Recordkeeping has always been essential to profitability on a farm — you need to track your inputs and activities before you can set prices to make a profit. Today, good records are more important than ever because of the reporting requirements for organic certification and food safety regulations. Two new systems allow you to keep records on the fly, using your smartphone. Here’s a summary of each:

COG Pro from Certified Organic Business Solutions (a GFM advertiser — see page 3) now includes a phone-based version. The system is easy to use because it is web-based; there is nothing to manage yourself except your own data entry. It’s also visually easy to understand because it looks like a notebook, with tabs for the various types of information you can record, as show at right.

The platform is designed to comply with organic certification requirements, but you don’t have to be an organic grower to use it because most of the data required for certification is important information to record on any farm. It has sections for seed and plant purchases, seed starting and transplanting, field work, harvest, sales, and dozens of other categories. COG Pro is also now available with special features to help with food safety certification. In fact, if you are new to recordkeeping, a good place to get started is with the list of data you can record in this program.

The program also offers analytical reports that you can customize to find out just about anything you want to know. For example, you can request a report on how many hours were spent weeding specific crops, or how much yield you got from each planting of a crop. The possibilities are vast, as long as you are disciplined about entering your data.

And for those who are certified organic, there is an option to allow your certification inspector to view your records online, rather than have you fill out or print paperwork.

COG Pro was developed by Richard Wilen, a longtime organic farmer in Oregon.
“The COG Pro Notebook grew out of my frustration with the poor tools certification companies were offering farmers to take care of ever-growing demand for documentation,” he said. “As a computer person I knew that Word documents and spreadsheets were the wrong tools for the task. I was also frustrated by the inefficiencies in the certification process and felt that we could bring the recordkeeping and the inspection online. We have a read-only portal for inspectors that allows real-time monitoring of farmer organic system plans and activity. It is far more efficient and offers the promise of actually reducing paper in the certification process (how many trees have died for organic certification?).”

Richard continues to fine-tune the program; he recently added a function that allows you to generate seed orders based on the data you entered in previous years, organized by seed company, vegetable, and variety. And he has added a Spanish-language version.

COG Pro costs $129 a year for the basic version. All you need is an internet connection at home or on your smartphone. You can try the system yourself by visiting www.cog-pro.com; log into the notebook using the word Guest in both the username and password fields.

FARMDATA is an open source, free program that was developed at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with funding from USDA’s SARE program.

“FARMDATA is a collaborative project between the Dickinson College Farm and the Dickinson College Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,” said Matthew Steiman, assistant manager of the college farm.  “About 5 years ago Professor Tim Wahls, who was teaching a course on database design, contacted the farm to see if we were in need of any sort of database that his students could build for us as a custom project. At the same moment the farm was wishing for the ability to digitize our sales records for reporting purposes. We also sought some better means of organizing field records, since we had struggled for years with the challenges of paper records – incomplete records, lost and damaged notebooks, and the major time hurdle involved with data entry from notebooks to computer at the end of the season.  

“Initial versions of the database were somewhat too cumbersome to be practical.  For example, they required us to manually enter data into an MS Access file from field notebooks. A later version used a rugged handheld computer but that too was hobbled by the need to regularly connect the device to a desktop where the database was stored.  In 2013 we won a small internal grant that paid for Tim and three students to work all summer improving the system. About the same time, my co-manager, several of our staff, and I began using smartphones – this really opened up doors for live updates to the database by multiple users. FARMDATA was born in the summer of 2013 and we haven’t looked back since. Our goal throughout the project has been to eliminate clipboards and the use of calculators in the field – wherever we may need to record data or do calculations, we try to let FARMDATA do the work.”

Although the program can be downloaded for free, you need web skills to be able to install it on your own website, said Tim Wahls. “FARMDATA needs a database backend and PHP support – as I understand it, most of the free websites (such as Wix or WordPress) don’t provide that. So you really need an account with a full-fledged web hosting company like Host Gator or Dream Host. We have installed FARMDATA on a virtualized server from Amazon Web Services, so that’s another option. These all tend to run about $15/month. No problem to run your farm website and FARMDATA from the same hosting account, so there is some potential for cost savings there. We also have a small consortium of four farms who are sharing one Host Gator account for FARMDATA, which makes the cost pretty minimal.”

Also, Small Farm Central, which develops websites for farms, is testing the program for some of its clients; about 35 farms are using FARMDATA there.

For more information about the features of FARMDATA, visit the guest page at farmdata.dickinson.edu/guest.php.