If your farm grows crops and keeps livestock, you probably run two software systems that do not share data. If you also run a farm shop, holiday lets, or a wedding venue, add another two or three. Every month someone on the farm manually reconciles information across platforms that were never designed to work together. This article looks at why that happens, which platforms come closest to solving it, and what a unified approach would actually require.
Farm management software was built in silos. Crop recording platforms (Gatekeeper, Omnia, xFarm) were designed for arable operations. Livestock platforms (Herdwatch, AgriWebb) were designed for cattle and sheep enterprises. Farm accounting packages (Farmplan, SUM-IT) handle the financials. None of these were designed to work as parts of a larger whole.
For a 500-hectare mixed farm with 200 head of cattle, a farm shop, and SFI agreements, the software stack might look like this:
| Function | Platform | Estimated Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Crop recording and spray logs | TELUS Crop Management | £800-£1,500 |
| Livestock compliance (BCMS/LIS) | Herdwatch | £119-£250 |
| Farm accounts | Farmplan or SUM-IT | £400-£1,000 |
| Farm shop EPOS/stock | Generic retail system | £300-£600 |
| SFI evidence capture | Manual / spreadsheets | Time cost |
| Total | £1,620-£3,350/year |
The cost is not just financial. The real cost is your time. Somebody moves data between systems, and errors enter during the re-entry. Nobody can see the whole-farm figures without a spreadsheet that pulls from four sources.
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One system must do all of the following before it can replace the usual set of mixed farm tools.
No off-the-shelf platform delivers all of this. But some cover more ground than others:
| Platform | Crops | Livestock | Accounts | Diversification | SFI Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TELUS Crop Management | Strong | Limited | Via Farmplan | No | Partial |
| Herdwatch | No | Strong | No | No | No |
| xFarm | Moderate | Basic | No | No | Developing |
| Farmplan | Via Gatekeeper | Basic | Strong | No | Partial |
| AgriWebb | No | Strong | No | No | No |
The closest existing combination is TELUS Crop Management plus Farmplan (both under TELUS ownership, with some data sharing between them) plus Herdwatch for livestock. But this is still three separate platforms with three logins, three data formats, and no consolidated reporting.
The spreadsheet at the end of the month is the symptom. The cause sits in the systems above it.
Your crop system, your livestock system and your shop till each hold their own idea of a cost, a date and an enterprise. None of them is wrong. They simply do not agree.
A person then decides what each figure means, and types the result into a spreadsheet. That decision is the work, and it happens again every month.
We build farm systems on engage.re. Every record type is declared in one shared dictionary, and the server refuses a write outside that declaration. A cost therefore means the same thing in the crop records, the livestock records and the shop. The whole-farm figure is then a query, and not a monthly job.
We explain why two systems disagree in why does AI get your own business data wrong. We compare the ways to record meaning in semantic layer, ontology or knowledge graph.
The mixed farm problem is where bespoke systems make the strongest case in all of agriculture. Every mixed farm is different. Take a 300-acre arable farm with a 150-head suckler herd and a farm shop. Its needs differ completely from a 1,000-acre estate with cereals, a shoot, holiday cottages and a wedding barn. No off-the-shelf platform was designed for either.
A bespoke system built around your specific holding can:
The investment is typically £15,000-£30,000 as a one-off capital cost. Take a mixed farm that spends £2,000 to £3,500 a year across several subscriptions. A system of its own pays for itself in four to five years. The subscription cost then drops to nothing.
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Our live farm demo opens without a login, and it covers the mixed farm work in this article. Sign in as owner and see the arable and livestock in one register with SFI evidence, or as vet and check both. It is a working system, not a screenshot.