Latest / The MonkCast / Tech for Chickens with JT Perry
Transcript
- speaker-0: Hello everyone, welcome to the monk cast. I am Rachel Stevens, Research Director with Red Monk, and today I'm very excited to introduce you to JT Perry. This is probably a little bit different than what we typically get on monk cast content. Maybe I'll just let JT introduce himself and what he is working on. speaker-1: Hey, JT Perry, ⁓ currently the co-founder of Barn Analytics. My background is actually much more boring than that. Enterprise development and leadership. Kind of grew up in the technology world and insurance companies and clean systems and fun stuff like that. I think I've had just about every technology role ⁓ possible in those worlds. somewhere around COVID, decided to return to farming roots. I live on 20 acres here. ⁓ southeast of Seattle out towards Mount Rainier, if you're familiar with that, ended up between rolls last summer and like a lot of kind of startup ideas decided to scratch our own itch. ⁓ we were having some challenges keeping track of the overall health of our chickens. We would have just really unexpected mortality all of a sudden, like walk in and and ⁓ you know, find one ⁓ is passed away and and not really sure why or or how to figure it out. ⁓ and that started us on this little adventure where we developed chicken sense, and that's what we're working on rolling out now. speaker-0: Very exciting. I feel like there's so many like jokes on old Twitter and things like that where people in the tech world start to burn out and say, I never want to touch a computer again. I wanna go live in the woods or I wanna go on a farm and you like kind of did that, but you also decided to still bring the computers with you. So that's exciting. speaker-1: Yeah, I have to say, you know, and Steve talks about this a lot. Like, ⁓ be careful what you ask for, right? Farming is definitely more work. It is definitely restrictive. If you've got pigs and chickens and garlic harvest is coming up, ⁓ your summers change quite a bit, right? The idea of summer vacation or we're just gonna pack up and drive to the city for the day or something, that that's not really an option anymore. So be careful what you ask for. speaker-0: Fair enough. Well, good morning advice for everyone. And also while we are doing disclaimers, I also want to do my disclaimer, which is that JT and Jenny did a friends and family round raise for barn analytics, and I am a nominal investor in that, mostly because it has vastly increased the rate at which JT texts me picture updates of barn animals, which ⁓ is delightful for me. So just so that's out in the open. But yeah, so let's talk about where you're at with barn analytics. speaker-1: Yeah. So the premises or the hypothesis that ⁓ we truly believe we are solving is that the one way to know if a chicken is ill or ⁓ not doing well is weight loss. So they will stop to eat. Because they are so low on the food chain, literally in the in the animal world, they have this incredible prey response to never show weakness, never show anything's wrong. And that's why it's really hard to see if, you know, frankly, if they are sick. And so that if you really see a chick or a chicken not doing well, ⁓ you know, you ⁓ you might be as close as like twenty four hours or thirty six hours and there's there's not a lot you can do. So really focused on egg laying chickens and kind of the backyard farmer up to, you know, maybe a hundred, two hundred chickens, you know, they they return to nesting boxes. And so this idea that ⁓ if you put a leg band on a chicken with a RFID tag, right? The same thing you basically use to tap and pay with your credit card or or iPhone. the NFC world, ⁓ and they come back, ⁓ you can have a scale ⁓ sitting in that nesting box and and, you know, capture their weight from an egg laying perspective, that gives us some other really interesting information too. If they lay an egg, right, you'll detect the egg's weight after they leave. ⁓ so you can get a feeling for our specific egg laying patterns through, especially right, fall and winter, ⁓ unless you start doing some manipulation with. temperature and UV lights and some stuff that ⁓ isn't great for the longevity of the chicken either, they're gonna dial back the their egg laying. Will different breeds do that at different rates? What does that really turn out to be? And then lastly, the idea of of broody, ⁓ which is where chickens w we call ⁓ broody when they get that natural urge to sit on eggs, right? And incubate ⁓ for twenty plus days and and hopefully you have chicks. Well, they don't sit on ⁓ twenty four hours. They they hop off to go eat, right? Get a drink of water. ⁓ at least you hope. And sometimes chickens aren't very good at this. ⁓ you know, one of the things w we discovered that we can talk about later, but is that one of our young chickens was really, really bad at this. They would go and sit on different eggs every time. So so no one pile of eggs would, you know, we've got, let's see, five nesting boxes. None of those piles of eggs would would ever actually incubate. And then in fact you couldn't eat them or sell them because they would be partially developed and I know it's uncomfortable feelings. We don't need to get into that. But, you know, that's where we learned that one of ours was really terrible at this. And and, you know, maybe she'll figure it out ⁓ over the years. We'll we'll have to see. ⁓ where we've got another one that's really good at it and we'll hatch eggs. So long way, you know, we created the device to be in the nesting box to to capture their activity. Most nesting boxes or or most chicken coops don't have Wi Fi connections, or a lot of them don't. speaker-0: That doesn't feel great at all. speaker-1: ⁓ you tend to put your chicken coop away from your house. Chickens don't smell like roses. Don't smell terrible if you keep up with them, but it's not something you want outside your ⁓ bedroom window. And so we really had to make sure we used Bluetooth and the phone that just when you if you have your phone in your back pocket and walk in to collect eggs or change the food or water or anything like that, ⁓ we'll download the information and and push it to the back end and and start to push alerts. If if you lose five or ten percent of your chicken's weight over a certain period of time, it's time to start looking. Start figuring out what to do from there. speaker-0: Very cool. So it sounds like the primary catalyst for you creating this was that you wanted to better track your own chicken's health is the and and brooding. Are were those the two main ones? speaker-1: Exactly. Right. It was really the health and then it was like, ⁓ by the way, we can figure out the brooding too and that's turned out to be ⁓ pretty interesting along the way. speaker-0: Right, cool. So d is this a common issue for all farms, just small farms, backyard farmers, everybody? speaker-1: All farms have the issue. When you get up into the industrial scale, there are different ways to track it. I would also say, you know, when you're up at the industrial scale, ⁓ this sounds very brutal, but they're disposable. It's it's there are some large scale farms that do a very good way of of monitoring chicken health and giving them a really good experience. There's others that's as industrial as you think it is with just little cages where the eggs just fall out on the conveyor belt and and you know. That's it too. But the small backyard farm, there isn't any ⁓ really way out there. You know, you can spend a lot of time with your chickens. I mean, you can spend as much time as you want. Some people spend a lot of time, some people just go and collect eggs every couple of days, and that's about it. You do start to learn them and personalities and you can start to pick up on some of it, but there's not really a good way to ⁓ know what's going on from a trending perspective. You know, if you have different breeds of chickens, you know different colored eggs. Okay. So I know this egg was laid by one of my green egg layers, but what what was it was it Greta? Was it Betty? ⁓ I don't know. You know, stuff like that. So ⁓ you can start to figure out some more information from there. But yeah, we're targeting the small ⁓ smaller end of the scale. speaker-0: Okay. Well let's talk more about then I wanna talk more about the types of analytics and the shape of the data that you're collecting, but like maybe let's talk a bit about both the platform and the hardware. So what what does the hardware look like? speaker-1: ⁓ the hardware looks like this. In a lot of ways it looks like a bathroom scale. Okay. LED lights and and all of that. ⁓ let me disconnect the antenna. The lid just has an RFID antenna on it. I that's very exciting. And then the inside is a custom circuit board we designed with the strain gauge for the for the weight, ⁓ you know, chips and all of that kind of stuff. And then I just have one battery in it at the moment 'cause we're actually doing a battery rundown test, ⁓ confirming how long it it It runs from there. It's it's relatively simple at the end of the day. Spend a lot of time with the circuit board and trying to be very power conscious, trying to figure out, okay, how how often should you turn the Bluetooth radio on so you don't miss the the farmer in there collecting the eggs, but at the same time that's the biggest power draw. How do you ⁓ mimic that? So our goal is to be able to keep it in the coop for speaker-0: Right. That makes sense. speaker-1: ⁓ at least two weeks. That's what we're shooting for. That's what the math on paper looks like. We'll we'll see what happens here in reality. And go from there. And then you can charge it overnight. Chickens don't lay eggs generally. There's always an exception to every rule. But at night they they roost, right? They they sit on their bars and huddle up to ⁓ stay warm or spread out to stay cool. And so you can pull it out overnight and and charge it in a couple hours and put it back in the morning and that kind of thing. speaker-0: How so you you talked about chickens maybe not smelling like roses. How do you protect all of the hardware from chicken grossness? speaker-1: A couple ways. One is is the design of the box itself, ⁓ making sure that anything that that lands on top, it's it's made of a 3D printed plastic called ASA. You can wash it, you can wipe it off. ⁓ we don't submerge it, but but you can wipe it off. But we designed ⁓ the box to to make sure everything flows off. We do have some channels within it, even if moisture gets in there. But but chicken coops are pretty dry. You know, maybe ⁓ any humidity is just You know, if you're in Florida versus, you know, some other place, you you'll you'll get humidity, but ⁓ design the components around that. All the switches and LEDs have, you know, gaskets and IP sixty seven and all those fun technical terms. And then really we spent a lot of time on the design of of the box landing on ASA to allow for the heat in that perspective. The other thing is a lot, and this is very personal style with ⁓ chicken farmers, but most ⁓ have what they call nesting pads. Think of it as a a ⁓ piece of carpet or or sometimes literally hay, sometimes kind of this artificial hay, astroturfe kind of looking stuff. And that'll protect the box. speaker-0: Okay. So this would go underneath that. speaker-1: Yeah, this will go underneath it. But even if not, if the chicken's just laying on there, look, as a chicken owner, you're you're dealing with chicken poop quite a bit. ⁓ you you kind of get used to that, but you can scrape it off like you do a right roost bar or anything else. ⁓ if you want to wipe it off with with, you know, a wipe or spray cleaner or something like that, you're you're welcome to, and and obviously you do before you bring it in, ⁓ to charge it and things like that. But it stays pretty clean. Done a lot of work to try to keep the top as smooth as possible to keep it clean. So yeah. Temperature's probably gonna be our biggest thing. We again all in the math, it all looks okay, but we'll we'll get out with some real testers, especially over this summer. More worried about heat than cold, but we'll we'll see. I I expect it'll be fine, but again, I think it's one of those that looks good on paper. We'll see how it performs in in practice. speaker-0: Okay, that makes sense. And where are you doing this manufacturing? Like how how is this getting built? speaker-1: ⁓ so the the boards and circuits ⁓ we're using a vendor overseas ⁓ to put together the first boards I built myself. ⁓ but I don't know that anybody would call those quality. I'm okay at soldering. I don't know that I'm great at soldering. So getting the boards assembled overseas, the printing is ⁓ right there, as well as some other printers we have access to. ⁓ we've got some ideas about ⁓ I'm super involved in in robotics. People can see other online talks I've done about that and some schools that wanna earn money and have a bunch of 3D printers. We we're looking to see if we can set up a deal with them ⁓ to to both, you know, make sure they make some money for that. But it is a challenge. I ⁓ you know, given everything that's going on in the supply chain world right now, the the cost of plastic has gone up. But yeah, we we should be able to keep up with manufacturing. If it takes off like our dreams, we'll we'll go to a third party printer. But at that point the the additional cost of that of course doesn't matter if you're selling that many of them. speaker-0: That that falls into the good problems to have. Love it. So so that's the kind of the hardware. What about the platform and the app and all of those things? speaker-1: Yeah, it's a React app across Android and iOS. I don't think we're doing anything groundbreaking, pretty standard ⁓ from from that perspective. Spending most of our time working on, frankly, the Bluetooth communications, right? How do we pair to these devices if you have three or four of them in your coop because you got three or four nesting boxes? How do we make sure we get the information? Get the information. in the time that that somebody's in there. And so, you know, a lot of like compression using protobuffs, things like that to shrink the size of the bits and bytes coming across. And then shipping it to the back end, we're we're hosting on Cloudflare, because we're again we're not doing a ton of magic here, uploading the data. Right now we're focused on a lot of basic trends, like, you know, what's the weight been over the last year, month, week, that kind of stuff, how across the breeds, if you if you've put in it's up to you how much data you put in about each chicken. But if you capture it, then we'll try to grab trending along ⁓ that information. As the data set grows, that opens up some other opportunities for us to really dive in and and kind of put on more of a data science hat. There's not a lot of data out there. Lucky to ⁓ have a local university vet professor advising a little bit in an informal way, but but advising in the background. ⁓ and there isn't there isn't a ton of of this kind of information. So ⁓ it's not anything that we can say, all right, let's put it in a vector database and create a model and all of those kind of stuff yet. We'll wait until we have a data set to allow us to start doing that and ask even more questions. Excuse the pun, but it's really been a chicken and egg problem on the on the on the data analytics side, I know. But it really has been. So we're we're we're hoping to collect a bunch more data from that perspective. speaker-0: Very cool. So so how are you doing the like weight loss alerts now before you have all that data? It's just kind of your words go off speaker-1: Yeah. We're pushing notifications to the app, like like a lot of applications on the mobile phone. You know, hey, we we noticed Greta is down five percent this week. Start to pay attention. Ten percent you really need to ten percent seems to be the big flag ⁓ based on all of our research and and talking to people and stuff like that. ⁓ and then there's some stuff you can do, right? Start putting supplements in in water. You could you can go down the the treatment route if you can figure out something more specific, right? Things happen. Egg bound, which is literally the egg gets stuck in the in the in the duct on the on the way out. So you can start to look for that. Yeah. And and ⁓ there's things you can do for that. They get these little sores on their feet sometimes. If you ⁓ especially that's something we battle up here where it's really wet and and that will just kind of keep them from wanting to frankly w you know, walk on over and and get food and stuff like that. So you it's it's just more of a hey, go p go pay attention, go start to figure out. what's happening. And then if you get a rash of your chickens all of a sudden starting to do that, then that's where you really got to start diving in and ⁓ figuring out if you've got ⁓ some kind of flock wide infection, which gets pretty scary in the days of bird flu, knock on wood that seems to be dialing back. ⁓ that's the worst nightmare because I mean unfortunately at that point you have to call the whole flock to to stop it. It's ⁓ very much protect your neighbor kind of situation at that point. ⁓ But there are some other ⁓ infections across the flock too that that you wanna stop or make sure there's nothing in your water or or things like that. speaker-0: Okay. So there are steps you can take, but you have to know to take them. speaker-1: Yeah, you gotta know to look. Right. And and you know, depending on how much time you're with your chickens and like I said, they have this incredible prey response to show they're tough, I'm fine, right? To you know, make sure they aren't the ones that that get picked off from predators. speaker-0: I think from what you've said, you have had a number of challenges putting this product together. ⁓ it sounds like Bluetooth has been one of them. It sounds like Heat has been one of them. It sounds like just general all the manufacturing requires in putting together a product. What would you say is the biggest engineering challenge? speaker-1: ⁓ the biggest engineering challenge has been that it's the the first time for ⁓ any of us involved actually designing circuit boards, right? And we've had amazing friends and and people who know a whole lot more knowledge, right? A big shout out shout out to Chris Petrelli, for example, ⁓ has been just an endless resource for hey, I've got this and I think I'm gonna solve it this way and and and for him to go. Or you could just Do this that people have done for 10 years, things like that. Right. I did some of this in the Navy, ⁓ especially kind of troubleshooting and and understanding how it was created and stuff like that, but from the ground up. ⁓ and then just ⁓ frankly, geopolitics, the tariffs every day, even the unknown, you order, it gets into customs, you get a bill from UPS or FedEx or or whoever that says, ⁓ you need to pay $75 or we're not going to release this. And it's it's very unpredictable. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: So just some frankly business trying to figure out what the costs are gonna be versus the revenue, they're really all over the the the map, you know, and and and now with ⁓ you need petroleum to make plastic. And so watching some of those costs starting to to ramp up as well. speaker-0: Interesting. No, that makes perfect sense. Maybe let's dive into the business side a little bit. Who are you trying to reach here? speaker-1: Really trying to reach the the folks that have ten, fifteen chickens in their backyard. Right. Research and all that shows the TAM total adjustable market is is something in the three point one million people have chickens both domestically and then it's even more when you get into Europe and and other places as well. ⁓ but we're gonna start in the US. ⁓ is ⁓ is our our first market. A lot of that is just frankly a logistics, especially with testing, right? Got a swap out parts and things like that, we don't have the same shipping challenges. And to hop back to the geopolitical, more predictable as far as shipping rates and tariffs and and all of that kind of stuff. ⁓ speaker-0: Okay. And is it fair to say do people with ten to fifteen chickens, do they tend to think of them more as pets? Or is like so if if we did the cattle pets from technology, like where where do we fall on that scale? speaker-1: You know, stereotyping is dangerous, right? But but the the our archetype is somebody who thinks of them as pets. You know, ⁓ we think of them as as pets. We're on our, you know, heading up. Let's see, af after the we have chicks right now that are growing up. ⁓ when they grow up we'll be up in the twenty, twenty-five number of chickens laying eggs by the fall. ⁓ looking to go up to fifty. So we're probably more in the revenue, right? Our our rule on the farm is everybody has to contribute somehow, right? Even the dogs, the coyote dog, to to keep them chased away. But we still think of them as pets, right? We know we we know their names, you know, Greta and Betty and Ted the Rooster and all of that kind of fun stuff. ⁓ but yeah, a lot of the smaller owners will think of them as pets and and that's good from a business perspective, right? Those are the people that are going to walk to even know more. The bigger numbers you get, the more you look at them as almost like machines and and maybe they become I hate the term, but disposable, you know, things like that. Even those chicken even those chicken owners really care for the chickens and want them to have a a ⁓ a good quality of life. But, you know, may have different views on on tracking. speaker-0: Gotcha. That makes sense. So tell tell me about just the general roadmap from here. It sounds like you're still kind of in testing is prototyping phase or no? speaker-1: No, we're past prototype. The goal is that for this to be the production model. The production board, everything about it should be the one. The the ⁓ you know, we we talked about problems earlier. The one other problem is is you've got a R fit antenna, RFID antenna sitting horizontal, the tags sit vertical. That's like the worst possible combination to get a reading. ⁓ so the the one other thing we may end up doing is having to design our own tag to angle the the RFID out a little bit, just how radio waves work and stuff like that. But ⁓ hoping not. And and so far it's looking okay. But assuming that all goes, we should be in production in July. We are starting our second product now in design as well, trying to do this in parallel. Another itch to scratch is is if you want to sell meat outside your local area. ⁓ and this varies on the state a little bit, but but generally you have to pursue USDA certification, which just is a hey, you're you're keeping everything is clean. You're keeping track of the meat, you know what what animal it came from, right? So a batch, so God forbid somebody does get sick, you can pull the whole batch right back. Think recalls, think all of that kind of stuff. But one of the bigger things you have to do is is ⁓ track temperatures of your freezers or fridge for your eggs if you've washed them and fridged them and stuff like that. And there isn't really something simple out there to do that. Right. There there's all sorts of devices that'll plug into security systems or home assistance or or this technology or that technology. But ⁓ stereotyping again, ⁓ farmers just want something that they can plug in and just work. So that when the USDA inspector comes out, they can just hit print or show ⁓ the mobile app or show ⁓ the the screen and have some kind of certified that yes, I promised this was the temperature at this date and you know, it hasn't been altered kind of security. So we're gonna put that together. Simple sensors ⁓ that capture both the air temperature and then what we call a protein substitute, because you're not going to keep a thermometer in one of your pieces of meat because you want to sell that piece of meat. ⁓ you use glycol or something like that as a as a substitute to to keep track of it. ⁓ and and go from there. So so that's product too that we're starting to build in the background while ⁓ you know testing for these things goes. Testing for this device isn't just you know, run a unit test. We d we do all that stuff too. ⁓ but it has to sit out there for a couple of weeks and you've got to see through cycles and so it provides some time to to focus on other things. speaker-0: And we we've been saying we're for this whole podcast, but like who does your team? speaker-1: Yeah, who's my team? ⁓ co-founder is the most awesome Jennifer Kenyon, also chief of staff at GetVocal AI. She's based out of the Windsor, UK, and would not be anywhere near this point without her. So I'm incredibly grateful. And then Jeremy Mase is public now, I can say, has really done the the app development and the web development ⁓ and also just been that awesome ⁓ engineering ⁓ mind to bounce stuff back and forth off of. So yeah, we've had a we've had a lot of fun all kind of doing this and in on the side, so to speak. speaker-0: What? Well I love it so much. Okay, so let's close with a lightning round. Okay. I want to hear all your chickens' names. speaker-1: ⁓ I don't know that I can rattle them all off. I need my daughter. Ted the Rooster is the rock star ⁓ of the place, keeping his his his hands in line, so to speak. It's a it's a very misogynistic world, the chickens, I have to say, for ⁓ how that that kind of works. Let's see, Nougat was kind of the original and the original mom as well. ⁓ let's see, we got Greta, Betty, my kids, Jane is gonna make so much fun of me because I can't remember the rest of their names. But that's what I've got off the top of. speaker-0: Okay, we'll take it. What is something that your chickens have done that would horrify me or someone who's never kept chickens? speaker-1: ⁓ I'm gonna go back to the poop. Like you've you've gotta be good with poop. You know, it's kind of the same thing as having your own infant. ⁓ you deal with it a whole lot more than you want to. They will eat their own eggs, which can speaker-0: That is slightly horrifying, yeah. Yeah. speaker-1: Yep. So there are times where you'll go in and find a egg cracked open and all over everything. ⁓ they'll eat anything, you know, whether whether you want them to or or not. It's it's probably ⁓ and then they'll peck at each other too. So you'll go out and suddenly see a bunch of feathers missing out of one. So they're they're not very friendly to each other. They're they're generally pretty friendly to people other than the rooster, right? Ted's a a jerk most of the time and that's his job. That's what he's supposed to be. But but he can be a real pain in the butt. speaker-0: Fair enough. Alright, last but not least, what is the best way to eat eggs? speaker-1: I am a fried person. ⁓ over easy is my particular I am not a cheese and eggs fan, so I don't go down the omelet ⁓ perspective. I have some weird block in my brain about that. Okay. So I am absolutely a fried egg person. With your own bacon on the side, I have to say. Bringing the pigs in makes all the difference in the world. speaker-0: It's it's it sounds like you've you've got all the ingredients for that. Absolutely. Wonderful. Well JT, thank you so much for carving out time to come and talk with me. This has been so much fun to hear about ⁓ all your adventures in both farming and in creating farm products for people. speaker-1: Thank you very much for having me. It's a blast. ⁓ one plug barnanalytics.com. ⁓ we are taking pre-orders. Or if you don't have chickens, we sell really cool t shirts too. speaker-0: Wonderful. Yes. Everyone, Barney Analytics dot com. All right. Thank you so much, J D. Great.