What is farm management software — and what should a 5-hectare farm expect from it?
Farm management software is a system of record for a farm: what you grow and raise, where, what was done to it, what it produced, and what the results were worth. In place of a shelf of notebooks and spreadsheets, one database holds the plan (plantings, breeding, bookings), the diary (tasks, treatments, harvests) and the paperwork (registers, invoices, traceability).
That is the definition. What the term covers varies enormously — and that variation is what a small farm needs to understand before paying for anything.
The category, honestly mapped
Most products called “farm management software” belong to one of four families:
- Crop-first platforms — built around field records, crop planning and often organic-certification compliance. Excellent at growing; most have no concept of animals, guests or services.
- Livestock-first platforms — herd records, treatments, breeding, weights. The mirror image: strong on animals, thin or absent elsewhere.
- Enterprise agriculture systems — satellite views, machinery telemetry, agronomic modelling, priced and designed for hundreds of hectares.
- Everything-else tools that farms borrow — booking systems for lodging, kennel software for boarding, generic invoicing. None of them know what a harvest is.
A 5-hectare specialised farm can be well served by the first or second family. A 5-hectare diversified farm — vegetables plus lodging plus bees plus direct sales — falls between all four, which is why so many end up running one tool per activity plus a spreadsheet to reconcile them.
What a small diversified farm should demand
Six tests, in order of importance:
- One calendar. Bookings, harvest windows, treatments and tasks in one view. If lodging lives in a different tool than the lettuce, you are the integration.
- One contact list. The same person is a guest, a boarding client and a veg-box buyer. If the software cannot represent that, it does not understand your business.
- Registers you are legally required to keep. Treatment records with withdrawal periods, boarding vaccination records. Software that blocks a sale inside a withdrawal window is worth more than any dashboard.
- Tasks someone else can read. The day a helper joins, the system must tell them what to do — ideally in their own language.
- A trial long enough to mean something. Fourteen days in the wrong month proves nothing on a farm. A real evaluation spans part of a season.
- A price a 100k-turnover business can ignore. The tool should cost less per month than one night in your gîte.
What you should not pay for
At small scale, satellite imagery, sensor networks, machinery integration and predictive analytics are weight, not value. The same is true of “flexibility”: a system that must be configured for weeks was designed for a consultant, not a farmer. Opinionated defaults that match how small farms actually work beat infinite settings.
Spravy is built against exactly this checklist — one system for the whole of a small diversified farm, opening end of 2026. The waiting list starts with 90 days free: a real part of a season, which is the only honest way to judge the category.