The AgSquared team is on the road this winter, attending a number of this year’s farming conferences. We look forward to meeting many of you at these events, answering questions and demoing the software at our conference booth.

We’ve developed a workshop on farm planning and management that we'll be presenting at the NOFA-NJ and MOSES winter conferences. Our highly interactive workshop is designed to help you think critically about information management on your farm so that you can identify the most valuable information to feed your decision-making processes, and develop a record keeping plan to make sure you capture that information. We’ve developed this workshop to share with others what we’ve learned about farm planning and management in the process of building AgSquared. We think that the group brainstorm and lively conversations among our workshop participants are a whole lot of fun, so please join us if you can!

For those of you who plan to attend a farming conference or two this winter, you can find us at the following conferences (click on the name of the conference to link to the conference website):
 

Great Plains Growers Conference
Thursday, January 5th to Saturday, January 7th
Fulkerson Conference Center, Missouri Western State University, St. Joseph, MO
 

NOFA-NJ Winter Conference “Cultivating Change”
Saturday, January 28th to Sunday, January 29th
Friend Center, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Our workshop: “Building a Complete Picture of Farm Planning and Management” will take place on Saturday 01/28 at 3:30PM. Location to be announced.

ECOFARM 2012
Wednesday, February 1st to Saturday, February 4th
Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, CA
 

MOSES 2012
Thursday, February 23rd to Saturday, February 25th
La Cross Center, La Cross, WI

Our workshop: “Rethinking Farm Planning and Management” will take place on Friday 02/24 at 8:30AM. Location to be announced.
 

Follow us on Twitter to connect with us at the conferences and receive updated information about our booth location and workshops. Please stop by our booth or come to our workshop – we’d love to meet you!

Start the 2012 farming season off with AgSquared - create your account today!

We are proud to announce that after 7 months of testing with a group of 150 growers, and lots of feedback and tweaking, AgSquared is now live! We welcome all farmers to create their AgSquared accounts and begin their 2012 farming seasons with AgSquared.

Why sign up for AgSquared today? Because AgSquared is the only software program that is designed to manage all of your farm’s information, helping you see the big picture and make the best decisions for your farm.

By creating your AgSquared account today you’ll get access to our suite of easy-to-use software tools so that you can:

1. Get a jump-start on creating your 2012 crop plans.
2. Organize and keep track of all of the tasks and to-do items on your farm.
3. Make 2012 the year that you get your record keeping in order.

Creating an AgSquared account is simple and only takes a few minutes. Every AgSquared account comes with a 3-month free trial – thanks to the generous support of Johnny’s Selected Seeds – so you have plenty of time to discover how useful and easy it is to use AgSquared for your farm planning, management and record keeping, before making any commitment.

Click here to create your AgSquared account.

Click here to read more about what you can do with AgSquared and see a demo video of AgSquared in action.

AgSquared will be presenting a workshop at the upcoming NOFA Summer Conference, which will be held at the UMASS Amherst Campus in Amherst, MA, from Friday August 12th to Sunday August 14th. 

We’re very excited to have been invited back to the NOFA Summer Conference! Our workshop, “Getting Started with Farm Planning, Management and Record Keeping” will take place on Friday, August 12th from 2:00PM to 3:30PM in Conference Center Room 903.

Through our interactive workshop growers will build a deep understanding of the connection between farm planning, management, and record keeping. Our workshop participants will work together to diagram information flow and key decision points in the farm management process.  As a group, we will discuss where the information about a farm's history, which can be gleaned from farm records, can be used in the decision making process to foster greater sustainability, in every sense of the word, on the farm.

We hope to see many of you at our workshop.  

For those of you who are new to the NOFA Summer Conference, you can click on this link to find directions to Amherst and a downloadable map of the UMASS Amherst campus.

Nearly two months ago AgSquared quietly launched its first software release to a group of 50 farmers for in depth testing. Since then our beta testers have been using AgSquared to create their seeding plans and planting schedules, to map their farms, and to keep track of their operations on a day-to-day basis, creating a stream of farm records in the process. It has been quite a thrill for all of us on the AgSquared team to have real users testing out our software and giving us feedback for the very first time. We've stayed in close touch with our beta testers and have received lots of great feedback and suggestions. We are incredibly grateful to our beta testers for the time and energy that they have put into testing AgSquared.

Our beta testers are a varied group of growers running many different kinds of operations, from small mixed vegetable CSAs, to larger operations growing for a wide range of markets from farm stands to wholesale. This diversity allows us to make sure that AgSquared works at different scales and for many different kinds of operations.

We plan on adding more farms to our beta test in the near future as we prepare for our fall 2011 public launch. We’re continually improving AgSquared and adding new features, and would love your input on what we can do to make AgSquared perfect for your farm’s needs! If you are interested in joining the AgSquared beta test, please contact us via the contact us form and make sure to mention the beta test in your message.

It's been a busy few months here at AgSquared. Since we last updated our blog we've been hard at work building the first set of AgSquared’s tools that will allow farmers to plan and manage their farms. We've made a ton of progress in the last few months, and now our launch date is just around the corner!   We’re so excited to give you a sneak peek at what we’re building that we've created this video to give you a glimpse of what AgSquared version 1.0 will look like.

(Note: the video is best viewed in full-screen mode so you can see all of the exciting details.)

As you can see from our demo video, AgSquared's first release is geared toward simplifying farm management for diversified vegetable growers. We know that these operations can be quite complicated and that farmers need to keep track of potentially hundreds of plantings, numerous inputs, and extensive labor requirements, and that all of this requires intensive planning and management. We believe that AgSquared will help to simplify these planning and management tasks and make the 2011 season more productive, profitable and sustainable.

There are many more exciting features in our development pipeline for the coming year. Keep an eye on this space to hear more about them as we develop them.

To all the farmers who have spent time helping us develop this first version of AgSquared, thank you.  We could not have done it without you.

We love meeting farmers at farming conferences, so we couldn’t pass up the chance to attend the 2010 NOFA Summer Conference. This is the largest NOFA conference yet, and it is sure to be an inspiring and educational weekend. This year's conference will be held at the UMass Amherst Campus in Amherst, MA, from Friday August 13th through Sunday, August 15th. 

We're excited that the organizers of this year’s conference have invited us to host a workshop on our favorite topic, farm management and record keeping. Our workshop, entitled "Easy and Free Computerized Farm Record Keeping", will be on Sunday, August 15th from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in room CC 805-09.  You can find directions to CC 805-09 by consulting this map of the UMass Amherst campus. 

We hope that our workshop will be a lively and engaging discussion on the topic of farm planning and management, and the role that good record keeping practices play in building a sustainable farm operation. In it we will highlight the challenges associated with keeping good records throughout the course of the growing season and using those records as a planning tool. We’ll also discuss the different solutions and approaches to management and record keeping that farmers currently use. Finally, we'll be showing a live demonstration of AgSquared's software, giving our workshop attendees a behind-the-scenes peak at what we have been working on and how our software addresses the challenges of making a good farm plan, managing a farm's day to day tasks, and keeping useful records.

We'd like to thank Ben Grosscup and all the NOFA staff and volunteers for putting together what will surely be an amazing weekend. We're very excited to be a part of the 2010 NOFA Summer Conference, and we hope to see you at our workshop!
 

AgSquared was recently featured on the Fast Company blog! Thank you Fast Company for naming AgSquared’s co-founders, Jeffrey S. Froikin Gordon and Giulia M. Stellari, among the top 5 social entrepreneurs of 2010.  We're honored to have been mentioned in the company of other entrepreneurs whose innovations are making a difference in their communities. Many thanks to all the farmers whose input has helped us shape AgSquared and its mission.

Read the complete article here.

AgSquared took part in the NOFA-NY conference this past weekend!

We had such an awesome time at NOFA-NY. Everything, from the talks to the food - and especially the people - was fantastic. We met many wonderful farmers whose farm businesses represent a diverse set of operations types, farm sizes and crops. All had one hugely important thing in common: they are all seriously committed to their land and sustainability. For us here at AgSquared, we felt like we fit right in and were among family! 

We were also very fortunate to have a forum and some time to speak with many farmers one-on-one for in-depth conversations about their farm record keeping practices and management tasks. It was great to hear your thoughts, comments, and concerns about AgSquared’s software and our upcoming beta test. Thanks to all of you who joined in for our group discussion about AgSquared on Saturday afternoon, and thanks again to the organizers of NOFA-NY for making a conference room and time slot available to us for our meeting. 

Many thoughtful questions about computerizing farm records were asked and a number of interesting points were raised. One of the more frequent questions we were asked is, “Is everyone going to be able to get a beta test account and when?” We are using a beta test server with limited capacity which keeps our initial development costs low, so that we can keep AgSquared free! We will therefore be limited in the number of beta accounts that we can offer when we begin to test our software later this winter. As we grow, pick up momentum and build server capacity, we will be able to offer you beta test accounts at some point during the 2010 growing season. 

Another important question that was asked was, “Does your software support livestock and poultry operations?”  The answer to that question is, “Not yet, but we will soon!” If you would like to become an AgSquared beta tester to try out our future poultry- and livestock-specific features, sign up now, and when invited into the beta test, set up your farm’s account. There will be a place where you can specify what crops you grow and which animals you raise. As we build livestock- and poultry-specific functionality into the AgSquared software package, we’ll make sure to include you among the first who are invited to beta test these new features. 

We hope to have answered many of your questions at our meeting and in this blog post. If you have any thoughts, comments, or concerns, please contact us and send them our way!

All the best for a healthy and productive 2010 growing season, from your friends at AgSquared.

Will you be attending this winter’s NOFA-NY conference? Are you interested in learning more about AgSquared and our upcoming beta test? Then come and meet up with us at the NOFA-NY winter conference from January 22nd to 24th in Saratoga Springs, NY!

We’ll be holding an informal information session to talk about AgSquared on Saturday Jan. 23rd from 1:30 PM to 2 PM in conference room Travers. This conversation will be an opportunity for us to meet you and hear your thoughts on how computers can help you in the management of your farm. You'll also get to learn about our farm record keeping software package, and its upcoming beta test. We want to be sure that NOFA-NY farmers have the chance to participate in AgSquared's development and make sure that AgSquared supports your farm record keeping workflow and management needs.

Thank you to Greg Swartz and Kate Mendenhall for making this conference room and time slot available to us.

We’re so excited to meet you and can’t wait for our upcoming conversation!

Dear Readers, 

Welcome to the AgSquared blog!  In this blog, you’ll find out about what’s going on and what’s new at AgSquared. Here you’ll get sneak preview descriptions of the features that are in our development pipeline. In our blog we’ll also discuss current happenings in agriculture and technology and the issues that affect small farmers worldwide. You’ll also read about our upcoming appearances and where you can go to find out more about AgSquared in person.  We welcome your comments and thoughts, so please do contact us to send them our way!

We hope this blog serves to plant the seed for the beginning of a vibrant and strong community of farmers who wish to improve the sustainability of their farms through better technology and through the development of an information platform where all are welcome to contribute and share their expertise. We invite you to participate in the development of the AgSquared community by signing up for more information and joining our mailing list using the big red box on the right hand side of this page. Become a fan of AgSquared on Facebook so that we can keep you updated on our latest developments. For those of you who Tweet, well, AgSquared is getting ready to tweet back, so stay tuned for that as well!

Best wishes for a healthy and productive season from your friends at AgSquared!