The gas boom happened here and then left. Does history have any bearing on this?
Only as a warning about who captures value. The well was in Eaton and the factories were built in Muncie and Anderson, because the towns that could organise around the opportunity did. What Eaton kept is a mill on South Romy Street and the ground, which is not nothing, but it is a fraction of what went past. That pattern has not changed much. The businesses here that will do well over the next decade are the ones whose records are good enough to serve customers, owners and insurers who are not local — and that is a solvable, unglamorous problem.
Half our ground belongs to people who have never seen it. How do you handle that?
By making the annual statement a by-product of the season rather than a project in December. Field operations are logged as they happen, rent terms are read out of the lease once, and the owner gets the same report on the same date each year from a page they can open themselves. Landowners who feel informed renew. Landowners who feel managed shop the lease around.
Say we part company in ten years. Where does two decades of field history end up?
They go with you, in ordinary spreadsheet and file formats, on request rather than on negotiation. The account is in the farm's name from the beginning. Records about ground get asked for at a sale, at an estate settlement, in a landlord dispute and by an adjuster, sometimes decades later, and none of that should depend on whether a software company is still trading.
The library is funded by memberships, not a levy. Is there a version of this we could afford?
Yes, and it is deliberately narrow. Renewals tracked, lapses caught early, restricted gifts reconciled, and a reporting page a board member can run in ten minutes. Fixed price, no monthly subscription taking money out of a small budget forever, and the accounts belong to the library rather than to whichever volunteer set them up. That last part matters more than the software.
Our income comes in twice a year. How do you price around that?
By quoting one fixed figure and scheduling it against your settlements rather than against our billing cycle. The first build gets sized so a single good year pays for it, and we will tell you which part of the scope can wait twelve months without hurting anything. If the honest answer is that you should spend the money on tile instead, we will say that too.
Signal out on the ground is unreliable. Will anything actually get recorded?
It will, because everything is written on the phone first and sent when there is coverage. A photograph of a seed tag taken at the end of a field with no bars still lands in the right place an hour later when the truck gets back to the road. We test that in a field rather than assuming it, because an office demonstration proves nothing about how this works in April.
Which parts of this are genuinely artificial intelligence?
Three, and they are all reading. Pulling obligations out of a lease written in 1998. Getting the product and rate off a photographed chemical label. Working out which memberships have quietly lapsed and drafting a note that reflects how long that person has been a member. The timelines, the statements and the ledgers are ordinary software, and that is how they are priced.
How do you show us it worked without us having to take your word for it?
One agreed number, visible in the system, chosen before the build starts. Days to assemble a claim. Days to produce landowner statements. Renewal rate. We put it on the front page so nobody has to run a report to find out, and if it has not moved after a season then we did not do our job and the conversation should be an honest one.