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Growing up, Marcus Stromeyer was surrounded by cattle ranching but also conflicted with the sense that ranch management needed to become a more environmentally friendly endeavor.
“I love cattle ranching, but there’s so much tension within it,” he told AgFunderNews. “We have to feed 10 billion people by 2060 and at the same time, we have to care for the planet and we have a responsibility to the communities and to animal welfare.”
Stromeyer helped found FieldData as a way to ease this tension — by helping ranchers collect data more easily and in so doing, making practices such as rotational grazing and holistic herd management more possible.
FieldData is uniquely simple in its approach to data management in that the entire process happens via WhatsApp. Users in the field can input data through voice or text, while FieldData’s AI system automates the process of turning those messages into stored data about ranch operations.
“The folks on horseback are the ones who know everything that’s happening, but they don’t come home at the end of the day and put data in a spreadsheet,” said Stromeyer. So far, he adds, these groups have welcomed the automated data entry process with open arms.
The company, which is headquartered in Argentina, raised an undisclosed pre-seed round in June 2024, and is currently focused on bringing its product to new geographies including the US.
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AgFunderNews (AFN): Why did you start FieldData?
Marcus Stromeyer (MS): My grandmother has a cattle ranch in Argentina, and I grew up my whole life around cattle and farming. I became obsessed with managing the cattle ranch, where all the data was all over the place in different spreadsheets.
I really dug into the problem and realized the bottleneck was the fact that the cowboys and the folks on horseback are the ones who know everything that’s happening, but they don’t come home at the end of the day and put data in a spreadsheet.
What we decided was to develop a bot on WhatsApp where they can just send us audio messages with all the updates, and then we use AI to take in that information.
In the last like, 30 years, technology has left so many people behind; with AI, we suddenly have this opportunity to bring them back.
AFN: I believe there was an environmental motivation too?
MS: I’m a very big believer in holistic cattle management: rotational grazing, high intensity grazing. What we love to see from our producers is that they use the satellite imagery data overlaid with the animal location to really ensure that the rotation patterns are optimal and effective.
I grew up always conflicted, because I love cattle ranching, but there’s so much tension within it. We have to feed 10 billion people by 2060 and at the same time, we have to care for the planet and we have a responsibility to the communities and to animal welfare.
A core part of my identity is growing up around cattle ranching but also feeling like the way we do this needs to change.
Agriculture has plenty of people outside of it, on the sidelines, screaming in and saying “this is the way to do it.” I think the right way to help agriculture advance and become more friendly to the environment is to do it from within.
AFN: How does FieldData work?
MS: For example, they’ll send us audio messages: “We moved 20 cows from this field to that” or “We applied this treatment to 13 cows.” Then we use AI to post that information.
They can send an audio or text message via WhatsApp and we respond with a confirmation message. For example, if they’re talking about moving 20 cows and 10 steers from field 10 to field 3, all that data gets stored in our systems. Then we have a whole web platform to visualize all this information.
You can edit the data through WhatsApp as well.
We also just added the ability to ask questions. So you can literally ask it things like, “How much did it rain in August?” or “How long have the animals been in this field?” We use AI to basically get that information, which is then is available on the platform.
AFN: What size farms are you working with?
MS: We have over 400 farms signed up. Our biggest ranch is 100,000 hectares, then we have a producer that manages 30,000 heads [of cattle]. We scale quite well. If you’re a ranch with 10 animals, that’s not really enough complexity [for us to add] value.
AFN: How does the company make its money?
MS: Users sign up and get a 30-day free trial, no credit card. Once the 30 days are up, they have to subscribe. Price is based on the number of heads of cattle. Zero to 500 cattle is $29.99 a month. If you’re above 5,000 cattle it’s $110 a month. It’s a subscription with a credit card so you can cancel at any time.
The number I’m proudest of is that we haven’t had a single ranch unsubscribe yet.
And obviously the product becomes more and more valuable the longer you use it, because all the historical data that becomes very powerful for us to analyze.
AFN: What sets you apart?
MS: To be very clear, we’re not the first product — there’s tons of apps to track cattle. So I always ask myself, what’s our reason for existing? Why do we deserve to exist?
I think what we’ve done, with a product on WhatsApp that’s simple, resonates.
AFN: In which countries is FieldData currently available?
MS: We have customers right now in the US, Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. We launched [the tool] in English about a month ago, and we’re also very bullish on Australia and New Zealand.
AFN: How do ranchers’ needs differ from country to country?
MS: Everyone tells me the same thing, which is that data entry is a huge bottleneck.
What is quite different is the profile of the end user. In the US, the end users are more digitally native. And then I would say American ranchers want to track even more data, and there are also a lot more compliance requirements in the US [than in Latin America].
We can do analysis of things like, how many rations have been eaten in a given field over time. That’s actually quite easy to calculate, but you need to know all of the cattle rotations. Ranchers are now increasingly asking us for data like that.
We solved the first part of the problem, so that ranchers no longer need to go running around, chasing people to get data and updating spreadsheets. Now they still have a lot of analysis left and want someone to just do it for them.
And if we can show that good practices, regenerative practices, are also better for the bottom line, that could become really, really powerful.
AFN: What’s next?
MS: Expanding beyond Latin America. On the commercial side, that’s the number one priority.
An interesting strategic decision we need to make is whether we want to just stay with cattle ranching or do we want to [expand to] the whole agriculture piece?
What’s interesting to me is that cattle ranching is actually a pretty underserved market compared to, say cash crops with all their software and IoT for tractors and such. The niche in which we play is actually quite good for expansion.
When we started this, the amount of people who told me “You’re not going to get ranchers to pay $1,000 a year for software.”
I’m very proud that we proved them wrong. To be very honest, people who are not in the space don’t realize how sophisticated ranching has become over the last 30 years. It’s no longer just “hey, we have a field, let’s put some cows on it.”
There’s also this transformation happening within the industry itself that I think we’re calculating quite nicely, which that all these businesses actually want to really up level their operations.