Ag-Mag 2016
Greenlight Grower Management on your iPhone! All of your cropping data, in your pocket
The Internet of Things
Agriculture ploughs ahead with sensor technology
Put your farm on the map
Have greater control with our mapping functionality
2016 - a year of innovation Our Business Development Manager, Paul Thomas, introduces this issue of the Ag-Mag and explains why 2016 has been, and continues to be, such an exciting year for Greenlight Grower Management. Did you know 2016 is Muddy Boots Software’s twentieth birthday? We were founded way back in the heady days of 1996 by a group of agronomists and agricultural specialists who thought there must be a better way to manage crop information than on reams of paper that get lost in filing cabinets. And of course, they were right. We now describe ourselves as long established – twenty years is a long time in the software business – but we’re not resting on our laurels. Farmers, agronomists and others in the farming and food production industry tell us of their successes using Greenlight Grower Management, but nothing stands still. That’s why we have a large team of dedicated professionals at our HQ in rural Herefordshire who are constantly working to make our products deliver more and more. And though we may be a software company, we never forget our roots and the need to work closely with those who use our products. You can learn more about how we do this on page 8. We launched our new app at the start of the year and the reception has been incredibly positive! Cargill, one of our customers, explains just why they find it so useful on page 7. They talk about how slick the new app is, and I have to say, that’s something we’ve been concentrating on across all of Greenlight Grower Management’s platforms.
We also highlight the advanced privacy settings to be found in Greenlight Grower Management. It’s now even easier to select who you share your data with, and you can toggle this access on and off simply with the click of a mouse. Finally, we’re giving our mapping feature a real showcase in this issue because it is just so powerful when it comes to managing your business and recording your cropping activity. Turn to page 5 to read about how having an aerial view of your farm in our app opens up many opportunities in how you view your business. Being able to filter by crop, variety, soil type and drill date, means that you can instantly see your business in whatever context you need. What’s also great is that this integration and visibility is only set to develop and enhance. By using Greenlight Grower Management, you can be part of the advance party. I look forward to talking to you in person one day, I hope you enjoy this issue of the Ag-Mag and I welcome you to join the conversation @MuddyBootsLtd on Twitter.
Best wishes Paul
It’s great to add lots of new functionality to the product, but it’s no good if the user experience isn’t up to scratch. I’m very proud to say that the usability of our product is regarded highly, and the ease of use certainly matches the breadth of functionality. On the subject of new functionality, 2016 brings with it loads of new and improved features in Greenlight Grower Management. We talk about some of them on page 12, including the new ability to create and save spray recommendation templates, a feature that’s set to save agronomists lots of time out in the field.
Paul Thomas Business Development Manager Muddy Boots Software
In this Issue: 3 Let’s get social 4 Manage your farm from your phone 5 Putting your farm on the map 7 iPhone app in action - Cargill Canada 8
Getting to know you better
9 The Internet of Things 11 Grow your business with our cloud 12 Putting more control in your hands 13 Greenlight Grower Management in practice -
Agrovista
14 Greenlight Grower Management in practice -
Frontier
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Word on the tweet @FarmersWeekly Brexit will force 11% rise in imported food proces, says Defra study.
@FARMillinois #Illinois innovators lead the way in #Drones tech, #DigitalFarming poised for explosive #Agribiz growth.
@UNEP We can make the global food system sustainable by producing & consuming responsibly. Start by #NotWasting food!
@Bayer4Crops 3,000 litres of water are consumed every day to feed a single person.
Connect with us @MuddyBootsLtd
Meet a Muddy team member! Richard Esson, Business Analyst Can you explain your job? I analyse the needs of all Greenlight Grower Management/ Muddy Boots Software customers, collating as much information as possible to understand what features need to be built and how they need to work. I do this to provide the best possible products and user experience for all of our customers.
What are you most excited about in Greenlight Grower Management? Building a global platform for the agricultural industry, providing our customers with the tools to not only capture data, but allow them to easily share it with trusted partners and analyse their own data to help make the right decisions to get the best possible outcomes.
What do you enjoy most about your job? Engaging with our customers to identify ways of making their day-to-day lives easier, allowing them to spend more time doing what is important to them. Also building great features that will excite our customers.
When you’re not at work, what do you enjoy doing? I enjoy visiting new countries and experiencing new cultures. Having already spent time in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Singapore & Malaysia, I’m always looking for somewhere new to visit.
74% 74% of the UK’s dairy products are exported to EU - worth £900m.
3.9m 3.9m people employed in the agri-food sector in the UK in 2015. 14% of national employment.
1.7% Food prices fell by 1.7% in the last 12 months, following a 5 year period when food prices were rising fast.
£470 The average UK household spend on food that could have been eaten but is thrown away is around £470 a year.
Julian Knight, Greenlight Grower Management Product Owner, talks about our new iPhone app, allowing truly mobile data collection. The industry called, and Muddy Boots answered - Greenlight Grower Management is now available on iPhone! Version 2 of our popular mobile platform is no longer confined to the iPad, and while the handset size has reduced, what you can do with the app has increased massively!
Giving our customers what they want
While the new app will feel very familiar to existing users, a huge amount of new functionality has been added. Greenlight Grower Management has always been an exciting innovation in mobile crop recording technology but, with the latest version, we’ve taken that portability to the next level. Being able to have the added functionality in a device that literally fits inside your pocket is something customers have been keen to have and Muddy Boots are very excited to offer.
We listened to our customers in terms of features and we’ve really taken on board their feedback.
The Greenlight Grower Management app is available now from the app store and customers can get started right away.
The new Greenlight Grower Management app comes with significantly more sophisticated functionality. Customers will be able to add, update and remove sites, fields, machinery, operators and cropping data.
There’s still plenty of development left in the app and the team is looking to replicate some of the great desktop functionality on it, such as field work, planting and fertiliser activities.
The mapping functionality has also been greatly improved in that users are able to set a pin location for sites, as well as being able to add, edit and remove field and crop boundaries. Agronomists in particular will be pleased to know that the new app will allow them to record the locations of observations right there in the field.
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Putting your farm on the map The mapping facilities in Greenlight Grower Management are not only very powerful but fully integrated with other key features. This allows for greater control when it comes to the planning and deployment of services and a high level of precision in identifying and communicating problems.
There is no doubt that one of the more powerful aspects of Greenlight Grower Management is its map-based capabilities. The ability to visualise a farm from the air – seeing details that no traditional map could ever successfully accommodate – puts even more power into the hands of the farmer and agronomist when incorporated in their management regime. Accuracy and quality is paramount when it comes to mapping data, which is why we use both Google Maps and, for iPhone and iPad, Apple Maps to provide the highest quality base mapping. Using these detailed maps you can easily determine and mark field boundaries from your desktop and then see your mark-ups displayed on the corresponding maps in the Greenlight Grower Management app on your mobile devices. But, of course, there’s more to using maps than simple displays: the mapping tools are fully integrated to many other features of the software. When you, or your agronomist are in your fields, you can take photos of specific problems and have those images precisely indicated on the map, enabling any other user of your system to rapidly find the location with the issue.
As a farmer you can take a picture of, say, an outbreak of clubroot and send it, along with its location, to your agronomist for advice. Or identify a specific orchard tree affected by canker with sufficient precision to send a contractor to the exact location in order to remove the affected tree.
More about aerial views The aerial views provided by Google and Apple are remarkably accurate but don’t always look just the way your farm does – so let’s explore aerial maps a little more. In particular, it’s worth noting that conventional aerial maps are rarely up to date. That means the crops shown in your fields might be different and, in some cases, a recently constructed building, track or other structural work may be missing. How old can the aerial views in Google and Apple maps be? Anything up to three years.
Something of a surprise for those of us who expect everything to happen in real time! So it’s better to consider the Map View of your farm as an overall indication of the size and shape of your fields, rather than an up to the minute rendering. And how are the aerial views produced? It’s from a mix of satellite imagery – that provide the wider views – and cartographers flying in camera-equipped planes for the more detailed views. Clever stitching software combines huge numbers of photos to produce seamless plans, and allow you to zoom in and out at will.
Looking forward Recognising the power of the mapping services within Greenlight Grower Management, we are keen to enhance and develop these, in line with the feedback we get from users. So you can look forward to even more functionality as we move forward. For example you’ll be able to apply custom colours to fields to make the identification of individual crops easier and quicker, overlay third party data sets – such as lab results – and apply zones to fields, great when you need to monitor controlled differential applications within a single field.
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Why Greenlight Grower Management is leading the market Cargill Agronomy Project Advisor, Janel Delage describes how the new Greenlight Grower Management app has helped significantly speed up the way their agronomists work, both in and out of the field.
Having identified a requirement to implement a new crop recording tool that could connect their team of agronomists and scouts across the country, Cargill Canada selected Greenlight Grower Management. “Greenlight Grower Management has been leaps and bounds ahead of anything we’ve had historically and we’ve worked with a number of different software platforms,” says Janel. “It was a really pleasant change moving onto this software; it has a lot of the functionality that we need and look for and it’s really easy to use and access. In general it’s been far superior to anything we’ve used before. In the past our software systems allowed us to work offline then synchronise, however they were cumbersome, and difficult to make recommendations from. They had limitations that got in the way of wide spread adoption. “Inspections can take place in the field, and then recommendations and planning activities can be done back in the office, on the desktop. Then, when we enter the main season, when the agronomists spend much of their time in the fields, it’s really useful to have the mobile version as they get a lot of field scouting done directly on their mobile device.” Speaking specifically about version 2 of the Greenlight Grower Management app, Janel describes just what a step forward it has been: “We got on very well with the original Greenlight Grower Management app, but version 2 feels just that bit more intuitive, it is just so easy to use and one of the most exciting things is now having it on our iPhone.
“We all have our phones in our pockets, regardless of where we are, so we aren’t having to carry any additional pieces of tech around with us. Being able to walk the fields without having to carry a tablet or iPad, or even a notebook (which is where we were at one point in history) is a huge deal.”
The process of going from field observations to creating a recommendation is so nice, it’s so fluid, and it’s a huge step up from where we’ve been in the past. Being able to do this for multiple fields, while out and about is saving us a huge amount of time.
Janel Delage Agronomy Project Advisor
Janel concludes by saying that because Cargill agronomists are scouting customer’s fields, one of the great things they’re taking advantage of is the app’s use of the phones GPS: “To be able to pinpoint specifically which field we’re in and which spot we’re inspecting and then to mark that inspection geographically is actually really neat, it gives some added peace of mind, which is really important when you consider that growers are trusting us with their most valuable commodities.”
Getting to know you better Giving our users a voice, and allowing them to steer our product development based on their requirements is critical in order to maintain an industry-leading software solution. This latest tool, UserVoice, allows us to do just that.
We believe that the best way to understand what you need from a farm management solution is to ask. As well as talking directly with many of our customers, we introduced a new in-app communication tool within Greenlight Grower Management last year. With this we’ve been able to advise you of new features and functionality and also alert you to anything that might be of interest. Our customers have responded favourably and are quickly accessing all the new features. But, what if you have a great idea for something that would make your experience with Greenlight Grower Management even better? Or, wouldn’t it be great to be able to see what other users consider to be useful features that aren’t yet available? That’s what our new tool, UserVoice, addresses. With UserVoice we can extend our existing in-product communications to share different users’ ideas for new features and solicit even more ideas.
UserVoice helps us get in touch with those that use the products every day, many of whom have an expert knowledge of both farming and the functions and features offered by Greenlight Grower Management. Many are keen to tell us how we can make the product even better and UserVoice lets them do this. We can get direct feedback from them when prompted and we can then distribute lists of features that different users have asked for, and ask our whole user base to vote for those they consider important. We are, of course, keen to receive feedback from any source, but with the considerable responses we are getting with UserVoice we are now able to appreciate what is really important to our users and, where relevant, adjust our production schedule to better meet their needs and ambition.
We can inform our customers of our development work, advising when we are reviewing feature requests, if we have begun planning a feature or if the development has been started. So, get thinking about what features would make your experience of Greenlight Grower Management even better!
Richard Esson Business Analyst
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The Internet of Things: join the advance party Business Development Director, Jeff Goulding, takes a look at the sensor-connected world we now work in and the role it plays in agriculture. ‘The Internet of Things’ is a term that’s cropping up more and more, and just like ‘cloud-computing’ a few years ago, it’s a phrase that people struggle to get their heads around, but promises to “change our world!” No sooner has ‘the cloud’ settled into the vernacular, ‘The Internet of Things’ or (even more confusingly) ‘IoT’ has been coined as the new concept to digest; but what exactly is it, and why should we care? Broadly speaking, the Internet of Things describes the network of physical objects which are connected together to enable the collection and exchange of data. You could be forgiven for thinking that urban businesses are paving the way for the development of this technology, but it’s actually the agricultural industry that is ploughing ahead in this brave new world. In Computer World’s run-down of the 12 best uses of IoT in enterprise, a quarter of entries were related to farming and agriculture. One example is John Deere’s GPS-based automated guidance system, AutoTrac, which can acquire signals from 56 satellites around the world and offers a position accuracy of up to 2.5cm.
John Deere say that building big vehicles is yesterday’s news; building intelligent vehicles is tomorrow’s. Because machinery manufacturers are limited by vehicle length, height, width and weight on the roads, they’re finding that they can only innovate by making vehicles more intelligent. But why would a farmer want to know his or her exact position down to 2.5cm? Significantly, it makes farming cheaper. By preventing excessive overlap when spraying, accurate guidance systems can ultimately help a farmer spray less and use less fuel, saving them up to 10% of their costs straight away; a saving that, according to John Deere could easily add up to £50 - 100 per hectare for a cereal farmer. Agricultural machinery is becoming increasingly covered in sensors, each ‘advising’ the machinery how to operate more efficiently. Believe it or not, the Internet of Things is changing the most basic of farm jobs, even muck spreading! Some manufacturers are now offering manure constituent sensing. By mounting sensors on the applicator that can deliver 4,000 readings per second, farmers can now measure nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, ammonium, dry matter and volume accurately, while spraying their fields. So when the manure is very light, the sensors will guide the speed of the tractor and decelerate it so that it gives more. When it is heavier, it speeds up.
So apart from cost savings and yield optimisation, what else does this new era offer? That’s right, data. A vast amount of information is being pumped out by these machines every minute. For example, irrigation probe manufactures are integrating their data with variable seeding rates and weather data to help optimise nutrient uptake, improve crop growing conditions and help the growers to strive for the optimum yield for their specific crop. Likewise, drone companies are exploring their potential to monitor all of this from the skies above, using a variety of different cameras and sensor technology.
Our program is ready and waiting to consume all manner of data and spit it out into real information. Information that farmers and agronomists can use to gain the upper hand on an ever-changing environment and guide farming activity. The agricultural industry is still only beginning to explore using the IoT in precision farming, but, there is huge potential to embrace and utilise this technology, and to drive its future development. Through direct integration into the food chain and retail sector, and the ability to manage complex farm data, you’ll be pleased to know that Muddy Boots is already leading the advance party.
This sets the scene perfectly for a system that’s designed to digest the data coming from all of these different machines and turn it into comprehensive information. Information that helps make informed, up to the minute decisions to optimise crop potential…. cue Greenlight Grower Management.
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The winds of change: Grow your business with our cloud
Muddy Boots was one of the first food industry software companies to see the benefits of moving to the cloud. We successfully delivered – and continue to deliver – full data security, flexibility in how and where your data is collected (you are not tied to any one computer or device) and the opportunity for all stakeholders to access evidence based data in a timely manner. Now that cloud based software solutions are more widespread, what still gives Muddy Boots’ solution the advantage? Let’s take a look. Security The data you collect and use on your farm is valuable. Using a secure cloud-based system provides the highest level of data security. Our solutions deliver that security, ensuring your data is under your full control, yet is easily accessible when you need it. An in-house team here at Muddy Boots Software ensures security and data integrity is maintained at the highest level at all times and keeps ahead of the industry with regard to new security initiatives. You can be assured that with us, your data is safe and accessible. Collaboration Chances are, if you are involved in agriculture, you are part of a team. That team includes farm staff, specialist staff and agronomists. Our systems help all members of that team work together as one, whether based in the farm office, agronomy company or – with our mobile apps – out in the field.
Our solutions include tablet and smartphone apps that extend your system – quite literally – into the field. This has a great impact on your efficiency, allowing you to collect data on location, rather than gathering notes to transcribe later. Using the smart devices’ tools, such as mapping and location services, along with their cameras, you can gather precise data and keep visual records of pests, diseases and anything else of note, all accurately tied to their location. Increased efficiency And while we’re talking about efficiency … with the opportunity to enter data on any convenient computer or hand held device, you can reduce the time spent on data entry by up to 50%. By working more collaboratively and efficiently with your colleagues and your partners – such as agronomists - you don’t just save on time and manpower, but also gain greater, up-to-date visibility of all parts of your operation. Something that was difficult, if not impossible, before. This is ideal in a world where budgets are constantly squeezed yet the demands upon you are ever greater. The future With Muddy Boots Software the cloud is not the future, it’s the here and now. And we’re always examining how we can better deliver features and services to you, helping you further improve your efficiency, increase your yield and profitability and work smarter!
Putting more control in your hands Greenlight Grower Management offers a wide range of services designed to simplify your farm management routine. Here we take a look at two; the privacy controls and spray templates.
Privacy: Keeping your data private In our feature opposite, we noted how cloud-based software offers data portability: the opportunity for you and your colleagues to access data from multiple locations and on multiple devices. The opportunities for flexibility in working and efficiency gains are obvious.
Spray Templates We talk repeatedly about how using Greenlight Grower Management can deliver efficiencies and save time. The spray templates feature is a great example.
There will, however, be occasions when widespread access is not needed; times when you want to keep your data private. Consider, for example, a farmer whose farm is serviced by two agronomists, one specialising in cereal crops and the other, vegetables. The farmer may not want each agronomist to know what the other is proposing.
The template is a predefined programme of spraying that takes into account not only the crop and the pests or diseases likely to affect it, but any other conditions. Typically, at the beginning of the season your agronomist will set up a programme of spraying for a crop on your farm. This regime can be saved as a template. It can then be recalled and applied to any other fields with similar conditions.
Greenlight Grower Management makes it easy, from your desktop computer, to authorise which external agencies can, or can’t see the data in your system. It will let you restrict access so that a specific agronomist can only see the information in which they have an interest – just the cereal production, for example. They will not have sight of any data relating to other crops that might be under the control of another agronomist, or which you’d rather they not see.
Spray templates are also proving a boon to agronomists, who can create templates remotely on behalf of their customers and distribute them widely. That’s especially useful when new products are introduced, or new regimes with higher success rates are designed; the agronomist can send the new or modified templates with the click of a button.
For added security, when you invite someone – such as an agronomist – to access your system, they can immediately see everything you grant them access to. However, if they invite someone further to help out, by default that person has only very limited access. This ensures that you remain in control of your system and the valuable data you are handling. It is you – and only you – that can determine who sees what. Compare this with a paper based system; It could be all too easy to inadvertently reveal confidential information. Keeping track of who should see what – and who might see what – in your records was, to say the least, problematic. With Greenlight Grower Management you need have no such worries and privacy is assured.
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Collaborating with farmers, producers and food processors
Lewis McKerrow, Agronomist and Head of Precision/Technology at Agrovista, talks about Greenlight Grower Management and why being able to record crop data when on-farm brings huge benefits to their business.
Agrovista has been using our PC based CropWalker software for many years and it has become an essential tool for their business. “With an increase in both workloads and the need to record greater levels of information, it became important for us to be able to access up-to-date information and legislation at the point required and at the touch of a button, rather than having to be back in the office in front of the PC. “We were keen to work more collaboratively with our farmers, with an ability to easily collect and share data with them and we were therefore excited to hear about Muddy Boots’ Greenlight Grower Management, a cloud-based crop recording system. “The advantage of being a cloud-based system means that at any point in time, our customers, producers and food processors can access the latest information and share this with the relevant people immediately, instead of having to rely on a phone call or email which may be missed. This improved collaboration will save significant amounts of time and therefore costs for everyone on this new platform.
“This new software meets all of our requirements; it enables us to capture all necessary information with mobile technology and automatically publish the information onto the Greenlight cloud, providing live and complete records for us and our farmers to access.
“We have been working closely with Muddy Boots throughout the development process and we have now integrated Greenlight Grower Management with Axis, our own internal customer platform.”
Lewis McKerrow Agronomist and Head of Precision/Technology
Harnessing software to work more collaboratively with customers James Moldon, Commercial Manager at Frontier discusses Greenlight Grower Management and how the system allows them to work more collaboratively with their customers. Frontier Agriculture is a leading crop production and grain marketing business. Frontier works with a team of 130 agronomists and 80 farm traders to support a large customer base which generates masses of data. James Moldon, commercial manager at Frontier discusses Greenlight Grower Management and how the system allows them to work more collaboratively with their customers. “We currently use our own online system called Frontier MyFarm which incorporates all the divisions of Frontier. We looked to Muddy Boots’ Greenlight Grower Management as the solution that allows us to become more interactive with our customers, and simplify the transfer of information between our agronomists, farmers and contractors. This system enables complete visibility of this process, which is vital to the way Frontier works. “Because we deal with masses of data, farmers wanted a solution that enables them to easily obtain and record data, whether that is for budgeting purposes, traceability or simply sharing cropping information more efficiently. There are so many solutions out there that all perform different functions, but no other system works as well for our agronomists and their customers. We did look at other companies but none offered such simplicity. Our agronomists are already familiar with Muddy Boots’ CropWalker too, so we avoided the need for retraining and ultimately saved time.”
The farmers benefit from this simplicity too, as the product has been designed for their use. Being web and app-based means they can use it in the field and access data with only one or two clicks. This easy access to data is particularly important during an audit, helping farmers to meet legal requirements and feel prepared. “For Frontier, the speed at which we can move data in a twoway sync is also beneficial. It has always been one-way traffic until now. Farmers can now input data for the agronomists to use as well. This software also loops in the operators in the field, making it the first solution that is not designed only for the farmer and farm manager.
Greenlight Grower Management provides time savings through one time data entry, and cost savings through better efficiencies. If you are working more efficiently, you are less likely to miss out on opportunities to get your timings right. This gives us an edge in the marketplace. Because of our use of Greenlight Grower Management and MyFarm, farmers can see we have IT solutions in place for their data management, helping them make decisions that are right for their business.”
James Moldon Crop Inputs Commercial Manager
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Supply chain software: delivering visibility, efficiency and trust.
Get in touch +44 (0)1989 780540 sales@muddyboots.com @MuddyBootsLtd www.muddyboots.com