About FarmHQ

Our Story

Why We Built FarmHQ

David Wallace spent four growing seasons driving 90 miles round-trip every week to check on irrigation pumps at his family's orchard in Wasco County, Eastern Oregon. The orchard ran six center-pivots and two drip zones. Every Sunday, David or someone from the crew had to be on-site to flip the start switch and confirm water was moving.

In June 2022, a relay stuck open overnight. The pump ran dry for 11 hours, seized, and the field didn't get water for three days during a heat dome. That section lost $46,000 in pear crop. A cellular remote switch would have shown the fault at midnight and prevented the damage. Every product David found either required a professional installer, cost more than the pump itself, or stopped working when the vendor's cloud subscription changed terms.

He spent the following winter building a prototype in a converted shipping container on the property. The first version was a $35 Arduino with a $12 cellular module and a relay scavenged from a broken furnace controller. It worked. He shipped three units to neighboring orchards. All three orchards asked to keep them.

FarmHQ incorporated in 2023. By mid-2024, the product had shipped to irrigators in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and California's Central Valley. Lowercarbon Capital led a $4.2M Seed Round that year — their thesis being that eliminating unnecessary pump drives and over-irrigation reduces both diesel use and water consumption at scale.

David Wallace inspecting irrigation pump panel

Backed By

Lowercarbon Capital

Lowercarbon Capital invested $4.2M in FarmHQ's Seed Round. Lowercarbon backs companies working to cut CO₂ emissions, accelerate carbon removal, and find approaches to cooling the planet. Their agriculture portfolio focuses on reducing inputs — fuel, water, and synthetic fertilizer — at farm scale.

FarmHQ fits that thesis directly: eliminating unnecessary pump runs cuts diesel or grid electricity, and dialing irrigation cycles to actual soil demand reduces water draw from aquifers and rivers under increasing regulatory pressure.

What We Believe

Four things we won't compromise on

Farmers install it themselves

If a product requires a certified technician to install and commission, most farms in the US will never afford it. Every FarmHQ product decision runs through the test: can a farmer with a basic toolkit do this in an afternoon? If not, we redesign it.

Cellular first, Wi-Fi never

Pump sites are rarely next to a router. Building around cellular connectivity from the start means our product works in a field at the end of a two-mile dirt road, not just in a barn with fiber internet. No Wi-Fi mode. No exceptions.

Data belongs to the farmer

Your telemetry is yours. FarmHQ will never sell operational data to commodity traders, insurance companies, or input suppliers without explicit opt-in consent. You can export or delete your data at any time through the app — full stop.

Priced for working farms

Most precision ag hardware is priced for 5,000-acre operations. FarmHQ's hardware and subscription are designed to pencil out for a 200-acre family operation. If a product can't justify itself on one pump station, we don't ship it.