This is the season to kill the wasted hours on farm administration.
It’s no secret. Farmers work long hours.
Across Europe, those of us working in agriculture have the longest average work week when measured against other industries. The highs and lows of these working hours are likely to have the biggest variability as well; quieter weeks in the off-season for planning and purchases are a stark contrast to the 80+ hour weeks during harvest season.
Farmers are the hardest working people I know.
The average European farm worker has a work week of 42.8 hours. That’s 5 hours more per week than the average EU working citizen who works 37.5 hours/week. Wouldn’t you like an extra hour in your day, every day?!
How can we make this a reality for farms?
How do you spend your time?
Your time is valuable, No matter what you grow or where you grow it. Like the General Manager of any business, you need to prioritize the tasks that provide the biggest return to your business. In farming, those tasks usually include things like discussing challenges with agronomists, evaluating new crops, cultivation methods, seed varieties, chemicals and training the people who work with you. All of these things have the potential to create business value.
Better data can help rebalance this assessment.
Unfortunately, farm managers often get stuck spending time on low-value-added activities. How much of your week do you spend on these activities?
- Assigning tasks to workers
- Checking up on workers (Are they doing the correct task in the correct field?)
- Estimating products required for different jobs
- Documenting completed work activities
- Reconciling production numbers
- Calculating wages
Better data can help rebalance this assessment.
How to stop the low-value work
We can break down the list of typical low-value-added activities into three buckets:
- Communication
- Calculations
- Documentation
Farmable Pro is a digital tool farm managers and their teams use to save time. Here is how to reduce the time-wasting happening in each of these 3 buckets with the help of this user-friendly app for growers.
1. Communication
The reality of farm work is that a lot of time can get burned communicating with your team. Workers get spread out across a large area and are constantly moving to complete their work. Mobile networks can be unreliable, so a quick call or text message doesn’t always fix things, and you easily lose a few hours a week driving to have face-to-face conversations.
With Farmable Pro, you can visualize tasks in the field, plan the essential details, and share the tasks with each of your team members. Make changes on the fly from your mobile phone, and your teammates will automatically receive a notification of the change.
Want to know how the job is progressing? View progress for every job in real-time with GPS tracking and receive a notification on job completion.
Certain jobs require more attention than others, and communication is particularly important when working with agrichemicals. Farmable Pro will prompt your team members with smart alerts to keep them informed on product label requirements such as withholding periods, application intervals or limits. This keeps your team safe and your farm compliant. Since communication happens easily through the Farmable app, you save time updating team members on where they can safely operate daily.
2. Calculations
Math is everywhere on the farm, and some calculations can have serious consequences if they aren’t right. This means a lot of time can be soaked up by double-checking regular calculations. The biggest culprit here is calculating the correct dosages of chemicals required for crop applications. This is automatically calculated when you plan a spray job in the Farmable app so the product requirements are clearly known before the job is started and stated clearly to the operator filling the tank.
Harvest volumes are critical to get right. Particularly when you harvest a crop manually, like in fruit production, it can be easy to lose track of bins as they move from the field to storage and beyond. Skip the constant maintenance of lists or spreadsheets and capture harvest volumes easily from your mobile with Farmable. Pull harvest reports from your phone or desktop computer anytime you need it and have the peace of mind of knowing your production figures (per field or variety) are readily available to you.
Wage calculations can also lead to a mess of spreadsheets. When jobs are managed using Farmable Pro, hours worked per field per worker can be viewed and downloaded from the Job report. If you want a flexible and mobile-friendly timesheet solution, check out the Farmable Teams & Timesheets module.
3. Documentation
The number one time-waster on farms these days is documentation. There are an endless number of certifications and audits to prepare in order to both sell crops and safely operate a farming business. The reality is this list of requirements is only expected to grow with more regulations coming on environmental compliance and pesticide restrictions. So, how can you simplify the compliance processes on your farm?
Farmable Pro is built to save you time and keep you compliant. When you manage your core farming operations from the Farmable app, your data is automatically organized so you can view or print compliant reports whenever needed.
Easily access the following from your phone or desktop:
- Audit reports for regulatory authorities
- Reports for certifications such as Global GAP, Freshcare, QS GAP
- Export and download custom reports about fields, jobs and harvest for easy analysis.
Suppose your farm is still manually entering data from paper spray logs, harvest records or timesheets. In that case, there is a better way to manage the data that will keep you compliant, avoid frustrating administration work and save you a lot of time.
What's your time worth?
The average European growing season is approximately 28 weeks long. Changing how you communicate, calculate, and document farm work can save you a few hours a week. Over the season, that quickly accumulates into weeks of time back to you, your business or your family.
Farmable Pro has a flat price of 99 EUR/year per farm. Unlimited team members, unlimited hectares. There is always a 14-day free trial so that you can check your time savings over two weeks without any commitment.
Farm managers and their teams deserve a 37.5-hour work week. Better tools can make this a reality.
How much time can you save in a 2-week free trial?
