Net Zero Compare

Xfarm App: Helping Farmers Manage their Operations more Ecologically

Written by Christopher Ian Curran
Published July 16th, 2024
9 min read
Updated August 1st, 2024

Summary

The xFarm app is a farmer-designed app for efficient farm management. It's designed to help farmers save time and keep their work organized with a simple and intuitive interface. The app is available on Google Play and has a 3.6-star rating based on 716 reviews. xFarm helps farmers manage various aspects of their farm, including field management, sustainability, crop protection, livestock, environment and climate, machinery, precision agriculture, and activities. The app is designed to be comprehensive and user-friendly, providing farmers with the tools they need to manage their farm effectively.
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Details

Name
Xfarm App
Date of establishment
2017-01

Deep dive

Managing Farms the Ecological Way

Products and Services

Xfarm App

The xFarm app is a digital tool designed to assist farmers in managing their agricultural activities efficiently. Here are the features and functionalities you will find in the xFarm app:

Field management: One of the most useful features of the software is its ability to create field maps. These maps can be used to track crop yields, soil characteristics, and other important data. Farmers can also use the app to create variable rate application maps, which can help them to optimize their use of fertilizers and other chemicals. This app also offers a variety of tools for soil management. Farmers can use the app to monitor soil pH, nutrients, and organic matter levels. This information can then be used to create soil amendment plans that will help to improve soil health and crop yields. In addition to its crop and soil management features, it also offers a variety of tools for irrigation management. Farmers can use the app to track water usage, create irrigation schedules, and monitor soil moisture levels.

Machinery: The xFarm app offers a comprehensive solution for managing your agricultural machinery. It provides a fleet registry where you can keep track of all your machines, including their machinery sheet, documents, and registration books. You can manage maintenance and revision deadlines and keep a detailed activities log. This allows you to assign tasks and enter processing time for each machine. You can also maintain a maintenance record of your agricultural machinery, recording details of interventions to control costs, durations, and inventories of spare parts. It also offers an automatic processing log that connects your machines to the app and automatically records all the activities they have done in the previous days. You can then view all the collected data in the form of charts and counters to analyse downtime, work duration, consumption, and more. The app allows you to send and receive processing details, prescription, application, and yield maps by connecting directly to the in-cab monitor, eliminating the need for USB sticks and waiting.

Environment and climate: One of the key features is the weather station, which allows you to monitor weather conditions in your fields directly from the app. You can use forecasts to plan your work effectively and check the status of your fields in real time. The app also uses data collected from sensors to provide agronomic advice. The Sensor module allows you to collect real-time data on environmental conditions, view data collected based on sensor locations on the map, and easily view data for each sensor and monitor performance in real time. You can also view detection history up to 90 days from the current date, allowing you to monitor changes in environmental conditions over time and compare data collected at different times. This will help you identify any trends or anomalies that may affect crop productivity. The app also provides spraying advice, displaying indications with hourly precision on the optimal times to carry out treatments to avoid drift and runoff. It offers seedability advice, visualizing, crop by crop, which times of the day are most suitable for planting to optimize germinability, saving seed and obtaining more plants. XFarm uses data from sensors in your fields to obtain predictive models of disease development, helping you prevent severe fungal disease, save time, money, and resources, and get a more sustainable and healthy product. The Insect module allows you to monitor more than 20 different insect species using monitoring traps. For each species, you can have automatic catch recognition, analytics, and development forecasts for future generations. This will help you understand when the parasite will be at its most susceptible stage and consequently increase the effectiveness of treatment.

Irrigation: They offer a range of features to help you manage your irrigation effectively. You can use data from sensors in the field to identify the water status of the soil, compare it with the crop's demands, and calculate the necessary irrigation requirements, avoiding plant stress. This allows you to carry out irrigation only when necessary, saving time and resources. You can also easily manage irrigation systems from your phone and get alerts to avoid crop stress. The app allows you to optimize the irrigation of your fields by defining the irrigation strategy for each crop, depending on the phenological stage. You can define the ranges within which the plant is not in water stress or use pre-set profiles to achieve your goal of yield, quality, and organoleptic properties. Finally, It allows you to automatically irrigate your fields by dividing irrigation operations day by day, field by field, establishing the times at which irrigation systems are activated.

Crop protection: It includes a range of features to help you manage crop protection effectively. You can use plant disease recognition to reduce field inputs and protect plants from pests and avoid insect infestations. The app also helps you identify the best time to enter the field to maximize protection. The crop disease recognition feature uses artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically diagnose diseases based on pictures of the plant or a part of it. Aailable is epidemiological risk prediction for various fungal pathogens, showing graphs regarding the degrees of risk, protection, and residual of phytosanitary treatment on your crops. You can also view graphs concerning the evolution of the phenological stage of your crop. This way you will always know the best time to intervene and enter the field.

Economic management: There is available a range of features to help you manage the economic aspects of your farm. You can compare revenues from different years, crops, and fields, identify areas of savings, evaluate the effectiveness of investments, and plan crop rotations. The app provides cost and revenue reports that give you an overview of the farm's income and expenses through intuitive charts and tables. This allows you to manage the economics of your farm by evaluating the most impactful stages of production and calculating profit. The cultivation revenue register displays all revenues generated by crops during the crop year, including both crop revenues, i.e., the sales value of agricultural products grown, and miscellaneous revenues, such as subsidies and compensation. The app allows you to calculate crop margins by comparing different crops and varieties to identify those that produced a greater profit. Finally, you have a complete overview of all costs incurred during the crop year with the overview of operating costs feature. This information includes machinery maintenance, staff remuneration, purchase of seeds and plant protection products, and the cost of operations.

Livestock: The digital assistant for livestock management that helps you manage your stables with ease. You can track your stables, manage your boxes, and monitor your silos. You can also manage your rations and analyse milk quality. With xFarm's simple and intuitive dashboard, you have a clear and easy view of all barns and pastures. You can view the productive orientation, herd indexes such as Average Lactation and Efficiency, the composition of the barn, latest activities carried out, silos loads, the production given by the various stables, and the welfare status of the animals. You can easily create individual stalls within the stables in which to manage your animals individually or in small groups. You can set the production orientation of the cows and the breeds present, enter the phase and characterization, mark data on size, watering type, and bedding, and view data on overcrowding and water availability. You can view the amount of product in the silos and trenches, monitor the quantity and quality of food provided to animals, and keep track of animal feed consumption. You can also receive alerts when feed needs to be replenished by linking the Activity module with the Warehouses module. Finally, you can monitor for each milking the quality of milk delivered and identify variations by checking the daily amount of milk produced, the history of the amount of milk produced, dairy efficiency, the % of fat and protein in milk, and fluctuations in the supply chain.

Case Studies

Xfams digital platform was deployed in a vineyard in Tuscany, this saw a 25% reduction in water usage and a 10% increase in the grape yield. This contributed to a more sustainable and profitable operations. Their precision farming tools were also implemented in Spanish Olive groves. They were used to optimize irrigation and improve the pest management, these improvements led to a 20% increase in production and a reduction in water usage.

Market Position

The agricultural technology (AgTech) industry is rapidly evolving, driven by the need for increased food production, sustainability, and resource efficiency. The integration of digital tools, IoT devices, and data analytics in farming practices has become essential for meeting global food demands and addressing environmental challenges. XFarm Technologies positions itself within this industry as a provider of comprehensive digital solutions that empower farmers to adopt precision farming practices and enhance their overall efficiency.

Competitors

XFarms major competitors in the AgTech sector are companies such as; John Deere who also offer advanced farming equipment and precision agriculture technology, and Climate corporation which focuses on data analytics and other digital tools to give agricultural insight.

Agworld is a collaborative farm data ecosystem for growers, agronomists, and others involved in the farming process. It's a leading global ag technology company that has been around since 2009. The app allows you to capture records, observations, machinery, and applications. It's quick and easy to record accurate seeding rates, dates, locations, and machinery setup information.

Farmbrite is a cloud-based farm management software that provides tools for managing farm operations, planning and optimizing production, scheduling tasks, and keeping detailed records. It's designed to help you run a more efficient, productive, and profitable farm.

Nax Solutions is a cloud-based farm management solution that helps users produce more and consume fewer resources using Artificial Intelligence. It offers satellite image processing, production estimate, irrigation control, harvest map, nitrogen maps, production control optimal levels, and crop analysis. Nax Solutions also provides accurate crop analysis and data modelling to provide you with processed information that allows you to make direct decisions in your farming operations.

The main problems that such a group can encounter is the reluctance of traditional farmers to adopt such modern techniques. In recent years farmers have pushed back against many green initiatives brought by governments and have protested. In order to keep ahead they must engage with farmers and help to show that this is the future and is the best for them.

Pricing

XFarm offers five pricing plans: Start, Essential, Plus, Decision, and Professional. The Start plan is free, The Essential plan costs €195, the Plus plan costs €570, the Decision plan costs €1640, and the Professional plan costs €2400.


Christopher Ian Curran
Written by:
Christopher Ian Curran
Staff Writer
Christopher Ian Curran is a staff writer at Net Zero Compare.