What is Agricultural Record Keeping Software?
Agricultural record keeping software platforms help growers centralize their records, improve their productivity, and make better decisions for their farms. Software platforms can vary in both features and scope, but the best platforms will allow you to easily measure and manage all aspects of your organization from anywhere.
Why keep records?
Agricultural record keeping software can allow growers and farm employees to easily record and view all their production costs and events, from the initial planting and field work, to chemical application, production labor costs, harvest events, packing, and shipping.
At the absolute minimum, growers must keep records to comply with legal requirements for taxes and restricted chemical or pesticide use, but additional record keeping can be a valuable tool. Tracking expenses, from equipment runtime, to labor costs, to chemical and fertilizer costs, helps growers to make informed decisions when pricing products to ensure greater profits.
An obvious essential for managing payroll and piecemeal payouts for your farm workers. More efficient payroll record keeping can save valuable time and money by speeding up the payroll process. Effectively tracking piece-rates for harvest can motivate workers, and make assessing overall productivity easier.
Many farms that employee temporary foreign workers are legally obligated to track not only hours worked, but hours offered to their employees, in addition to the usual hourly and overtime tracking, and to maintain detailed records of all employee activities on the farm.
Used to compare crop yields from year to year, yield records can reveal patterns overtime to help growers make educated decisions for their crops in the future. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so record keeping around harvest quality and quantities is essential to growers tracking their income against their production costs.
Essential for both food and worker safety, as well as for compliance with export laws and business requirements at major food retailers, spray and chemical records are critical to farming operations. In many countries, chemical use reporting is mandatory to comply with regulations around food and environmental safety, and maximum residue limits (MRLs) are put in place to protect consumers. Records of spray dates, chemicals used, and safety intervals suchs as the re-entry interval and the pre-harvest interval protect your customers and employees from exposure to potentially harmful residues.
Food safety and traceability records:
A growing concern for growers and consumers worldwide, food safety and traceability records are another major requirement. The Global Food Safety Initiative, or GFSI, established in 2000 sets global food safety standards and certifications to demonstrate that produce has passed its rigorous food safety standards. Global Good Agricultural Practices (G.A.P.) is the most widely used international standard for farm production, and includes standards for food safety and traceability, environmental protection, worker safety and welfare, animal welfare, and more.
To meet these standards, a rigorous auditing and record keeping system is required, to ensure safety and traceability of products being sold to consumers worldwide. Effective agricultural record keeping is also a must for an easy auditing season. The more accurate and precise records you have available for an auditor, the quicker and easier the process will be.
Why use a record keeping software?
Using a mobile farm record keeping app to enter data can help farmers to eliminate double entry of harvest or spray information. Typically recorded in the field on paper, traditional record keeping methods are at a high risk for loss or error. Data is harder to organize, and audit time means searching through pages and pages of records to find what you need. Paper records are more susceptible to human error, and all calculations need to be done manually. Additionally, the risk of record loss or damage is high. Cloud based records eliminate the headache of storing, sorting, and retrieving physical records. This frees up office space and makes surprise audits and record requests less daunting.
What are some features to look for in an agricultural record keeping software?
Farm management and record keeping software systems are extremely varied in scope. Some platforms will offer a comprehensive overview of all aspects of production, while others focus on a single aspect of operations, such as spray record sheets and agricultural chemical application records.
Chemical Application Records
Digital chemical application records can vastly simplify your pesticide and chemical application recording. Look for a software system that will help track not only your applications, but your farm chemical inventory levels. Some software programs will even calculate tank mixes for you!
Improved record keeping, access to chemical information, and REI and PHI notifications are great features to look for.
Harvest Yield Records
Yield data stored by agricultural record keeping software can be an asset to growers identifying patterns in their yield across time. Software that will record not only your yield, but track harvested inventory and picker data can improve traceability and help establish productivity trends.
Labor Productivity Records
Systems with farm employee time tracking will allow you to monitor what your employees are working on at any time and to review productivity trends by employee or by team. Record keeping systems can allow growers to keep records of work hours offered, work hours completed, and work activities completed throughout the day.
Farm Analytics
Farm record keeping programs with built in data analytics will help you to make the most of your data, providing insights into best practices for your operation, and modelling your data in simple, human readable formats.
Keeping accurate farm records is crucial to growers who want to measure their efficiency and progress throughout the year. With comprehensive records, time spent on administrative work such as payroll and audits can be drastically reduced. Agricultural record keeping software helps growers to make better use of their data, and to improve organization both in the office, and in the field.