If you grew up on a farm or, like me, spent time on a relatives’ farm when you were a kid, you probably saw them pull out a notebook and write down things like how many eggs they had that day, how many chickens they sold or how many gallons of milk the dairy cows were producing.
Back then, journals and notebooks were the best way to keep track of data over time. Some people, of course, still use them. But if you’d like a more reliable way to keep track of everything happening on your hobby farm, it’s time to take a look at the different farming apps you can find in the App store or Google Play.
Beyond complicated farm management software for your computer, there are apps that are easy to set up, easy to use and will lend a helping hand to anyone with livestock, gardens and more. If you’ve never used apps to manage your farm, here are a few you can try right now.
PictureThis
Many farms are passed down in the family from generation to generation. But if you’ve just bought or you own a generational farm, one of the first things you realize is that you now own a lot of different trees, shrubs and other plant life.
Unless you’re a pro at identifying different greenery, you’ll need a bit of help figuring out how to take care of everything on your property.
That’s where the PictureThis app comes in. To use it you’ll just take a photo of what you’d like to identify, open the photo in the app, and it will tell you what the plant is. PictureThis identifies trees, fruit, leaf plants and flowers, and it can even identify weeds. The app will identify toxic plants and let you know if the plant is safe for your animals, and it can identify insects and birds, and tell you how old a tree is by identifying the rings.
You can use it with or without a yearly subscription, and it’s been an incredibly helpful app that I’ve used daily.
Flockstar
If you have chickens and you’d like to track how many eggs they are laying every day, week or over the course of a month or year, Flockstar is a good choice. It’s a productivity app for all types of poultry, and you can organize your flock based on breed, egg color or species.
One of the reasons I like Flockstar is that it tracks your egg count on a daily basis. You can also use it to track expenses incurred and find out your profit when selling eggs or chickens. There’s even an option to take photos of receipts so you have your expenses on hand when doing taxes.
Cattle Market Mobile
If you have cattle and you’re wondering what the sale price would be in your area, there’s an app for that. Cattle Market Mobile lets you monitor auction prices in different states, and you can view different reports by the USDA.
There are also other tools including a gestation calculator you can use for breeding.
PictureMushroom
A hobby farm can be more than just livestock and farm equipment. If you like to forage on your property and you often come across different mushrooms, the easiest way to identify them is by using PictureMushroom. It’s a lot like PictureThis but instead of identifying all types of plants, PictureMushroom identifies different mushrooms on your property.
You can snap a photo of a mushroom and find it in the app, determine if it’s edible, and even search for deadly mushrooms so you know if what you’ve found is poisonous.
Which Farm Apps Are Your Favorites?
As you can see, there are a lot of unique farm apps you can use to track productivity, find out what types of trees and vegetables you have on your farm, or monitor your expenses and profit. They make your phone one of the most powerful tools you have on your farm.
