How the market-leading farm management system is changing
© GNP New-look, cloud-based digital farm management software incorporating the best elements of the well-known market-leading Gatekeeper and Muddy Boots crop recording programs is set to be rolled out throughout 2025 by a Canadian telecoms giant.
Telus Agriculture & Consumer Goods acquired Muddy Boots back in 2020, eventually renaming it Telus Farm Management after a stint as Greenlight Grower Management.
Telus then bought Proagrica, including Farmplan’s Gatekeeper, in 2024, leading to a period of uncertainty in the market about the future of both programs.
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That has now been clarified by the company.
Jez Pile, group product manager for Telus, announced in a webinar introducing Telus Crop Management that, while no end date has been set for Gatekeeper and Telus Farm Management, the firm’s investment focus was on developing and enabling migration to the new system.
Legacy product support
While the company is focusing its efforts on new developments, the legacy products will remain maintained and supported.
“When it is appropriate, we will announce a sunset date on Gatekeeper and Telus Farm Management,” Jez said.
“But we can ensure you will be given plenty of notice. We are committed to the UK market and continue to invest significantly in our products and support for the UK.”
Development of the new web-based tool, Telus Crop Management, started some time ago, sales and key account manager Ben Hatton tells Farmers Weekly.
“After the Proagrica acquisition there was a full strategic review of our products and what our customers wanted.
“We needed a tool that handled the ease of use and connectivity of Telus Farm Management, with the ability to provide the depth of features of Gatekeeper,” he says.
Developing that with either existing product, however, was challenging, necessitating development of a new product.
“We’re focused on the most valuable functionality – compliance, traceability, workflow management, verification, and information and cost analysis,” Ben says.
Achieving that means making data exchange between agronomists and the farm as easy as possible, including maintaining machinery connectivity.
“That will help reduce double entry, inaccuracy and allows completed information to be accessible and usable.”
Decision support tools
Decision support tools, such as verification of nutrient management plans and crop protection recommendations, remain vital.
“They’re key for farmers and agronomists to help them address statutory or supply-based requirements.”
Core fundamentals of crop recording system, such as the ability to not only set up fields, but also split them, handle multiple cropping sequences, failed crops and providing the ability to interrogate or manage information based on cropping season, are integral in the new system, Ben says.
“It’s something we know other systems can struggle with when they are based off a map or telemetry system.
“Enabling verification, detailed analysis and managing information is fundamental and something historically we’ve done well.”
The look and feel of the software are much more Telus Farm Management than Gatekeeper, with clarity and simplicity prioritised.
“We’re trying to make the product more consistent and easier to navigate,” Ben says.
A cropping planner makes it easier to select fields en masse to update crop rotations or make recommendations, for example.
Curated lists in dropdown menus also help minimise the use of free-typing and ending up with variations of spelling of the same product or crop.
Timing
Telus is expecting to transition existing users of its legacy products to Telus Crop Management over the next 12 months, although stresses that users only move when they are ready.
This is likely to be in stages depending on the product used and farm situation.
For example, this spring, Gatekeeper desktop and Telus Farm Management single farm users could consider switching, according to Jez.
“Multi-farm users and those needing more complex functionality will be next from the middle of the year, while the most complex users, including agronomists, will be from the end of the year,” he explained in the webinar.
“We anticipate farmers moving first, with agronomists using either Gatekeeper or Telus Farm Management being able to push recommendations to the new programme to give the smoothest pathway to overall migration.”
Originally, Telus planned to migrate up to five years’ worth of legacy data during transition, but following feedback from customers after the webinar, this is now likely to be increased, Ben says.
Standardisation
Telus is working behind the scenes with partners on standardisation of products within software, including fertilisers, for those dropdowns.
Users will also be able to search by nutrient content as well as name, for example, when looking for a fertiliser product.
Users can also add tags – for example, soil type – to fields to make it simple to create different programs for a particular subset of fields or analyse results.
Workflow around jobs, including spray recommendations from agronomists, should help avoid double entry with an app available to record when tasks have been completed.
Full integration with machines is planned for later this year, Ben says.
“A farm will be able to permission data or connect to their fleet management tool.
“As jobs come in, it can flow to the machine, be worked on by operators and, when completed, flow back to update records, taking readings directly from the machine.”
The crop protection verification and full compliance nutrient management modules are still in development, but will be core staples of the product, Ben adds.
Pricing information can be added either as a simple price per kilogramme or litre for a product or from invoices creating the opportunity to have dynamic pricing through a growing season or financial year.
Gross margin information is easily found and builds through the season.
Sharing and editing of data is governed by permission levels within the software, including whether to share pricing detail.
New entrants offering alternatives
Other firms are following the lead of agronomy provider Hutchinsons as new entrants into farm management software.
Hutchinsons expanded its Omnia digital platform last year to provide crop recording and other capabilities alongside its existing precision farming and field analytic tools.
UK firm Team Ag (UK) is working with the Association of Independent Crop Consultants to develop its FIX platform to initially provide an alternative for creating digital agronomy plans and recommendations.
“There’s been uncertainty about the future of the Telus products, while some agronomists are wary of using a tool linked to a distributor,” explains Team Ag head of agtech Ben Gillingham.
Team Ag promises the cloud-based tool, which will initially be aimed primarily at agronomists, will be easy to use and intuitive, provide choice and independence within a market that is shifting away from the established options, and offer connectivity with existing digital tools, including Telus products.
In the longer term, Ben says the plan is to expand the offer to give a breadth of functionality that will allow farmers to use FIX for other tasks, where appropriate.
One key goal is to ensure farmers receive a fair share of the value when they share data with a third party.
For example, Ben envisages the FIX platform eventually becoming a portal that allows smooth collection of data from farmers involved in schemes where a water company is paying farmers to change practices to reduce risk from a pesticide.
“Another potential case is where a bank offers lower cost credit in exchange for sharing data around carbon emissions.”
Dyson Farming
A second firm looking to break into the UK market is Italian company xFarm Technologies.
Its aim is to be a one-stop shop for digital applications for farmers and farm organisations, says xFarm sales director Giovanni Causapruno.
“Today there is a very fragmented market, where a farmer has many apps on their phone to manage weather, machines, the operational side.
“We aim to simplify that to bring everything into one place, so you don’t have to replicate data input,” he says.
“For example, you register the data for a machine and record the information about an activity done in the field, but also the maintenance the machine requires, and generate sustainability and carbon footprint information.”
It is the system chosen by Dyson Farming to increase the efficiency of its farm operations management.
In a three-year project, the firm is digitising 14,400ha, collecting and processing data for Dyson Farming’s management and record-keeping, plus connecting machinery to better track use and effiency.
“By implementing xFarm, we will be able to make more informed decisions and provide full traceability for our consumers,” says Ben Abell, head of agronomy at Dyson Farming.
