Above: LiteFarm's Farmer Success Manager, David Trapp, with a member of a partner organization during the annual meeting of the Agroecological Transitions in Latin America project.
For modern farmers, one resource has become increasingly essential to their operations: data. As business managers, farmers rely on data to assist them in making decisions to help their bottom line and operate more sustainably.
“We see a lot of interest globally in technology innovations to feed the world. However, many of those resources, tools, and datasets are not accessible to small scale and diversified farmers,” says Hannah Wittman, a professor of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia.
Wittman is one of the co-founders of LiteFarm, a free app which aims to make this kind of technology more accessible to all farmers. The app, available on mobile and desktop, is a free farm data management tool which is designed to make it easier for farmers to tackle new projects such as achieving organic certification, recordkeeping for sustainability grants and measuring the profitability of different crops.
Examples of modules in the LiteFarm mobile version
LiteFarm is an open-source tool, meaning it operates under a creative commons license so that individuals and other organizations can both use and contribute to the code behind the app.
In 2023, LiteFarm was one of ten recipients of a grant from Scotiabank’s Net-Zero Research Fund, a 10-year, $10-million initiative launched in 2021 that provides research and innovation grants to help organizations exploring decarbonization solutions and transition efforts for net-zero. A new cohort of fund recipients will be announced in the coming months.
The proceeds from LiteFarm’s grant helped support a team of students to begin to integrate LiteFarm with Holos, a software program developed by Agriculture and Agri-food Canada to estimate greenhouse gas emissions on farms. An important first step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is estimating current outputs. LiteFarm is also using the grant to support the development of soil health and livestock management tools within the app that will provide farm data to the Holos software. Soil health was also a key feature that users were requesting from LiteFarm.
By integrating these tools LiteFarm hopes to make useful emissions tracking information available for farmers.
“Collaborating with partners in the agricultural sector is a key part of the Bank's efforts to advance the net-zero transition. We are proud to support LiteFarm, as their technology can help farmers to implement more sustainable practices,” says Kim Brand, Vice President and Global Head, Sustainability at Scotiabank.
Reducing emissions in agriculture will be key to reaching net-zero as 10% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions come from crop and livestock production, excluding emissions from the use of fossil fuels or from fertilizer production, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Agriculture can also play a role in slowing climate change because farmland and farming processes themselves can help capture and store carbon in organic matter.
As well, not only are farmers increasingly interested in environmental stewardship and social responsibility, the agriculture industry is responding to government policies and programs pushing for emission reductions, according to a Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute paper, supported by Scotiabank through the Net-Zero Research Fund. Plus, as publicly-traded food and beverage companies face increasing requirements to track and disclose emissions associated with their products, farmers anticipate being asked to provide data about their own operations as well, the paper added.
Source: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
LiteFarm’s story begins in 2018, when researchers at UBC, led by Wittman and postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Zia Mehrabi, now at the University of Colorado-Boulder, joined forces with farmers to envision new ways to equip small farms with needed digital tools, which are often both too expensive and too specialized.
Farmers face a lot of regulations in many jurisdictions, requiring them to record data and provide it to the government. Some farmers record data using pen and paper, sending it off for reporting purposes. LiteFarm offers farmers a place to centralize all of this data and empowers them to use it to make informed decisions about operations on the farm and simplify processes like organic certification.
Farmers manually enter farm-related data through LiteFarm’s various user-friendly modules, which are designed specifically for smaller-scale sustainable, diversified and organic farms. With this information, the app can provide sustainability recommendations, track tasks on the farm and more.
“There’s a consolidation of power in the global agricultural industry that’s leaving the majority of the world’s farmers out of the digital revolution,” Wittman says.
Digital tools can help provide data to researchers
Without the proper digital tools, not only is it harder for small farmers to reduce their carbon footprint, but their data may not become available to researchers, whose work relies on quality information to inform climate policy and other subjects, Wittman says. This is especially true of diversified farms, which grow many crops and have more difficult tracking challenges given the complexity of their management systems.
“It’s not hitting the records. It’s not in the agricultural census. It’s not in a lot of the evidence-based decision-making frameworks that governments and policy makers need to decide where to allocate their resources for agriculture.”
LiteFarm allows farmers to share their data after entering it for their own purposes, which provides researchers with quality information on smaller-scale farms to advance their work.
On-site during the annual meeting of the Agroecological Transitions in Latin America project hosted by the Association of Organic Producers of Paraguay.
Source: LiteFarm
Farming sustainably
One important way LiteFarm empowers farmers to operate sustainably is through tools aimed at securing payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs. Similar to subsidies, PES programs are financial incentives offered typically by governments to reward farmers for their environmental stewardship, such as watershed protection, carbon capture and safeguarding local biodiversity. When farmers put in work that advances these goals, LiteFarm makes it easier to record and export the information needed to qualify for PES payments, ensuring they are remunerated for their labour and land stewardship.
As with all activity in the app, farmers maintain ownership of the data they record for PES payments. They can also take that data and connect with other open-source services to explore other ways to improve sustainability.
Supporting the livelihood of farmers
One important business decision a farmer may decide to make is to grow organic crops. However, the organic label you see on food at the grocery store can only be applied to crops when farms have met certain requirements. In Canada, for example, food labelled as organic must be grown on land that has been free of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers for at least three years. By providing a streamlined data collection experience, LiteFarm makes the recordkeeping requirements for crop certifications more manageable for smaller farmers, ensuring they have credible data to seek a premium for their organic and sustainably grown produce.
LiteFarm also helps farmers to manage their overall operations. For example, it can be difficult for smaller farmers to assess which crops are making them money because each requires a different amount of labour, growth time and space on the farm. But when farmers have a user-friendly data collection platform to track these inputs, it becomes easier to determine which crops are actually profitable.
The app can also help farmers make the most of seasonal fluctuations in crop price and help them select the optimal nutrients for each crop, which Wittman says farmers do not always have optimized.
A free and open-source technology
The decision to make the app free and open source goes back to LiteFarm’s roots as a collaboration between farmers and researchers at UBC. “I think this comes from the very beginning DNA of this project,” Wittman says.
The profit-driven proprietary model behind most commercial farming software was exclusionary and didn’t promote collaboration, Wittman says. Because of LiteFarm’s collaborative approach, the app is connected with many nonprofits and public-sector partners with similar mandates, which expands its capabilities for users.
“We really felt it was important to produce a tool that was free and accessible to low-income farmers and to farmers all over the world that could contribute to global networks working with the same ethos.”
