This project worked to address the risks farmers face through lack of data and decision making in pricing, crop planting, yield, and sales channel. As farmers become more competitive it becomes increasingly more important for them to make data-driven decisions based on their farm business data, as well as understand regional market trends in local produce production and consumption trends. The five active farmers who used this software package diligently captured critical data about their farm operations to optimize pricing, understand harvest relationship to sales data and were able to share the information in a seamless way across the farm. This resulted in an increase in profits of about 1%, lower than anticipated based on the fact that farmers were reluctant to make changes despite the suggestion of the software, when they did make the adjustments, they were made in small increments.
Those farms that used the software did have a huge increase in awareness of crops being planted, harvesting and sales ratios to better plan for the 2018 year. This resulted in reducing time, costs in cost of goods sold and other overhead. In our post-survey results, we did see a shift of improved user experience and ability.