A new crop of apps and websites attempt to convince sceptical farmers that computers may be better than their brains

DESPITE the stereotype of slack-jawed farmers bumbling around fields, farming is and always has been rooted in careful analysis of data. From deducing the best conditions to achieve bumper crop yields to keeping track of the bounty from their hectares of arable land, farmers have to deal with as much information as some City traders. Yet they may not realise it. Your correspondent asked one farm labourer whether his employer used any technology to track weather conditions and output. “Why would we need to?” he asked. “We check the weather forecast.” A new crop of apps and websites attempt to convince sceptical farmers that computers may be better than their brains.

FarmLogs, an alumnus of the Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley start-up programme, was founded by Jesse Vollmar in August 2012. Having helped out on his family's farm in Michigan when younger, Mr Vollmar knows well the reams of paper records that show planting and harvesting times demanded by government from the farming industry.

Mr Vollmar’s firm replaces all that paperwork with a simple smartphone app. It already allows the owners of hundreds of American farms to analyse the economics of their land and plan for the future. Users pay a monthly charge (a farm of less than 400 acres owes $20 per month). FarmLogs has found backers confident of its growth. It gained $1m in seed funding in January to expand its staff and develop the app further for the new farming season.

That investment may help it gain ground on an older competitor: iCropTrak, a 19-month-old old app developed by Cogent3D. The firm won’t say how many users it has, but it boasts 15,000 from one government contract alone. Last year it was commended by the World Ag Expo, a farming industry trade show, as one of the ten best technology innovations in agriculture.

The app tracks everything needed in a farm’s upkeep, says iCropTrak’s Aaron Hutchinson—from tillage, to planting, to irrigation, to scouting, to spraying, to harvest, to soil sampling. The service also connects labourers, ensuring everyone is aware of completed and uncompleted tasks. Fields are divided up using map data, allowing farm owners to analyse each section of their farm to see whether wheat, for example, is performing better than maize (corn).

Another company aiming to plough its own furrow is Vital Fields, an Estonian start-up and an alumnus of Startup Wise Guys, an accelerator based in the country. The service, which was launched in August 2011, does not come with an app, relying instead on a mobile-friendly website. Vital Fields aims to provide the most accurate field-specific weather forecast for farmers, co-founder Martin Rand explains.

Like the other services, it helps keep track of any actions performed on a field (such as spraying, ploughing or seeding). Yet this feature is secondary to the main product: “an integrated pest management (IPM) solution”. It uses the data to calculate the risk—field-by-field—of crops being hit by disease. This information allows it to tell a farmer whether he needs to increase or decrease the use of pesticide on a specific field.

The IPM tool and in-depth weather data down to field level are paid extras to Vital Fields' free offering, explains Mr Rand. The website has secured a loyal user base in its home country and he expects that Vital Fields will gain a 5% market penetration in Estonia by the end of the year. It has made a small foray into the British farming market, but it intends to mainly expand in eastern Europe, where agricultural expertise is less developed than in Britain.

Whether or not they acknowledge it, farmers are accountants, engineers and research pioneers all bundled into one. If anything, services such as FarmLogs, iCropTrak and Vital Fields are proof of that. But farmers are also a sceptical bunch, who pass down tips and tricks across the generations. Convincing them to cede to technological knowledge, rather than relying on their own intuition, may be a tough battle.