In 2011 UVM Extension approached Empower to become their mobile app development specialist and take their nutrient management plan from an Excel spreadsheet to a mobile app. The app was to be comprised of three components:
- Document a plan for how a farm intended to work its land
- Track how a farm actually worked its land over the course of a season, and
- Provide a report generation tool to document / review a farm’s progress
After extensive immersion in our Discovery process, it was determined that both a web and mobile app would be required. This was necessary to establish a robust foundation for proper growth and scalability of their app. The web component would help farmers to layout their plan for the year and produce the required reports. The mobile app would collect what actually happened on the farm throughout a season. It was to be a complete, robust solution.
In early 2013, version 1.0 of goCrop was released to reasonable fanfare. From various press releases to being featured in the Vermont Technology Alliance’s Tapping Tech 2, enterprise mobile app development in Vermont was taking hold.
In late 2014, UVM signed with Empower again to develop version 2 of the app. It was to be a complete redesign of the original, with a new data model and mobile experience that aimed to separate us from our competitors. In 2016 the web version was released, and in the spring of 2017, the next version of the mobile app was released. The screenshots shown here are from the second version of the app and as you can see, the mobile side was quite robust.
The app was designed for offline first. Because goCrop was to be used in rural parts of Vermont, it insured that all day-to-day operations could be performed if the mobile device was offline. When the device came back online, any data collected offline would be uploaded to the web app.
From calculating balances on the fly to capturing manure applications through a counter, goCrop could show a complete picture of what was happening on the farm from day-to-day. It supported push notifications. It ran on both iPad and iPhone form factors. goCrop even offered real time data checking both on device and on the server side.
We are proud to have laid the foundation for UVM to build on for years to come.
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