abby

A cheery Ian Boyd with his cows in a field of clover and wild-flowers knee high. The whole farm is covered in wildflowers!

I arrived at Whittington Lodge in the Cotswolds on a very grey and damp day in August. A cheery Ian Boyd greeted me and immediately put the kettle on. At first Ian seemed very wary as I told him I’d made an app that was going to help him monitor his soil health that we were trying out today. I don’t blame him for being suspicious, I am a British girl with a distinctly American accent, wearing leopard-print leggings and claiming that I had created an app that could help him out in the field. Who wouldn’t be suspicious!?

I was there on the invite of Niels Corfield, a soil health advisor who is setting up a framework so that farmers can use a combination of visual methods to assess the health of their soils. He is doing this in conjunction with the Pasture Fed Livestock Association (PFLA) a relatively young organisation that certifies and provides resources for about 300 farmers who are committed to farming animals solely from their pastures. This practice requires careful soil and sward (grass) management to ensure the animals always have something to eat out in the fields. This type of farming can also be extremely regenerative for soils, as the animals help to return critters to the soils and this practice is thought to have the potential to sequester large amounts of carbon in the soils.

Back to the misty farm – Niels, Ian and I bundled into the trucks with our simple tools – a spade, a card-table, few trays, soil corer, garlic crusher and a refractometer.

Niels counting earthworms, part of the spade test. (credit: Niels Corfield)

First thing you notice when you get out into Ian’s fields is that there are wildflowers everywhere, the fields are alive with colour. We trundled over to Fir Hill, setup the card table and got to work. Ian downloaded the app on his phone, and we walked around the field counting the % of undesirables (i.e weeds), % of bare earth, no. of grass species, no. of broadleaves and more every 60 steps, Ian recording it all himself using the app.

By lunchtime Ian was so excited, all reservations abandoned, he was telling all the newcomers about how easy he had found the different visual tests Niels had put together, and that the app he used to record it all was no trouble at all to use to note down results. I was thrilled at the turn around and his enthusiasm – It’s moments like this that make me realise bringing simple digital technology to the sustainable farming sector is so worth it!

Ian jumping on the spade to do the spade tests. Ian looking through his refractometer to get a Brix reading. Preparing to do a Brix test, with a garlic crusher and a good handful of the foliage from the field. Quite a bit of diversity from the herbal ley Ian planted.

A bit about the app, my parents moved to Chile over ten years ago and planted 8000 olive trees. We experienced repeated frost damage on a few hundred trees and so I devised an app to help keep track of this. We have now collected over 2 years of data and are starting to use it to make  decisions on our farm. We started selling the app to fellow farmers just under a year ago and now have blueberry growers, vineyards, agroforestry projects and more using it in the UK, Chile and US.

But why is this app relevant to the soil health on Ian’s mixed arable farm in the Cotswold’s?

Well, a few reasons:

1. Customised settings: Firstly the app is incredibly customisable. On our farm we set it up to record information about pruning and frosts, but you could set it up to record whatever you want. So before heading to Ian’s farm Niels and I sat down and went through the different visual tests he had learnt were helpful on farm. We added a list of them all, with a list of options to choose e.g bare soil – 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% or a numerical value for the Brix reading. This means that Ian picked up the app and basically had a checklist of everything to record in his field, no typing necessary.
2. Easy to use: Secondly we made the app incredibly simple and easy to use with big buttons (my dad is not the nimblest of typers). We had to do this because we wanted anyone on our farm to be able to use the app with almost zero training. This means a super farmer-friendly app, something I think Ian would attest to.
3. Making data understandable: Finally we are now focused on providing helpful graphs and analysis that make the data interesting and easily understandable for the farmers – this is what we will be focused on going forward with Ian and Niels. As farmers ourselves we think it’s so important to have data that is really useful for your own farm. The digital collection of data like this also means that farmers will be collecting a consistent data set across many farms – this can therefore be combined across farms to build an evidence based that is so important for informing policy and providing vital info to the PFLA.

Some of the results (whited out) and photos from the initial visit.

We are incredibly excited to be working with Ian, Niels and PFLA to support visual assessment of soil health by farmers. Our next steps are to work with 2-3 PFLA farmers who over the course of the year will use the app to do these soil assessments on their farm every couple of months. That way we can help them figure out the best way to monitor their soils themselves and also the best way for us to visually show any results. This is all so that farmers can feel enabled to manage the health of their own soil and learn what indicators really show improvements in their soil health. This will also benefit the PFLA to see across multiple farms what the best indicators are and share these insights with their members and maybe even policy makers!

If you are interested in using Sectormentor to monitor data on your farm don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on info@vidacycle.com. We would love to hear from you!

Meet Erik and Soledad who live on a farm in Maule Valley, Chile where they grow 11 acres of blueberries and 70 acres of corn. They are the latest farmers to start using Sectormentor and Workmentor.

Erik and Soledad are very hands on farmers, you find them out in the field most days. Soledad is a mother of 3 and the agronomist, she is using Sectormentor to ensure their blueberries stay healthy and they catch any problems early. Erik will be using Workmentor to help manage pay and workload for their 2 full time workers as well as contract workers during pruning and harvest. We are excited to be working with them and supporting their farming business.

Will Davenport and his team have been collecting data for years but it was confined to scruffy notebooks and only typed up a few months later. No he uses Sectormentor to record the pruning weights from sample vines to determine how vigorous growth is. Back in the office they use the Sectormentor website to look at weights, combined with bud numbers to decide if they need a second pruning, or if they should add more compost in specific areas. Good data, combined with their years of knowledge, helps ensure they do all they can to help the vines produce high quality organic grapes.

Last year he also used Sectormentor to record number of flowers per vine in early June, and that same day he had what turned out to be pretty accurate prediction of his yield 5 months before harvest, helping him plan and have his harvest run smoothly.

Sectormentor is very flexible so you can set it up to record whatever is important to you on your farm, so we have many different types of farmers using it. Sectormentor is also coming in handy as part of on-farm research and trials across groups of farms, from soil-sampling to agroforestry it can help everyone collect information and learnings that can easily be combined to help create a consistent and reliable data set, perfect to find patterns between multiple farms.

Will Davenport tells us about his experience:

“Sectormentor helps us run our business effectively. It’s a management tool for out in the field, the more data I have about what’s going on in the vineyard the better I can do my job. We use it to record things like flowers per vine which gives us an early prediction of yields. It’s simple, you just record the things you need.”

Interested in how this could work for you, you can read more about it here, or contact us here

Marcela and Jorge run a family business growing and propagating blueberries and other fruits in the Central Region, Chile. They always used paper and poker chips to record the harvest but they recently switched to Workmentor to record how much each worker picked. Their workers love it, as do they! It saves them lots of time and makes it easier to pay workers. They have many fewer errors than before, plus it’s easy to sort any disputes because they have a trusted record of everything that happened.

They are also starting to use Workmentor to manage their day to day timesheets as it’s an easy way for workers to log their hours on the go and record how long they spend on each task which is key for pay, understanding production costs and estimating workload. This is a new feature we have created to better support worker-farmer relationships and smooth administration.

Here is what Benjamin the blueberries manager has to say about using Workmentor:

“It saved me hours and hours of time as I can quickly and easily see amounts every week for every person. It’s a very systematic way of getting data, there is not much room for mistakes. There is good traceability of who did what and when. We use it with no trouble at all with our regular workers and get good feedback from people that they trust the system. For example, we had a difference in kg between what one worker thought they had picked and what we thought they had picked. To resolve this we went and looked through Workmentor, it was clear minute by minute who had harvested what so we added it up there and she went away happy.” 

Interested in how this could work for you, you can read more about it here, or contact us here

Being an independent and smaller-scale farmer doesn’t always look that easy and we have been a bit quiet since a fire swept through our farm and charred everything.
The more time we spend on the farm, the more we want to feel part of a wider community of independent farmers, both locally and around the world.

We remain after the fire, and the rains have brought some green back to the land – it is amazing to watch the natural world recover… and funnily enough most of our RFID tags we use to record data survived the fire!

We now must wait and are focused on building up our soil… in the meantime we enjoy seeing the faces and farms of others and knowing that we can all work together to create a thriving independent farming sector. So part of the tech and tools newsletter & blog going forward will be about sharing these faces and voices, an echo of what Abby helps create with Farmerama. If you haven’t listened to the latest podcast yet then do tune in here, it’s all about a farming sector built on beauty and business.