How to Simplify your Organic Certification

If you’ve gotten your farm or ranch organically certified, you know that a lot of detailed record keeping is required. To ensure success, you need to be diligent about tracking, gathering, and storing data. Equally important, you need to be able to efficiently access years of archived information.

With Farmbrite, you can track, store, and access the data you need for certification – and recertification – all in one place. You can even update and access this data from the field using your smartphone.

Whether you’re collecting data for your first organic certification application, or have years of experience, Farmbrite can help. To learn how, let’s look at some Farmbrite features and explore how they can benefit specific aspects of the certification process.

If you haven't already read it, check out our 6 step guide to becoming organic certified.

Farm mapping for organic certifications

In this USDA-provided Organic System Plan template, the first information requested after filling in your “State” and “County” is a map.

Mapping your farm is easy in Farmbrite. To ensure accuracy, Google maps are built in. Farmbrite helps you identify the borders of your farm or ranch and color code items like property boundaries, fields, beds, buildings as well as animal and growing enclosures.

Once you’ve marked these areas, you can print your customized map or save it as PDF to share – or to edit further in other applications.

Reports for Organic Farms

In the certification application process you need to provide information about what you’re doing today, AND detail what’s taken place on your farm in the past. How quickly and easily can you access production practice information and management history for the last 3 years?

Not everyone can immediately recall all the details from memory; some of us struggle simply to find where we saved specific files in the file cabinet or on the hard drive.

It’s a lot easier if all the information is in one place.

Farmbrite stores historical data – and so much more – and lets you access it in a variety of reports. In addition to general accounting reports, which provide visibility into things like “Profit & Loss” and “Spending by Category,” other reports are livestock- or crop-specific.

Check out the dozens of pre-built standard farm reports that are included with Farmbrite, including some that provide a break down of all your cropping activities to assist with and streamline your certification or audit process.

Crop Traceability

As a grower, every aspect of your internal and external farm traceability information can be stored in Farmbrite. This includes seed-to-harvest records; lot numbers, batch numbers, trace numbers, grade, and more. You can track soil treatments and amendments as well as pest and disease treatments with detailed notes and images.

Once this information is stored, it can be easily accessed at any time through Farmbrite’s standard farm reports or can be included in any custom report you create.

Livestock Reporting

Livestock operations are also fully supported, but through their own unique set of standard reports. From feed and nutrition records to grazing rotation practices, Farmbrite simplifies recording and organizing the vital details of any livestock business and provides dozens of pre-built farming reports to help you understand the key aspects of your cattle, sheep, goat, chicken or other livestock business as well as to simplify data gathering and organic certification reporting.

Custom Farm Reports

We’re not know-it-alls and we recognize that every agricultural operation has unique needs and data requirements. We don’t think we know everything about your business. And while Farmbrite is uniquely responsive to customer suggestions of what to add next, we also left the keys out for you. With custom reports, you can create your own report to look at different aspects of your farm data and help answer any questions you might have.

We believe this kind of flexibility is essential, as no one knows your business like you do.

Creating a new, customized report is easy and flexible and allows you to choose what data to include, how to organize and summarize your data and even include charts and graph. Learn more about building custom farm reports in Farmbrite.

Sharing your Farm Data

Throughout Farmbrite and in all reports you can easily print or download your data. Data can be exported and used in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or any spreadsheet program. It can also be used to import your farm data into other applications you might use, like Quickbooks.

Learn more about downloading your farm data from Farmbrite.

This means you can easily copy all the data you captured in Farmbrite into other documents (including forms and applications) as necessary. You can also import this data into nearly any software, so you’re never constrained or locked into any one workflow or process.

Beyond Reports

In addition to maps and reports, many other areas of Farmbrite can also facilitate the kind of record keeping required for organic certification (and recertification). For example:

• Farmbrite’s farm schedule, calendar, and task list all capture day-to-day actions that are crucial parts of the production practices you need to track.
  

• Everything you record under “Equipment” – from how long you’ve had a piece of machinery, to where it’s been used, and how it was cleaned – can be pertinent.
  

• Farm Inventory and farm input usage and details
  

• The QR codes Farmbrite associates with your fields, crops, equipment and animals can help you track pertinent information, both in the field and the office.
  

• And more...

Additional Benefits

Farm Data - Easy In, Easy Out

Farmbrite makes it easy to capture and report on all you farm activities, even when you're offline.

Tip: Don’t like to type? You can enter data in Farmbrite using speech-to-text functionality that’s built into today’s computer and smartphone operating systems.

Once you enter data in Farmbrite, it’s at-hand whenever you’re near a computer or your smartphone. Whether you need to simply refresh your memory, copy and paste some text, or export some reports, the information you need is just a few clicks away.

Farmbrite also reduces the need to reenter information you’ve already entered once, increasing efficiency and minimizing the frustration of double entry.

What if Requirements Change?

We're here to help and grow with you. We know that requirements for any kind of certification can change over time and that sometimes it seems like you’re dealing with moving targets. Not to worry, Farmbrite is adaptable, flexible and customizable for your operation.

In addition to offering open-ended features like customized reports, Farmbrite itself is improving all the time, and we always welcome your input. Have a great idea or need help, contact us anytime.

Wherever you are in the organic certification process, thank you for your good work. If we can help. Just let us know.

Not sure if Farmbrite will work for your farm or have additional questions? Check out our extensive help documentation or join us for a free demo or training, we'd love to help you with your farming goals.

Not using Farmbrite yet? Try it for free today and see how it can streamline your organic certification or recertification process.