How Hoffman Appalachian Farm uses Farmbrite to Simplify Their Organic Certification
- Joshua Brock
- 22 hours ago
- 6 min read
Updated: a few seconds ago
Discover how Hoffman Appalachian Farm, a family owned hops farm uses Farmbrite to streamline plan, track and manage their operation and streamline their Certified Naturally Grown certification in rural Pennsylvania.
Nestled in the heart of the Pennsylvanian Appalachian mountains, in a small town inhabited by mostly Bavarian Roman Catholics and home to Straub Brewery, you'll find Hoffman Appalachian Farms where owner Joshua Brock and team are growing and processing Certified Naturally Grown hops for craft breweries located in the PA Wilds region of Pennsylvania.
Rooted In A Bavarian Tradition From Long Ago
In the small, rural Appalachian community of Saint Marys, Pennsylvania, which finds its roots in Bavaria over 180 years ago, it wouldn’t be too big of a leap to assume that beer might be part of that history. And you would be correct to assume so.
Like many in our community, our family lineage goes back to various parts of Germany. In fact, our farm is named after my maternal grandparents, whose parents only spoke German when they immigrated to the United States. Having moved back East in 2009 after six years in Colorado (ironically, unbeknownst to me, literally down the street from Farmbrite’s home offices) I intended to start an agricultural operation at our family’s property after working a season for Certified Naturally Grown (CNG) farm, Ollin Farms, in Longmont, Colorado.
At the time, I was living some two hours away from our farm operation, which made it extremely difficult to tend to a vegetable operation. At a friend’s recommendation, I then dove into hops. The year was 2016, and it was time to make a change in my “hobby farmer” status, from growing annual vegetables to perennial hops. Our hometown brewery, owned by the Straub family, traces its roots back to Bavaria as well. So when Straub brewery caught wind that a local farm was growing hops, it was a match made in…well, Saint Marys.
Here in the Mid-Atlantic at that time, the local craft beer revolution was just taking off, along with local hops production. It also didn’t hurt that Straub Brewery, the third oldest family-owned brewery in the US and the smallest pre-Prohibition brewery still in business, just happened to be located here.
Sound Familiar? “We Had A Hard Time Finding the Right Farm Management Software for Us”
As a small business owner, juggling both a full-time job and a part-time job, on top of the farm and the lengthy commute, it was evident early on that keeping track of critical farm projects, tasks, and finances was extremely difficult.
Having my feet firmly planted in the Software As A Service (SaaS) realm as a tech support analyst, I was on the hunt for a farm management solution we could afford, was simple to use yet powerful, aided us in our annual CNG certification, tracking farm finances, and was cloud-based so it could be accessed out in the hopyards on a mobile device. You can already see how the groundwork was being laid to bring us to Farmbrite.
In addition to my work in the SaaS realm, I’d spent five years working for an organic certifier in central Pennsylvania in an IT/tech support role. As such, I was quite familiar with the wide variety of large, complicated desktop and cloud-based tools for livestock and crop tracking, field planning, inventory, and other record-keeping features. The majority of those I came across in my research were either too expensive, too complicated, or not well-suited, lacking critical features that smaller and mid-size farms like ours would find most useful.
And then, in 2022, after trialing at least five different crop management SaaS tools, I came across Farmbrite and never looked back.
How This Small Hop Farm Uses Farmbrite
Being a hop farm with no livestock, we spend 70% of our time in the Plantings section, 20% in the Schedule and Tasks sections, and the remaining portion in the Resources and Accounting sections.
Like those that answered our Customer Success Survey, and for those who will hopefully be taking it in the near future, to the questions regarding what challenges we as a farm were facing before using Farmbrite, my initial response pretty much sums it up;
“A record-keeping system that was detailed enough, without being overwhelmingly complicated or incredibly expensive. Ability to access the information while in the field versus having to wait until I got back to my laptop. We need specific documentation for our annual CNG certification, and I wanted it in a system that was easy to use, provided traceability, tracked things like equipment, maintenance, planting and harvesting, spraying...everything a farm would need on a daily basis. Not having access to those records while I was actually in the middle of the work itself on the farm was an issue.”
I also wanted to point out my responses to a few things we love about Farmbrite and what we’d say to folks like yourselves who may be considering it.
“Great support, have integrated a number of feature requests we'd suggested, accessible on desktop and mobile device, easy to use, but also a deeply featured platform…If you're looking for a great piece of farm management software that's affordable, built by a team that puts customer service and support high on the list, Farmbrite is a stellar choice!”
The hands-on support offered as part of your Farmbrite subscription is exceptional. I can’t recall how many tickets I’d submitted over the last 2-3 years for general questions, or for feature requests, and all have been turned around within hours, or at most, a day or so. I am immensely honored to be part of this team to contribute to this level of service and support. Additionally, you’ll find many times, rather than responding with an email, the team will often put together a quick Loom video, using your Farmbrite instance, to demonstrate how to accomplish something you may have stumbled with or were uncertain the best way to do it.
Stellar, just plain stellar!
Prost (Cheers) To New Found Farming Successes
If you’re looking for hard numbers, I can easily say we reduced the time involved in tracking our farm activities by 20% using Farmbrite, there’s been a dramatic improvement in our records keeping processes and required for our annual CNG certification and reduced the time needed to generate those reports by 1-2 hours. And for the first time since we began selling our hops to the local brewery, I was actually able to generate professional-looking invoices with detailed inventory line items on the varieties and quantities they’d purchased at the end of the growing season.
As our business grows, Farmbrite is ready to help us expand our offerings. For instance, now that we have detailed and up-to-date records on our harvests and inventory (“fresh”, dried, and vacuum-sealed, pelletized), we can automatically push that information to the web and begin selling to other breweries and home brewers alike, and it’s all tied together seamlessly.
Good To The Last Sip, And It’s A Special One
Before we tidied up this article, we thought we’d bring you back to where we started: our Bavarian roots.
After all these years of toiling in our hopyards - the heat, freezing rain and snow, pests, equipment breakdowns, you name it - we feel like we turned a corner in 2023. This was the year we’d finally gotten our processes in place to produce a harvest large enough that Straub brewery could use it in a production brew. To top off our excitement, they reached back into our collective history and chose a keller (German for “cellar”) style beer. Here’s the description from the brewery’s website;
“St. Marys Keller Ale is a spin on the classic style of Kellerbier from Franconia, Germany. Combining our lager brewing heritage with ale yeast instead of the traditional lager yeast, we’ve created a smooth drinking beer with some fruity esters that complement the mild bitterness of locally grown Cascade and Nugget Hops from Hoffman Appalachian Farm.”
It’s next to impossible to describe the feeling of holding a beer in your hand, crafted by your hometown brewery, made exclusively from your hops, and to see your family’s farm logo proudly displayed on the label along with the words, “Made With Fresh Local Hops”.
In my heart, I feel like it’s moments like these why many of us love and embrace this livelihood known as farming. It’s not about the glitz, the glamour, it’s about a sense of pride, accomplishment, pulling together as a family and a small community to support one another by nourishing not just our palettes but our souls. These are the Bavarian roots that have found their way to the fields of our farm and the hometown brewery of Saint Marys, Pennsylvania.
You can watch more of our shared story here…
Ready to Simplify and Succeed In Your Farming Operations?
Are you ready to simplify your farm operations? Tired of spreadsheets and scattered notes? Want more time in the field doing what you love, and less time in the office doing administrative work? If so, we invite you to try Farmbrite, crop management software - built specifically for small and mid-sized farms - and take the guesswork out of growing. Streamline your harvest, inventory, and fieldwork with one easy-to-use farm software designed for farmers who are passionate about what they do and the communities they serve.