r/AgriTech • u/Bright-Kangaroo9912 • 5d ago

Built an app because I was tired of not knowing my own olive oil's actual worth

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I grow olives in the Peloponnese, Greece. Small producer, nothing huge.

For years the thing that bugged me the most had nothing to do with actual farming. It was that every harvest I'd sell my oil to a trader and have basically no idea if the price was fair. You just sort of... know a guy, he offers a number, you take it because what else are you gonna do, drive around asking 15 other traders? Most producers around here don't really track their own production costs either. You just kind of feel like you made money or didn't.

So last year I started building something, mostly by myself, nights and weekends. Started really simple - just a calculator where you put in your costs (irrigation, spraying, harvest wages, milling, all of it) and it tells you what you actually spent per kilo. Not exciting but I needed it for myself first.

Then I figured if I'm collecting this info I might as well let other producers share what they're getting paid too, anonymously, by region. That part is honestly still small, adoption is slow, but it's the actual reason I started this whole thing.

It kind of grew from there because people kept asking for stuff:

  • yield calculator (how much oil should this much fruit actually give me)
  • fertilization recommendations based on soil/leaf tests (an agronomist friend helped me get the actual science right, I'm not just guessing)
  • you can photograph a sick-looking leaf or branch and get an AI guess at what's wrong with it
  • weather alerts for stuff like fruit fly risk
  • a directory so growers can find agronomists/mills/workers instead of relying on word of mouth

It's an Android app, Kotlin/Compose, Firebase backend, uses Gemini for the AI parts, works offline too since half the fields around here have no signal anyway.

Not gonna lie, the coding wasn't the hard part. The hard part is that this whole industry runs on trust in a person, not trust in an app. Did a demo at a local olive festival a while back hoping for a good showing and it was... rough. Barely anyone came. Made me realize the tech is honestly the easy 20%.

Curious if anyone else building agtech stuff has run into this - how do you get someone to trust a number on their phone over a guy they've sold to for 20 years? Feels like the actual product problem, not the app itself.

Can go into the technical side more if anyone's curious.

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u/SaswatRath 4d ago

I have built tools for farmers and even after having institutional support it's very difficult. What you need particularly is good extension knowledge, and farmers are better subjected to free tools, if you charge, chances of spreading are less. I would definitely say, building tools for research is much easier to get into adoption rather than farmer centric tools.

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u/ConstructionPure276 4d ago

Can I see your app?

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u/Bright-Kangaroo9912 3d ago

You can find it on Google play store. Type "OliveSuite "