After becoming frustrated with how grain prices were accessed, a local farmer decided to create a solution for the problem.
For Lynn Dargis, a grain and livestock producer from outside of St. Vincent, the answer came in the form of her website and app: Farmbucks.
The program collects and brings information regarding grain pricing together to make it easier for producers to find the best price.
“A farmer goes in, they put in their location, search radius around them, and it will pull from our database of all the crop bids that they’ve chosen,” Dargis detailed. “It will sort and display them in a quick and easy one-stop shop type manner.”
After coming across the 2019 Telus Pitch competition, a Canada-wide small business grant contest, Dargis entered and made it to the top 10.
“I was quite excited and in disbelief,” she said about making it that far. “I appreciate any kind of awareness I can build about trying to help farmers market their grain in an efficient way.”
Although she didn’t find herself in the top five, Dargis was invited to attend the live finale on July 30 in Toronto.
After launching a beta version of her app in February, which took about a year to create, Dargis has been trying to expand its reach within Canada.
“It’s all about raising awareness right now, and getting more farmers on board, as well as convincing some other buyers that aren’t fully integrated into it to say, ‘hey, look at what’s going on around you, check us out, we’re here to help you, and work with you.’ I think it can be beneficial to both parties,” she explained.
Farmbucks is available through iTunes and Google Play. It shows 12 months worth of pricing to allow users to choose the best time to sell, and provides real-time and historical pricing information from local buyers.
Dargis was born and raised on her family farm located just outside of St. Vincent. She took agriculture management at Olds College, and has run the farm since her parents passed away in 2007.
The idea for Farmbucks came to Dargis when she was searching for an easier way to find prices for grain.
“It was just born out of growing frustration from sourcing grain prices and trying to find them. I decided to do something about it, and started interacting and communicating with different grain companies to see who would be interested in participating and sharing their bids with me so that I could share them on the platform.”
She described the previous method of gathering the information as “all over the map.”
“We get text messages from certain companies, emails from others, or some grain companies have their own online bid platforms. We’re just trying to collect it all and bring it all together to make it easy for farmers to find those pricing opportunities.”
Dargis views the app as a way to shift the focus for the industry to marketing. She also wants to stress the importance of having all the crucial data in the same place.
“Since I have the farmer’s perspective, I think that I have a lot of good insight on how it should look and act. I think that’s valuable, because we’re just trying to get guys on the same level of playing field because there’s so many different grades and protein levels,” Dargis stressed. “There’s different factors that go into marketing each crop, and it’s kind of complex. When I started telling my programmers what I needed, how things are currently working, and what we were looking to build, I had to teach them what was going on.”
Since the launch, Farmbucks has grown in popularity and Dargis continues to work with programmers to make it even better. She’s constantly looking for ways to improve the app, and “to bring more value to both customers, users, and buyers that are participating.”
Currently, there’s around 15 grain companies, along with farmers from across Canada, that share their prices through Farmbucks. In the future, Dargis hopes to expand to offer the services to the United States.
