Privacy

Tilth exists on one principle: the farm's data belongs to the farm. Not to us, not to advertisers, not to anyone selling you inputs. This notice says what is held, why, where it lives, who helps store it, and your rights over it.

Who this is from

Tilth is run by Tilth Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17356418) and registered with the UK's data regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (reference ZC205891). For your account details, Tilth Ltd decides how they are handled. For the records you enter about your farm, your farm is in charge and Tilth Ltd only holds and processes them on your behalf, to run the app for you. Questions: privacy@tilth.farm.

What is held

Your account: your name, email address and a scrambled one-way fingerprint of your password (the password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered from the fingerprint). Your farm's working data: field boundaries, cropping, spray and fertiliser records, stewardship options and payments, livestock, machinery, and the photos and documents you attach. The people you add to your farm and their role. Any feedback you send, and basic technical error reports that help fix faults (these can note which page went wrong, but not your farm records).

If you ask to join the beta before you have an account, what you put in that form: your name and email address, and whichever of the optional answers you chose to give, which are your farm name, your county, your farm size, your farm type, whether you use an agronomist, what you use for records now, and anything you wrote in the message box. Nothing is required except your name and an email address to reply to.

Why it is held

To run the app for you, which is our agreement with you, and to keep it working, secure and free of bugs. That is the whole of it. Your data is not sold, not shared, not used to profile you and not used to sell you anything, so there is no marketing to opt out of.

A beta request is held for one reason: so we can reply to you and, if it suits you both, set you up with an account. That is a step taken at your request before any agreement between us. The optional answers exist so the beta ends up as a spread of different farms rather than twenty of the same one, and they are used for nothing else. Asking is not signing up to anything, and it does not put you on a mailing list, because there is not one.

Where it lives, and who helps store it

The app runs on servers in London, and the database sits in the UK. A few trusted companies help run it, and only ever see the part they need to:

Fly.io runs the app itself, in London.
Neon holds the database, in the UK.
Backblaze keeps the off-site backups: the daily copy of the database, and a copy of each photo and document you attach. These are encrypted with a key only the operator holds, so they cannot be read by anyone else, wherever they are stored.
Resend sends the app's emails, such as password resets and invitations. It sees your email address and the message, never your farm records.
The map and weather providers (Mapbox, Copernicus and Open-Meteo, listed on the Credits page) receive the requests that draw the maps and fetch the forecast. What those requests carry is set out below.

Every connection to the app is encrypted (https). Your farm records stay with the app, its database and its backups, all of them run by the companies named above. Four other things go out to an outside service, because the job cannot be done without them, and this is all of them:

Opening plant health on a field sends that field's boundary to Copernicus, because a satellite service has to be told which shape to measure. The shape goes on its own: not the field name, not the crop, not a single record.
The forecast sends the middle of your farm, to about ten metres, to Open-Meteo, because a forecast is for a place.
Bringing your fields in from the Rural Payments Agency sends your SBI to the agency's own published parcel service, which is how it finds the parcels registered to you.
Drawing the map asks Mapbox for the picture of the ground you are looking at, so Mapbox is told which piece of ground that is, and nothing else about it.

Nothing else of your farm's goes to the map, weather and parcel services, and none of them is told your name or your email address.

How long it is kept

For as long as your farm is active. Close your farm and its data is removed there and then, and the off-site copies of your photos and documents are removed with it, normally within a day. If the off-site backup cannot be reached at the time, the removal is tried again every night until it is done. Those copies are kept while your farm is here rather than on a rolling cycle, because a spray photo from three seasons ago is still the evidence for that spray. The daily off-site copy of the database is kept for two months before it is deleted, so a closed farm's records drop out of those copies within two months. You do not have to ask permission or give a reason.

A beta request is kept in a form that identifies you for no longer than twelve months from the day you sent it. If you become a Tilth farm within that time, the request is kept in full from then on, as the record of how your farm came to us. If you do not, then once twelve months have passed, your name, your email address and anything you wrote in the message box are removed for good. What is left is the county, the size and type of farm, and the date you sent it: enough to show us where interest in Tilth is coming from, not who you are. If you would rather your request went sooner, say so at privacy@tilth.farm and it will be deleted outright.

Your rights

You can download everything from the Export page whenever you like, ask for anything to be corrected, and close your farm to remove it entirely. If you are ever unhappy with how your data is handled you can tell the operator at privacy@tilth.farm, and you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk), the UK data regulator.

Cookies

Only the ones strictly needed to keep you signed in and remember which farm you are looking at. No tracking, no analytics cookies, which is why there is no cookie banner.

Tilth is in beta. This notice is written plainly and honestly and will be reviewed by a solicitor before the app takes paying customers.