In this MonkCast Conversation, RedMonk Research Director Rachel Stephens talks with JT Perry, co-founder of Barn Analytics, about building ChickenSense — a hardware and software product that uses RFID tags and in-coop sensors to monitor backyard chicken health. JT shares how his own farming experiences led him to build a solution for detecting illness in egg-laying chickens before it's too late. They discuss the challenges of designing custom circuit boards for the first time, managing Bluetooth communication in environments without Wi-Fi, navigating tariffs and supply chain uncertainty, and the chicken-and-egg problem (pun very much intended) of building a data analytics platform before you have the data.
Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/tech-for-chickens-with-jt-perry/
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction and Background
01:32 From Tech Burnout to Farming (With Computers)
02:46 The Hypothesis: Weight Loss as a Health Indicator
05:34 Bluetooth, Battery Life, and Coop Connectivity
09:18 Protecting Hardware from Chicken Grossness
11:22 Manufacturing and Supply Chain Challenges
12:26 The Platform
16:24 Biggest Engineering Challenges
17:54 Target Market and the Cattle-Pets Spectrum
20:08 Roadmap and Product #2: USDA Temperature Monitoring
22:37 The Team Behind Barn Analytics
23:16 Lightning Round: Chicken Names, Horrors, and Eggs
