Industries | Agriculture
Digitising a paper based, remote industry
We’ve spent years working through problems with agricultural businesses, and we know what it takes to build products that hold up in the paddock, not just in a demo. Agriculture is a tough place to build software. Compliance and safety obligations don’t pause for harvest, and the people using your product are practical, time-poor and quick to drop anything that gets in their way. These are some of the challenges we’ve discovered, and what we did about them.
Our experience in Ag-tech:
Making safety compliance work where there’s no signal
Rhodes Pastoral’s workforce compliance ran on paper and manual processes that were hard to track and harder to complete on the move. We started with a handful of digital forms and ended up building a single portal for 16 forms, plus QR-code pre-use checks for 16 pieces of machinery. It works fully offline, so nothing is lost when a worker is out of range.
Turning in-house tools into a product growers rely on
Decipher helps growers plan, collect and track their soil samples in one place, from choosing where to sample to seeing the results on a map. Wesfarmers had software they gave away to fertiliser customers and saw the opportunity in it. We helped them take it from concept to market in 11 months as a SaaS product, with growers, agronomists and ag service providers each getting a clear reason to use it.
Shifting bargaining power back to buyers and sellers
In livestock trade, agents held the price information, and with it the power. We worked with the founder to map the trade process, then built a buyer and seller platform around shared price grids. The result is a service that gives both sides visibility without exposing buyers to undercutting.
Challenge 1:
Remote work means offline capabilities
The problem:
Many agriculture products are used out in the field, which means that limited connection could stop the product from working, exactly when people need it. After completing the initial forms e realised that much of the work would happen in paddocks and sheds well outside mobile range, which meant that if a worker couldn’t get online, they couldn’t complete a check. The whole point of moving off paper for them was to make compliance easier, not harder.
How we’ve solved it:
We built the Rhodes Pastoral Platform with offline built in from the start. Workers can open the app, pick their vehicle, scan its QR code and complete the checklist with no coverage at all. The submission is held on the device and uploaded automatically when they’re back in range, with nothing for the worker to remember. This kind of thinking comes from our years of experience building products in agriculture that people use and depend on, and it wasn’t something that was just an added bonus of whatever platform we used. Payload, the CMS that we had chosen to build the Rhodes Pastoral platform on is built around a live connection, so we engineered the local storage, queuing and sync layer ourselves.
Challenge 2:
A no-nonsense environment
The problem:
The people using agricultural software are capable, busy and unforgiving of friction. Tech confidence varies, and any tool that becomes a barrier to getting the work done gets ditched. The environment (a dusty cab, a shared iPad, one hand free) shapes the design as much as the user does.
How we’ve solved it:
We build for the context, and we talk to real users to get there. On Decipher, we worked with frontline employees and people with first-hand farming experience to map journeys for the grower, the agronomist and the service network, and ran choice-based research with real customer segments to shape bundles, pricing and features.
That shows in the results. Four weeks after launch, Decipher had over 270 customers (half farmers, half ag service providers) from around the world, and no support requests. That’s what a self-serve product looks like when the design has done its job.
Challenge 3:
Thin margins mean data has to do the work
The problem:
When margins are tight, decisions based on guesswork are expensive. Agricultural businesses need data they can trust and reports they can act on, and in some markets even basic price information isn’t visible.
How we’ve solved it:
At Agora, price information sat with agents, which meant deals went to whoever had the network rather than the best value. We built a buyer portal where price grids are created, managed and shared, and a seller app to search and save them. We also introduced indicative pricing, so buyers can signal what they’d pay without exposing exact figures to be shopped around.
For Decipher, accuracy was non-negotiable. Soil sampling only drives good decisions if samples are taken in the right place and the results can be trusted. Growers plan sampling jobs on a map, and can use an automated site suggestion tool to choose where to sample. Jobs go straight to the lab, and the results come back onto the same map, so growers can see trends instead of wrestling with spreadsheets.
Challenge 4:
Outdated safety and compliance processes
The problem:
Safety obligations aren’t optional, but paper forms, email chains and disconnected processes make them hard to complete and nearly impossible to track.
How we’ve solved it:
At Rhodes, each form had existed in isolation, with no one place for workers to check what had been done and no central view for managers. We built a single hub: inductions, toolbox meetings, pre-start checklists and a resource library together, with each submission routed automatically to the farm manager for sign-off. Role-based access means managers, contractors and equipment managers each see what’s relevant to them. If a machine is faulty, it’s flagged and withdrawn from use, and managers are alerted straight away.
The client’s own words: “Our meetings are now more productive and visual, and our staff have information readily available when they need it.”
For Healthengine, the question was how to connect people with the right practitioner in a simple, accessible way, and how to help ensure professional and personal fit. Working closely with their founders and growth team, we moved from problem to design in a week.
What ties it together: a product mindset
Rhodes, Decipher and Agora are different problems in different parts of agriculture, but they share one thing. Each is a true product: a system that people rely on every day, that other people paid for, and that has to work for the people using it.
That shapes how we work. With every one of our clients, we treat what we build as a product, focusing on the long term “what” and “why” of the end result, rather than just the “how” and “when”. Testing it with real users, designing for the conditions it will be used in, and sticking around as it grows. Rhodes started with a handful of forms and is now an evolving platform we continue to build on together. Decipher’s team grew from 2 to 40+ in under 12 months, and we worked alongside them as they scaled.
“From the beginning we worked as one team to build the service offer from creation to development and design through to activation in the market… We found the team had the ability to quickly understand what we wanted to achieve and what our customers’ needs were to deliver the best outcome.” - Former Marketing Manager at Decipher.