Sarah Hinkley grew up in a farming family, and her hands and heart are still in the soil.
Hinkley, her brother Jaron and husband, Bryan Stafford, founded and operate Barn Owl Precision Agriculture, a high-tech company that manufactures agricultural robots that perform repetitive chores for farmers and help ease their labor needs.
In 2017, “we got started to find a way to help the local farmers in the La Junta area,” Hinkley says. The first service was a drone analysis system that could scan fields and feed information to farmers. The product evolved to include small robots that could fit between rows to do chores like weeding, and then bigger ones that could navigate large boulders.
“The original mission was always just to help farmers have sustainable business —something that makes them want to wake up every day and say, ‘I want to do this,’ and
something they’re excited to leave their kids,” she says.
After slow and steady growth for seven years, Hinkley is expecting 2025 to be a breakout year.
“We’re ramping up, and we have requests for $1.75 million in robot sales,” she says.
Going back several generations, Hinkley’s family farmed on land near La Junta and in Arkansas, where corn was the primary crop.
“We had small specialty crops — blackberries, tomatoes, chilies,” along with a small orchard, she says. “The biggest scale was the pasture and the cows. I remember having to do the chores in the small acres and then spending most of the rest of the day moving cows and putting feed out. That’s a big positive memory for me — sitting on the back of my grandfather’s tractor.”
Though they sprang from those roots, Hinkley and her brother took different paths in their early careers. She started working at a Chick-fil-A restaurant at age 14 and continued there after graduating from Texas State University in 2013. She was headed toward restaurant management and ownership, along with Jaron, who worked with her.
“My goal was always to bring joy to people through food,” Hinkley says. “I just wasn’t satisfied with how happy I was making people. I decided that I wanted to look at what else was out there.”
She went back to school and earned a master’s degree in healthcare administration and management, but ultimately decided healthcare wasn’t for her, either.
“I returned to the soil and, and that’s where I really started to commit to the startup idea, to the seed of Barn Owl,” she says.
Jaron helped Sarah build the drive-through system at a Chick-fil-A that’s still used today, but in 2014, he went to work for a company that flew drones over stockpiles, rocks, landfills and sands to analyze and measure them.
In 2015, Sarah, Jaron and then-boyfriend Bryan decided to move back to Colorado Springs from Texas and open a restaurant. But Jaron had long had ideas about using technology to improve farmers’ lives, and the drone company was born.
For the first couple of years, Jaron and Sarah held restaurant jobs to bootstrap the company, and worked out of a 900-square-foot house in Colorado Springs. By 2019 they were gaining traction and brought on Bryan, who had studied computer science, robotics and navigation.
Bryan “has been able to build this entire beautiful, incredible system, where we’re at today,” Hinkley says. Jaron develops the hardware, while Sarah heads the company as CEO. Barn Owl now has nine employees and is looking to hire more.
Along the way, Hinkley has acted on the issues, ideas and suggestions of her farmer clients, and she’s gotten support from the entrepreneurial community.
She completed a business development course at Mi Casa Resource Center in Denver, a woman-focused program that ended with a pitch to other women business owners, who recommended she seek venture capital. Family and friends helped finance a prototype robot, and when Hinkley presented the concept to the Greater Colorado Venture Fund, she was awarded $50,000. The fund in turn connected her with the Emergent Campus in Florence, where the company is now headquartered.
“We had no idea how much positive impact we could have with this technology,” Hinkley says. “We’re creating internships, creating high paying jobs in rural communities, and I’m working to do that at scale.”
Hinkley encourages women, especially those in tech, to follow an entrepreneurial path.
“If you have an idea and you want it to create value for others, model it out, plan it out and talk about it to people you trust,” she says. “Colorado has really good resources. Find me on LinkedIn if anybody wants to ask me questions, and if I can’t answer them, I have a massive network of women who are trying to be supportive and available to others. We are here. Come find us.”
