5 New Ways FarmLogs Can Help in 2020

With the 2020 season underway, we thought it would be helpful to summarize all the new things FarmLogs can do to help your farm this year.

Our team has been steadily adding new features and improving the way FarmLogs works to make it even more valuable for farms. Here is a quick recap of how our software can help make farm management easier for you this year.

Custom Activity Types 

Configure your account to match the way you farm. Pick from over 15 new activity types or create your own to match your equipment, practices and costs.

• Set per acre costs to match your specific equipment and labor costs
• Change activity names to match what you call them
• Archive activity types that aren't relevant to your farm
• Keep detailed records for compliance or certification 

Cost of Production Tracking

Set the cost per acre by activity type to automatically calculate production costs from your record keeping. 

• Set per acre costs to match your specific equipment and labor costs
• Automatically calculate operation and input costs by simply logging field work
• Make optional adjustments to activity acres for accuracy
• View costs by field, activity category, or commodity on the Activities page

Input Cost Tracking

Keep track of all your input purchases and benchmark your average prices. Simply enter records of how much you bought at what price so you can:

• See your average price per unit across multiple purchases
• Automatically associate input costs with usage in Activities
• Compare the price you paid with current market prices

Land Cost Tracking

Enter your multi-year leases and crop share agreements once and have the cost accrue to crops over many years.

• Automatically generate crop share and flex rent reports after uploading yield
• Accrue land costs to crops in your P&L to see how different agreements impact your bottom line
• Stay organized by uploading scans of your paper agreements or PDFs

Crop and Field-Level Profit & Loss Analysis

Easily see the profit or loss for every dimension of your farm. Calculate costs and profitability at the farm, commodity, and field level so that you can:

• Expose which fields have the biggest opportunity for improvement
• Allocate capital to the most profitable areas of your business
• Explain the overall health of your business to your lenders
• Evaluate the continued farming of rented ground
• Negotiate fair rental rates for your fields
• Find costs that drag down profitability
• Make plans for next year based on this year's results

How to use the Profit & Loss feature:

1. Use the Land Costs feature to track crop share leases, cash rent leases and land mortgages (one time setup)
2. Configure your per acre operations costs for Activities in your Farm Settings (one time setup)
3. Enter your input purchases into the Inputs feature to set up per unit costs (as you buy inputs)
4. Log your activities with input application rates (throughout the season)
5. Enter your sales contracts into the Marketing feature to keep track of revenue (as you make sales)

We want to help! 

These are just some of the new ways FarmLogs can help you manage your farm's finances and record-keeping this year. It is never too late to get started and we're happy to help. We understand that during the busy planting and growing season it may feel daunting to have to keep up with the office work, but we promise FarmLogs makes it easy.

If you would like help setting up your account for a successful season, please reach out to our support team by emailing support@farmlogs.com and we will be happy to help!