Automation in agriculture verses automative. Cole Powers shares his journey from working at Tesla to co founding IntelliCulture.
A harvester's engine shuts down mid-run in a California vineyard. Nobody is standing there to see it happen. The vineyard manager and the winery both get a text before the crew does.
Cole Powers and his co-founders met on an alternative fuels design team at university, where they were given full control to rebuild a car as a hybrid from scratch, then went on to automotive internships at two major manufacturers. They chose agriculture anyway, and built a company around a simple bet: strap a small, cheap device to any machine, from a brand new combine to a 1950s tractor, and tell the farmer what it is actually doing.
What's Inside
- Why the team walked away from automotive despite the internships, and what agriculture had that the corporate track did not
- The real difference between automating a commute and automating a field, and why farmers do not want the first thing automotive assumed they would
- What the device actually pulls off a machine in real time, and the fault codes most operators never see until something breaks
- Three simplified views built for three different people on an operation, from the shop to the cab
- Where the financial case is strongest, and what a missed spray pass costs before anyone notices it was missed
- His estimate of how much of the Prairies has basic digital tech versus real operational sophistication, and the gap between those two numbers
- A specific year for when he expects automated equipment to hit broad adoption, and why equipment cycles are the real constraint
- Running out of money before the first sale, and the mentor who helped get the company through it
Related Episodes
He Built Farms.com Before Farmers Had PCs
Learn more about IntelliCulture and Cole: https://www.intelliculture.ca
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