What is it like to manage a commercial avocado farm with broad-acre technology?
August 2024
Author: Matt Fealy
There are 3 things in my life that drive me; family, farming and technology. I have been lucky enough to balance these 3 things and that happens when technology supports the farm which allows the farm to support the family. Recently, this balance was disrupted, and it was painful across all fronts. Here is what I learned.
A Family Farm
Up until August 2023, I was the Farm Manager at Blue Sky Produce. Blue Sky is a 60 hectare farm that produces mangoes, avocados and Tahitian limes in Far North Queensland. My family and I lived here and thrived here for more than 10 years.
I also love technology and in 2017, I received a Nuffield scholarship to study technology I could use on the farm. I tested a lot of different digital tools but nothing was a perfect fit for tree crops. In 2019, I found a farm management app called Farmable. It was built from the ground up with experience from a fruit farm in Norway and it actually worked for tree crops! I started using it for delegating and recording spray jobs and quickly got hooked. I was saving time on paperwork and low-value tasks like assigning and recording jobs, freeing up more time to manage the farm and spend with the family. You can read more about my early experience with the app and the team from an earlier article – but suffice to say, this was the first farm management tool that really stuck with me.
(Full disclosure, I am now a Farmable ambassador and have share options in company).
While working at Blue Sky, I used Farmable daily. The product rather subtly wound itself into our natural operating workflow and never left. But then came the day that I left. And that’s when I began to notice what this fit-for-purpose app really meant to ‘the balance’ of family, farming and technology.
Bigger Not Better
I was ready for a new challenge and in September 2023, I took over as Farm Manager for a 300 hectare avocado farm. It is a high-density farm with over 250,000 trees. Not only was it a larger farm than Blue Sky, it required up to 100 staff during harvest season across 5 different planting stages across the farm.
The owners of the farm were not new to technology, They had tried to implement a wide spectrum of digital tools and platforms to improve the efficiencies of the operation. But like my earlier experience, they had been unable to find a tool that was fit for tree crops. So my first days on the new farm were spent trying to understand the patched together web of applications which were all primarily designed for broad acre crops.
Constantly using a tool that is a mis-fit, creates more work
Since none of the tools being used were designed for tree crops, there were constant compromises and work-arounds that essentially rendered these software tools useless. More than useless in fact, they were counterproductive.
I’m not writing this to blast broad-acre systems but rather to share why using a tool that isn’t fit for purpose can cause more harm than good. So let me get specific here on how this plays out in the farm in 3 very real ways:
1) Planning with a mis-fit system
Two expensive and incompatible broad acre systems were implemented on the farm, one for job planning and delegation, and the second for task recording and cost tracking, neither of them suited the workflow for an avo farm. I was immediately reduced to writing paper job plans. I’d need to start in Excel, to calculate the tank mix required for each job, and then print to paper to write out all the job details.
(Remember, this team is a lot bigger than my last one, which means many more people to plan jobs for).
Of course this paper gets lost, ripped, wet or ruined but should eventually be handed back to an administration resource which would manually input the cost of inputs used into one of the expensive broad-acre systems.
Pain Point: As Farm Manager, I should be managing the operation not getting weighed down on low-value tasks such as assigning work. These same processes created a huge amount of unnecessary administration when you consider the number of people working and the volume of tasks being done each day. Managing the gap between these two incompatible systems was actually creating more work than they could ever individually save.
2) Executing a work-order with a mis-fit system
One of the expensive, broad-acre systems was integrated in the equipment we are using on the farm. Despite the earlier paper planning exercise, I needed to create digital work orders to be sent to staff through this system and these jobs are connected to blocks. On an avo farm, blocks are a lot smaller than in broad-acre farms. We have 60 blocks, each 4.5 hectares and there are a dozen jobs to do across all 60 of them.
Here is the daily frustration of trying to use a work order system built for broad-acre in a tree crop operation:
- Start out to complete your first work order in the assigned block
- Drive down one row of approx. 120 metres and then you are about to enter a new block
- Stop. Wait for the RTK to load.
- Sync RTK (can take up to 20 minutes)
- Receive new work order for new block
- Drive a further 120 metres only to enter the next block…
- Repeat steps 3 through 5, again and again…
Pain Point: Obviously in broad acre, one work order may cover thousands of hectares, and the operator and machine may be in the block for days or even weeks. This is not the case for tree crops. This resulted in frustrated workers, massive amounts of wasted time by both drivers and equipment (those are expensive machines to sit idle!)
3) Reporting on completed work with a mis-fit system
Back in the office, the reports on job execution from the expensive, integrated broad-acre system don’t match with the second system used for cost/inventory tracking. This results in more administrative resources needing to work in Excel to match paper records on work planned against work completed and costs.
Pain Point: Manual data entry fills the gaps of the mis-fit system, this opens for unnecessary human errors and costs the company nearly an entire administrative FTE.
These mis-fit systems, used alongside with paper process to fill the gaps, resulted in:
- Day to day frustration for farm operations
- Wasted time for operating team and operating equipment
- Huge administration workload, with manual data entry processes ( ~ 1 full time resource)
- Management time wasted – (my time could be much better spent!)
On top of it all, these inefficiencies were costing the business more than 10, 000 AUD in software fees every year.
You can likely guess what happened next. I made it a priority to implement Farmable, ASAP.
Having worked on a farm where work processes were managed with technology, it was impossible for me (or my family) to go back to a place where technology was not supporting the farm.
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The 300 hectare farm is larger, with more people and overall a more complicated operation – but more complicated software didn’t help. Back at BlueSky, we paid less than 500 AUD/year for Farmable and I didn’t realise how much I was using until it was taken away.
There have been some significant changes on the farm recently. New upper management have been appointed, and they have allowed me greater autonomy over the technology being used. The first thing we did was cancel all broad-acre platform subscriptions and implement Farmable.
Luckily, due to Farmable’s intuitive design, it didn’t take long to retrain the staff..
Today, Farmable is being used for digital data management on the farm.
This is exactly what I mean by that:
1. Job planning is done from my mobile phone in the Farmable app
- Tank mixes are automatically calculated in the app making ordering products a breeze.
- I can assign blocks and operators to the job in just a few taps
2. Operators complete the jobs using Farmable
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- Everything a driver needs to know to do their job is in the Farmable app
- Work is GPS tracked, so progress can be viewed from the mobile
- No expensive proprietary equipment is required, just the mobile phone you already own.
3. Reporting is automated
- Spray diaries are automatically created and ready for audit
- Input costs related to a job or a field are instantly captured and readily available
- Product inventories are always updated
With this change, we were able to re-allocate a full-time administration resource. We are saving the money on the broad-acre software fees. Operators are less frustrated. And I’m spending my time managing the farm, not pushing paper. With the added benefit of having much more time with my family.
The Bottom Line
Don’t suffer with software that doesn’t fit your farm.
Using fit-for-purpose software gives a completely different experience than forcing the wrong system into place. While Farmable was the right solution for my farm, don’t give up until you find the right farm management tool for your farm. With a mis-fit system, you will spend more time fixing data gaps than you will benefit from the data management. With the right tool in place, the cost and time savings should happen easily and you won’t be able to go back to operating without it.
