Built by a farmer, not a software house.

Why it exists

We were trying to get more out of the software the farm already had, and kept hitting the same two walls. Whatever we wanted to do next turned out to be in another module, priced separately. And the parts we could get at did not work the way we wanted them to, so we ended up bending the farm round the software instead of the other way about.

I said I could probably build something that fitted how we actually farm. So I did. And once it was working it was fairly obvious that none of it was only our problem, so we decided to see whether it was any use to anybody else.

There was one more thing, and it is where the rule at the bottom of all this came from. My partner tried to get her own yield data out for a trial and could not simply download it. She had to ask the software supplier for an offline copy she could use outside their platform, and wait. She got it in the end, and I am not going to name them over it, but by the time it arrived it had stopped feeling like hers.

So Tilth has one rule that beats every other consideration in it. Your data is yours. It is never sold, never shared, and never used to sell you anything. If you stop paying, the farm goes read only and the export still works, forever. Nobody is ever held hostage.

Why another one

The systems most farms use are good, and they are also owned by companies with something else to sell, and quoted rather than published. You cannot find out what they cost without giving somebody your phone number.

I wanted the opposite of that: one price you can read on the website with everything in it, nothing held back in a module, and an owner with nothing to sell you but the thing itself. Whether that is a business or just a stubborn idea, I will find out. The founders price went to the first twenty farms and those places are taken; the beta itself is still open.

It is also built for the way the work actually happens: on a phone in a field with no signal as much as at a desk in the office. If something in it is annoying at seven in the morning in the rain, I want to hear about it, because I am usually the one finding out.