Our work
Building Digital Workforce Tools for WA Agriculture in Payload
Enabling a farming workforce
Rhodes Pastoral is an agricultural business across the Boyup Brook, Arthur River, and Kojonup shires in Western Australia.
Like many agricultural operations, their workforce compliance relied on paper and manual processes that were hard to track and even harder for workers to complete, as they were on the move.
Hatchd were first engaged in October 2025 to solve a more specific, practical problem. Rhodes Pastoral needed a handful of digital forms for their farming workforce, including induction checklists, a toolbox meeting form, and pre-start checklists. It was a small, well-defined starting point and it's where our relationship with Rhodes Pastoral began.
No Single Place for Forms to Live
Rhodes Pastoral had initially engaged us to digitise these forms to make completing, tracking and reporting on them easier. They wanted to streamline the whole process for their workers, and enable them to have a fail-proof system in place which helps to ensure workforce compliance with safety regulations.
As we worked through the first of the forms, it became clear that solving this properly meant more than just digitising a few forms at a time. Working with Rhodes, we surfaced a bigger opportunity, to create a centralised hub where everything could live.
Before we got involved, each form had existed in isolation, with no one place that workers could access and check what had been done, and no central view for managers where they could view, track and record completion.
We identified the opportunity to house a library of resources and documents alongside the forms giving workers and managers a single, reliable place to find and store both the checklists they needed to complete and the reference material to support them.
Each form carries its own set of requirements and checklist logic, and each one needs to be completed and routed to the farm manager for visibility and sign-off. Multiplying that across an expanding list of forms meant Rhodes Pastoral needed a developed and bespoke portal. One place for their workers to find the right form, complete it correctly, and know it had reached the right person.
Given the nature of the work, accessibility on the go was a non-negotiable. Rhodes Pastoral's workforce is out on the farm, so the portal needed to work smoothly from phones and iPads in the field.
Choosing the Right Foundation
We selected Payload CMS as the technology foundation for Rhodes Pastoral for several reasons, all driven by the requirements of this product. The main one: a Payload collection defines the backend schema by default, and we could use that same collection to generate the front-end form schema. Define it once, and never build a form by hand.
Access control and user roles were also important. In Payload, they come built in. Access roles can also be easily extended by way of adding more roles and permissions. Different people on a farm need to see and do different things: a farm manager needs visibility over submissions and sign-off; a contractor needs access to the forms relevant to their work, not the full internal library; and equipment managers have restricted access to the Payload dashboard. The portal supports multiple levels of security access, including farm manager and contractor roles.
Payload's core model — collections of documents governed by access rules are mapped directly onto what Rhodes Pastoral needed: structured forms with permission-based visibility.
Experience of Payload within the team meant that we could move through the work efficiently.
A Portal Built for the Field
With the forms and access model defined, we delivered a portal that consolidated Rhodes Pastoral's inductions, toolbox meetings, pre-start checklists, and resource library into a single mobile-friendly platform. Workers can find the right form, work through its checklist, and have it routed automatically to the farm manager, replacing what had previously been manual, paper-based, or email-driven processes.
The QR code link for every piece of machinery and equipment also had to be built so that if a piece of equipment wasn’t operating as expected, or something was broken, the farm manager was alerted straight away.
As the relationship matured, Rhodes Pastoral came back to us to extend the platform further, but this time to solve for offline access.
Western Australia's farmland is vast, and much of it sits in areas where connectivity is patchy at best and non-existent at worst. A portal that only worked with a live connection wasn't going to be good enough for a workforce spread across paddocks and sheds well outside mobile range. If a worker couldn't get online, they couldn't complete a check and the whole point of moving off paper was to make compliance easier, not harder.
QR Code
Vehicle ChecksA QR code fixed to each vehicle or piece of machinery links to a shared pre-use check form, with the worker selecting the specific vehicle or machinery before starting their check, bringing the same forms-and-compliance approach to fleet safety.
Offline Mode & Progressive Web App (PWA)
We built the portal, including the QR-triggered machinery checklists, to work fully offline. Workers out of range can still open the app, select their vehicle, and complete their checklist as normal. The submission is held on the device and automatically uploaded the moment they're back in range, with nothing lost and nothing left for the worker to remember to do.
Offline-first field operations
One of the more novel parts of the Rhodes Pastoral build was offline support. Farm workers often log activity, complete equipment checks, and submit Job Safety Analysis (JSAs) from remote areas with little to no mobile connectivity, so submissions needed to be captured locally and synced reliably once a connection returned.
Payload CMS, like most headless CMS platforms, is built around a live, connected API, so offline-first submission handling isn't something it offers out of the box. Our team built that layer from scratch, engineering the local storage, queuing, and sync logic needed to bridge an offline-first field experience with Payload's API-first backend. This was not new territory for Hatchd as we had built an offline capability for Horizon Power, but it was new in terms of making it work with Payload. This piece of custom groundwork extended what the platform could do.
Together, these phases reflect a broader pattern: what began as a request for a few forms has grown into an evolving digital workforce enablement platform for Rhodes Pastoral, one that now works as reliably in the paddock as it does from their headquarters.
From paper-based forms and reporting, Rhodes Pastoral has moved to a system where 16 pieces of machinery now use a QR-based online checklist before a worker operates the equipment, confirming it's fit for purpose or reporting faults. This is being extended to other areas of the farm for essential checks across sheep, cattle, and cropping operations. Additionally, Rhodes Pastoral now has 16 forms available in one portal, which can be easily completed and communicated to farm workers.
Testing process
To ensure the platform held up under real farm conditions, we ran a structured test estimate covering the full breadth of the new equipment and inspection system from the admin-side equipment register and QR code generation, through to meeting type management and the inspection forms workers use in the field.
Test scenarios covered core admin functionality (creating, editing, and deleting equipment and category records), data integrity checks (unique registration and asset numbers, unique category and meeting names), and the QR code workflow itself, including verifying that codes update correctly when equipment details change and that deleted equipment or meeting types return a proper error rather than a broken form.
Particular attention was paid to the inspection form experience, since this is what farm workers interact with directly: confirming that scanning a QR code always loads the correct checklist for that specific piece of equipment, that JSA documentation is present, and that both logged-in and logged-out users are correctly redirected back to a pre-filled form rather than losing their place.
Data migration was tested to confirm historical inspection records displayed correctly alongside new submissions, and new requirements such as flagging faulty equipment to withdraw it from new submissions and triggering fault notification to the farm and equipment managers were specifically tested end to end. This level of rigour across a system now used for 16 pieces of machinery reflects the reliability the platform needed from day one, given it directly supports worker safety in the field.
Because many of Rhodes Pastoral's iPads are shared across multiple workers on a given day, we also tested and built for that reality, making sure each worker's submissions stay tied to the right person and are not visible to or mixed up with who picks up the device next.
For a WA agricultural business, getting compliance and safety processes right is how a workforce spread across paddocks and sheds stay safe, informed and accountable. We're proud to be building the digital tools that make that easier, one form and one checklist at a time.
Ongoing support
Working collaboratively with Rhodes Pastoral has felt seamless. We continue to support the workforce enablement tool for Rhodes Pastoral, working alongside their team as new needs, new forms, new roles, new use cases and new features come up. Since the first meeting with Damien and Sharon and really listening to what they were looking for, through to a bespoke space that can now be built on based on feature needs, we are pleased that this is freeing up time and providing a much simpler way of doing things.
For a WA agricultural business, getting compliance and safety processes right isn't just paperwork, it's how a workforce spread across paddocks and sheds stays safe, informed and accountable. We're proud to be building the digital tools that make that easier, one form and one checklist at a time.
“As a proudly Western Australian company, it was important to us to partner with a locally based Perth business to develop what we initially envisioned as an app to bring our Safety Management System online. When we discussed with the Hatchd team our ideas, they suggested we develop a website that will work like an app. “
Sharon Bagnall
Office Manager - DFD Rhodes Pty. Ltd.“ It has been a pleasure working with such a dynamic and ideas-focused team. They took the time to understand our requirements, listened to our ideas, and transformed them into a custom-designed website that is practical, easy to use, and tailored specifically to the needs of our farm staff.
Our website is simple to navigate and allows us to record meetings, incident reports, and plant and equipment checks, while also giving our staff easy access to our policies and procedures. Importantly, the system can be accessed on mobile devices and used both online and offline, making it particularly valuable for our team working across the farm.
The new system has improved the way we manage and record our safety processes. Our meetings are now more productive and visual, and our staff have information readily available when they need it.
Hatchd has embraced our ideas and worked collaboratively with us throughout the process. The result is an innovative and practical website that has made a real difference to the way we manage safety across our farming operations.”