Saskatchewan app developer Farm At Hand Ready to Grow

“Your Farm at Your Fingertips”.

Saskatoon-based company Farm At Hand is ready to take its farm management app to the next level, as it gets ready to participate in Vancouver incubator GrowLab’s fall 2013 cohort.

Kim Keller developed the app with partner Himanshu Singh  using her own family farm near Melfort, Saskatchewan, as the guinea pig for how it would work. She told the website Real Agriculture, “I’d give my dad a bunch of information to input. If he needed too much help or asked too many questions, we knew we had to go back and re-do that part of the app.”

The farm data management app launched in April, 2012, with a mobile site for Android and Blackberry users, and an Android app “coming soon”.

The app keeps track of fields, detailing acreage and the contents of each field, along with a calendar for scheduling activities such as spraying, seeding and harvesting. Within that, users can keep track of seed type, seed depth, spraying activities, irrigation, delivery, etc., as well as details on the equipment fleet.

Keller says, “Farmers won’t be charged a registration fee, upgrade fee, subscription, nothing. There will never be a charge to them and their data will never be sold. If you stop and think about it, a well-run farm benefits the whole industry and all of us relying on a stable food source. We don’t think that should come at a cost for the farmer.”

And what does Farm At Hand hope to gain from its participation in the upcoming GrowLab session? Co-founder Singh speculates, “We’re currently working on a really big update that’s going to introduce a whole host of new features. There’ll be a lot more customization, and a way more detailed equipment management section. Maintenance logs, things like that. Our goal is to always continue updating and introduce new features that are helpful to producers. What we’re working on right now has come from direct feedback from people who use our program and our app.”

Sounds just a little more productive than “Farmville”.

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