then we put all this logic in the cloud and on the back end and not in expensive equipment. And we continue to release and improve the experience of the user, but make the data actionable.

And you see some guys out there who are building software for big platforms, whatever it is, for the industry. And I think a challenge will be to get data into these platforms, whether you're trying to look at like feed conversion for the plants or whatever. But if we can be that vehicle and work with those guys too, there's opportunities everywhere. Yeah, I mean, collecting the data is the easiest part of the equation. We've been doing that for a long time. But making it usable and making it to where you can use it to make decisions,

that's the value. That's the value. And for the, you know, we operate in a pretty diverse, system as far as all I can speak to is a swine business in that we run everything from people that have a closed system where they're farrowing the pigs, they're finishing the pigs, they're selling the pigs to people that are custom farrowing, people that are custom nursing, people that are custom finishing, everything in between from fairly small operations and fairly large, but being able to tailor that data to the person

that's receiving it because what I want it for versus what my integrator might want it for are two different things but the beautiful thing about it is if you do it right you can both use the same platform it's just I just need lower level

data I need to know every day that the temperature's right the water's flowing and the air is good versus a sal unit they need a lot more of them and the people that were custom feeding

they want to see that data over time and they want to see the feed conversion. They want to see the water usage and that it's increasing. They want to see, you know, and they want to see that over a set of barns. And so their need is larger, but if you build the platform right, you can cater to all those people. Right. So all we need is to nap, feed air water. Yep. Is my finishing bar have power.

Yeah. And I like that. level data, right? Yeah. And these producers or these integrators want high level, or I would say large data sets aggregated across their entire, you know, base of contract growers, whatever. And then we can get into the sexy terms of big data and analytics if we can get you that data.

And so here we are the vehicle. And then, yeah, look for, do some fancy analysis, whatever you're trying to do and analyze tons of data across your entire system. In fact, every day we collect millions of data points because we take temperature, water, humidity, power, ammonia, everything. We take measurements by the minute, by the sensor, across all our user base.

And if we just assumed they were all part of like one system, one system, that's some pretty powerful data. Yeah, for sure. How, what was the biggest struggle of starting barn tools? Was it getting farmers to kind of like adopt new technology? Because I know that can be a big struggle, obviously. We're a little different because we're techie, but I know that a lot of farmers are skeptical. But I think like we touched on, you guys have made it really easy. If they just give you the chance, they will see that it's pretty easy to set up. It's dependable. It's no wiring, none of that stuff. So was that biggest

challenge or is there something else that was hard that's a good question uh wow we might need to take a break go hit some whiskey or drink some whiskey and come back uh the biggest challenge i mean there's a lot of challenges in software development right and uh just getting an MVP minimum viable product launched and i mean it starts as an idea right and and And then somehow you have to build it into a tangible product. Yeah. So an app. And then I would say the beginning challenges were more around building the actual product.

Yep. Not so much market adoption. Yeah, because you started with basically a clean slate because there wasn't anybody doing what you were doing. And so, you know, we have lots of great ideas. I mean, we can give you a hundred great. everybody has business ideas it's the people who act on it didn't steve jobs say it's about the ones you say no to yeah but then you not you had to find i mean the last i checked i don't i don't know you that well but i don't know if you're a software engineer i i would say probably no by definition so you

you had to find people not only that could do it but actually got the vision and said yeah that's a good idea and didn't say oh this is crazy this ain't going to work Yeah, when you build software, there's a whole, you know, I guess mindset out there. There's a whole world out there that just focuses on customer experience. And it's like, so what's the quickest, you know, what's the quickest path to value for you? So if I put the app on your phone, how do I get you immediately onboarded in value? And having this background really help that, right? So I feel like I drove a lot of good value there.

And what do they want to see? And let's get them to see that fast. Let's not go through a lengthy setup process and so on. And then, yeah, transferring that to the developers. I got to give Jim credit to. Jim's a linear thinker. He's my co-founder. He's process-oriented.

I'm the type. It's like, let's jump off the cliff. We'll put the airplane or the parachute together as we're falling. Jim brought the tools to do so. So I'm like, thank God because I probably forgot those. And so we're like polar opposites, but we're a great team. Yep. And we balance each other.

That's very well. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, because if I had to describe you to somebody that didn't know who you were, I would describe you as a guy that has three hamsters running in a two hamster catch. Just because you, you are like. You're a dreamer. Well, no, but you. I think this is a little, I'll take it as a compliment.

No, it is. A little pot kettle, though, too. I think that is. I think that could be why we're kind of like-minded. But you know, you have the vision, but you also, it's really hard when you have the vision because you think everybody should be going as fast as you are. And that's why you got to have somebody like Jim, because Jim's like, we don't even have the motor to drive the wheel for the hamsters. Yeah. So I guess I tend to make things sound a lot easier than they are. I'm like, What do you mean? We can just do this right now. Right. He brings some good perspective. So at its core for somebody that isn't familiar,

what does the barn talk system look like? Sure. So we built really at its core of replacement for your alarm system or your dialer. Okay. And we did that because there's obviously issues. And I think you see issues every day, you know, across this industry, across poultry, and so on. And so what we did was we built a gateway. We knew, one, we don't want to have to convince you to wire your barn or pay for it. Two, we don't want you to have to go to your local carrier, get a SIM card, a hotspot.

Phone lines are terrible. I mean, they're sunseting. Even the 3G hotspots you have are starting to sunset to make way for 5G. so those touch tone dialers you're used to are starting to stop working. That's starting to stop working. And so we looked at what were all the problems with the current way. And then wanted to bring visibility as well, as I alluded to earlier. So we built a box, you plug it in, you have sensors, you go hang them, that's it. We didn't want you to do anything else. So as soon as you plug that box in, we find the nubes.

nearest cell phone tower. If that cell phone tower goes down, let's say during a storm, we jump to the next one. It doesn't matter the carrier. So it connects. You hang those probes. And right there on your phone, you can see, there's my barn. My barn has power. My barn has temperature. I'm getting water readings. And it's like a monitoring and alarm system at its core. But we're collecting data to give you those values. And then in the app, you can set parameters around those values to trigger alarms. okay, if the temperature goes over X, call me. And by the way, I don't want to have to go to the barn anymore to set all that up and edit it. So here's my call tree. It's probably Torque Sawyer. We'll try

torque and Sawyer again before I have to get out of bed and torque and Sawyer. And then maybe me. Yeah. And then being lower on the call tree, back to visibility. And I say call tree, you know, a list of who the alarm's going to call in order until someone picks up. You're kind of blind. down below. And usually the guys down below, probably like the barn owners, right? The hired hand star, it's kind of like the totem pole, right? Well, he can see what alarms happened. He or she can see what alarms happened. And so we bring that visibility, give you real-time data, and then allow you to set triggers to be notified when things go wrong. Yeah. Yeah, we can speak on that because we have, we have the barn talk system and two well three out of four of our barns and just like michael said it is

super easy to set up literally all the sensors that come with the gateway you hang up the gateway put it on a wall finds the signal put your sensors in your barn and it's already pre-sunk up download the app and literally it starts reading information it's literally that easy that's what like i said they just made it so so simple to do and it's so so nice to see all that because our biggest problem, especially in my barn, I built my barn last year, and the signal was just terrible that I had. And every time an agri alert or, you know, whatever system out there people have, it just would not take the password. It wouldn't take the password. And I could never disarm the alarm. So it just keep calling me and calling me and calling me and calling me.

And if I was away, I could never go disarm the alarm because I wasn't here because I'd have to physically go up to the barn and disarm it. The other great thing that I love about it, is, and it. And I was away, is like you were talking about you can manage your, you know, your threshold, your limits. And the nice thing is you can have, there's three zones, am I right, about that. There's warning zone, and then there's an emergency zone. Right. You could, you could just get a less invasive notification if it's trending the wrong way. Right. So like if you have, you know, you've got an 85 to 90 and that's your warning zone. It's not really your emergency. And then like 90 to 9 finds your emergency at the warning zone. It'll just send you a text message.

or an in-app notification, which is nice because I don't like getting called all the time. All the time. And with the old system, it didn't matter. You would just get it and get it and get it and get it and get it and you can. Or you know what you're getting called about. Right. And you got to know the zones that doesn't tell you, it doesn't tell you, hey, South Room Temperature. It just kind of says zone three.

Yeah. So one of the, I'll give you a real, a real life story of one of the things that I love the most about our barn tool system is shortly after we put Sawyers in his was the first we were at world pork and it was a nice day nice hot day like you would expect it to be it's either pouring rain or it's blistering hot at world pork expo and um we were there and i got an alarm call on my double site which were the oldest pigs and you on that on that system you can set a high limit and then you can set a critical and if it hits the high limit it'll look to the outside probe, and if the outside probe is hotter, then it'll say,

okay, it's fine. However, I had not set up the critical temperature from winter, because in winter I always turn them down because there's no reason to have them set at 95 degrees in the wintertime, because it's not going to be that hot. But in the summer, I set them up, and I hadn't, and the critical was set at 90 degrees. And that thing started calling me, and it would not take my password. And so it just called and called and called. Well, about 30 minutes later, Sawyer gets an alarm call from his Barn Tools alarm. And we hadn't set the high limits on it. We just got it going.

I think we literally just put it in a week ago. Yeah. And we were like, oh, this is awesome, you know. And it started, it got a text and then he got a call. But he was able to just go into the system and raise that high limit. And it was fine. Stop calling me. I just shut my phone off. In fact, well, I think I actually called, I think I actually called one of my neighbors,

neighbor, and he came and just shut the alarm off. But then, here we are, and we spent the night. So here we are, we're away from home, and we've got the alarm shut off because we didn't want to call on us. And I wasn't going to make him come back. I knew my curtain drops were set. But basically, we were blind while we were gone. And that's one of the greatest things that I love about the system being cloud-based is you can get in there. and if you do something stupid like me because it was my fault i didn't set the alarm up but still

i couldn't change it and um it wouldn't take my password so anyway um that's one of the you know that's just a little bit of uh life experience well that's just that's coming from us farmers just kind of give you guys perspective we've used it we enjoy the product we've installed it and it's just simple as like michael is explaining you know it just it's easy and that story in itself right there's like selling point on it. So you guys referenced password like four different times. And back to that customer experience piece, we even thought about passwords. And no one likes to enter passwords. If you're having me reset my password, I'm like, I just don't even want to use this anymore. This is terrible. So we've, so we thought about things like that for customer experience. And

now you log in today, you put your phone number, and then it auto fills a one time text message from password. By the way, side note, best thing Apple ever did. I don't know if Apple, did Apple invent the OTP? I don't know. But that's, I freaking love that. But the auto fill, I mean, you can't get any more efficient than that. No, it's awesome. That is awesome. And I know you, Torque, you mentioned cloud. One of the things that we tried to overcome and still try to overcome is that you don't need broadband. You don't need, I mean, shout out to Elon Musk and Starlink, but you don't need it. Right. And if your cell phone doesn't work at your site, there's still probably a really solid chance we will. And that's just because we're sending bits of data and not trying to

watch YouTube have a phone call or anything like that. Yeah. And I'll say that in the, at Sawyer's Barn, it's quite a ways off the road. And it's in just in an area where for whatever reason, and there's not good cellular coverage on the carrier that we used. And so when we put that alarm in there, we could not get a strong enough signal. It could get a strong enough signal to dial out, but it would not take the password. And so I guess explain that a little bit

because your system is not tied to one carrier. Right. So because we provided the connectivity, what we did was we made our communication module, or the chip inside, be carrier agnostic. Just find me the strongest cell signal. I don't care. And again, if something happens, I'll just switch to the next.

So there's a bit of redundancy built in. You've had the phone lines be, you know, we've all experienced those phone lines on those dialers, be somewhat shoddy, unreliable, and so on. So we built redundancy in how we connect right there. And then we do something called, the heartbeat. And what we do is every two minutes,

pretty much what happens is we ping all our customers' boxes. And we say, hello, are you awake? Is anyone home? And the box responds, yes, I'm awake. I'm still monitoring

Torqu and Sawyer's barns. And if it doesn't, then what we do is we trigger an alarm saying it's offline. And we've seen, you know, we've seen instances on other systems where, let's say the water

line breaks, fries the system itself, whatever it is. Well, when the system dies, it can't tell you it's dead. Well, ours, because it wouldn't respond to the, hello, are you still awake? On our side, we'd say, oh, we didn't hear from Torx Barn. Right. And then we'd send you an alarm. So there's a fail safe there as well. Yeah, that's awesome because on all of our sites, we had them set up to auto call once a week. Oh, for testing. So it would test call. you once a week. And, but really, if something happened to that in between, yeah, you wouldn't know it. You know, if you're in a situation where you've got, when you've got, you're halfway through

a group, pigs are all fine, everything's going. You wouldn't give a second thought if you didn't hear from that alarm because it's only supposed to call you once a week and it's not and it could be dead. And I've actually found that where I've had a phone line issue and I didn't know it until I don't know how long it'd been down because it just didn't call me. And then I thought, well, that's weird. Didn't call me. The other two did, but this one didn't.

And then that's when you find out, oh, yeah, it hasn't worked for however long. Right. And so that's great. So how's been, like, how's the adoption rate been accepting barn tools? Like, how fast have, you know, people adopted it? Were you surprised by it? Were you, were your expectations lower than what you thought it'd be, you know, like, how many people were going to adopt it?

That's a great question. So the good thing is we don't really have to sell it. It just makes sense, right? And if you can cut your phone line that maybe you're paying 60 bucks a month for, I mean, that's a no-brainer. And it's simple. So I would say our adoption has gone pretty well. I'm not, it's a short sales cycle.

Hey, we're switching your barn alarm. Yeah. And with something better. We're talking to big integrators. they get it to let's get data from the barn so it's pretty straightforward um so yeah adoption's been good what we're trying to figure out now as a company is maybe our best channel for distribution whether you know is it online is it with these uh the QC supplying hog slats of the industry is it referral and so we're we're doing i'll call them channel experiments and then figuring out

which one we'll decide as a winner and then amplify. So adoption, pretty solid. How we're going to magnify that is really the focus right now. Do you notice between species like, you know, the swine business versus the poultry business, have you had more interest in one versus the other? I mean, I would imagine the swine just because you have a few more. connections and just more people that are aware of it there. But that's a great question.

And swine, I'm better at talking swine, right? So what we found was, you know, we built this with a 2,400, 4,800 head finishing barn in mind. Now we outfit sow farms and everything, too. But that was kind of where we started, our focus was. And then you switch over to poultry, and these guys are like, I have a 10-house site. I'm like, wow. Okay, so poultry, we had to learn how to adopt to poultry because we want to be affordable, right? We're not trying to, we're not trying to break the bank.

But then you have 10 barns on a site. And so I think for adoption, both were very receptive to it, but we needed to maybe position it or come up with a different angle for poultry, given that these poultry housing complex. are huge. So that was probably our biggest challenge among switching species. Okay. So when you look into your crystal ball, what's next for, four barn tools? What's on the horizon? I think, Tork, if I had a crystal ball, I wouldn't have sold my 100 Bitcoin. I had in 2014. That's a great, that's a great answer. Yeah. So for barn tools, it's about catching up the industry. I mean, let's go back to like 2011 when Amazon was a touting cloud computing and all that. And then you have this wave of SaaS. So software as a service, think of,

you know, the subscription software you're paying for today. You have all these things that are coming now. And the egg industry, especially animal. Well, animal egg is behind. But that's a connectivity problem, right? That's because, okay, you could build the coolest software for animal agriculture, but how are you going to get it to the barn? And then how you're going to get stuff out of the barn? And so it's about playing catch up. And once we do that, then I think the opportunities from there are, I like to use the term maybe we're trying to become a system of record. Okay. So if we can, we're focusing, I know this seems very, it seems very small and niche like today, the alarm system,

but we're capturing barn environment data, right? And then if we can use that and build on that and create other opportunities, I'm just, you know, the futures. First, we've got to bring everyone up to speed. And it's not just about connecting the barn. It's because you can connect the barn today, but with the controllers in there, you can't send stuff out still unless you modify or replace quality of data yeah or just getting

those archaic you know controllers to to connect but uh so so really um we bring everyone up to speed first and then and we continue to build out sensors and you know measure different things and then use those to create efficiencies and eventually we can touch every department and uh and a production production system. So today maybe it's barn environments and maybe one day we do a collaboration or something and we're measuring feed. And then from there, you know, so now your feed ordering goes through barn tools. Right, because we're measuring. We've played with some technology where we geo-fence the farm. Okay. And so we're using that for tracking who comes in and out for biosecurity purposes, but so now we, so now we have, you know, the barn talk alarm system.

We have the geo fence. We can actually see if someone shows up at 3 a.m. like they said they did. But then we can record all these transactional records and maybe optimize delivery routes and so on. So let's just be really good at the alarm system and collecting data today and then naturally build on that and offer or build different solutions for different parts, animal agriculture. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents.

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When I was overseeing field staff, my favorite time of the year was the first snow. The first snow on a Saturday. That's specific. Loved a good snow on a Saturday because on Monday morning, you knew that once some fieldman was going to call, they got to a barn at 9 o'clock and there's no tracks. So you know nobody's been there since Saturday. And then the phone call, and, you know, it was always interesting. The excuses were amazing.

Like, I fully expected somebody to just finally say, you know, well, you know, I parachuted it. Yeah, I was having a helicopter. You got a rope ladder. But anyway, yeah, that geo-fence, when you said that about geo-fencing, I was just thinking, oh man there's some guys that would hate that because when they didn't understand you know when it was geo fence and you're trying to explain to somebody that uh you knew that they weren't there and they're going to argue with you oh no i was there well how are you here yeah i got proof you weren't buddy you're like no that's wrong that's wrong so why are we even working on geo fence

we just need a new snowstorm every day well if you could order weather you got a relationship with the chinese they're working on that weather manipulation they might be able to do that that. Well, I appreciate, I so appreciate you coming down because this is kind of a subject that's near and dear to our heart as far as I feel like that within our industry, given the challenges that we have, that technology is going to help us in a lot of ways, some that are known as we, as what Barn Tools is doing, but in others that I don't think we even know, we don't even know yet what what can change and how we can get more efficient and do a better job with less basically and so welcome back or you're welcome to come back anytime and we're both looking forward to

what's ahead for our tools yeah appreciate coming on the show michael awesome name by the way barn talk i mean yeah first i thought you guys were like playing a joke on me but uh we just great minds think alike. That's right. Yeah, and it could have been bar talk, and we still would have loved it. We still would have been interested. I like that better.

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. All right. Have a good week, guys.