Outback Almonds: Time-saving App increases productivity
About our farm
I manage and operate my family’s 35 Ha almond property in Western NSW. The orchard was established by my parents in the late 1990s with an initial 12 Ha planting and has been gradually expanded to its current size over the past 23 years. We have four varieties of almond tree: Non-Pareil, Carmel, Fritz, and Wood Colony, producing approximately 105 tonnes of almond kernel per year. The trees blossom in August and the nuts grow vigorously until late December, where they begin drying out in preparation for harvest from late January to late March.
Major Benefits For Our Farm
I use the Farmable app nearly every day primarily as a tool for recording and planning jobs on the orchard. Generally, I work by myself in multiple locations on the orchard during the day. As such, I am often finding jobs that need to be done while I am doing other jobs. The Notes tab in the app allows me to record these jobs in an easily accessible location so I can then plan when to come back and complete the job once I am finished with the job I was doing. This has greatly improved my efficiency in the orchard.
The most important further benefit of the Farmable app for me is in the Spray tab. This feature allows me to easily record every detail of every spray I do on the orchard. This becomes very beneficial when our spray program is audited every year by the processor we sell our almonds to. The auditor is required to confirm every spray we do on the trees to ensure that we are not exceeding the Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) of certain chemicals. All I do is show the auditor the Farmable app, and the entire year’s spray data is available for them to analyse. This greatly increases the reliability of the information for the auditors and saves me a lot of time and effort in trying to remember the exact details of 12 months worth of work.
*Article originally written in 2021, Updated in June 2025.