Leading a third, fourth, fifth generation family farm? There’s a lot to be proud of when carrying on the family business: decades of growing knowledge, with the tried and true practices passed along from earlier generations, can warm the heart with tradition and spell success for harvest season. But there may be some old routines worth letting go of – say, like manual data entry from clipboards – in favor of more robust digital tracking solutions like Croptracker’s Quality Control (QC) module.

Effective workflow advancements in agriculture can’t happen from the sidelines. When Croptracker CEO Matt Deir reflects on the company’s oldest relationship with Tregunno Farms, he’s brought back to one of his early RFID product development discussions with Ryan Tregunno, manager of the post-harvest side of the business.

If online tool adoption feels a little overwhelming, that’s understandable. Determining what would be most effective for a growing or distribution operation that’s historically relied upon paper tracking and Excel can be daunting, especially when acronyms are peppered throughout feature descriptions.

According to the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Unit (ITU) in 2019, only 38% of homes in rural areas had access to the internet. Growers and distributors’ operations are more often located in areas that can be considered rural or remote – frequently meaning that there’s less reliable (if not non-existent) internet connectivity access for workers and local residents.