I designed a mobile and web app experience that allowed farmers to create their own Variable Rate Prescriptions. A prescription creates a precise plan of the amount and location of fertilizer or seeds to apply on the field to optimize for maximum crop growth.
FarmLogs is farm management software to help farmers run a more efficient and profitable operation. FarmLogs managed 65M+ of 275M total acres of U.S. farmland, coming out to 2 of every 5 farms.
Company: FarmLogs
Role: Lead product designer
Team: Sam Pierce Lolla, Jason Amor, Nick Donahue, Chris Schneider, Rodney Lyons, Christian Schwartz, Faith Bradley, Andrew Kirkegaard, Jesse Vollmar
Timing: December 2015 – June 2016
Our team saw an opportunity to simplify the creation of Variable Rate Prescriptions, an emerging farming practice that can optimize crop production on a field.
Adopting Variable Rate Technology (VRT) at a farming operation came with challenges:
Though we couldn't change the cost of equipment upgrades, we wanted to make it more cost-effective for farmers to implement their own prescriptions simply and universally. We first tackled helping farmers who already had VRT-enabled equipment.
We aimed to meet our 2016 Q3 Sales Projection revenue plan, calling for selling 46,700 acres worth of prescriptions to our pilot customers (we sold prescriptions at $2/acre).
The beginning of the project was fairly ambiguous. To see how we could shape solutions, we conducted user interviews using low-fidelity design concepts. We presented our ideas to get initial reactions from customers and help scope the needs and requirements for an MVP.
We set out to get feedback on:
What we learned:
In January 2016, we officially kicked off the feature work under a new way of working at our org: agile. We definitely experienced some "growing pains" because we were working under a tight timeline while also having to learn a new methodology for working together.
Before we began, I worked with our PM and Design Director to break out the entire project into phases. We were given requirements by our Product Manager, who was pretty green to the world of product managing because his expertise was in farming and agriculture, not building software. It was one of the areas of the project that made the project challenging. It was up to the design, eng, and research teams to work together to figure out what could be in scope and what couldn’t. We followed the requirements for the users, then interpreted that into the work we were going to achieve.
To generate a prescription, we were going to do something that hadn't been done before in the industry.
Rather than using antiquated soil surveys and consultants looking at every inch of your field, we decided to pair historical performance data with historical weather data to generate a more well-informed prescription.
At least 5+ years of 5-meter resolution multispectral satellite imagery is amalgamated with historical weather and environmental data. Similarly performing areas of the field are then clustered into "management zones." These zones inform how much nitrogen or seed to put down that gives the field its most optimal performance output.
At FarmLogs, we had a saying: "Grip it and rip it," coined by one of our designers, to mean just use your expertise and don't over-rotate. With such a constrained timeline, I decided to explore handing off low-fidelity mockups (aka sketches, low-weight wireframes) to garner early feedback and to more quickly jumpstart engineers on laying the foundation. It gave them enough for framing of the feature while I worked through the visual design details.
I facilitated collaboration between the product and research teams to determine the simplest required information to ask our users to provide. The data needed to work with varying tractors and integrate with the historical weather and performance data (going back 7+ years).
In early designs, we used a red/yellow/green color scale. We had received feedback that it was confusing for our users, as it was the same color scale used for yield maps. So I set out to create a new one.
I decided to use a sequential, colorized scale, which is best suited to display data that progresses from low to high. The scale also worked better for color blind users and worked at grayscale (as farmers like to print their prescriptions).
Prescriptions can be created and managed from the FarmLogs Web, iOS, and Android apps. We wanted our farmers to be able to access and utilize them from anywhere.
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First, users tell us their yield goal for their field, or how many bushels per acre they are wanting to harvest.
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Then, they select the fertilizer or seed they want to apply.
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Lastly, the user confirms the seeds and fertilizers they put on their field in the previous year.
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Voilà! A prescription is created! Users can interact with the prescription and edit the rate.
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A user can take a closer look at the management zones to see the rates.
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Prescriptions are easily accessed from the FarmLogs app any time.
We made the prescription application process as seamless as possible, integrating the ability to see prescription on a field's detail page. A farmer downloads the prescription, save it to a thumb drive, and put it in their cab's monitor.
Here is a FarmLogs prescription on a tractor cab's monitor. The prescription tells the Variable Rate machine how much nitrogen to apply in different zones of the field, taking out the guesswork and waste of money and resources.
With our pilot customers in the first season of using prescriptions, we learned that fields who used Prescriptions on average were able to increase their yields and decrease their wastes:
• $60 per acre
• $8/acre Nitrogen savings
By 2017, prescriptions were used on over 435K acres.
In 2014 Illinois farmer, Corey H., adopted new nitrogen management strategies that boosted his yields by 15 bushels/acre and reduced nitrogen waste by about 10%.
By 2016, we partnered with Corey to pilot prescriptions with to add to his management strategies. In the first season, he saw an estimated additional 5-10 bushels/acre to yields on test fields compared to his standard variable-rate nitrogen program.
“What makes this nice is that it keeps track of weather, so you know what is happening to nitrogen prior to side-dressing and throughout the growing season,” he said. “A big thing for us was going from hand-writing prescriptions to getting prescriptions with a push of the button.”
The following year, he expanded the use of prescriptions to over half of his fields to continue testing its efficacy for his program.
Farmer Chad K, from Nebraska, trialed Prescriptions with us in 2017. He said, "15 years ago I explored variable rate using soil maps and saw little benefit. Naturally, I was skeptical, but when FarmLogs approached me to trial their prescriptions, I agreed because I’ve been so impressed with what they have done in the past. This year, with a FarmLogs prescription, one of my toughest fields had its best yield ever.”
“What makes FarmLogs Nitrogen Prescriptions nice is that they keep track of weather, so you know what is happening to nitrogen prior to sidedressing and throughout the growing season.”
– Corey H., Illinois, FarmLogs Prescriptions customer
