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Revision as of 02:00, 21 December 2009
From Agrilink to AquaSpy - A history of Agrilink
The founder of Agrilink had a simple goal: to become the Dell or Microsoft of the agriculture sector, to revolutionise farming by making available a host of web based services. By June 2009, when the company relocated from Australia to the United States of America, it had consumed over $50m AUD of venture capital without achieving its dream. This article provides an insight in to the history of the company and its many incarnations.
Company Incarnations
The history of Agrilink can be traced to a small company operating in Western Australia, Agrilink Water Management. After a number of years trading as Agrilink - Agrilink Holdings, Agrilink International, Agrilink Florida - the company morphed in to AquaSpy in 2008.
Agrilink Water Management
Agrilink Water Management was founded by Peter Moller in 1997 (Layden 2002). The company Moller had been working for closed its agriculture division and, rather than looking for employment, decided to start his own company. Agrilink Water Management began life as a neutron probe consultancy (Moller had been introduced to these then new devices by his former employer) providing irrigation management advice to growers in the south west of Western Australia. As Moller related to the Naples Daily News in 2002, after the company for whom he was working closed its agriculture division, he "had an entrepreneurial seizure one day, and thought I would go into business" [1].
When Adelaide based company, Sentek Sensor Technologies [2]introduced the EnviroSCAN capacitance soil moisture sensor, Moller signed on as a dealer. The company then switched from taking weekly neutron probe readings to consulting based on the continuous soil moisture data the new product delivered. This provided customers with far more information and helped increase the value of the services the company provided. At its peak the business employed Moller and two young consultant agronomists. Moller had ambitious plans for the company and called in a business consultant to help prepare a business plan to drive the company forward. Progress stalled when his newly appointed business manager and one of his agronomists left in quick succession.
During his time as a Sentek distributor, Moller worked closely with Nigel Robinson, the then Marketing Manager at Sentek. Sentek's soil moisture probes utilised multi-core cable to connect back to a data logger. The logger would be removed every week and taken back to the office to download the stored readings in to a computer running Sentek's software. The system had two major shortcomings: firstly the cable was susceptible to damage from machinery and lighting and secondly, users often returned to the site a week later only to discover that they had not correctly primed the logger prior to replacing it in the field, meaning a week of lost data. There had to be a better way.
Agrilink Holdings
Agrilink Holdings was added to the Australian companies register on 1/5/1997 (ACN 078 399 158, registered name AGRILINK HOLDINGS PTY LTD). Robinson had by then left Sentek and was looking for new opportunities.
Earlier in the year, Sentek had received a visit from Austrian Company Adcon Telemetry [3], to explore opportunities to distribute Adcon's range of telemetry products in Australia. At that time the equipment was principally used for automatic weather stations, providing information not just on current climate conditions but, through the use of a number of models, providing warnings on the likely outbreak of a number of plant pests and diseases. Sentek at the time could not see a place for the products in its range.
Robinson approached Adcon Telemetry ande secured the distribution rights for their products in Australia. Robinson and Moller reached agreement on allowing Robinson to take on the Agrilink name and business model and Agrilink Holdings was born.
The company initially operated from an office in Melbourne St, North Adelaide, South Australia. The first employee, an office administrator named Tanya, joined Nigel from Sentek. The second employee, was also an ex Sentek staffer, Wayne Hogben. The third employee, Gavin Wheatcroft was employed fresh from university. Having developed a likely hit list of companies likely to be interested in weather data, the company set out installing weather stations on a trial basis on grower's properties. In each district one of Adcon's telemetry base stations would be deployed to collect the data from the radio data loggers which formed the heart of each station. A computer in the company's office would dial out via landline telephone each day to collect the data and store it on Adcon's addVANTAGE software. If at the end of the trial the customer wished to keep the weather station, it would be left on site and the customer invoiced; if not, it would be moved to another property.
Whereas in Europe interest in disease management was high, the same could not be said for Australia. Sentek's efforts had proven that there was however a good market for soil moisture monitoring, however many potential customers were put off by the need to install cables to link the probes back to a central data logger. Robinson could see what Sentek had failed to: the opportunity to use Adcon's telemetry products to deploy radio linked soil moisture probes. However Adcon's current family of radio data loggers were too expensive to be used for the purpose. What was needed was a lower cost, short range radio. Use of the Sentek soil moisture probes was out, mainly because the company was not interested in developing a new interface to replace the proprietary interface used to date by their probes.
Adcon agreed not just to make a new low power radio, but also to begin development of a capacitance sensor. The latter development was shelved when Agrilink decided to take the task on themselves.
The C-Probe Corporation
Developing new products is not cheap. To take on the task, Robinson needed funding and he was introduced to Adelaide's emerging Venture Capital sector. Using market growth predictions developed during his time at Sentek, Robinson convinced a group of local investors to provide him the money to develop his own sensor - the C-Probe, with which he could compete against Sentek.
The C-Probe Corporation was created by the directors of Agrilink, to create an impression of independence between the company as the local telemetry provider and the new soil moisture sensor. According to SOWACS, a web site established to promote soil water sensors, the C-Probe was "manufactured in Australia under license from the C-Probe Corporation of California" [4]. The two companies shared common directors and Agrilink Holdings was awarded the master distribution rights for the sensors.
Responsibility for developing the new sensor was passed to ADD, an Adelaide based electronics company specialising in electronic promotional signs and displays. The brief for ADD was to create a sensor which was compatible with Adcon's radio equipment and used the same form factor (and hence installation tools) as the Sentek probe.
In 1999, the company relocated to 7/69 Burbridge Rd, Hilton, South Australia. Soon after, Adcon delivered their new radio, the A720 addIT, but delays in the development process meant that the new soil moisture probe was not quite ready. As a stop gap measure, early customers were given Watermark soil moisture tension sensors, connected to Adcon's Watermark interface module. By the second quarter of 1999 the C-Probe was finally ready for market. Staff were trained up on installing the probes, using techniques and tools which borrowed heavily on those developed by Sentek.
Sentek had developed a business model based on selling hardware to its dealers who in turn backed the hardware up with consultancy on irrigation management. The inability of the capacitance sensors to accurately record soil moisture levels meant that interpretation of the data was beyond the average farmer. The consultant would analyse trends and inflections in the data and set full and refill points. In the first year the consultant would get rid of gross errors and in the second start managing irrigation to the new full and refill points. Robinson needed an experienced agronomist to provide this scheduling advice to his customers and called on the services of Peter Moller.
The company could service customers in South Australia on its own, but to service those further afield, the company needed distributors. Agrilink Water Management became the first, switching allegiances away from Sentek. Serve-Ag in Victoria and Tasmania followed soon after as well as Sunraysia Environmental in Mildura and Cropsol Consulting Services in Griffith. A linkage was also opened up with Agrotop in South Africa.
By late 1999 the company had grown to 12 staff and plans were put in to place to quickly grow further.
GolfLinx
To coincide with its refocusing on the turf market, Agrilink opened a new branch called GolfLinx. Although not registered as a separate company, a Board of Management was formed to run GolfLinx. To build credibility with the golf sector, former profession Bruce Devlin was appointed to the board [5]. Equipment was installed on 6 high profile courses to give the company reference sites. Back in Australia a GolfLinx division was created to target Australian courses.
Despite a belief that “our soil moisture and salinity sensors, combined with our telemetry and software, are the best in the world” neither the US or Australian arms could achieve any traction in the golf market and the division was quietly disbanded in early 2009.
AquaSpy Group
In November 2007 the "Agrilink" brand was dropped in favour of a new name - Aquaspy Group. The company's latest soil moisture sensor had been christened the Aquaspy and the company adopted that moniker. The board cited the reason for the change as being that the previous name was "too strongly linked to agriculture and didn't reflect other products and services. This includes a turf and golf course business that is tapping a large and receptive market" [6].
At the time of the name change, AquaSpy claimed to have “more than 50,000 AquaSpy sensors in use around the world” [7]. It is not clear whether this figure is related to the actual number of probes sold of to the actual number of sensors installed on the probes. As the new probes have 10 sensors, the number of probes sold would be much lower..
The Aquaspy brand was mated to a new corporate web site, with revised look and feel. Underneath it all was the same staff and systems, including the quickly fading AgWise platform.
Product Development
Soil Moisture Sensors
The Series 1 C-Probe
The Series 1 probe was built around an 8-bit peripheral interface controller (PIC) chip. Development of the firmware for the probe was sub-contracted to a local electronics engineer who received a royalty on each unit sold.
To match the capabilities available in Sentek's software, new features had to be made available in the addVANTAGE program. The modular nature of the program meant this could be achieved with a new module - the C-Probe Extension.
Although it took a few incarnations to get the probe working properly, many units are still working ten years later.
