This entrepreneur from Ireland is helping US farmers wield analytics
For Daniel Foy, cofounder and CEO of agtech startup AgriGates, leaning into his identity as an immigrant and his connection to agriculture helped him find support for his business. Foy grew up in the world of farming, food production and entrepreneurship in his home country, Ireland. His family is made up of farmers and his parents owned a local supermarket in his small town.
He didn't choose to take on either of those businesses, instead going on to study pharmacology and microbiology in Scotland. Foy found himself returning to his childhood experience when he pursued food tech and worked with dairy and food companies to increase safety, nutrition and marketability.
While he was working for a company that makes wearable technology to track livestock health, essentially 'Fitbit for cows,' he said, he was introduced to the North American market and American agriculture and agtech.
In 2016, Foy moved to the US and went on to learn about the challenges the agriculture industry is facing, including how to use the data they were collecting about their livestock. There was no unified reporting system that connected all of the technologies farmers were using, he said.
He started Philly-based AgriGates in 2020 to help farmers collect and analyze their data in one database, but ran into low-quality information. So, he pivoted to developing a hardware and software system that gathers high-quality data about individual animals throughout their lives. Foy's company uses machine learning to produce insights about the animals that farmers can use to make decisions about their business, he said.
In this edition of Technical.ly's How I Got Here series, Foy discusses how his experience as an immigrant has helped him navigate the agtech space in the United States and why he's excited about the impact technology will have on the food production industry.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
What have you learned from your experience as a founder?
You build a lot of confidence as you go. Do you believe you can do it at the start? Yes, but there are all these new unknowns that challenge you to keep moving.
I'm a subject matter expert, but sometimes what business and funders want is different from being a subject matter expert. So you have to have your business case. You have to understand how it applies, how it's going to scale, what's the value. I'm at five years, and I would say, in the last year, I've become more confident in those areas.
I hear a lot of companies in agtech talk about how much they're going to save farmers, but have never proven that in their use cases. We're really working to try and build trust and reliability into data.
How has being an immigrant impacted your entrepreneurial experience?
If you're coming in and you don't have an understanding of the US, you have to operate somewhere where it's hundreds of times bigger. That challenge as an entrepreneur, if you're coming into the market, should not be underestimated, because America is ginormous.
In the last 12 months, the amount of support I get locally is astounding. People are cheering us on in Pennsylvania, which is so encouraging. And even being an immigrant, they want me to do well, because that is the viewpoint of success in America. It resonates with a lot of people, and I find that quite exciting.
One of the things I have to my advantage is that I do come from a rural community. I have an understanding of rural life that excites people, because people imagine what Ireland's like, green fields and dairy industry. My native identity is associated with agriculture.
I think partners are very willing to say, well, here's somebody who's come here who wants to help us have a better system in place. We should at least listen and support them, because there's a new possibility. As an outsider, it has not been negative. It's actually been really encouraging.
What's next for your company?
Our emphasis on welfare is really getting people excited, because if we can improve the lives of animals, and we can still have a profitable industry, we can have nutritious products and feel like we're paying a farmer and they're getting rewarded. But we're also able to have peace of mind that this animal has had a good life, and it's still supplying nutritious products to us.
I'm just so excited about machine learning coming, or AI coming, to assist us with that. The foundation infrastructure and what we're doing with machine learning are about to blow that apart in our space.
What excites you right now about the agtech industry in general?
If farmers can actually have these metrics that we're talking about on their farms, they'd be standing in front of the milk and cheese and butter sections to promote their products, because they're so proud that they need more tools to help them be able to demonstrate that to the consumer.
When that relationship is really digitized, and consumers can really look at a product and go back and maybe take a QR code and see where it came from, that's going to create a whole new understanding of where food comes from. That will get the consumer connected back to basic food, because we're so far removed.
We want to build trust. Whatever part of the world you're in, you like going to markets. You like going to your butcher. You like going to these places, creating those opportunities for the consumer with technology from the farm level. I think it's so exciting for us as consumers and the industry itself.
What advice would you give a fellow entrepreneur?
Speak to everybody. If there is a goal, I will always communicate with people to find new ways to solve these problems. Lifting up your phone or writing to somebody and telling them what you need, how it would help, I think that's been one of the most valuable things I've ever done.
Continuing to communicate with people about the challenge and what we're doing, you can't underestimate that. You have to plan. Don't hope that somebody's going to call you and help with your idea. You go out there and do it and keep going forward until you get what you need, and people communicate with you.
Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
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