How to Choose Right Enterprise Farm Management Software?
Selecting the right ERP can be a tedious, confusing, and challenging task thanks to all the options available in the market. But it’s stress worth pursuing, given the right farm ERP can lead to massive progress in the farming business, enabling farmers and other relevant parties with numerous advantages.
What is Farm Management Software?
Before jumping on to the ‘how’ part, let’s address the ‘what’,
In general, farm management involves making and executing decisions that revolve around everyday operations. It assists in organizing various decisions with the objective of maximizing profit and productivity.
Farm management helps monitor plant growth stages, farm animals, information on soil, seed health, soil fertility status, weed control, insect pest damage, and much more. It helps stay updated on farm-engineering details, such as prices of machinery, irrigation, farm building, and more. It also attends agricultural economics with data on new agricultural policies, markets, goods prices and credits, and leasing.
By combining, managing, optimizing, and integrating the production processes and various activities of the farm, the best farm management software aids the farmers to be more efficient.
The farmers can analyze and monitor the different farm activities, update and monitor daily expenses and business budgets, and do much more. This subsequently brings more transparency in the marketing, budgeting, planning, accounting, and procurement process.
Why is Farm Management Software Needed?
Farm management software enables the visibility of efficient planning and monitoring of real-time activity on a single platform. It helps make the best decisions by ensuring optimal farm operations with the highest efficacy on the back of real-world data that the software collects, analyzes, and facilitates. The best farm management software can suggest applicable pest control methods, fertilizer application based on the crop specificity. Here are more benefits the farmers avail:
With the help of advanced features in farm management software India such as predictions of pest and disease surge, weather conditions, market demands, and more – farmers can enjoy better control of external risks.
Alerting farmers about the upcoming storms, climatic threats, or any risks, the software shields them against losses. In the short and long term, it paves the way to higher yields.
Most of the farm management software focuses on traceability and agreement with HACCP, GAP, GHP, etc., which ensures the farmer provides products of the highest quality and safe food for consumption.
The rich features of farm management software decrease the damage done to the environment. By following responsible and sustainable agricultural practices, it promotes water conservation, as well as limited usage of fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemical elements that usually damage the quality of the soil and find their way into the food chain.
In all, by combining both the operational and business data – and providing an integrated platform that facilitates seamless accessibility – a farm management software paves the way to a higher return on investments.
Choosing the Right Farm Management Software: The ‘How’ Part
The objective of outlining what is farm management software and why it’s needed is to give you a fair idea of the features and benefits you should look for from the solution you’re choosing. And that is the first tip here! You want software that delivers all the basic and essential features to adequately deliver you on your every-day, most fundamental needs. So, whatever software you’re considering to get, look at the number of features it checks out.
In addition to ‘how many’, those features should also be relevant and useful. So, when you’re looking at the features, also establish how they will help you. Find out what those features will do for you; how they will benefit you. Here are some of the advantages you should ideally look for from your farm management software:
Planning, forecasting, and tracking
Extreme weather conditions like storms, hail, droughts, and flooding can adversely affect crops and cause massive amounts of loss to farmers. The result could be similar if adequate crop protection is late and not enough measures are taken on a timely basis. Therefore, monitoring pest and disease occurrence in one’s field – and analyzing weather conditions – are of the highest priority. A good farm management software must help here.
Soil health
Top farm management software can help increase the production on the farm by doing soil testing and by monitoring the moisture content. Soil with low water content can result in poor quality crops with issues arising at each growth stage. One must choose an ERP that can analyze the field conditions by suggesting a chemical, seed, and fertilizer utilization scheme based on a field map.
Marketing of output
An ERP that offers a custom marketing plan for the crops grown, as well as tracks the profit and market trajectory based on the yield of the crop – this is a feature that farmers could benefit from to attain higher income. It is almost mandatory that the ERP has precise data and thereon make effective decisions through predictive analysis. Hedge plan tracking, training, market reports must be provided by the ERP, which would lead to easy profit-tracking.
Overall productivity
Apart from managing crops, the factory team-connectivity, inventory management, data recording from equipment, offline accessibility, and more – these small features can ensure many benefits. In such a connected and efficient ecosystem, quick decisions can be taken by the farmers, leading to crop sustainability – thereby making crop management simpler and stress-free with higher crop productivity.
Data integration
The amalgamation of data is a feature in ERP that makes it possible to automatically collect data. This is possible when the system can set up a connection with other software, hardware, and sensors. Several companies offer Internet of Things (IoT) and remote sensing solutions to help the farmers. Ideally, when one has to pick the right farm management software, they should choose a solution that can merge with the pre-existing hardware i.e automatic data collector from equipment and other machinery software i.e accounting, eCommerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and any other third-party system.
Accurate monitoring
All reports and data recordings can be analyzed by ERP, making it possible for the farmers and other relevant parties to stay updated about several things. An ideal farm ERP can help manage many things in an orderly way, subsequently improving the farm’s productivity (and farmers’ lifestyle).
Nativeness
For a farmer to be successful, he must get the application in his local language; an application that supports different languages. By enabling the farmer to set up the account in his preferred language and make the best out of the application – it can ensure enhanced benefits to them.
Know What You’re Looking For
The above-mentioned are the advantages you should expect from your farm management software. But that said, the priority shouldn’t exactly be on them but instead your own definite needs.
Outline your unique needs, requirements, and preferences and see if the software fits them or not. Remember, every farmer has their own distinct requirements; they have their own set of challenges. Your case is no different. So, you want to make sure that the farm management software has the right built, features, and options that sync with your needs and challenges.
Don’t rally behind others. This is often an undermined tip in finding the best farm management software India. As mentioned earlier, different people have different requirements. A solution that may have worked for others might not work for you. Sure, you should take their opinions and consider their view. But the priority should always be on why you’re looking for the said software and how you want it to make your life easier and productive.
Why is Kheti Buddy the best farm management software?
Kheti Buddy’s ERP is an integrated farm management system that offers end-to-end solutions to cover every farm management requirement. By collecting, monitoring, improvising the farming data, and integrating with other software platforms, KhetiBuddy stands as an advanced and intuitive farm crop management system that assists farmers in swift decision-making.
Kheti Buddy makes integrated and seamless farm management possible, on a single interface among relevant stakeholders in the supply chain, like vendors, dealers, manufacturers, retailers, and more. In addition, it provides connectivity with different on-field sensors, which helps in creating data for the AI engine to give key insights; this adds newer layers of benefits to the value chain.
For more information on how KhetiBuddy can help you on the field please contact us today.
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