5 ways modern farm software makes your life easier

Farm records have a habit of living in several places at once: a notebook in the pickup, a spreadsheet on the office PC, an ageing software package, and someone’s memory.

When the assurance inspector calls, or the accountant asks what a field actually cost you, that scatter becomes a problem.

Richard Anscombe, who is leading xFarm Technologies’ as their UK Business Manager, works with UK farming Businesses making the shift from paper to a single digital record.

Here he sets out five ways the xFarm platform supports you in practical changes worth making.

Richard Anscombe © xFarm Technologies

1. Record the job where you do the job

Most record-keeping fails for a simple reason: it happens hours after the work is finished.

“By the time you’re back in the office, you’ve done four jobs and you’re writing down the one you remember best,” says Richard.

“Recording it in the field takes 30 seconds and it’s accurate.”

Spraying, drilling, fertiliser applications, stock movements and grazing can all be logged on the xFarm app directly from a phone at the point of work, with the field, date and operator details.

Once you are finished, you don’t have to worry about anything and your records are captured instantly and accurately on your xFarm system.

2. Get your data off the farm office PC

A single computer in the farm office is a single point of failure. It is also useless to anyone standing in a field.

With xFarm, cloud-based records mean the same information is available to you, your agronomist, your contractor and your accountant – from whichever device they happen to have.

“The question I ask farmers is: if that PC died tonight, what would you lose?” says Richard. “Usually it’s three years of cropping history.”

It also makes audits and inspections considerably less painful. Records can be pulled up on a tablet at the kitchen table, or exported and emailed ahead of a visit.

© xFarm Technologies

3. Let the machines do the paperwork

If your tractors and telemetry are already generating data, there is no good reason to type it in twice.

Connecting the fleet to xFarm – across makes and models – means field operations are recorded as they happen: which machine, which field, which operator, how long, how much. Sensors, weather stations and soil probes feed in the same way.

“Farmers are already paying for this data through the machinery they’ve bought,” says Richard. “Most of it never gets used because it sits in five different manufacturer portals.”

The practical gain is twofold: records you didn’t have to write, and a genuine picture of machine hours and field time when you come to cost a job or price contracting work.

© xFarm Technologies

4. Make the nutrient management plan work for you

The NMP is a compliance requirement. It does not have to be a compliance-only document.

With xFarm, where cropping, soil analysis, yields and applications are already held in one system, the plan largely builds itself – organic and manufactured nutrients, crop requirements, and a record of what actually went on each field.

“Done properly, the NMP stops being something you produce for someone else and becomes the fertiliser plan you’d have written anyway,” says Richard.

That matters for Farming Rules for Water, for Red Tractor, and for the growing list of buyers asking questions about nutrient use.

5. Know your gross margin field by field

Whole-farm figures arrive too late to change anything and hide too much.

In the xFarm platform, costing at field level – seed, fertiliser, chemical, machinery and labour time against yield and price – shows where the money is actually made.

“Nearly every farm has fields that are subsidising others,” says Richard. “Most people have a hunch about which ones.  Fewer can prove it.”

With inputs where they are, that evidence is what allows a sensible conversation about cropping, rented ground and rotation – rather than a decision based on the way it has always been done.