I have a computer science degree, spent several years writing software, and have spent more than a decade working on small organic vegetable farms.
Those two experiences have left me with a slightly inconvenient opinion:
- Small farms often need less software, not more.
That probably sounds strange coming from someone who also helps farms and agricultural organizations with websites, technology, spreadsheets, and digital systems. But the longer I’ve worked in both farming and technology, the more convinced I’ve become that software is rarely the first thing that needs fixing.
Usually, the system underneath it does.
A New Tool Won’t Fix an Unclear Process
Small farms are complicated operations.
There are crops to plan, seeds to order, employees to coordinate, harvest records to keep, labels to print, customers to communicate with, grants to manage, equipment to maintain, events to organize, and bills to pay.
When one of those processes becomes messy, it’s tempting to look for an app.
There probably is one.
There are farm-management platforms, project-management systems, CRMs, inventory tools, scheduling apps, bookkeeping integrations, form builders, marketing platforms, and software specifically designed for almost every agricultural task imaginable.
But buying software before understanding the actual problem often just creates a more complicated version of the same problem.
If three people record information differently, putting that information into an app doesn’t automatically make it consistent.
If nobody knows who is responsible for updating a crop plan, moving the crop plan into a prettier interface doesn’t solve that.
If the real problem is that a task has seven unnecessary steps, digitizing all seven steps isn’t much of an improvement.
Sometimes the most valuable technology decision is deciding not to add another piece of technology.
Software Has an Ongoing Cost
The price of software matters more on a small farm than it does in a large organization.
Ten dollars a month doesn’t sound like much. Neither does twenty or thirty.
But subscriptions accumulate.
A website platform, bookkeeping system, email service, farm-management application, scheduling tool, cloud storage account, point-of-sale system, and a few specialized services can quietly become hundreds or thousands of dollars per year.
And subscription pricing rarely stays fixed forever.
That doesn’t mean paid software is a bad investment. A tool that saves several hours of labor every month can easily pay for itself.
But the question should be whether the tool is actually creating enough value to justify becoming another permanent operating expense.
I’m especially cautious about paying for sophisticated software to solve a problem that could be handled almost as well by a spreadsheet or another tool the organization already pays for.
I Like Spreadsheets More Than I Probably Should
I’ve built software professionally, but a surprising amount of useful work on farms can be handled with a spreadsheet.
That isn’t because spreadsheets are sophisticated. It’s because they’re flexible, understandable, and easy to change.
A spreadsheet can become a crop plan, harvest record, contact list, event roster, planting schedule, grant budget, seed inventory, or label database without requiring someone to learn an entirely new system.
More importantly, people will actually use them.
That last part matters.
The technically best system is not always the practically best system.
A custom database may be capable of doing everything a farm needs, but if only one person understands it, the system becomes dependent on that person.
A specialized farm-management platform may have dozens of useful features, but if employees avoid entering information because the interface is cumbersome, the data isn’t useful.
Meanwhile, a boring Google Sheet that everyone understands may quietly run an operation for years.
That doesn’t mean spreadsheets are always the answer. It means complexity has a cost, and small organizations should have a good reason for taking it on.
Who Actually Owns Your Data?
There’s another question I think small organizations should ask before adopting software:
If I stop using this service tomorrow, what happens to my information?
Your crop records, customer lists, financial history, planting plans, donor information, event registrations, and production data may represent years of work.
Ideally, you should be able to export that information in a useful format and move it somewhere else.
That isn’t always the case.
Some platforms make exporting easy. Others let you export only part of your data, give it back in an awkward proprietary format, or make leaving sufficiently difficult that switching services becomes a major project.
The more important the information is to your operation, the more I care about portability.
Before committing to a platform, I want to know:
- Can the data be exported?
- What format does it come in?
- Can another program actually read it?
- Will the farm still have access to historical records if it cancels the subscription?
- How difficult would it be to migrate to something else?
A system can work perfectly today and still become a liability if your entire operation is trapped inside it five years from now.
The Boring Systems Often Matter Most
Some of the most useful systems I’ve worked on have not been impressive.
Label printing is a good example.
Printing product or seedling labels doesn’t sound like an important technology project. But if someone has to repeatedly type the same information, manually format labels, correct mistakes, and search for old files every time something needs printing, that small inefficiency gets repeated hundreds or thousands of times.
Organizing the underlying information and creating a repeatable printing process can save far more time than introducing an elaborate new platform.
The same is true for forms.
A well-designed Google Form feeding into a clean spreadsheet can solve a registration, intake, volunteer, or recordkeeping problem with almost no training.
Everyone already understands how to click a link and fill out a form.
That simplicity has value.
Start With the Workflow
When someone asks me what software they should use, I increasingly want to ask questions first.
- What are you actually trying to accomplish?
- Who needs to use the system?
- What happens before the information gets there?
- What happens afterward?
- Where does the current process fail?
- Which parts are repetitive?
- Who maintains it?
- What happens when that person is gone?
Those questions often reveal that the technology itself isn’t the central problem.
Imagine a farm struggling to keep track of harvest quantities.
The first instinct might be to find harvest-tracking software.
But the real questions are more basic.
- Who records the harvest?
- When?
- By crop, variety, field, or destination?
- Does someone need that information the same day?
- Is it being used for crop planning next year, inventory management this afternoon, or simply because someone thinks harvest records are a good idea?
Until those questions are answered, choosing software is mostly guessing.
Once they are answered, the solution might be specialized software.
It might also be a clipboard and a spreadsheet.
Sometimes Software Really Is the Answer
I’m not arguing that farms should avoid technology.
There are plenty of situations where dedicated software earns its complexity.
A website is obviously better handled by a content management system than by manually editing HTML every week.
Online payment platforms make accepting donations or payments dramatically easier.
Email marketing software is useful when an organization has hundreds or thousands of contacts.
Accounting software exists for good reasons.
And when a farm grows large enough, crop planning, inventory, employee management, or sales can become complicated enough that purpose-built tools are worth learning.
The question isn’t whether software is good.
The question is:
- Does this tool remove more complexity than it creates?
For a small farm, I’d add two more questions:
- Is the value worth the ongoing cost?
- And can I take my data with me if I leave?
Technology Should Disappear Into the Work
The best systems rarely feel impressive once they’re working.
- Someone fills out a form.
- A spreadsheet updates.
- A label prints correctly.
- A customer gets the information they need.
- An employee knows what to do next.
Nobody thinks much about the technology because they’re busy doing the actual work.
I think that’s a good outcome.
Farmers already have plenty of things demanding their attention. Technology should reduce that burden rather than becoming another thing that needs to be managed.
My own rule is becoming increasingly simple:
- Use the simplest system that reliably solves the problem.
- Sometimes that means custom code.
- Sometimes it means WordPress.
- Sometimes it means specialized farm software.
- Sometimes it means a spreadsheet.
- And sometimes it means putting the computer away entirely.
The goal isn’t to make a farm more technological.
The goal is to make it work better.