We are delighted to announce that our inhouse agritech start up, CropFarmer, has been shortlisted in the Agri Innovation Den 2019 competition.
The Agri Innovation Den competition, which is supported this year by BASF, is run by Agri Briefing, the media house behind national publications such as Farmers Guardian and industry leading events such as LAMMA.
Out of 100 entries of the latest farming innovations - from software, to satellites, to robots to genome editing, CropFarmer has been placed in the top 6. This shortlisting means we'll be pitching the tool, designed to be a very cost effective way to help farmers keep an eye on their budgets, to a "den" of Dragons at Farm 491's Gloucester based incubation centre in November.
There are various farm management tools available on the market, but they generally are so fully featured that their price point makes them unaffordable for smaller farmers, of which there are over 100,000 in the UK alone, with 5,000,000 farms worldwide still owner - or family - run. CropFarmer is completely farmer-led with regards to it's features, as the project came about from the direct need of Tom's father Richard. 5 years ago he gave up with the bigger pieces of software, finding them expensive and hard to use, and switched to a spreadsheet instead. Now a days that spreadsheet is getting quite unweidly - so he came to Tom for a easier solution and CropFarmer was born.
CropFarmer is designed to be easy to use even if you just dip in and out of it a couple of times a year. Although more and more is moving online, farmers are often a demographic who - whilst they love farm technology - are in a career which doesn't involve them sitting to a computer all day. Therefore if they use a piece of software just every few months, it needs to be clear how to use it when they log in each time. Using CropFarmer, they can quickly and easily - on any device - see their costs and returns on their crops in order to see what brings them the best return on their investment. They can also keep records alongside the costs they enter to help with their grain assurance checks.
If you'd like to create an account with CropFarmer and check it out - please do so here!