100,000 jobs recorded is something we can all be proud of. Supporting farms to digitally document work on the farm will benefit the farming industry as a whole.
May 16th, 2024
This week, we celebrate a great milestone at Farmable; our users have documented more than 100,000 farm jobs in our software. We think this is the ultimate definition of engaged farmers, and it’s the best way to determine that a farmer has begun the journey toward participating in digital opportunities.
We’ll dive into all the benefits of digitally documenting farm jobs, but first let’s define exactly what a job is.
What’s a farm job?
A farm job is a job undertaken by the farmer or their crew in the fields, which affects the growth and health of the soil and crop. The most important jobs to document properly are those involving pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, because those are often mandatory to document. Most Farmable users start documenting all types of jobs in the fields, like pruning, thinning, harvesting, and so on, as it gives the best overview of efforts expended versus yield obtained.
A spray job, for example, is not a tiny data point, it’s a full data set spanning up to hours and days of work and includes, for example, the following data:
- Fields: what fields the job included. This also includes what type of field is being used. Is it covered? Row structures? Open field?
- Crops: what crop categories, varieties and other details about the currently planted crop
- Causes: The agronomic reasoning for the job. What pest or disease does a job treat? With the rise of integrated pest management, documenting this step is essential.Â
- Applications:Â In what ratio is the product(s) and water mixed, including specific details about the tank used. This includes the necessary safety protocols for handling products and information on product use restrictions.Â
- People: What persons have been involved? Who created the job, who approved it, and who executed it.
- Equipment: What equipment was used, including tank size, inspection information and registration numbers.Â
- Weather: The weather during job execution is automatically collected from the farm’s own weather station or estimated based on globally available weather data via the Farmable app. This estimation will include Delta T for Farmable Pro subscribers.
- Location: A completed GPS track for the job execution is available to verify the location of the job completed, along with the average speed driven by the person executing the job.
The job data makes the farmer compliant
In addition to the simple fact that having better data allows the farmer to make better decisions, there’s the added benefit of being compliant with current and upcoming regulations, an automatic direct benefit of simply documenting each job as guided in the Farmable app.
Now that the data for each farm job sits in a database, it can be repurposed to fit any reporting and documentation needs requested by the farm.Â
For example:
- Monthly reporting to government databases as required by the EU or central legislation
- Reporting to Global GAP or other certification authorities
- Reporting to wholesalers and other customers seeking improved traceability for the produce.
Benefits for the agricultural industry
The 100 000 jobs we have supported have been recorded across all continents, for all crop categories and are documented and stored in a harmonized format. This means all the data can be directly compared and analyzed. Want to know the difference between growing pink lady apples in Australia and Italy? The data contains the weather, the agronomy practices, the disease pressure, the harvest volumes, you name it.
Down the road, artificial intelligence will work its magic with this data and learn to become a useful tool for real-world agronomists. The industry at large, including the farm, will benefit from the products and services that can be developed from a global set of harmonized data. Â
More immediately, the data should inspire various industry players to think differently about their own future strategies. Some examples:
- For agronomists and chemical manufacturers: The weather data can be overlaid with the GPS track, so the efficacy of the spray can be analyzed taking weather changes into account.
- For the equipment providers: The data shows how the equipment is being used in the field, how many kilometers at what speed, spraying what chemical products at what times for what purpose, and so on.
- For the autonomous robot providers: The 100 000 jobs includes 350 000 kilometers of GPS track, which can be analyzed to identify driving routes inside of field boundaries. Just like the robot vacuum cleaners creates a map of your home, we already have the date to create the robot map for thousands of agriculture fields.
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The list goes on. The start of digitizing agriculture lies with supporting the farm to document what is actually done by farmers today.Â
Want To Know More?
Contact us to talk about API access to aggregate farming data.
