A Unique Gift the Whole Farm Will Want
Need a gift for the grower, child or farmer-customer in your life? Two companies have thought of a product that caters to the farm kid in all of us.
Aerial Rug and Boundri are using satellite imagery to create custom farm products that allow imaginations to run wild in farmers young and old. Whether it’s a wall hanging for the farm office, a blanket for a client, or their most popular item: rugs that take carpet farming to the next level.
“I’ve got little kids, and I wanted to create something kind of cool for them,” says Nathan Faleide of Boundri. “I bought a rug and made one of a farm field in North Dakota. I brought some old farm toys that I had as a kid out and they really seemed to enjoy it.”
Faleide, who has a nearly 30-year background in satellite imagery, saw his product quickly go viral on Twitter.
Susan Stroud’s company, Aerial Rug, was built from similar inspiration. Her son’s love for farm toys sparked the idea of farm landscape rugs.
“We created all sorts of different already laid out landscapes like a feed yard in Kansas or a gold mine out west,” Stroud says. “We quickly realized it was a market for something custom and people wanted their own farms on rugs.”
Though both companies started with carpet farming in mind, they recognize their custom items are meaningful for anyone with a passion for agriculture – no matter the age.
“I had one customer who got one of the farm for his dad. His dad is retired and lives in town but it’s in the front door of his house,” Faleide says. “They don’t even own the farm anymore so it’s a nice memento.”
Faleide shares other customers have placed the rugs in their offices or used them for farm safety demonstrations with local schools. Stroud has also had orders from real estate brokers who give them to clients.
How to Bring the Farm Indoors
To get these customized gifts under the Christmas tree, the process varies slightly between the companies.
Aerial Rug uses customer-submitted photos, screenshots, addresses, etc. as a guide to know where to pull satellite images. And according to Stroud, they’re able to work with just about anything.
“Someone sent me a photo of one of those old flyover pictures that were popular in the 80s and 90s,” she says. “We were able to use image enhancing and we printed that old school image on a rug.”
Boundri customers use a free mapping program on the company’s website to build their own product, which the company hopes will save time and improve accuracy. They input their address or zoom into a specific area and manipulate the map view or layers to their liking. Customers can also upload their own drone or logo files to the program.
Both companies are able to use a few different years of satellite imagery if the customer has a preference to the time of year the photo was taken, but there are limitations to what is available in rural areas.
Things to Know Before Ordering
Rugs from either company are available in multiple different sizes, depending on the customer’s needs and price point, and are made from a woven polyester material similar to an outdoor rug.
As for their durability, Faleide has put one to the ultimate test.
“I had an extra rug and gave it to my local daycare where my kids go,” he says. “It’s been played on nonstop for the last year and still looks good. I call that probably 10 years of experience in one year for being at a daycare.”
The size of the farm that will fit on a rug depends as well. Some customers are looking to achieve a 1/64 scale to match the size of farm toys (which according to Stroud would fit 20 to 25 acres), some prefer to have the farmstead prominent, and some just want to include as much land as possible.
Rugs from Aerial Rug take about 10 to 14 days from the time the order is approved by the customer and Boundri will need seven to 10 days from when the order is processed.
If a custom farm rug sounds like the perfect Christmas gift for someone on your list, both companies have set the first week of December as their cutoff to guarantee it makes its way onto Santa’s sleigh.
