Corbin Massey still keeps the whiteboard sketch from the class project that became Plowline Analytics, a piece of software his Auburn startup now sells to row-crop farmers across the region. What began as an assignment to design a tool for tracking soil moisture data has grown into a company with a small but growing customer base and a handful of full-time employees working out of a co-working space near campus.
"I didn't set out to start a company," Massey said. "I set out to get a good grade on a class project. It just turned out other people wanted the thing I built."
From Class Project to Working Software
Massey said the idea for Plowline Analytics came from conversations with farmers in his home county who were frustrated by how disconnected their equipment data felt from actual decision-making. Soil sensors, irrigation systems, and yield monitors often produced numbers that never got compared against each other in any useful way, he said, leaving farmers to make judgment calls without a clear picture of what was actually happening across a field.
"The data existed, it just wasn't talking to each other," Massey said. "We built a platform that pulls it all into one place and tries to flag things a farmer would actually want to know, like which section of a field is underperforming and why."
After graduating, Massey spent nearly a year refining the software with feedback from a small group of local farmers willing to test early versions in exchange for free access. That feedback loop, he said, shaped almost every major feature the platform now offers.
Staying Rooted in Auburn
Rather than relocating to a larger tech hub after finishing school, Massey chose to keep Plowline Analytics based in Auburn, citing both the university's ongoing agricultural research programs and the practical benefit of staying close to the farming communities the software serves.
"If I moved to a big city, I'd lose the ability to just drive out to a farm on a Saturday and watch how someone actually uses the product," Massey said. "That kind of feedback is worth more than almost anything else we could invest in."
The company has also benefited from connections to Auburn's agricultural extension network, which Massey said helped him reach farmers outside his existing personal network and lent the young company credibility it might otherwise have struggled to establish on its own.
Scaling Carefully in a Cautious Industry
Massey acknowledged that farmers, as a customer base, tend to be skeptical of new technology, particularly software that asks them to trust digital recommendations over decades of hands-on experience. He said building trust has required demonstrating clear, practical value rather than leaning on flashy features.
"Nobody in this business cares about your app if it doesn't help them make a better decision about when to irrigate or where to focus attention in a field," Massey said. "We've had to earn every customer one field at a time."
Plowline Analytics currently serves a growing number of farming operations across the region, and Massey said the company is working on expanding its sensor compatibility so the platform can integrate with a wider range of existing farm equipment. He's cautious about growing too quickly, though, worried that expanding the customer base faster than the support team can handle would damage the trust the company has spent years building.
"We could probably sign up more customers faster if we pushed harder on sales," Massey said. "But if we can't support them well, we'd rather grow slower and keep the people who already trust us."
