Rachel Hagan, Yorke Peninsula Country Times
From farmhand to company director, local entrepreneur Tyson Adams went out on his own, taking a big financial risk, to bring his new career and mobile app FarmTrak to life.
The Kadina 24-year-old attracted just under 50 users to his new farming app in its first fortnight of operation.
Gulfview Grain’s Todd Woodley was one of Tyson’s first clients and has now fully subscribed to the app because of how effective it was to keep on top of his seed and storage inventory.
“We also love that this young local bloke is showing initiative to help us farmers navigate a terrific system,” Todd said.
Tyson never thought he would end up as the founding director of a company but, as a natural problem solver with a lot of big ideas, he said he had taken the right path for his future.
“Even if it failed, at the end of the day this has opened up a lot of opportunities, so it was definitely worth a crack,” he said.
Growing up, Tyson was not an academic student and said he really hated school.
“I virtually just went straight to working hard on the farm and just doing as many hours as I could for as much money as I could,” he said.
After some travel and life experience, he said the idea started to seep in that there was more out there, and there were other paths he could take to succeed in a career.
“The app idea came to me when I was carting lentils to Adelaide, and my boss rang asking how many lentils were left in his shed.
“He said to me the prices had skyrocketed and he wanted to sell the rest of them.
“But, I said ‘look I couldn’t tell you if it’s between 350 tonne and 450 tonne’ because it’s on a whiteboard in the shed.”
The risk was too big to take, and Tyson said his boss ended up missing out on a massive sale because no one was able to access the physical recordkeeping.
“It only takes a couple of hours or even an hour for the price to jump, and all of a sudden, or even if the contract is just filled, they cull the price back down,” he said.
FarmTrak helps farmers keep records of what they have in storage, where they are storing it, what date it was updated and who did the updating.
“Everyone from like 12 years old to my grandpa can go in there and add what they are doing on the farm, so you can clearly see what’s happening from your phone,” he said.
“We’ve made it with no limitations; I was speaking to a farmer and he’s actually put his cattle on here.
“It’s not what it’s made for, but it works really well.”
The intention was to get FarmTrak out before this year’s harvest, but Tyson said he held it back to make sure everything was perfect before the big launch.
“You can’t rush these things, and a farmer doesn’t like a product that doesn’t work, so if I brought it out before harvest they probably would have just gone ‘nah’,” he said.
“But the best thing I did was the market research before, which is why it is working so well.
“About 95 per cent of the farmers could see there was a problem, and there was about another 50 per cent who were like ‘yeah bloody oath we’d use something like that for sure’.
“But those were really good odds, there was definitely a problem out there and no one had a solution.”
To find out more, visit https://www.farmtrak.com.au.
This article appeared in Yorke Peninsula Country Times, 17 December 2024.