Farm Management Software and Apps

What farm management software covers

Farm management software is a catch-all name. Some products are full systems that hold fields, crops, inputs, labor, machinery and money in one database. Others do one job well, such as spraying records, payroll or grain contracts, and expect you to export the data somewhere else. Before you compare brands, it helps to know which of these jobs you actually need covered.

Most agriculture software on the market falls into five groups:

• Records and compliance: what was planted, sprayed, fertilized and harvested on each field, with dates, rates and operators.
• Planning: crop plans, rotations, budgets and field layouts for the coming season.
• Inventory: seed, chemicals, fertilizer, fuel and parts, with stock levels that drop as jobs are logged.
• People and machines: rosters, task lists, work orders and equipment hours.
• Field data: yield maps, soil tests, weather and satellite imagery that show what is happening in the crop.

A single family farm might only need the first two. An agribusiness running several sites with seasonal crews will lean on all five, and on how well they share data.

Farm record keeping apps and software

Records are where most farms start, because someone outside the farm asks for them: a buyer, an auditor, a lender, a certifier or the tax office. Good farm record keeping software lets the person doing the job log it on a phone at the field edge, with the field, product, rate and time filled in from lists, then turns those entries into the reports each of those people wants.

Three things separate the apps that get used from the ones that get abandoned after a month. They work without a signal and sync later. They take under a minute per entry. And they export cleanly to a spreadsheet or PDF, so the data isn’t trapped if you switch products. Inventory is the natural next step, since a logged spray job can deduct the chemical from stock; our guide to agriculture inventory management software covers how that link works.

Crop planning software and field data

Crop planning software works from a map of your fields. You draw or import each boundary once, then assign crops, varieties, planting dates and expected yields, and the software adds up seed, fertilizer and labor needs for the season. Market gardeners and pasture managers use simpler versions of the same idea to plan beds, paddocks and grazing rotations. If you are designing new blocks, our article on farm layout apps looks at that step on its own.

The plan is only half of crop management software. The other half is knowing how each field is doing once the crop is in. Many systems now pull in satellite imagery for this, because it covers every field on the same day without a field walk. In Farmonaut satellite crop monitoring, for example, you map a field by drawing it or uploading a KML, KMZ or shapefile, and we update 16 satellite views of it at 10-meter resolution each time a satellite passes over. The report covers crop health, water need, soil, expected yield, pest risk and fertilizer, and the same data is available through our API if your main system needs it.

Agriculture staff scheduling software and work orders

Once a farm has more than a handful of people, the whiteboard stops working. Agriculture rostering and scheduling software assigns shifts and tasks, records hours for payroll, and shows managers which jobs are done, waiting or running late. Work order tools do the same for machinery repairs and maintenance. Our overview of agriculture scheduling software compares tools for tasks, staff and fleets.

The test of a scheduling app is the field worker’s side. If the crew can’t see their task list on a phone, in their own language, with clear instructions, managers end up phoning them anyway. Our farm task management app takes this approach: managers assign tasks with instructions, deadlines and resources, field staff see them in a mobile app, and a central dashboard shows each task as done, pending or delayed, along with completion rates by team.

How to choose farm management software

The best software for farm management is the one your team will keep using through a busy season. A short trial on a few real fields is usually worth more than a feature list. These are the questions we would ask on any demo:

Larger agribusinesses sometimes look at farm management software development services and a custom build instead. That makes sense when your workflows are unusual or you need to join several existing systems. For most farms, an established product plus a few connections through its API is quicker to roll out and cheaper to maintain. Our comparison of five agriculture management systems is a reasonable place to start a shortlist.