Devin
Appearances
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
Tell us who you are. Great. Well, thanks for coming over and chatting with us. My name's Devin. I joined TerraClear just about a couple weeks ago, and so I'm the new CEO. The new CEO. Super excited to talk to you guys. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
So what'd you guys do before this? Well, yeah, I'll go first.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
So I spent seven years at FBN, Farmers Business Network, for those of you who know that company, and started what was called FBN Financial, built that side of the business up, and so I had a chance to really understand where technology played a role in agriculture, and we were well-capitalized, turned over a lot of rocks, so to speak, from a technology perspective, and got a sense of how technology plays a role next.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
So when I was looking for something new, I certainly wanted something that had a really good technology foundation, but it actually worked, and there's not always a lot of cases where that happens. TerraClear must be doing something right if they pulled you from FBN. Yeah, well, I hope so.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
It's a Northwest Iowa thing. Have you ever heard such a thing? No, this is nonsense. I grew up in South Dakota. We don't have crazy things like that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
I think at the end of the day, you know, as a problem, that was a compelling solution for technology. And I think, you know, that's the start of TerraClear, too, and I think we want to grow beyond that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
Yeah, I think even from a mapping perspective, one of the questions I had when I joined you guys, you should keep me honest, like, well, what value does that have? Are we identifying more rocks than you can identify by sight? And from the early studies, what these guys told me is that, you know, oftentimes it's 60, 70% of the rocks if you just drive them around with the sight on the side.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
And so, map, you actually see everything. You get to then decide what you actually want to take out of the field.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
Especially if you've got a crew working their tail off all day long, and then just to learn they missed that many rockets.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
Those files got to be huge. Yeah. They are. One of the big efforts we have, because we're looking at, you know, two, three millimeter resolution. You can start mapping a whole field like that. That's too much data just going to beam up to the cloud. So what we're starting to work on is what we call edge computing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
It's how you get the compute power out to the field so you can start generating maps in real time. Because time, like you said, is your most precious commodity. So you want to be able to get a drone out there, map it, get a map, and get to work in that field at the same time.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
We have a pretty dramatically expanding sales and service provider network that we're building right now. If folks are interested in that, as a source of income for you for entrepreneurs who are here locally, it's a great opportunity. And that is the, you know, sort of the resource that we have to go out and do so much more.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
You're gonna pay for it either way.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
No, I mean, the last thing I want to mention, we're constantly doing R&D and looking at other areas to try to solve problems for farmers and reduce time, reduce that commitment. One thing, kind of with our core market here, we are starting to develop some real autonomy for this type of picker. And so imagine this thing with nobody running around picking rocks. So...
Farm4Profit Podcast
Cutting-Edge Ag Tech and Strong Partnership Insights
Got a couple of those units running around. They're not quite ready for prime time, but certainly keep tuned for that to come to the market soon.