Spreadsheets vs farm software: when the notebook wins
Most small farms run on a spreadsheet, a paper notebook and a group chat. That is not a failure — for a single activity at a small scale, it is often the right tool. The honest question is not “should I get software?” but “what am I actually losing to my current system?” For many farms the answer is: nothing yet. For diversified farms, it is usually several hours a week.
What spreadsheets do well
A spreadsheet is free, flexible and yours. Market gardeners have built remarkable crop planners in Excel — bed assignments, succession dates, seed orders — and communities like Permies trade them openly. A well-kept notebook beats a badly-kept app every time, and extension services still publish crop record templates precisely because paper works.
Spreadsheets win when three things are true: one activity, one person, and no dates that trigger other dates.
Where the spreadsheet breaks
The breaking point is rarely volume. It is coordination between activities.
- A booking arrives for the gîte. The spreadsheet does not create the cleaning task, block the calendar, or remember that this guest also buys eggs.
- A treatment is applied to a hive or a bed. The spreadsheet does not know the withdrawal period, and it will not stop you selling honey or lettuce too early.
- A second person joins the farm. Now there are two versions of the file, or one person who cannot read it.
Each of these is a small failure. Diversified farms accumulate them daily, because every activity generates dates that matter to the others. That coordination work — re-copying, cross-checking, remembering — is invisible admin, and it happens in the evening.
When software is worth it
A fair rule of thumb for a farm under 10 hectares:
| Your situation | Verdict |
|---|---|
| One activity, one person, records for yourself | Keep the spreadsheet |
| Legal registers (treatments, boarding vaccinations) done on paper without stress | Keep the paper |
| Two or more activities that share customers, a calendar or a team | Software starts paying |
| Anyone besides you needs to know what to do today | Software starts paying |
| You reconstruct the season’s numbers in winter from crates and memory | Software starts paying |
Note what is not on the list: farm size. A 3-hectare farm with vegetables, a gîte and boarding kennels has a harder coordination problem than 100 hectares of wheat.
The trap to avoid
The worst outcome is software that recreates the spreadsheet’s weakness: five specialised tools that do not talk to each other. A crop planner, a booking system, a kennel app and an invoicing tool mean four calendars and four client lists — the coordination problem, now with subscriptions. If you move past the spreadsheet, move to something that treats the whole farm as one system.
That is the problem Spravy is built for — one calendar, one client list, one task list across every activity of a small diversified farm. It opens end of 2026; the waiting list gets 90 days free to decide if it beats your spreadsheet.