About
An engineer on a family farm.
Leckerstone Labs is a founder-led studio, started by John Hutcheson to build practical technology for the problems he meets running a farm in Fife, Scotland.
Background
John trained as a mechanical engineer and spent his early career working in hydraulics, before completing a PhD. He then moved into the family farming business, where the day-to-day work of growing and selling crops sits alongside the paperwork, compliance and record-keeping that goes with it.
That combination shaped Leckerstone Labs. An engineer's habit is to measure a problem, build something to test an answer, and refine it. On a farm, the problems are close at hand: records kept in too many places, paperwork that has to be re-typed, crops that need to be identified at the right stage, and stored grain that needs watching.
Our projects start there. They are built and used on our own farm first, and we are open about how far each one has got.
How we work
A simple approach.
- 01
Understand the task
Start with the job as it is actually done, and what makes it slow, error-prone or expensive.
- 02
Build something testable
Make the simplest version that can be tried with real records, real crops or real equipment.
- 03
Try it in practice
Use it on the farm, under ordinary working conditions, and note what falls short.
- 04
Improve it
Fix what matters, drop what does not, and only then think about wider use.
Have a farming problem worth solving?
Tell us what you are working on.