Ballistic Chickens: The Need For New Frameworks in Agriculture

If you don’t tell your customers how to deploy your product or how they can succeed using it, then you will have built an expensive paperweight, a great piece of software that no one uses...

Hey - I will be attending World Agritech March 14-15th in San Francisco. If you are going to be there, let’s connect!

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has a unique device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at a plane's windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies.

The theory is that if the windshield doesn't crack from the carcass impact, it'll survive an actual collision with a bird during flight.

Legend has it that the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand-new, high-speed train they were developing.

They borrowed FAA's chicken launcher, loaded the chicken, and fired.

The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, broke the engineer's chair, and embedded itself in the back wall of the engine's cab. The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly.

The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:

"Use a thawed chicken."

The Need For New Frameworks in Agriculture

Agriculture is not facing a lack of new products, but a lack of new frameworks.

These are what Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger calls “latticeworks on which to hang your ideas.”

In other words, the operating system or thinking your customer should use to get the best results from your product.

Over the past few decades, hundreds of agricultural products have been released to the industry. Many of which have been incredible technologies that were extremely hard to make.

Yet adoption has been slow at best.

Some say this lack of adoption is due to technical difficulties and the inability to translate hype into change. Some people blame the industry, saying it is opposed to change.

I believe the problem with adoption is that we have created new technologies that rely on old frameworks.

- “Agriculture needs a digital transformation.”

- “We’re disrupting the agriculture industry.”

We don’t need your digital transformation, and we don’t need your disruption. Both of these approaches mean slapping a new coat of paint on an old and broken system.

We need you to bring us new frameworks with which to view and overcome the problems we face.

If you don’t tell your customers how to deploy your product or how they can succeed using it, then you will have built an expensive paperweight, a great piece of software that no one uses - a frozen chicken.

Be different, and build new frameworks.

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.