Being shown at Cereals, the Land App is a design tool for land management. It allows users to digitise the land they manage. It gathers everything into one place, helping the user to see the overview of what they are managing and enabling them to make more strategic decisions.
It has been devised as a solution to an overwhelming problem for many land, forestry and estate owners. When deciding when to change or manipulate land or land use activity, it can create a real head ache when you have all sorts of information from water networks, building plots, flooding liability to environmental schemes scattered across many different platforms – with people taking ownership of different aspects.
The Land App simplifies this – it brings everything together, into one place and presents the information in a simple, user friendly format that multiple users can access. When this information is on paper format, it is far more difficult to share with others, and the whole process for making changes is inefficient and time consuming. We’re in a digital age; we must all embrace technology. Similar to the Google Drive application, the Land App concept provides an online platform for collaborative working; a space where multiple stakeholders can contribute on one working document – ultimately streamlining efficiency, accuracy and cost.
Farming has been a heavily paper based industry. Until now, a land consultant may visit a farm, take notes and then input this data into the computer when back at the office – and then share that data with third parties. This is all very labour intensive and costly.
With over 215,000 farms in the UK, there is a lot of land to manage! There must be ways to streamline efficiency for both farmer/ and owner and Government. Moving forwards Brexit will also mean that farmers can no longer rely on subsidy – it will force farming to become even more efficient and for data to be more transparent.
The app’s founder Tim Hopkin is from a farming background and is now the 4th generation of his farming family in Surrey. Tim’s family farm is situated next to a major route way and for him to sustain the longevity of the farm, he needed to look at avenues of diversification – leading him to explore the Land App solution. Tim recognised that there had to be a shift in the way land was managed and with more diversification, the current format of land management would soon become antiquated. Land management needed to become more collaborative to drive efficiencies.
Tim says, “Farm491 offers wonderful facilities, help, guidance and support to boost your business.”
