At Cereals 2018 we are announcing two new features that will help give an overview of what is happening on your farm by showing where your team and machinery are: Team Radar and Vehicle Locations. These join our existing mapping, record keeping, task planning and communication tools to bring your farm map to life.
A lot of conversations on farms centre on two questions: “Where are you?” and “How are you getting on with that bit of work?”.
We realised that “I’m halfway across the second field, near to the telegraph pole” is not an effective way to share that information. It also requires you to stop working and get your phone out to do it – not always convenient or even possible. Being able to find team members when they cannot be contacted is particularly important on a farm where people are often working alone in remote locations.
Team Radar lets you answer the question of “Where are you?” seamlessly by showing the location of your farm’s team members on your farm map which you can view on your phone or on the web app.
Once set up with your farm’s working hours, each of the people on your farm can choose to share their location using the GPS on their mobile phone. Their location and when it was last updated can then be viewed on the farm map. Team members’ locations are only shared the during working hours that have been set for the farm and they can easily stop sharing their location if, for example, they have a day off.
This is supported by Vehicle Locations, which lets you see where your farm’s machinery is. Initially this will be John Deere Machinery that is able to share live telematics and location data (‘JDLink’ ) but we are keen to expand support machines of all colours so that you can see where all your kit is in one place. We are in conversations with machinery manufacturers to facilitate this. In time we will also show more information from your machinery such as engine health and fuel consumption.
Together these two new features will let you easily see where your team and machinery are on the farm so that you can:
- See the progress of work
- Check who is nearby to help with a job
- Find team members without disrupting their work or if you can’t contact them
Using fieldmargin at harvest allows you to share farm maps so everyone knows where they should be working, tasks so they know what they should be working on and can record when it has been completed, an instant messenger to ask questions and share status, and live locations to see where your team and machinery are so you can see progress on work and find people in case of a problem.
fieldmargin is a completely free app which works on mobile devices (iOS and Android) and on computers via our web app. You can sign up for an account here or learn more about the app here.
If you’d like to know more, have comments or questions you can get in touch by emailing support@fieldmargin.com or calling us on (+44) 203 289 4200.