FarmMind
FarmMind
Let's paint a picture: You're a crop consultant/professional with clients around the state, and you've drawn out a total of 4,000 fields in your GIS software. A new disease starts spreading through your clients' bean fields, and you need to figure out how much it would cost to apply a certain fungicide plus labor to each of your individual clients' fields, and observe how it would affect their bottom lines. How would you do this right now? Assuming you already had all of your fields mapped out, you would have to figure out the total acreage of each of your clients fields, then apply that labor flat cost plus fungicide cost/acre for each client, then figure out all of the metrics that change like breakeven, ROI, etc, and then have to manually organize a whole bunch of spreadsheets and numbers and then finally figure out whether or not it is worth it to spray. This is a huge organizational headache, which is why we created field dashboards to organize all of your field and cost information per-field, per-season.
Let's start with the simplest type of dashboard: The season dashboard. To create this dashboard, on the dashboards page, press 'Create' and then select your field and the 'Season Dashboard' option. Or, you can click your field on the maps page and select 'Create/View Dashboard' and then select the season that you'd like. Then, you'll see a lot of different widgets pop up that represents everything about your field. Let's unpack some of the main ones.
Use the field properties (which will be auto-populated from your current field) to organize your tags from a season-by-season basis. For instance, if your variety or crop changes from season to season, you can track it here. Yield data will be automatically populated by the crop based on local average data, but you should put in your target and actual yield for higher accuracy. This yield widget will have direct affects on our finances, which we will discuss later.
Here, you can see all of your rain events and field notes that reference this field for the selected season. You can filter what appears on this timeline and set thresholds for different rain events so they do not clutter the timeline.
Here is the core of all of your field finances: the field balance sheet. There are three sections to this balance sheet, those being revenue, costs, and analysis. Click between the different sections to access them, or you can swipe right or left on mobile devices. The revenue section is pretty self-explanatory. Put in the cash price for your crop in $/unit and the revenue is automatically calculated based on your field acreage. Revenue is calculated based on your actual yield in the yield tracking widget discussed earlier. Now, let's input some costs.
You can add costs to this field by pressing the 'Add Costs' button. A dialog will pop up with some default categories and prices, feel free to choose on of those and change the price or create your own cost. Once added, you can specify if this cost is a per-acre cost or if it is a per-quantity cost. For instance, if you have 3 scouts each costing $20 of labor, and you want to record a labor cost for this field, you can record a flat cost of 60, or you can specify a cost of $20/scout and 3 scouts. Another example would be a pesticide 5 gal/acre application costing $3/gallon. To record an application for the entire field, input $3/gallon, an application rate of 5, and check the per-acre box to multiply it by the field acreage. Now that you have your cost information, it's time to analyze our margins, ROI, and other metrics in the analysis section. One of the best parts of the balance sheet is that you can use AI to analyze all of your field costs and metrics to identify anomalies and find places to improve, saving you money and increasing your bottom line. All you have to do is press the 'Analyze with AI' button, and see the results for yourself!
Here, you can see the futures prices over time for different active contracts and commodities. The cash price is automatically pulled from the balance sheet and the basis is calculated based on the futures price and the cash price. The breakeven and cash price are shown as horizontal dotted lines so that you can compare them to the current futures price. If you'd like to compare the current prices of different contracts, you can select the 'Forward Curve' option. Futures prices are updated once at the end of day.
At the bottom of the dashboard, you will see 4 tabs where you can further analyze what's going on in your field. The first is weather analysis, where you can view the weather and accumulation of precipitation, temperature, wind speed/direction, predicted soil moisture, and more. Growth analysis predicts the current growth stage of your crops by calculating the Growth Degree Units (GDUs) of your crop using temperature data and thresholds. Soil analysis uses different models to predict the soil composition of your field automatically, and elevation analysis uses USGS data to figure out the max/min elevation throughout your field.
Let's say that you've input data for multiple seasons for a single field, and you'd like to analyze how that field's information changes over the seasons. Well, with FarmMind, you can do exactly that with our season comparison dashboards! To create this dashboard, go to dashboards > create season comparison. Then, select the field that you want to create a comparison for. Now, all seasons that you have recorded for this field will show up, side by side! At the top, you'll see the crop rotation from season to season, and you'll also see how the tags for that field have changed over each season. Below that, you'll see a financial analysis for each season (shown below), as well as an analysis of the costs for each season. Finally, if you'd like to run economic analysis on all seasons at once, you can press the 'AI Economic Analysis' button at the bottom.
All of this is great and all, but what if you had THOUSANDS of fields? Good news! You don't have to put in all of that information for each one of your fields, and you can do it all at once and compare across all of your fields! From Dashboards Home, click on the 'Add cost/yield data for multiple fields' button. This will allow you to select multiple fields and will pop up a dialog where you can input all of your cost and yield information attributed to all of your fields, all at once! You can also select multiple fields on the map and press the 'add costs/yield' button in select mode. In this dialog box, you can add cost line items and yield information that will be applied to ALL fields at once. For a cost, you can choose that item to be an aggregate cost (where the cost represents the total cost for all fields, like a tractor cost attributing to 5 fields at once), a per-acre cost, or a per-field cost. The total costs are automatically calculated based on your input values. Once you're finished, click on 'Save and view dashboard'.
Let's start at the top. Here, you'll see the crop distribution by acreage, aggregate field costs, and aggregate field costs from other field comparison dashboards. Below that is where the real meat and potatoes are: Side-by-side field costs and revenue comparisons. Here, you can compare all of your field costs and revenue so that you can identify trends and anomalies in your data. All of this cost information is taken from each of your fields, all in one place. Also, below that, you can view a cost breakdown for each of your fields, all categorized by operating/fixed and the cost category for easy organization.
Managing thousands or even tens of fields, from season to season, can be a challenge. That's why we created dashboards, to save you time and to identify anomalies to save you money. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to book a demo by emailing support@farmmind.org.
MONROE, La., April, 2025 – FarmSmarter.ai, an innovative agricultural technology star
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