[aj_icracked]

Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc.

We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com

[explorigin]

> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network

Years ago I worked on Farmforce that is basically this. In America we have centralized agriculture. Over the ocean, small-holder farmers in Africa provide lots of food to lots of markets. Keeping track of all of these farms, their herbicide and pesticide usage and weather-based yield projections is already a solved problem.

[xyzzyz]

We should not model our food supply chain on Africa. In fact, it is beyond absurd to suggest it. African small holders run very unproductive farms, with horrible yields despite high labor intensive practices. Most countries have been on the brink of starvation up until very recently (some still are), and this only improved via adoption of modern farming practices.

[blast]

You just want to work on things that crack easily.

[TylerE]

Seems interesting a bit but surely the economics are rather brutal? Even a traditional coop has an ROI of years and years and years.

[aj_icracked]

It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories.

Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!).

Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.

[aimanbenbaha]

Amazing project! I always get excited when I hear new innovative ideas to improve ecosystems/businesses that are taught of as "traditional". There's this My First Million podcast episode with Justin Mares (DTC Food entrepreneur) where they talk about boostrapping alternative food biz ideas and are very bullish on these verticals and they also talk about various types of birds breeds and how cornish cross became the predominantly type of chicken raised.

Regarding this smart poultry startup, where I'm from I often hear from poulty farmers chicken should be able to roam free and have a wide space to lay around eggs and reproduce. I'm curious how this limitation is addressed to backyard herders?

[aj_icracked]

Most of our customers have decent sized backyards - I would say on average from clips people have shared, most yards are about the size of a tennis court or more (which is more than enough for 4-6 hens). Basically we look at it as, if you have a backyard, you have enough space for 4-6 chickens. Also, It's funny you mention My First Million - Sam Parr is a good friend of mine and I've been trying to get him to invest in Coop, lol.

[iancmceachern]

Very cool, let me know if you need and hardware or design support. I've done a lot of agtech stuff

[KennyBlanken]

> We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback.

Nobody is going to pay you anywhere near the amount of money you'll need for the energy and equipment to do this.

"Well shit, coyotes got one of the chickens" and then...just go get another chicken for...about $5 each. There's no data you could possibly collect that would interest people enough to buy your company.

The whole point behind chickens is that there are some manageable startup costs but then they're cheap to "run" - if you have a big enough property and free range 'em or use a 'tractor', even your feed costs are cut.

> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables.

It's not decentralized if everyone has to use your app (I'm guessing your plan is to get a cut...) This stuff already exists. They're called "farmers markets."

It's also called "talking to your neighbors." That's been going on for hundreds of years.

> build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture

Hammer, meet nail that does not exist.