Dear LiteFarm Community,
We are excited to announce a new collection of features that we hope will enhance your LiteFarm experience! We want to say a big THANK YOU to the team of farmers, researchers, designers, developers, and financial supporters that made this possible, with a special shout-out to our growing community of contributors. We are excited to see how these new features will help farmers better manage their operations and improve overall productivity!
Without further ado, here's what's new:
Greater control over your crop catalog
With this update, you can now include the genus and species for each crop as well as for specific varietals or cultivars. By popular request, you'll also be able to upload custom images for each crop and varietal or cultivar as well.
For those interested in supporting the LiteFarm Community and diversified agriculture, we've also added the ability to nominate your crop for inclusion in the global LiteFarm crop catalogue. By selecting this, you give the LiteFarm team permission to work with agronomists in your region to verify and add the necessary data to make your crops visible to all LiteFarm farmers. For reference, LiteFarm provides about 400 crops out of the box. Users such as yourself have documented 1,300 more for their own use. Now you can share your knowledge with the world if you'd like, helping LiteFarm achieve its mission of providing a relatable app for farmers around the world.
Irrigation tasks
Irrigation tasks have arrived in LiteFarm! You can now easily schedule and track your irrigation tasks the way you would other tasks, ensuring that your crops receive the right amount of water at the right time. This feature allows you to set up irrigation schedules for each of your fields. LiteFarm supports 7 common types of irrigation out of the box with the ability to add custom types as well. You can also track your irrigation history, giving you more information about when and how much water each crop received. We hope this feature will help you streamline your irrigation management and achieve better results.
Tasks have been streamlined
This update includes several user-requested updates for tasks. These new features are designed to streamline your workflow and ensure that you and your team can stay on top of your to-do list. Included in this update are:
Delete tasks. Deleted tasks will no longer show up on your farm. This doesn't change the current task abandonment or completion flow.
Creating a task now takes fewer clicks.
We've streamlined the completion flow to make it easier to choose the date work was actually done. This will be especially helpful for farmers who "batch" the work that gets done a few times a week.
LiteFarm will now prompt you when you're assigning a task to a worker that doesn't have a set wage. You'll have the ability to assign a permanent wage, a wage for the task, or continue without setting a wage. We hope this will help new and veteran LiteFarm farmers keep track of their finances more accurately.
You can now download your documents
We're pleased to announce that you can now quickly download any documents that you have previously uploaded to the "Documents" section, such as invoices, receipts, or other important documents. With this enhanced level of accessibility, you can easily share documents with other team members or partners, and keep your farm's records up-to-date. We believe that this new feature will help you to stay organized and improve productivity.
Offline capabilities (with more to come)
We've made our first foray (of many to come) into introducing offline functionality to LiteFarm. Your crop catalog will now be cached when you view it with an internet connection and even after losing that connection, you'll retain the ability to view and navigate around the catalog. This feature is meant as an early proof of concept to test offline capabilities in the field and we hope to make many more portions of the app offline-capable in future releases.
A look ahead
Looking forward, our next releases will include a variety of features and improvements. First up, we’ll expand on our current release with additional support for irrigation and irrigation tasks - including the ability to integrate with soil sensors. Following that, we’ll develop support for integrated crop-livestock operations. We also intend to help farmers better track their greenhouse gas emissions. After much grassroots support, we’re planning an overhaul of finances to make it easier to use and more tightly integrated with other portions of the app. Continuing with this theme, we’re going to streamline tasks and crop plans further, and slowly expand what can be accomplished while offline.
You can review all of these items and vote for your priorities on our public roadmap here. If you’re looking for other ways to get involved, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at community@litefarm.org. We’re currently forming resource groups on several of the above features to make sure we build them right.
In closing, thank you so much for being part of the LiteFarm Community. We're proud to support you and thousands of farmers in over 140 countries, and we hope this newest release will continue to help you thrive in your farming endeavors. As always, happy farming!!
The LiteFarm Team