Granular
DEET, dirt, and data
Farming is the oldest production process known. Managing that process can be very difficult, and many contemporary farms still rely on largely analog methods to do this. As the world’s food needs continue to escalate however, the need to farm more efficiently will only increase.
Catering to large crop farming operations, Granular is cloud-based farm management software, encompassing operational, agronomic, and financial needs. Typical customers have operations spread over large areas, with employees and equipment working in a variety of changeable weather conditions. Users may be in an office, a storage facility, on a tractor in the field, or meeting with a landowner or banker.
Granular provides real-time access to enterprise-level farm data, allowing farm owners and managers to see how their business is doing at any point before, during, and after the growing season. Without it, the same information might not be available until after the season is over, and then not without combining information from a variety of disparate sources.
Daily operations can be reviewed and managed from a single dashboard, providing essential information about current tasks, attendant weather and soil conditions, and what stage a crop is at in its life cycle.
Crop production plans are built up from a series of small, sequential tasks, each with specific parameters (a particular chemical may be spread, sprayed, or injected, for example). Costs associated with each plan can be assessed, providing management with much needed insight during the season.
Crop plans are assigned to fields and combined with seeds to create flexible growing plans. Results from previous seasons allow farm owners to assess which fields are most productive and profitable, and also adjust plans in the face of current market conditions.
Farm operators are guided through their daily tasks via a native mobile app. Essential information (such as the constituents of a fertilizer mix), together with ‘workability’ (the suitability of climatic conditions for a given task), allow the user to operate independently, reporting progress as they go. During harvest, crop loads are logged via the app, providing a point of reference when inventory is reconciled later in the process.
Designed in collaboration with Kelsey Ring and Josiah Roe.
Field operations are available in a Gantt-like timeline format, allowing office staff to better manage resources in the context of overall plans. A farm could have hundreds of working fields, so task status and ‘workability’ indicators ensure that progress is clearly visible.
Managing what goes into and onto a field is a vital part of farm management. Granular allows each farm to establish a customized catalog of inputs, track inventory over the season, set default application rates, and factor costs into the overall budget.
Unlike typical ERP software, Granular is a modern SaaS app, and utilizes paradigms common to many other types of contemporary software: drag ‘n’ drop interactions, editable vector shapes, and stateful, modular components. The user interface is intended to provide the familiarity of a spreadsheet but with a distinct visual language, completed by considered color usage and custom iconography.
Monitoring inventory and available storage—and checking for mistakes—during harvest, when loads are tracked from field to storage and may change hands (and vehicles) three or four times in a day.