Laura Preuss manages 320 ha of avocados across 160 blocks with Farmable, New Zealand
Laura Preuss is the farm manager at Avocado Heaven, a 320 ha avocado orchard in Tapora, Northland, New Zealand, farming across 160 individual blocks. Before Farmable, keeping records across that many fields was a logistical challenge - activity scattered, block histories difficult to retrieve, coordination during harvest hard to maintain. Over the past three years, Avocado Heaven has used Farmable to centralise spray records, harvest logs, mowing runs, and irrigation checks across all 160 blocks, with every team member recording jobs directly from their phone in the field.
Before Farmable
Managing 160 avocado blocks means tracking spray applications, mowing schedules, irrigation checks, and harvest records for each individual field, simultaneously, across seasons. Without a central system, that volume of activity is difficult to manage consistently. Records were scattered, field histories were hard to retrieve, and ensuring the whole team was working from the same information required constant manual effort.
During harvest, the most time-critical period of the year, coordination and traceability were particularly difficult to maintain. Timing and communication between team members needed to be precise, and any gap in the records created risk around compliance with buyer requirements and industry standards.
How Avocado Heaven uses Farmable
Avocado Heaven uses Farmable to record and manage activity across all 160 blocks. Spray jobs, mowing runs, irrigation checks, and harvest records are all logged in the app, either in the field from a phone or at the office via the desktop portal.
Each block has its own record history in Farmable, including field notes and photos. This means the team can review what happened in a specific block in previous seasons, spray timings, crop health observations, past decisions, without searching through paper files or spreadsheets. Laura describes it as "an incredibly useful tool for tracking the history of each block, making it much easier to access past activities and decisions."
Every staff member at Avocado Heaven has Farmable on their phone. Jobs are updated in real time from wherever they're working in the orchard, so the whole team is always looking at current information. During harvest, when timing and coordination are critical, harvest data, yield logs, and activity records are visible to everyone as they're entered.