Industries
The season sets the deadline
Agriculture runs on a calendar nobody negotiates with. Software that arrives a month late here has not slipped a sprint, it has missed a year, and the person who has to use it is standing in a field with one bar of signal and a spreadsheet that already works.
Systems for growing, trading and moving food.
What agriculture demands
Built for the field, not the boardroom.
Agri software gets bought in an office and judged in an orchard, and the two rooms want completely different things. The office wants visibility, the person in the orchard wants to be finished before dark, and anything that costs them time in order to give you data will lose that argument no matter how good the reporting looks.
The spreadsheet is the competition
It works offline, it bends to whatever this season is doing, and everybody already knows it. A system that only wins in a demo ends up running alongside the sheet rather than replacing it, which leaves you with two versions of the truth and no reliable way to tell which one is current.
Signal ends at the farm gate
The people capturing the most valuable data are standing exactly where there is no reception. Capture that assumes a connection quietly collects nothing on the days that matter most, and the gap then gets blamed on the user rather than on the design.
The plan changes with the weather
A programme set in winter gets rewritten by a wet fortnight in spring. Treat the plan as fixed and it becomes the thing everyone works around by the second month of the season, at which point your platform is faithfully recording a version of events that never happened.
How the pieces fit
Central plan, distributed reality.
An agronomist sets the programme once and it goes out to every block. What comes back is what was actually done, captured on a phone that may have had no signal at the time and synced when it found some, and the plan moves to meet it. That return leg is the half most systems never build, and it is the only half that makes the first one true.
The plan
One agronomist sets a programme for the season.
Every block
It fans out to ground that is never uniform.
- Block A
- Block B
- Block C
- Block D
Captured in the field
What actually happened is recorded where the work is - which is usually where there is no signal.
Queued, then synced
The record waits on the device and moves when signal returns, and the plan moves with it.
How we help here
The parts of agri we build.
This is operations software with a field interface, so it draws on the platform side of the studio for the planning and integration work, and on the experience side for the harder problem of making a complicated programme fit on a phone screen held in one hand.
The work
One grower, one marketplace.
We have worked at both ends of the sector. At the growing end, the orchard management system for one of South Africa's largest agricultural exporters, taking agronomist-led spray and fertilisation programmes off spreadsheets and out to the people running the blocks. At the trading end, an embedded design partnership on a multi-marketplace agri-trade platform, cutting it back to something a farmer can actually use standing in a field.
Karsten Group
Orchard planning, off the spreadsheet
Designing the orchard management system for one of South Africa's largest agricultural exporters - agronomist-led spray and fertilisation programmes planned centrally, pushed out to orchard managers, and adapted as the season turns.
Nile.ag
Cohesion for a fast-growing agri marketplace
An embedded UX partner bringing cohesion back to a multi-marketplace agri-trade platform: fewer clicks, decluttered dashboards, and a mobile experience farmers can actually use in the field.
Talk to us
Still running the season off a spreadsheet?
Most agri businesses we meet know exactly which sheet is holding everything together, and exactly how nervous that makes them. That is usually a good place to start the conversation.