The 5 commandments of modern farming.
Very few sectors have contributed to the GDP of Nigeria as much as agriculture and the practices of modern farming has made it more desirable as a profession.
However, like every industry, there are important commandments you need to keep to be successful in it. In this post, I will share 5 commandments every successful farmer needs to abide by and how ProbityFarms helps them to comply with them.
HINT: ProbityFarms is free farm management and accounting app and we are giving 10,000 farmers access to free tier of the app, sign up today)
1. Thou shall be accountable.
This is the first commandment.
In order to be successful in farming, you need to treat farming as a business, not as a hobby. Hence, you need to be accountable. As a modern farmer, you must be able to document every aspect of the farm operations and finance. This sense of accountability enables you to know how profitable your business is, and will be useful to prepare your farm’s book keeping and profit and loss balance sheet.
With ProbityFarms, our “pilot farmers” depend on our simple dashboard to solve these important needs. The core solutions of Probityfarms help farm operators to keep farm records and all farming data in one place in order to get real-time insight into livestock and crop activities. The farm accounting tool also enables easy management of sales, expenses and cash flow such that the data generated from the information supplied by the farmer makes it easy to work with insurance, banks, accountants or their financial providers for assessments.
Let me break this down as follows:
- Farm operations: You can populate the app with people (HR function), capital and machine inventory of your farm. We even recommend filling this section as one of the first steps to take.
- Farm size: it is good to know your farm size and other information about the farm. This can include coordinate information, address, ownership type etc. When logged in, you can complete this info in 2 steps (provided all data is available).
(NOTE: On the free plan you can only add 1 farm, if you upgrade to a paid plan, you will be able to add multiple farm locations. Upgrade your account).
To add information about your farm size:
STEP 1: Navigate to the farm section of the app to add farm. Click on the “add farm” button from the drop down.
- STEP 2: Enter the details about the farm, including the name of the farm (you can give it any name of your choice), details of the person in charge (your farm guardian and her phone number), type and cost of ownership scheme of the farm.
You can also capture more information about the farm including the GPS coordinates of the farm area.
- Capture daily operations: You might want to keep a daily or weekly logs of activities on the farm. These are your farm tasks. They can be simply recorded based on the kind of farm activities (either crop or livestock). The management of your financial will be discussed in a later section.
The app is automated to send reminders of tasks to the farm owner and farm managers via SMS and email. For example, if you schedule a task to weed your maize plantation, you will get an email reminder on the designated date. This keeps you alert to your responsibilities.
On the dashboard, you also see a list of activities that are due and you get in-app notification of any pending tasks.
2. Thou shall leverage your network.
This is the second commandment. It addresses one of the major challenges of farmers, which is access to capital.
It is a common knowledge that cooperative society is one of the informal ways that people use to raise cash when in need. The same concept can be applied to agriculture as people can combine resources together and deploy it to run a farm operation. This strategy to funding farm business is becoming common nowadays.
We are currently delivering an enterprise project that combined the efficiency of our cooperative management solution with Probityfarms to help a cooperative group with 1,000 members manage their 1,000 hectares of farmland. As soon as we complete full integration of the 2 apps, it will be announced.
3. Thou shall figure out the best platform to sell.
It is important for you to be able to access ready-to-buy off takers for your farm produce at competitive rates. This removes the concerns most farmers have about finding market for their farm produce and eliminate middle men that have exploited the fractured market to under-price farm produce, leaving farmers with marginal profits.
We heartily recommend platforms like Releaf.NG — a marketplace of trusted buyers and sellers for wholesale transactions.
You can also use ProbityFarm’s marketplace to sell farm produce and list agricultural equipment like tractors for sale/lease. With a click, you can “instantly” list your produce in the farmers marketplace. You can also take advantage of price checklist to get competitive rates for your farm produce.
4. Thou shall prepare for Risk.
This is the fourth commandment. It will help you assess your risk exposure level in order to claim compensation.
Usually, in cases of farm loss, it could be difficult to get insurance cover if you do not have adequate data for assessment. ProbityFarms makes it easy for you to get this information from your farm report. With the farm report, you can easily pull out any data to be presented for insurance claims.
Your risk assessment also includes getting real time alerts about what can affect your farm and how you can mitigate the risk, understanding of weather and soil report etc. We are building these features into the app.
5. Thou shall make it easy to receive payment.
Either you choose to sell through 3rd-party platforms (like Releaf.ng) or directly to your off takers, you can easily accept payment and update your books for proper accounting with ProbityFarms.
We made this possible by integrating the inventory and invoicing functions of ProbityBooks; small business accounting app to Probityfarms in order to help you capture all transaction details and generate report accordingly.
You can also capture and record sales generated on PoS, cash transactions and online payment into the database.
Ready to keep the new commandments?
Many of us don’t like rules, but the truth is that successful farmers live by these commandments. The good thing is that using ProbityFarms makes it easy to keep these rules.
We invite you to sign up you free account on Probityfarms.
Please click the “clap” icon to recommend for all farmers to know about these commandments.
