Information Management System (IMS)

Designed For Engaging With Farmers

We Take A Pragmatic Approach To Understanding How Our Customers Operate

At Farmforce we invest the time to listen and analyze your needs and the specific challenges you are facing on the ground during food’s first mile, and we curate a dedicated team to define a solution tailored for your business requirements. As part of each implementation, we make sure the users receive the right training, and we continue to provide support and innovation throughout the customer lifecycle. Great technology combined with an engagement model and experienced people who implement our solutions are the recipe for success.

The Information Management
System (IMS) from Farmforce

Designed for engaging with farmers. At its core is a digital farmer database upon which field staff register each farmer, together with their photo and GPS-mapped polygons of their individual fields. Each one is assigned a unique ID number for traceability purposes. Family members can also be linked to individual farmers, including relatives and children, which helps MNCs, NGOs, and cooperatives tackle social issues such as child labor in the food supply chain.

Features

GPS Field
Mapping

GPS Field Mapping

Enables organizations to view the precise geographic distribution of all the engaged farmers and their fields in Google Maps. Farmforce works with Global Forest Watch (GFW) to tackle deforestation, and by uploading the farmer field files into their database, organizations can make sure growing activities – particularly for cocoa – are not in protected or deforested areas.

Yield
Forecasting

Yield Forecasting

With the IMS customers can perform yield forecasting for an individual field and aggregate the forecast across all farmers growing crops for a particular production target in a planting campaign. Yield forecasting provides invaluable forward projections on when crop production can be expected and allows organizations to anticipate if yields will be affected by pest or disease outbreaks.

Growing
Activities

Growing Activities

Farmforce provides visibility through year-round tracking of all the growing activities on each farmer’s fields such as crop varieties, fertilizers, and chemicals applied. Committed to more sustainable farming, organizations rely on this data for compliance with GLOBALG.A.P., the Rainforest Alliance, and other certification programs. This is key for product exports in general, as food companies must demonstrate that maximum residue levels of chemicals are not exceeded in their food sourcing operations.

Traceability

Traceability

Farmforce delivers bag-level traceability. Each bag of cocoa can be linked to a specific farmer’s field in Farmforce and identified by a unique barcode that is attached to the bag/crate/case and tracked as it moves through the supply chain. As bags are combined during transit and in the warehouse into lots and containers, thanks to this traceability functionality there is still a record of the individual bags and the weights of the produce they contain. For MNCs and other food companies, this level of traceability allows them to ensure the authenticity of the origin of their products and their various certifications

Custom
Surveys

Custom Surveys

The IMS allows office staff to easily create fully customizable surveys on the web platform and issue them to field staff via point and click (a non-technical, no-coding process). Surveys can be short and include just a few questions to obtain farmer feedback on a recent training event, for instance. Or customers can create and conduct extensive Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) surveys on farmer income sources or the potential use of child labor in farming operations.

Compliance Surveys

Compliance Surveys

The compliance survey module helps organizations meet their reporting obligations and certification requirements. Office staff can create a Farm Sustainability Assessment certification survey including more than 100 questions, with branching conditions and automated scoring. Auditors and office staff have access to all the survey responses for individual crops or farmers, including photos, custom scoring, and filtering options for proposed actions and non-compliant answers.

Certifications

Certifications

Certifications generally require recordkeeping, traceability, auditing, and premium payments. Each certification has its own sets of requirements, with extensive data collection surveys conducted during the pre-audit, risk assessment, and formal audit phases. The various requirements can be loaded into Farmforce surveys for digital data collection by field staff using the mobile app.

Farm Loan Management

Farm Loan Management

From dispersal to repayment, the IMS is used to track and manage micro-loans with farmers. Inputs can be specified as part of an input loan, which is auto calculated based on crop and field size. At the end of the season, the farmer’s outstanding loan amount can be automatically deducted from the harvest sale. Over time, the farmers benefit by building up a digital credit history and a digital economic identity, giving them – or the cooperative as a whole – easier access to loans from formal financial institutions in the future.