New solutions are seeking to disrupt what was a stable farm management software market. Tech Farmer gets the lowdown on a major new entrant – an upgrade to Hutchinsons’ Omnia platform
Written by Mike Abram
Arable farm management software was probably due an upgrade. For years, Gatekeeper has been the dominant player in the market, with Muddy Boots – now Greenlight Farm Management – the main competitor, while Landmark with Geofolia had a loyal following.
But times are changing. Both Greenlight and more latterly Gatekeeper in March have been bought by Canadian telecommunications firm Telus Agriculture and Consumer Goods. Quite what that means for the future of either software is currently unknown.
That uncertainty plus a recognition of gaps in delivering what growers would ideally want from a system has encouraged new entrants into the arena, the latest of which is agriculture advice and input supplier Hutchinsons. It is launching its EasyPlan upgrade to further develop its digital offering, Omnia, which has over 4000 users, covering 1.5m ha of land.
Hutchinsons managing director Gordon McKechnie claims it is the most advanced, easy to use farm management system for UK growers.
“The updates will move Omnia from a precision farming system into a new style of farm management software. It leverages the latest digital technologies, data analytics and agronomic expertise, and provides farmers with a comprehensive suite of services.
“These services are designed to optimise crop production, enhance resource efficiency and maximise profitability,” he says.
Omnia began life in 2016 as a precision farming nutrient management tool, explains Hutchinsons head of Omnia Oliver Wood.
“Since its launch the platform has evolved into a broader digital farming system offering a range of user-friendly business modules, such as cost of production, yield mapping, rotational planning and carbon mapping tools.”
The EasyPlan upgrade is the next step in its development, which Hutchinsons believes will move Omnia uniquely into the centre of an agricultural software market that covers four main areas: telemetry, precision agriculture, decision support and farm management systems.
There is a user demand for such software, according to Oliver. Over the past 18 months Hutchinsons has run focus groups with farmers, agronomists and sprayer operators where there was a consistent message that users wanted one integrated system, with a significant number also wanting it to be digital-based and paperless, he says.
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“There’s also been changes in the sector, with the market getting smaller, predominantly in foreign ownership, and in our opinion not delivering what users are wanting.
“We are very keen to deliver innovation into this sector,” he says. “Delivering British-based solutions for British farmers.”
The upgrade consists of either completely new functionality or rebuilds of existing functionality to deliver spray plans, spray plan auditing, record keeping, stock management and additional functionality to enable users to decide how, where and with whom to share data.
It now offers users the chance to go paperless, although printed reports are still an option, and critically maintains a core requirement of being easy to use, he says.
Lewis Mckerrow, head of field-based IT for Hutchinsons, says Omnia will help farmers and agronomists while making crop inspections, creating crop protection plans, managing stock, making and recording field applications, and analysing crop performance.
Integrating crop inspections into records is already required in the fruit and veg sector, and likely to become more widely needed to help justify applications and enable end-to-end traceability for supermarkets and end consumers.
Upgrades to the Scout app make that easy to achieve with pictures, notes, logged areas of weed or pest infestations, for example, transferred seamlessly into Omnia for any stakeholder to view.
“At any point users that have access to the field diary in Omnia can see the full history for the season of that crop,” Lewis says.
A completely new spray module for producing crop protection plans has been built for the upgrade. A frequently requested new feature from growers and advisers, it will allow Hutchinsons agronomists using Omnia for precision farming and nutrition recommendations to move away from using third-party systems for sprays.
“As a business we felt it’s also an area that lacked innovation. Pesticide legislation is a tricky area to deal with, labels are getting more stringent and complicated,” Lewis says.
The module allows users to easily customise how spray plans made during the season are viewed by crop, month, season or status, and whether finalised or in progress.
Top of users wish lists when making a plan was having key bits of information easily viewable on one screen. To achieve that, Hutchinsons has created a split-screen design with one half for data entry and the other an interactive window, which has different functionality depending on which part of the process is happening.
For example, it could be showing a map of the farm to easily select all the fields of one type of crop. Once selected the fields appear on the left-hand data entry side, where further drop-down menus enable the user to select key information, such as growth stage and products to be used.
The hardest functionality to develop was building a pesticide database that runs behind the scenes, Lewis stressed.
“Omnia Halo is a database of pesticide approvals with the core data taken from Fera, which allows Omnia to audit spray plans for compliance with pesticide legislation.”
Other software has similar functionality, but Lewis said two features made Halo different – firstly a daily update of the Fera data rather than the weekly standard, and secondly the database was internally managed by Hutchinsons technical agronomy specialists.
“That allows us to enhance the data.”
Enhancing the data means structuring the data so it can be more easily audited automatically. For example, often on a pesticide label there will be boxes of text that are difficult for computers to understand, such as “apply from the beginning of tillering (GS21) to up to and including second node detectable stage, and do not exceed max dose of 1.33 l/ha before stem elongation (GS30)” on a chlormequat label.
“What we do is translate that into numbers that the system can use. So, although the max dose is 2.0 l/ha, there’s a nuance that before a certain stage you can only apply 1.33 l/ha.
“So we’ve added a first application stage before GS30, where you can apply up to 1.33 l/ha, and then from GS30 onwards up to GS32 it uses the default max rate.
“I can’t overstate how much effort has gone into that process. We’ve structured 47,000 individual pesticide approvals in this way, so we can have the best pesticide audit on the market.”
The end user doesn’t see any of that, however, he notes. “In other systems they tend to give users the unstructured comments and leave it to them to decipher and decide what actions to take.
Halo uses a two-stage audit process, again unlike most other systems, where an instant audit does some basic checks, such as checking a product is approved for the target crop or being used within correct growth stages or rates. Non-compliance is signalled by warning icons.
The second audit at the end of making a recommendation goes through the complete 15 different checks to make sure you’re not breaking any more complex rules taking into account previous applications and even multi-year loading of actives.
Other useful features in the spray module for sprayer operators include an on-by-default automatic spray order tool, and a calculator to help adjust how much chemical is required in the tank, for example if only two out of three fields are to be sprayed or the water volume needs adjusting.
The field diary module has been significantly extended to now allow task management and record keeping, rather than just holding crop inspection records.
Lewis Mckerrow’s top reasons to move to Omnia from Gatekeeper or Greenlight
- Cloud-based, more user-friendly experience than Gatekeeper
- Easy, but customisable access for other stakeholders (eg agronomist, sprayer operator) to access and seamlessly interact with Omnia
- Bespoke management of latest rules and regulations
- Much better map functionality for precision applications than Greenlight
- Broader scope than Greenlight
Record keeping is an area ripe for improvement as users often report a disconnect between the office and field, and not knowing whether a recommendation or task has been completed.
Omnia solves that in three ways, Lewis says. At its simplest, it allows users to create a record directly on either mobile or desktop computer; or it can create a task which when completed creates the record; or for complex farm business with multiple operators and machinery to create and allocate tasks to specific operators and machinery, schedule it, and once completed automatically create a record.
Allocated tasks will appear in a new task module in an operator’s Scout app, with, in common with existing Omnia functionality, compatibility with most popular machines and platforms.
Completed tasks are viewed in the records section making it easy to see when it was done, weather, operator, machinery, products, etc., Lewis says.
Another new module will help growers manage stock from delivery through to application. The module allows growers to manage orders from any supplier, although there is an advantage of being linked to Hutchinsons enterprise resource planning system that will automate some of the stock management processes when buying from the firm.
“The order will be tracked so as statuses change in our system that will be reflected in Omnia as well,” Oliver says. For other suppliers, delivery status will need to be manually updated.
Within Omnia there are dedicated stores for product types, such as seed, fertiliser and chemical. Multiple stores of each can also be set up.
“Updates will happen automatically. Once delivered, the inventory will be updated, and then again when it is applied,” Oliver says.
For stock taking, users can either check amounts of a product against what the system says is in store or do a blind stock take where the user just has a list of products and counts what is in store.
Pricing can be entered at any stage of the season, and users can choose whether to allocate costs from the last purchase or a weighted average across the season.
Hutchinsons has also made some minor upgrades to its business performance module in Omnia to make sure the new modules are linked and automate where possible. It provides crucial information to help growers understand how farms, fields and parts of fields are performing, Oliver says.
Using various filters, users can easily, for example, compare variable costs, yields, or net or gross margins for all fields of winter wheat on the farm. On a field level, the same can be seen on a map highlighting performance in different areas of the field.
The Omnia upgrade will be available from 7 June, with no change in the cost structure to users. To access the new modules users will need to be on either the Field Manager subscription level costing £3.15/ha or the Omnia Business Manager at £6/ha.
Business Manager subscribers will have access to the Halo audit, variable rate prescription plans and the business management tools in addition to the other new modules available through Field Manager.
Data security concerns addressed
Hutchinsons is making clear attempts to address farmer concerns around data – control, security and ownership – although whether that is enough to convince farmers to buy into a system built by an input supplier remains to be seen.
On control of who can access data, Hutchinsons has built new functionality which means for each module users can set permissions for others to either view or view and edit, and where there is pricing information, whether they can access that as well, Oliver says.
“That’s in the hands of the farmer, and can be set for any user, whether they work for the farm, for us or any other third party, so it can be tailored to business need.”
Around security and ownership of data, Oliver says the firm always had a clear policy that the data remains with the farmer, but by signing up to both ISO27001, the international standard for information security management and the new industry-led Farm Data Principles, he hopes that will brings a new level of independence to enable users to trust the company with their data.
“ISO27001 brings a whole series of policies and procedures around security, around development and what staff can and can’t do, and around access controls,” he says. “We are externally audited every year to prove we are doing what we say we are doing.”
Farm Data Principles has four pillars around data – ownership, sharing, safety and security, and how we make using data easy for users. “This clearly sets out what those standards are and as a business we have to declare how we are meeting each of those.
“There is a publicly accessible form on our website that clearly states what we are and aren’t doing.
“We are the first platform to have both of these, which we’ve done to give farmers peace of mind that we can be trusted with their data,” Oliver says.
Data is stored in cloud space rented from Microsoft Azure, which brings additional inbuilt security, while a non-commercial Hutchinsons data governance team sits between the database and Hutchinsons business with a clear remit and powers devolved by the Hutchinsons board of what can be done with data, he adds.
“If someone says, for example, can I have a look at this pricing data, the answer is no. That is empowered by our board, laid down in our terms within our data governance access, with our Farm Data Principles commitment, which is all governed and audited by ISO27001.
“It’s not just take our word for it, but built into our auditing procedures and gets externally audited,” he stresses.
What other data connections does Omnia have?
Hutchinsons didn’t announce any new data connections with the EasyPlan upgrade, on top of existing ones to the likes of John Deere, Claas and Bayer, but others are on the roadmap, according to Gordon.
“As more machinery manufacturers go to cloud-based telemetry there will be more customers asking for that,” he says. “Our roadmap for later this year is looking potentially at an AGCO connection and beyond that Case New Holland.”
Similarly, Hutchinsons is assessing and talking to a number of carbon calculators and trading platforms to see whether and how it can allow farmers to transfer data to their platforms. “But it’s not functionality we have at this time,” Oliver says. “We will see how that market develops and then make some decisions. It’s not [a market] we’re planning to enter ourselves.”
Integrations with financial or accounting software is also on the development roadmap. “We are open to creating data connections with any system where there is demand for it.”
After the controversy about using anonymised Gatekeeper data to potentially provide farmers, adviser and the wider industry information about trends from big data sets, it’s probably no surprise Hutchinsons has no immediate plans to use anonymised data in the short or even medium-term.
“It is on our radar to think about,” Oliver says. “If data comes into the system in a structured way, it potentially can be used, but in terms of what, how and when we do something like that is an entirely different question.
“Given the sensitivities around the topic, it’s not something we have any plans to do in the short or medium term. Longer term, when the market understands the benefits of amalgamated, anonymised data I think we will be a good position to do something at that point.”
What about support?
With any new farm management software, or technology generally, support for new users is vital – it’s something that both Gatekeeper and Greenlight have good reputations for providing.
Lewis says Hutchinsons recognises that the ability to offer support is crucial. How to guides and user help videos are in-built into Omnia – accessible by clicking on question icons at the top right of the screen, while three people are employed full-time to provide phone support.
“As demand increases, we’ll add further staff.”
In addition, another 12 regional Omnia digital specialists act as key account managers to visit farms one-on-one to provide sales and support.
Other new entrants to consider
Fieldmargin has grown from its initial field mapping service in 2014 to a more full-service offer including field scouting, planning and recording field work, checking compliance of pesticide applications and reporting. It, too, was recently bought in February, this time by Danish agtech firm Agreena, best known for its soil carbon platform that supports farmers transitioning to regenerative agriculture.
FMEC UK has also built its own Farm Management Suite, which provides plant protection product compliance and stock control among its modules. It also has direct API links with Syngenta’s Cropwise precision farming software, plus fleet telematic and fuel usage data for machinery regardless of manufacturer. Connections with farm accounts software help link planned and applied farm data with costs. All financial and private farm information is stored in FMS creating separation as well as an end-to-end package.
