Screw FarmVille. REAL farmers use FarmLogs. The app — which just snagged $4 million from investors — combines weather data, crop market rates, budgeting tools, and even tractor maintenance reminders into one powerful package. The intense work that is farming can’t be made easy with a few lines of code, obvi, but FarmLogs certainly helps.
Jesse Vollmar, who grew up on a farm, created the app with friend Brad Koch two years ago. (Vollmar was frustrated Big Ag wasn’t doing more to get farming up to speed in the digital age.) Since then, FarmLogs has spread to 130 countries, including 5 percent of American row farmers. Here’s part of Modern Farmer’s interview with Vollmar:
“When you come into our product as a new farmer, you can start clicking on your field, and we already know the rainfall and crop history and what yield looks like for those fields,” says Vollmar. With this information, a budget for the season can be done in a matter of seconds, says Vollmar. “Agriculture really boils down to a science. It’s agronomy. And it can be optimized by applying data science.”
FarmLogs especially useful on organic farms, Modern Farmer notes, because of all the record-keeping required to get the organic label. The app is definitely more utilitarian than entertaining, but we’d rather have organic produce than crushed candy any day.
