When Kent Egerton-Warburton started writing software in the early 1980s, little did he know that the language he was using was far more readily understood in the bush than the BASIC code he used.
According to users of the Kojonup pastoralist’s program, the cash management program he developed “spoke farmer”, an advantage that helped the software, now known as Agrimaster, become a major force in the local market.
Four decades later, Mr Egerton-Warburton has passed control of his business on to the next generation, but the family still believes the Agrimaster software retains that essence of farmspeak despite the multiple iterations over the decades that now use code that is increasingly unrecognisable to the former sheep breeder.
Despite being a tale about computers and programming, the Agrimaster story leans far more into the Australian outback where innovation was more entwined with survival and, when faced with something that needed repair, its inhabitants most often made do with fencing wire.
Given that notion of self-sufficiency, Mr Egerton-Warburton was an early adopter in the market for portable computers, buying what was the first available such product known as the Osborne 1 for a price that would be around $10,000 in today’s dollars and was soon coding a budgeting system.
While Agrimaster trailblazed systems development in its space for 15 years, Mr Egerton Warburton remained a farmer, albeit increasingly part-time and, by the early 1990s, with the help of sons David and Robert.
The emergence of Microsoft’s world-beating Windows graphics interface for its operating system in in the early to mid-1990s was a big challenge to Agrimaster and prompted Mr Egerton Warburton to leave farming to his sons and go into the software business fulltime.
As it happens, the latter half of that decade was important to the longevity of Agrimaster for different reasons. During those years, David and his partner Natalie became more and more immersed in the software through an internet training business they ran.
The disruption for Agrimaster, one which turned out to be positive, was the introduction of the GST which introduced significant complexity for farmers, especially with the need to report quarterly to tax authorities.
The GST transition, which came with significant threat of severe penalties for non-compliance by the federal government, also coincided with a major change in the payment system operated by Australian Wheat Board monopoly grain exporter, which affected many WA Agrimaster customers.
“It is hard to underestimate how difficult that combination of the GST and AWB’s payment system changes really was,” Kent Egerton-Warburton said.
The impact on Agrimaster was immense and was a catalyst for the transition in ownership that occurred around that time. David had stopped farming and moved to Perth, while Kent’s role as the company’s programmer of new software was about to end.
David and Natalie took over the distribution rights for Agrimaster and the basic form of the business as it stands today was formed.
“It was like a startup again in so many ways,” David Egerton-Warburton said.
“We had to move our training business and life to Perth over a long weekend.
“We were running support services and we had to ask during (a property) settlement to put phone lines into the shed in the back.”
