FARMABLE
Helping farms go digital
Fruktgården Has Revolutionized Office Work with Farmable
At Fruktgården, we now have full control over which fields are making or losing money each season. This helps us make the right operational decisions for both new investments and optimizing existing fruit and berry orchards.
Previously, this level of insight was nearly impossible, as it required manually compiling data from Excel sheets, timesheets, logs, and more. Since we started using Farmable in our daily operations, data compilation has become automatic.
Foundation for Effective Use of Farmable
It all starts with establishing fields for all crops. Everything in agriculture is geographically anchored, and the field serves as the central reference point for storing and managing data later. At Fruktgården, we have 27 fields—apples, plums, raspberries, and pears—spread across several locations. Each field ideally contains just one variety to simplify logging, traceability, and regulatory reporting. Dividing fields according to spraying strategies is a big advantage, as it makes executing spray jobs and other tasks logically organized and listed in the same way. We’ve also set up numerous permissions and default options tailored to Fruktgården, turning many daily tasks into one-click choices in the app and minimizing time spent on it in the field. This includes:
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Members: Everyone working on the farm—field workers or advisors—can have their own access, making all information readily available on their smartphones.
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Sprayers: All sprayers are configured with tank volume and water application rates, allowing the Farmable app to instantly calculate mixing volumes for each tank.
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Causes: Integrated pest management requires documenting why pest control measures are taken. This is recorded using a predefined list of causes.
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Pest Control Products: We’ve created a library of all pest control products we use, including label requirements like maximum annual usage and withholding periods.
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Custom Jobs: We maintain a list of recurring tasks—pruning, thinning, support system repairs, machine maintenance. Timesheets enforce selection from this list, ensuring we always know how work hours are spent.
Predefining all these elements has two major effects:
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Using the app in the field becomes highly efficient, and
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All information is automatically standardized and easy to analyze.
Farmable in Daily Use
Spraying
One of the most critical tasks on a farm is spraying against pests and diseases. A mistake here can lead to significant crop losses.
We always plan a spray job before it’s carried out—creating a new job in the app, selecting reasons, pest control products, the sprayer to use, and who will perform it.
Since all parameters are known in Farmable, a calculated tank mix is generated automatically. This reduces the risk of human error in mixing ratios and makes it clear and simple for the person executing the job—no mental math required.
The next common quality issue is the execution of the spray job itself. A driver can easily miss a row, spray a row twice in an orchard where all rows look alike, or drive too fast. Any of these reduces the application rate and thus the effectiveness of the pest control product. With GPS tracking of the entire job, the driver avoids mistakes, and any errors are logged for later analysis.
With multiple drivers working at once, the farm manager also gets a clear overview of all ongoing tasks through their app.
After a job is completed, all details—including GPS tracks—are stored in the log, along with automatically fetched weather data from Fruktgården’s own Davis weather station.
Field Observations
Conducting and documenting observations with photos and notes in each field is a necessary part of effective integrated pest management. In Farmable, we typically document two things:
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Photos and notes capturing the plant’s phenological development, as well as diseases and pests. As harvest nears, we also document size, quantity, and quality while the fruit is still on the trees.
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Counts of pests in traps or by estimation, giving us an easy overview of historical pest population trends at selected observation points.
Farmable also offers an AI feature to identify pests and diseases and suggest control methods. When fruit is on the trees, the AI can estimate yields by combining fruit counts from photos with historical harvest data and other factors.
Logging Harvest
During the harvest season, we log all harvesting in the app throughout the day. For piecework, we record the team for each entry. Farmable allows us to either log each individual crate or the entire day’s work in a single large entry. We use all these options depending on whether we’re harvesting berries, plums, or apples.
Farmable then generates batches based on this definition: one batch per day, per field, per variety. These batches appear in the inventory and can be used later for sales logging.
Each batch can be saved with a quality assessment, photos, and other details, enabling us to trace the causes of quality issues later.
It’s also possible to print labels for the crates, but Fruktgården doesn’t use this feature since we get labels from the packing facility’s system.
Logging Sales
When we send harvested goods from Fruktgården to the cooperative packing facility in Lier or elsewhere, we record a sale in Farmable.
We select from harvested batches using either first-in-first-out, first-in-last-out, or manual selection principles. This ensures full traceability of which batch each delivery contains, where it was harvested, and its quality.
We can also take photos as proof of quality at departure, which has proven useful on several occasions.
Here, we also enter an estimated price for the delivery, giving us a good indication of where we’re making or losing money.
Time Tracking
All our workers log their hours daily in the app on their own mobile phones. Some are team leaders who also log on behalf of the workers they’re responsible for.
When logging, they’re required to specify which field they worked in and what task they performed. No one complains about this, and it gives us excellent statistics on where our costs are going.
Logging Purchases of Pest Control Products and Fertilizers
Registering Purchases of Pest Control Products and Fertilizers
All farms are required to maintain an up-to-date overview of chemicals stored on-site. Farmable handles this as follows:
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We record all purchases of pest control products and fertilizers, including volume and price. These are then tracked as inventory.
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Each time we log a job using these products, the volume used is automatically deducted from the inventory.
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At year-end, we conduct a stock count to ensure everything matches up.
The costs recorded at purchase are, of course, also used to estimate the expenses for jobs performed per field.
Farmable for Analytics and Decision Support
When all field work is completed and properly documented in the app, we’ve already come a long way. Reporting, analysis, comparisons, and any other use of data then become very straightforward.
Some general statistics and access to historical data are visualized in the app under different tabs, much like Google Maps.
If we want the data presented in a more traditional log format, we can log into Farmable’s web version, which is designed for computer screens rather than mobile phones. Here, we can also download the data in Excel format for use in other programs.
For advanced users, data can also be accessed via an API—for instance, if you want to automatically transfer it to other software.
You can read more about all this on Farmable’s website! You’ll also find pricing there if you’re interested in using this system on your own farm.
