Grainswest - Tech 2023

Tech 2023 grainswest.com 37 Progress, even if it’s incremental, is still progress, noted Driedger. As an example, he cited the fertilizer market as a seemingly prime target for disruption. With countless buyers, sellers and wholesalers, it could easily be tied to a futures market. However, this has never materialized. “It’s hard to get people to change how they do business if they’re sort of comfortable doing things a certain way and it’s working for them. Even if it’s not working as well as it maybe should or could,” he said. “People are increasingly more comfortable using technology and apps, and I think just by virtue of that, it does make it easier to put information quickly and easily in people’s hands. If they’re comfortable using it, all of that helps.” LIKE EXPEDIA FOR GRAIN MARKETING If you want something done, ask a busy person. In 2017, amid the busyness of farmyard chores, Lynn Dargis had set a price target for her spring wheat and awaited the call. With a bit of downtime, on her phone, she scrolled through a competitor’s platform. To her surprise, that buyer had just shored up its basis and suddenly her desired price was staring back at her. She was glad and frustrated all at once. Had she not randomly done the quick search she would never have known her target price was met elsewhere. “I was super annoyed modern technology wasn’t allowing me to properly find these prices quick,” said Dargis. “Farmers just don’t have time in the day to check everyone’s websites and sort through the thousands of bids that are available because, you know, we have farming to do.” She spent the rest of that day trying to find an app that gathers bids in one user-friendly platform, but none existed. So, like any good farmer, she made one herself. Dargis is a woman with many skills, but app developer isn’t one of them. She enlisted tech professionals and set about building what is now Farmbucks, an online portal and app to connect western Canadian farmers with live bids on every crop. A farmer punches in their location, commodity and radius, and the Farmbucks algorithm gets to work. Within seconds, they will view thousands of available bids sorted according to their parameters. No more scouring every grain company’s price page continually throughout the day. To begin, though, she needed buy-in from the industry. She quickly gained support from several large multinational grain companies through face-to-face meetings. Over the years, she has slowly added just about every major buyer a Prairie farmer might do business with, and there are very few holdouts. Her 400 users view 100,000 price updates per day. The 3,500 newsletter subscribers receive Dargis’s weekly insights and latest scuttlebutt from the grain marketing world. Even without a paid membership, users can access key information such as canola bids and futures. Dargis has configured the program to give farmers the real goods with as little guesswork as possible. That means she’s integrated spreads on wheat so everything is on a level playing field and farmers can try and find pricing with both a grade and protein level in mind. “Once farmers select their grains, it automatically pulls up the top bid for every delivery month for the next 12 months,” she explained. “When you click on a specific delivery month of interest, you will find a drop-down chart of all the ‘next best’ bids. We also try to show specials that pop up or targets that are triggering. There is all sorts of good information you can use to your advantage as a farmer.” For less than the price of a Netflix account, farmers receive greater transparency on pricing data like no other app. Beyond grain prices, farmers can browse the recently introduced rack fuel prices on gas and diesel. As increasingly more farmers turn to digital grain marketing solutions and spend less time speaking over the telephone, Dargis believes it benefits a company to have farmers see its name while scrolling for prices. “People don’t shop like they used to. The grain marketplace has changed so much and there are more buyers and locations than ever. We all want convenience. It’s no different than using Expedia to find hotel options and best deals,” she said. “As for grain buyers, the more you’re involved in the marketplace and have eyes on you, the better. Farmers need to be able to sell grain confidently, and that’s where transparency comes into play.” Frustrated by the difficulty of finding timely market information, Lynn Dargis built an app that gathers bids in one user-friendly platform.