u/Early_Perception7000

Hi all,

I'm working on an agritech product (predictive models for dairy farms) and we're in the field-validation phase (TRL 5). I'd love to hear from anyone who's validated an agritech product in the real world: IoT sensors, algorithms, predictive models, anything where you had to prove it works on an actual farm, not just in a test set.

A few things I'm trying to understand from people who've been through it:

• How long did validation actually take you? From "we think the model works" to "we can confidently say it works in the field." Months? A full season? Longer?
• Who ran it? Was it a dedicated person/role (field validation, agronomist, data scientist on-site), or did it fall on the founders? Did you hire specifically for this?
• How does field validation usually work in practice? This is the one I'm most stuck on: does it always require a farmer who actively cooperates and reports back? In our case, farmers rarely respond to or act on our alerts, so closing the feedback loop is hard. Did you find ways to get ground-truth data that don't depend on the end user reporting back, existing records, third-party data, on-site observation, etc.?

Trying to get a realistic picture of what "good" looks like here, because right now the uncertainty around validation is making everything downstream (timelines, GTM) hard to plan.

Any war stories, timelines, or approaches welcome, even a one-liner helps. Thanks!

Hi all,

I'm working on an agritech product (predictive models for dairy farms) and we're in the field-validation phase (TRL 5). I'd love to hear from anyone who's validated an agritech product in the real world: IoT sensors, algorithms, predictive models, anything where you had to prove it works on an actual farm, not just in a test set.

A few things I'm trying to understand from people who've been through it:

• How long did validation actually take you? From "we think the model works" to "we can confidently say it works in the field." Months? A full season? Longer?
• Who ran it? Was it a dedicated person/role (field validation, agronomist, data scientist on-site), or did it fall on the founders? Did you hire specifically for this?
• How does field validation usually work in practice? This is the one I'm most stuck on: does it always require a farmer who actively cooperates and reports back? In our case, farmers rarely respond to or act on our alerts, so closing the feedback loop is hard. Did you find ways to get ground-truth data that don't depend on the end user reporting back, existing records, third-party data, on-site observation, etc.?

Trying to get a realistic picture of what "good" looks like here, because right now the uncertainty around validation is making everything downstream (timelines, GTM) hard to plan.

Any war stories, timelines, or approaches welcome, even a one-liner helps. Thanks!

Hi all! Talking with lots of dairy farmers, they always agree that the biggest problem in their farm is not the technology that they are using, nor the cows....but the people that are working.
It is pretty difficult in Italy to find skilled workers to work on dairy farms, and usually the turnover is high so each time you need to train again (and hope that the job is done correctly).
Do you feel the same around the world? How do you approach such a problem?

Hello! I would like to connect with other CPO in agritech around the world to discuss about how to build products that are useful on the field with proven ROI for the farmer.
Someone's there?