Managing a Modern Hop Farm With Farmbrite: A Full-Season Use Case Scenario for Growers
- Joshua Brock
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
For many small hop growers, farming is both a legacy and a leap of faith. The work is specialized, seasonal, intensely hands-on, and often unpredictable. That’s certainly the case at Willow Ridge Hops, a fictional yet entirely realistic family-owned hop farm nestled in the rolling hills of North-western Pennsylvania.
What began as a one-acre experiment in specialty crop diversification grew into a regional supplier for craft breweries, homebrewers, and local malt houses. But with that growth came complexity—meticulous Certified Naturally Grown (CNG) certification requirements, multi-year hop yard planning, tracking rhizome transplants, maintaining trellis systems and harvesting equipment, and reconciling a season’s worth of inputs and sales.
The family knew they needed a way to keep their records, schedules, and decisions aligned. After recommendations from neighboring growers, they chose Farmbrite—initially to clean up their recordkeeping. Instead, it transformed the entire farm. Let's take a look at the topics we'll cover:
This is their story.
Winter: Using Farmbrite to Build a Long-Range Hopyard Plan
Every winter, the family gathered around the kitchen table with notebooks, handwritten field logs, and a whiteboard full of ideas. But as the farm expanded, planning became nearly impossible to track.
With Farmbrite, the family began by creating digital field maps of their two hop yards—North Ridge and Willow Bottom. Each hop hill, alleyway, and irrigation source gained a digital profile. For the first time, the family could see their entire farm represented visually rather than as overlapping notes in a binder.
Farmbrite’s crop planning tools allowed them to assign hop varieties—Cascade, Chinook, Centennial, and a newer experimental variety gifted from a brewer—to specific hills. Instead of scribbling notes and roughly estimating the various growth phases of their rhizomes, they used Farmbrite's templates and custom fields to calculate everything from "crowning" and flame-weeding, stringing and training, fertigation timing, and harvesting.
The platform quickly revealed mismatches in their old plan: too much early-season labor concentrated in one field, and too many late-season harvests with improper moisture levels falling in the same week. Farmbrite generated a staggered training, cultivation, growing, and harvesting timeline, making the season far more balanced.
It was the first time the family felt genuinely confident about the upcoming growing cycle.
CNG Certification: Turning Compliance Into a Streamlined Habit
Willow Ridge Hops takes pride in its Certified Naturally Grown status. But the paperwork was always time-consuming and a bit nerve-wracking; inputs required detailed documentation, soil amendments required verification, and field practices had to be meticulously logged.
Before Farmbrite, these records lived in a patchwork of folders, emails, and sticky notes on the barn fridge.
Farmbrite changed that completely. The family created digital logs for:
weed and pest management
biological controls
Every entry was time-stamped, geo-tagged, and tied to a specific hopyard and row. When CNG inspectors requested documentation, the family generated a clean, organized report in minutes rather than hours.
For the first time, audits felt collaborative instead of stressful.
Spring: Crowning, Splitting Rhizomes & Transplanting, and Early-Season Tasks
Spring on a hop farm is a season of urgency. As soon as the soil warms, the removal of plant and hop crown material ("crowning"), and the splitting, assessment, and transplanting of certain rhizomes must be done before they break dormancy. Previously, family members worked from memory—“Did we split 50 Cascade rhizomes in the North Ridge hopyard last year, or was it 70?”
With Farmbrite, they documented each rhizome block:
parent plant
date of propagation
number of divisions
planting date
soil conditions
survival rate from previous seasons
When transplanting began, Farmbrite served as the farm’s checklist and guide. Each planting crew member used the mobile app to confirm which varieties were assigned to which rows. Notes like “This row had soil compaction issues last year—add compost and loosen before planting” were recorded and visible to everyone.
This prevented mistakes that once cost hours of rework - rows filled steadily, accurately, and on schedule. Farmbrite also handled irrigation setup and trellis inspection reminders. By mid-April, every row had notes describing trellis cable tension adjustments, replaced anchors, and materials used for repairs.
The whole farm moved into spring with a sense of preparedness they had never experienced before.
Early Summer: Managing Growth, Tasks, and Equipment
As hop bines reached skyward, Farmbrite became the farm’s day-to-day operations center.
Each morning, the family checked the daily task list generated by the system. Tasks were automatically scheduled using task templates based on each hop variety's lifecycle:
stringing trellises
training shoots
monitoring for downy mildew
managing understory vegetation
applying OMRI-approved biological treatments
Instead of trying to remember whether the Chinook in the North Ridge had been trained that week, Farmbrite’s completed tasks showed a clear history with photos and notes.
Pest and disease scouting became far more consistent. When a worker spotted early signs of aphids on one row, they logged the observation immediately. The team could then view all scouting reports in chronological order, spot patterns, and make earlier interventions.
Equipment: From Emergency Repairs to Proactive Maintenance
Hop farms rely heavily on specialized tools—tillers, tractors, sprayers, pulley systems, harvesters, and drying equipment. Willow Ridge Hops used to handle repairs only when breakdowns forced them to.
Farmbrite created profiles for every piece of equipment, recording:
maintenance intervals
past repairs
fuel usage
oil change dates
part replacements
labor costs for each service
The platform reminded them when maintenance was due. As a result, their tractor didn’t stall mid-way through spraying like it had the previous year. Their stringing operation ran smoother than ever. Even their trailer-mounted sprayer, a notorious source of last-minute frustration, stayed in working condition all season.
Downtime shrank dramatically, and so did repair costs.
Mid-Summer: Managing Canopy Growth, Irrigation, and Stress Events
Hop farming requires careful monitoring of water stress, vine training, and nutrient management.
Farmbrite helped the family track soil moisture, fertigation, and irrigation cycles, noting adjustments during dry spells. They documented canopy density and used the data to adjust fertility inputs, all while ensuring compliance with CNG standards.
When a severe windstorm hit the region, the farm used Farmbrite to record:
damaged trellis poles
fallen bines
affected rows
labor needed for repairs
estimated financial impact
These records were valuable not just for insurance but also for future risk-mitigation planning. The season’s unpredictability felt manageable for the first time.
Harvest Season: Organization Instead of Chaos
Hop harvest is famously intense. Once cones reach peak maturity, the window to pick them is narrow. With Farmbrite’s predicted harvest dates, the family prepared ahead of time:
scheduling labor
cleaning equipment
arranging fresh-hop deliveries to nearby breweries
preparing the oast (hop cones dryer)
securing vacuum-sealing and packaging materials
As harvest progressed, the family logged:
moisture levels
wet weights
dry weights
variety-specific yields
quality notes
buyer details
By storing harvest results next to planting and input histories, Farmbrite helped identify what was working and what needed to change.
For example, one variety in the Willow Bottom field consistently underperformed when "crowing" activities took place later than in years past. The family planned to adjust the timing of this critical pruning activity next year, an insight they might have missed without Farmbrite’s integrated view.
Fall and Winter: Accounting, Sales, and Future Planning
After harvest, the family turned their attention to sales, bookkeeping, and preparing for the next season. Previously, their accounting system consisted of several spreadsheets, paper invoices, and annual panic.
Farmbrite simplified everything.
Sales to breweries, homebrew stores, and online customers were logged automatically. Expenses tied to specific fields, equipment, and inputs are connected directly to each crop’s ledger.
The cost-of-production reports were especially valuable. For the first time, the family saw exactly:
which varieties generated the highest margin
which fields required more investment
how labor was distributed across tasks
which buyers were most profitable
where the farm overspent on materials
Farmbrite’s financial clarity became the backbone of their multi-year plan. It helped them set realistic expansion goals, identify which equipment would pay for itself quickest, and optimize their CNG certification efforts.
By December, planning the next year didn’t feel overwhelming—it felt exciting.
The Result: A More Confident, Data-Driven, Sustainable Hop Farm
Farmbrite didn’t just give Willow Ridge Hops better records. It gave them:
a unified vision of their farm
consistent communication across family members
a stronger ability to meet CNG standards
healthier plants and better yields
lower equipment costs
clearer financial insight
fewer late-night planning sessions
Most importantly, it gave them something priceless: the sense that their family’s hop farm had moved from “trying to keep up” to truly thriving!
Joshua, his wife Jenn, and their dog Rooster live in North central Pennsylvania. Joshua is the owner and operator of Hoffman Appalachian Farm, where they grow Certified Naturally Grown hops. Joshua has over twelve years of experience in growing crops, including growing in an organic system. In his spare time, he enjoys trail running, backpacking, and cycling.