It's planting season on our client John's apple orchard. He's spent the last few weeks manually recording meticulous data on soil conditions, fertilizer applications, and planting locations for each of his 5,000 trees. Just thinking about having to transcribe all that data makes my hand cramp up!
But he can't afford to cut corners - without accurate records, John risks lowered yields, wasted fertilizer, and poor harvest forecasting. It's a headache for even small operations like his, and becomes unmanageable as farms scale up.
Thankfully, agriculture software offers a cure for John's frustrations. Let's take a look at how it can save farmers time and unlock key insights.
Current Manual Processes Are A Drag On Efficiency
During my early days selling herd management software, I visited a dairy farm still tracking their cows' milk production on paper charts. The owner showed me their intricate filing system that took hours of manual work each day. And when I asked to see milk yield trends over time, he could only sigh and say "One day I'll get around to entering it all in the computer."
Unfortunately that's still the reality on many farms today. Common tasks like recording planting data, tracking livestock, measuring harvests, and managing inventory remain manual, siloed, and clunky. For example:
Planting And Growing Operations
Farmers traverse their fields recording handwritten notes on paper maps. Those notes then get brought back and transcribed into a digital format. It's double the work!
Analyzing soil variabilities and planting the right seed varieties in response requires compiling scattered data in giant spreadsheets. And good luck interpreting it all - forget data visualizations.
Livestock Management
Notebook pages or whiteboards track animals' health and medications. Finding insights means sifting through reams of paper. Want to see the effects of a diet change over time? More manual analysis.
Inventory And Equipment Monitoring
Spreadsheets and whiteboards again for asset tracking. And listing out every inventory item purchased or used is yet more manual entry. Determining optimal future stock is near impossible.
Harvesting And Yield Tracking
Measuring harvests and produce shipments from different fields requires error-prone manual measurements and logging. Reporting by field, crop type, and season means sorting through it all post-harvest.
As you can see, the list goes on. And I've got the sore wrists and headaches to prove it!
Ag Software Goes Easy On You And Your Data
The right agriculture software package can break down these inefficient silos and give farmers back their sanity. Let's highlight some of the proven benefits:
Automates Data Collection
Instead of recording data manually, specialized sensors and equipment integrate seamlessly with agriculture software platforms.
Soil sensors transmit soil moisture and nutrient data wirelessly into your system. Drone-mounted cameras survey your crops and upload images for analysis. Tracking devices on livestock send movement and behavior data. Robotic milkers record hourly production per cow. The list goes on.
This automated flow of data removes the need for manual tracking.
Visual Insights Through Dashboards
Poring over spreadsheets is out. Agriculture software condenses millions of data points into interactive dashboards that help you visualize key trends and performance metrics.
See graphs showing your soybean yields increasing over time. Click to filter results by field or season. Zoom in on nitrogen levels spiking after a fertilizer application. The insights are endless.
Real-time Analysis and Forecasting
Running ad hoc analyses on the fly provides instant intelligence for decision making. Predictive algorithms can even forecast crop yields, future harvest timing, ideal planting dates, livestock weights, and more.
During a drought last season, our irrigation monitoring software predicted fallen crop yields. We worked with the farm to preemptively adjust budgets and crop insurance. Manual spreadsheets wouldn't have surfaced the risk until too late.
Eliminates Double Data Entry
Once data is digitized upfront, it flows directly into your platform. No more transcribing paper notes or re-entering numbers across systems. Updates sync bidirectionally across devices.
We integrated our herd management software with a client's robotic milking stations. Now milk output data uploads automatically instead of an admin entering numbers hourly. They can finally fire the data entry temps!
Scales Seamlessly
Whether you're managing 50 cows or 5,000 acres, agriculture software scales as your operation grows. There's no need to reinvent processes down the road.
When our client expanded from 5 dairy barns to 50, our platform easily onboarded the additional barns, cows, and users. We even visualized the new hierarchy with interactive org charts! Try that in Excel.
Tailored Software For Any Farming Need
Name a farming discipline - livestock, row crops, orchards, cannabis - and we've built tailored software to meet its needs. Here are some examples:
Farm Management Software
Centralize operational data from planting, irrigation, harvesting, storage and more. Includes visual crop health dashboards, mapped fields, and real-time inventory tracking.
Precision Agriculture Analytics
Analyze soil, crop, weather and topographical data for insights. Features variable rate technology integration, yield prediction, and prescription mapping.
Supply Chain Management
Track products from the time they arrive at your farm through processing, storage, and shipment. Enables traceability and reduced waste through expiration management.
Equipment and Asset Tracking
Attach IoT sensors to equipment for monitoring usage stats, location, diagnostics, and maintenance alerts. Keeps track of all farm assets in one place.
And with custom development, we can build around your farm's specific needs.
Custom Agriculture Software That Fits Like A Glove
Off-the-shelf solutions provide a strong foundation, while custom development tailored to your operations delivers maximum benefit.
Collaborating with our specialized AgTech engineers, we design purpose-built software that fits your workflows like a glove.
Features we commonly build include:
- Integrations with your existing hardware and software
- Customized data models and business logic
- Branded, intuitive user interfaces
- Role-based access control and permissions
- Automated notifications, alerts, and reminders
- Reports, labels, and documents with your branding
- Responsive web and mobile apps
- Data science capabilities like yield forecasting
- API access for expanding and integrating
We also coach you through moving off legacy systems and optimizing processes, ensuring user adoption across your operation.
The result? A solution built for your present needs and adaptable to future growth.
Conclusion
Agriculture software delivers insights not possible with manual processes alone. It saves time, reduces headaches, and enables data-driven decision making.
Automated data collection, analysis, and forecasting unlock key insights and eliminate double entry. Custom agriculture software development provides tailored solutions that scale as you grow.
Sound better than tracking data manually? Reach out for a demo tailored to your operation's needs. We're here to help you start optimizing processes today.
Author Bio
Jeff Parcheta is a Sales Director at Chetu Inc., a global, custom software development company, overseeing the Facilities Management, Residential Services, Insurance, Construction, Modeling, Drafting, and AI & Machine Learning accounts. A graduate of both the University of Texas at Arlington and Nova Southeastern University, where he received his MBA, Jeff joined Chetu in 2020, where he has built a reputation as a thought leader and industry expert within the IT community. Jeff has risen through the sales department ranks, helping the company grow into an award-winning organization.
You can express that as far back as the new progressions have been discovered, every business, ventures are enduring it to diminish their remaining burdens and enhance work quality.
Agriculture Industry is the equivalent than others, It has been a dynamic change in it since the arrival of new developments and programming.
In case of agribusiness business; unmistakable sort of business visionaries uses the help of the different kind of systems to vanquish their contentions.
If we see through the course of occasions, Agriculture business has grown unmistakably with developments.
We are walking around new examples and rapidly changing the development outlines in the entire cultivation industry.
Cultivating is among them, people call them Agriculture Drones.
Smart farms - farming of the futureWorld's population continues to grow every single year.
Therefore, the problem of nutrition is among the most urgent ones that humanity has to resolve.
We have to find new ways to obtain more food and use our land plots more effectively.
Old ways of increasing crop yield and livestock growth are not very efficient.
To prevent such a state of affairs, it is necessary to apply the latest developments in the IT sphere - both technologies and appropriate apps for agriculture.Farmer of the future - tablets and smartphones are his best friendsWhile robotic farmers still seem to become something in the distant future, human farmers keep on doing their job.
The received information is processed and stored in a cloud.
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