In this customer spotlight, we are shining a light on a Harvest Quality Vision (HQV) user in the UK, Avalon Growers Producer Organisation (AGPO). This collectively owned marketing organization was formed in 2016 and is 50% grower-owned. Over a dozen apple and pear growers across the Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Kent and Hampshire regions have combined forces to manage the sale and marketing of their own fruit through AGPO. They have been using Croptracker since the 2020 harvest. For this piece, we spoke with Simon Everett, who is the farm manager at Moatlands Farm, one of the largest growing members of AGPO.

Located north-east of Toronto, Algoma Orchards stands out for its longevity and agricultural excellence. For over 50 years, Algoma has been family run and has cultivated and processed quality apples, building a legacy rooted in reliability, innovation, and a deep commitment to sustainable practices. As a leading grower, packer, and marketer of apples, producing 2 million boxes of apples and up to 10 million liters of apple juice annually, Algoma Orchards continuously seeks advanced solutions to maintain its high standards.

In this Croptracker Customer Spotlight, we were excited to connect with Molly Bell of Bell Farms. Located in Auburn Maine, the Bell family has been farming potatoes for nearly 100 years, operating under the Bell Farms name since 1937. Currently the farm is managed by the 3rd and 4th generation of the Bell family. Molly and her husband Shane work alongside Shane’s aunts, uncles and siblings to farm 500 acres of grain corn, sweet corn and potatoes. Molly Bell is the Farm Manager and Food Safety Coordinator at Bell Farms and has been using Croptracker since the 2021 harvest season.

Croptracker is excited to be featuring Columbia Fruit in our Customer Spotlight series. Since 2018, Columbia Fruit has been using Croptracker’s Punch Clock and Spray modules. Discover how Columbia Fruit leverages Croptracker’s employee management and spray tools to improve efficiency, track costs and activities and support audit processes. For this blog, we spoke with Farm Manager, Garrett Dolan. Garret has been at Columbia Fruit for the last 2 seasons and took on managing employees and ensuring proper record-keeping with Columbia Farm’s existing Croptracker workflow.

Cultivating Efficiency, Enhancing Food Safety and Traceability with Croptracker

Lakeshore Veggie Growers Inc, (LVG) located in Leamington on the shores of Lake Erie, is a family run business specializing in greenhouse grown, flavourful, heirloom tomatoes. Officially incorporated in 2008, Lakeshore Veggies has scaled up from three to 18 acres by acquiring surrounding farms as they become available. They now operate three main greenhouse and packing facilities, supplying various local national marketers in Leamington. This expansion has brought on a greater need for fast paced inventory management and food safety systems, leading LVG to seek out Croptracker’s farm inventory traceability features.

In this special edition of our Croptracker Customer Spotlight series, we take a closer look at several growing association users. The Ontario Apple Growers (OAG), Tender Fruit Growers (OTF) and Fresh Grape Growers (OFGG) worked with Croptracker to develop and launch our Association level features, now in use by several grower associations around the world. In this article we will explore the benefits for Croptracker Association users through the lens of their staff, Kelly Ciceran, Sarah Marshall and Larissa Osborne. We will also explore some of the advantages to their organization’s growing members Croptracker accounts.

Schriemer Family Farm at a glance

Location: Otterburne, Manitoba, Canada
Acres: ~300 acres
Main Crops: Onions, Pumpkins, Squash, Sweet Corn, Tomatoes, Peppers, Cucumbers
Croptracker Modules Order Desk, Packing, Receiving, Storage, Shipping, Harvest, Field Pack, Spray, and GAP Reports and Audits

About Schriemer Family Farm:
Founded in 1999, Schriemer Family Farm is a vertically integrated operation dedicated to growing choice vegetables while maintaining excellent relationships with customers. By combining field and greenhouse growing, they provide a diverse product range to major retailers and local shops year-round.

Challenge:
Managing a broad product range and custom-pack capabilities created a significant operational complexity, resulting in 16-hour administrative days. The farm struggled with a crushing workload of manual communication, fragile spreadsheets for orders, and the high risk of expensive errors when shipping mixed-customer orders.

Solution:
Schriemer Family Farm implemented an integrated digital workflow using Croptracker's Order Desk and logistics modules. This system provides digital validation for order fulfillment, replaces manual spreadsheets with a "source of truth" for inventory, and allows for seamless English-to-Spanish communication between the office and the shipping team.

Schriemer Family Farm, located in Otterburne, Manitoba, is a multi-generational, vertically integrated operation. They grow a diverse offering of fresh vegetables, including field-grown onions, pumpkins, squash, and sweet corn, alongside greenhouse-grown tomatoes, cucumbers, and sweet and hot peppers. Supplying major retailers and local co-op shops, their own pack house, storage, and logistics infrastructure also allows them to pack and ship for smaller local growers.

This Croptracker Customer Spotlight is focused on Scocan Holdings / Springvale Pines Farm. Located in Queensland Australia, Scocan Holdings is a family run farm business growing quality pineapples for the domestic market. We spoke with farm owners, Katherine and Scott Maxwell to learn more about the benefits they get from using Croptracker. They have been using Croptracker’s Spray module since 2019 to track their chemical and fertilization treatments. They are heading into their 5th season with Croptracker this year.

This month’s Customer Spotlight is highlighting WA Farm Direct’s use of Croptracker’s Harvest Quality Vision (HQV) module. We spoke with Rebecca Blackman, Executive Manager of WA Farm Direct about how HQV helps them gain insight into their exclusive management of the ANABP 01 apple variety.

Welsh Bros is a multi-generational family farm that has been working their land outside Scotland, Ontario, for well over 150 years. Stewardship for their land and management of their farm currently fall to the 8th generation, with three Welsh brothers sharing responsibility. For this Croptracker customer spotlight, we spoke with Charles Welsh.

While whole-farm metrics are necessary for tax season, they often act as a cover, hiding your revenue killers behind your most profitable blocks. The core value of block-level metrics is granularity. It moves you away from generalities and allows you to pinpoint exactly where you are losing money and where your ROI is highest.

Moving from high-level oversight to actionable precision requires a shift in how you capture daily farm data. To help you implement these practices, this article provides a roadmap for tracking the biggest expenses: labor, inputs, and water. We will walk through the essential setup requirements in Croptracker, from block mapping to chemical inventory, and explore the specific workflows and reports that transform raw field data into a clear picture of your true break-even price.

In the world of organic horticulture, a map is far more than a simple drawing of a field, it is a foundational legal and operational document. Whether you are a long-standing organic producer, a grower navigating the transition period, or managing a mixed operation with both organic and conventional plots, boundary mapping is the primary tool used to safeguard the integrity of your crops. This use case article will highlight the importance of boundary and buffer zone mapping and how our users do this in Croptracker today using the Field Map.

Driven by customer feedback, Croptracker recently developed a workflow to handle a new and significant requirement: building a full inventory of hundreds of thousands of trees on a newly acquired orchard and continuously recording their long-term health and performance. To make this goal possible, Croptracker added a new Plant Inspection workflow using our Quality Control and Field Map modules.

Croptracker is delighted to have been invited to Southern Ontario's first Innovation Expo, hosted by Innovation Guelph and Bioenterprise Corporation. The expo will showcase over 100 companies whose innovative projects were supported by Innovation Guelph and Bioenterprise Corporation's Federal seed funding program.  

Croptracker is looking forward to returning to this year’s Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Convention (OFVC), February 19-20 at the Niagara Falls Convention Centre. As one of the largest and longest running horticulture conferences in Canada, the OFVC is always an important way to build relationships with industry experts and new clients and strengthen ties with our loyal customers.

Croptracker is very excited to announce we will be exhibiting at the International Fresh Produce Association’s Global Produce and Floral Show this year. The show will be hosted at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta from October 17-19th.

Are you going to the Ontario Fruit & Vegetable Convention in Niagara Falls this year?  If so, make sure to drop by Booths 1022-1024 on the trade show floor to say hello and be one of the first to view a live demo of Croptracker's exciting upcoming module: Harvest Quality Vision.

Are you going to the Ontario Fruit & Vegetable Convention in Niagara Falls this year? If so, make sure to drop by Booths 1007-1009 on the trade show floor - we're looking forward to meeting everyone!

Croptracker recently released a new feature available to all our users on our reports called ‘SearchPanes’. Because this feature is potentially helpful to all our users, we have decided to drop a mini use case and help illuminate how and when to use it.