Farmer feedback and suggestions is key to everything that we build here at fieldmargin. Doing our end of year survey and reading all of your responses is something we really enjoy which is also very useful for planning what new features and improvements we should add to fieldmargin. This year we had over 300 responses to the survey from 26 countries! Congratulations to the winners of our prize draw – you should have received an email notifying you.
Of our respondents 80% said they would recommend fieldmargin to other farmers. Working out to an NPS score of 49 from our paying farms, which is brilliant.
The main benefit that farmers mentioned from using fieldmargin was better record keeping. Of course our mapping was also mentioned and improvements that come along with that such as more accurate field measurement information, easier navigation for farm staff and help planning rotations. Lots of people also mentioned how fieldmargin has helped with team communication and planning work.
We released lots of new features to fieldmargin which we spoke about in our end of year roundup here. The most popular feature that we released this year was our improvements to field job records. These introduced the ability to record weather conditions and start/finish times for each field on a job which means that your records will be aligned with the information that Red Tractor and Global GAP require.
We know it’s been a challenging year in farming with ripple effects from the war in Ukraine causing price inflation and supply chain disruption. We also continued to see an increasing number of extreme weather conditions, from drought in Europe that revealed long-hidden ancient artifacts in river beds to flooding in Australia and extreme cold and snowfall at the end of the year in the USA.
These themes came up in our survey when we asked what has had the greatest impact on your farms this year. With two key themes coming up across the countries our users farm in.
Unsurprisingly weather was mentioned the most with 32% of you mentioning something to do with it. Most of this was related to water availability with extremes of drought or too much water! However it was nice to hear from a few of you who had just the right amount of rain and had achieved bumper crops (congratulations).
The second biggest impact was cost inflation, in particular the rising costs for inputs like fertilizer (which had 300% inflation in some parts of the world this year) and fuel. Labour costs and availability also came up as a challenge, particularly for those of you who rely on seasonal workers such as at harvest. Of course the flip side to this is that sale prices have been higher than usual and some of you mentioned particularly high sale prices – particularly for those growing cereals or grain crops.
All of this means there is even more reason to be keeping track of your inputs, yields and costs on fieldmargin so that you can compare costs and productivity across your fields. We recently updated our guide on how you can use fieldmargin for assessing and benchmarking Gross Margins – read it here.
Ready to give fieldmargin a go?
If you have any further questions, suggestions or help with anything at all email support@fieldmargin.com.