Step Away From The Notepad! Gripp Launches Digital Equipment Management App

Gripp is an AgLaunch-incubated mobile app focused on helping operations digitally manage, track, and report farm equipment issues across brands and even non-driven implements and tools.

As part of our renewed effort to bring you the latest information on cutting edge technology and machinery we’re featuring regular Q&A discussions with several handpicked ag tech startups.

For this iteration, we’re connecting with Gripp co-founder Tracey Wiedmeyer. Wiedmeyer grew up on a farm and through the years amassed a fleet of equipment. He noticed that asset tracking for both driven and non-driven farm equipment was lacking in synergy and integration across different paint colors and product lines.

According to Wiedmeyer, the core premise of Gripp is solving unmet tracking needs across agriculture. The startup accomplishes this via QR code technology that is easy for farm workers and operators to use.

Farm Journal (FJ): How does Gripp “help farmers digitize their operations, improve efficiency, and increase productivity?”

Tracey Wiedmeyer (TW), cofounder: We’ve focused Gripp on making it the easiest way for farmers to enable everyone on their farm to store small pieces of information at the moment of truth - when they’re in front of their equipment and the information is fresh. Gripp leverages familiar user experiences from everyday social media and chat platforms, encouraging the information collected to be casual and media heavy since we all know pictures & videos say a thousand words. We’re removing the friction of collection from using thumbs on a mobile keyboard to leveraging natural forms of input, enriching the captured information to be the most valuable – it’s the nuances that are worth remembering. We can transcribe, translate, and summarize nearly all captured information, bringing on farm communications to the 21st century, a level very few farmers imagined – and consolidating all those on-farm activities and conversations in one place means you can get rid of the app-soup of voice, text, WhatsApp, Facetime, and numerous others - simplifying the whole operation.

Another area we’ve focused on is making Gripp as accessible as possible across the entire farm, giving full-time, part-time, and seasonal workers the ability to track information without requiring an app, user account or password – regardless of their native language. That’s something owners love because historically tracking is left to 1 or 2 people on the farm, usually the owner or farm manager, and most of the time important activities don’t make it to them at the end of the day or they arrive with so little detail, it leaves more work for your most expensive resources to fill in the gaps. With Gripp, those that know your equipment best now have a voice, freeing owners to be more productive with their time.

The labor savings and improved communication increases productivity, and the information collected is able to remove operational blind spots, making the day-to-day more efficient - a hidden cost on the bottom line that most farms don’t track – because it’s always been a pain to do.

FJ: How does a product like Gripp enable farmers to continue to manage their operations/improve decision making as farms consolidate and grow larger?

TW: The unique aspects of Gripp play very well as operations grow. We’ve spent a lot of time designing Gripp through the eyes of the operators in the field and on the front line. In addition to leveraging familiar interface design, Gripp remains easy for anyone to use and doesn’t require a “re-training” event every time Gripp is accessed. Everyone understands how to scan a QR code and take a picture or record a video – a basic activity that scales across an operation, even as acquisitions and consolidation continues.

We also have a unique pricing model. We don’t ask you to pay by user or piece of equipment so you’re able to avoid the mental gymnastics of determining if a certain person “deserves” a seat or if a certain piece of equipment is “worth” tracking. We have a simple all you can eat model, with monthly pricing that we stand behind. No multi-year commitments or service contracts that lock you in - if Gripp doesn’t work for you, you simply cut the cord anytime you’d like.

Lastly when we talk about analysis by paralysis, this is where we expect Gripp to shine. Most tracking software, if you’re even using software, asks you to sit in front of a shiny dashboard and create reports to determine how successful you’ve been. I’ve yet to meet a farmer that has time for that. Using the unstructured, natural language information we’re collecting, and using AI with a ChatGPT-like interface, you’ll soon be able to uncover trends across your operation using simple natural language questions, something never seen before in Ag.

This means Gripp scales as the farming operation does with minimal incremental costs. As your farm grows there’s no additional burden for more reporting, complexity, training or analysis, it just works.

FJ: Skilled labor is another limiting factor in agriculture operations. How does a product like Gripp help a farmer set his hired help up for success?

TW: Farm labor is more transient than ever, the farms we work with see upwards of 40% year over year turn over in seasonal staff, many coming from non-English speaking countries. Empowering this workforce to be productive as fast as possible and throughout the season is a massive challenge – things like training are often conducted in unproductive group settings where you end up wasting a lot of time getting the least experienced up to speed. Using the tribal knowledge collected in Gripp, previously collected pictures and videos can form the basis for very targeted training for the entire workforce, even per user thanks to translations, rather than one-size-fits-all. This allows the least skilled and experienced to become productive very quickly while also making sure that institutional farm information and know-how doesn’t leave the farm when your workers do.

FJ: How did Gripp get its start?

TW: Gripp was incubated out of Purdue University’s DIAL Ventures, which works to connect entrepreneurs to the leading challenges across agriculture’s constantly evolving landscape. The core premise of Gripp is solving unmet tracking needs across agriculture which has historically been focused on the maintenance of “things on tires”, but we’ve widened our sights to virtually anything that a farm operator relies on to be successful. The options for today’s farmers range from costly and complex software that wasn’t built for Ag, or more commonly, relying on unreliable memory, shop whiteboards, and, on a good day, paper forms, notebooks, sticky notes, and sharpies.

Having grown up on a farm and still owning lots of equipment, it’s been a problem I’ve experienced my entire life, so when I got involved with Purdue it was a natural pairing with my tech-heavy background. I own a couple back hoes and tractors, a dump truck, skid steer, countless attachments, a telehandler, and lots of other things that aren’t on tires – finding the information I need when I need it is difficult, even for a small timer like me who grew up as a software engineer and surrounded by technology. It just gets exponentially worse for farmers as the size of their operation grows.

FJ: Is there anything else you’d like to share about Gripp?

TW: Gripp will begin conducting wide scale farm trails starting in March in the Midwest and South through our AgLaunch partnership, we’d love you to get-a-Gripp on your farm, join the revolution!

Learn more about this equipment tracking startup at www.gripp.ag.