Getting a plan in place is the first step to farming success. While challenges like the weather, disease, breakdowns or livestock can soon throw carefully constructed plans out the window, having something to refer to over the course of the season that the whole team can update provides a strong foundation to make your farming season run as smoothly as possible.
As the old adage goes: “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.”
In our web and mobile apps, it’s straightforward to set up plans for the new season and log what’s been done, as well as record data and measurements on the go. This means you have all farm records and reports to make informed decisions and to feel prepared in the run-up to farm inspections.
Here is our 6-step process for setting off the 2025 season as you mean to go on!
🗓️ Wrapping up the 2024 season – set input costs, record yields and log output prices so you can review, analyse and make management decisions for the season ahead
🌾 Setting up 2025 – assign field usages to create a colour coded living farm map, helping plan rotations
📋 Planning work – this includes field operations like drilling and fertiliser applications, as well as livestock treatments and day-to-day tasks
👩🌾 Share information with your team – get your farm team onboard fieldmargin and assign them tasks
🔢 Tracking data – whether it’s input use for costings, crop scouting, soil sampling or grass availability having easy-to-refer to data is key to aid decision-making and understand what is working or not
🛰 Using satellite imagery – monitor your fields and crop performance from space
Read on to find out how you can do all of this in fieldmargin, it really as complicated as you think it is!
Step 1: Wrapping up the 2024 season 🗓️
- Set costs for inputs used across the year To take a look at costs on a field level, take a look at the Field Input Report which has a detailed breakdown of inputs used per field with applications, rate applied, total and costs.
- Enter crop yield data Capture farm performance by recording each field’s yield using harvesting Field Jobs. You can compare crop and field performances via the Yield Report and export this for further analysis.
- Set output prices for what’s been harvested Entering output prices, even if estimates of current market values, will mean you can assess farm performance with gross margins per field or crop type.
Step 2: Setting up your 2025 cropping 🌾
2024 has been a difficult year for no end of farmers and many will have had to change their cropping plans due to the wet autumn which prevented the drilling of winter crops and large areas of crop losses due to flooding.
With cropping decisions changing over and over again, or having to re-drill a field after flooding, keeping track of what’s growing where can quickly become confusing. With fieldmargin you can record which crops are growing in each of your fields, this creates the colour coded map of your farm. The fields list will then show the total area of each crop type – handy to refer back to when ordering seed and other inputs.
Your farm records are grouped into Farm Years. This means that you can switch between views of cropping for different years to check on rotations. You can read more about this in our rotations guide here.
You can set up or edit your cropping in bulk using the edit fields feature. This allows you to choose all of the fields that you want to set for each crop type by selecting them from the list or on the map. You can also see the usage of each field in previous years.
Step 3: Planning field work and day-to-day tasks 📋
We know that in farming it’s impossible to plan with any certainty because of factors such as the weather. Knowing what work needs to be done and when helps keep things running smoothly on-farm and nothing gets forgotten. Everyone then knows what work is coming up and you can be ready to get to work on the next task – be that drilling, servicing machinery or worming livestock!
“With Field Jobs, I can keep track of everything that needs to be applied like fertiliser and herbicides. I can quickly see when the farm manager completed tasks as he gets things done. Even if I’m 200km away, I can load tasks and keep an eye on progress”
Charl Botha, livestock farmer, South Africa 🇿🇦
Before you start setting up your work, make sure you have the correct Farm Year selected. Farm Years act like a filing system for all work done in each growing season, helping you to keep records organised and produce reports for your farm, including gross margins.
Setting up field work – a refresher 🚜
You might not know exact dates when field work will get done, but you can start making a rough plan of key drilling, fertilising and spraying dates. For now, this could just be a rough due date, then more information can be added, such as inputs, later in the season.
Specific instructions such as which machine or implement to use can be added in the comments, and recommendation sheets from your agronomist can be uploaded as a file attachment.
You can find instructions for how to create Field Jobs and record inputs on jobs via our support site here. As you add inputs to your jobs, your reports will be updated with the totals you’re projected to use which you can use as a guide to help with ordering and costings.
Using your To-Do List ✅
All the Field Jobs created will appear in the Activity List – any jobs which you have been tagged in will appear in your To-Do List. These lists are sorted so the most recently edited records are at the top. You can filter the Activity List or search for a specific task.
As jobs get done, they can be marked as complete – this will automatically record the date it was done and who did it. If you forget to record something was completed at the time, you can edit the completed date/time so your records are correct.
Step 4: Share information with your team 🧑🌾
fieldmargin is most powerful when all of your farm team uses it. All your farm data is automatically synched to the cloud and is available on all your team’s devices*. This allows you to:
📞 Spend less time on the phone checking on work or explaining where issues are. Everyone can see the location of jobs on the map and you get notified as soon as they are done or if there is a question.
🖨 Print less. All maps and job sheets can be accessed on your team’s phone saving you time, frustration dealing with uncooperative printers, and money on paper and ink.
🗃 Keep records up to date. All work is updated as it’s done so no need to set aside hours to type up completed job sheets.
“The amount of fields we deal with is massive, we were working with over 10 ring binders of paper maps. It has been great to digitise them. It means that the whole team can access them on their tablet in the cabs”
Rob Boole, spraying contractor and agronomist, UK 🇬🇧
It also helps you to keep your team safe. You can add hazards to your map (particularly useful if you have temporary workers coming on-board for harvest) and ask your team to share their location when using the app (good for lone workers).
We understand that transitioning to a new system can be hard, particularly for those who aren’t big fans of technology! That’s why we wrote this handy guide to help you get your team started.
*Farm Admins can view farm reports and manage team settings and billing information. Team Members can update farm records, but not delete objects they did not create. They do not have access to farm reports, team settings or billing. Learn how to manage team permissions here.
Step 5: Tracking Data 🔢
“If you’re not measuring it you can’t manage it”. One top goals shared by farmers in our 2022 End of Year Survey was to collect more farm data. Recording the right data on your farm is key to identifying areas for improvement, seeing if changes are having the desired result and understanding how you stack up against other farms.
“The big problem I’ve faced is that after 4-5 years I go back to the office and all my year books are very busy, complicated or information may have been thrown away. That is why I really like using fieldmargin – being able to keep everything together and separated by year is really important”
Willie Liebenberg, farmer, South Africa 🇿🇦
Here are a couple of ways you can record vital farm data in fieldmargin:
Inputs & Yields 🌾
Keeping track of what you’ve applied to your fields, such as fertilisers and sprays is one of the fundamental areas of farm record-keeping and forms the basis of most farm assurance schemes. Yield recording is one of the most important ways to track and benchmark farm performance to make more informed decisions going forward. Having these records makes it simple to look back and see how different treatments impacted crop performance.
The Field History tab in the field information shows a timeline of what work has
been done in each field, with input application rates and yields.
The Reporting features make it easy look up work that has been completed for improving farm performance, managing costs, benchmarking or audits such as farm assurance schemes.
Scouting and Observations 🔍
Using located notes, you can add photographs of issues found when scouting to track and monitor observations. Having access to these when field walking means you can monitor how treatments are performing and can find them stored in one place – rather than in notebooks, somewhere in your camera roll of bits of paper stuffed somewhere in the tractor cab! For example, if you’ve mapped the areas where weeds, disease or water-logging have been an issue throughout the season, you can compare these with your yield map – read more on this here.
Quickly record issues spotted when field walking. You can add an area by
walking around the issue or just drop a pin where you are.
“By making everything digital I can easily see how decisions turned out”
Adam Foden, Assistant Vineyard Manager, UK 🇬🇧
Record Measurements
Numerical measurements taken at the same location over time can be recorded using Monitoring Sites. Some things you can use this for include measuring rainfall, crop storage checks, soil testing data, plant counts or plate meter measurements. Find out more ideas for using Monitoring Sites here.
Step 6: Monitor crop performance from space
Field Health gives you access to regularly updated NDVI analysis of satellite imagery so you can see at a glance where you have high or low vegetation levels. Use this to spot problems such as disease or nutrient deficiencies earlier. You can then focus your field walk on these areas and helps farm profitability since you can treat issues before they cause significant damage.
“It doesn’t stop the flea beetle issue, but it does show the impact of the problem and help map out and measure the areas that you may re-drill with a different crop. Ground truthing areas of what I have mapped I’ve mapped out to carry on with, it’s very accurate”
Kieran Walsh, Velcourt agronomist for the Hands Free Hectare. Keiran uses Field Health to support his crop monitoring to measure the spread of pests, weeds and diseases.
If you need a hand getting your 2025 Farm Year set up, just drop us an email to support@fieldmargin.com and someone from our support team will be happy to help you out.