Digitising the agricultural industry with FarmFacts and NEXT Farming

FarmFacts GmbH is a medium-sized company based in Lower Bavaria dedicated to providing innovative and feature-rich developments in the agricultural sector. As a partner for comprehensive digital farming solutions, FarmFacts offers software solutions as well as complementary products and services from a single source - and has been doing so for over 35 years. One of these solutions is NEXT Farming.

NEXT Farming offers simple solutions for optimizing agricultural business processes in the most economical way, for smart farm management.

To make a decision on the most relevant tech stack, we held a brainstorming session at the architecture level. In conjunction with various tests and internal team discussions, the decision was made to switch from SpringBoot to the Quarkus Java framework.

In combination with an API-based headless approach, together we aimed for a future-proof and modern system landscape that would make it possible to efficiently and economically extend features years later, without compromising everyday operations. 

The project was completed in just five months. From project start in February 2020 to the go-live in July, the teams managed to develop a product that makes FarmFacts the first company in the industry to combine farm and agronomic management with the procurement of inputs.

With NEXT marketplace it is now possible to not only plan daily operational procedures, document or calculate fertilization requirements but also  to directly order the right fertilizer out of the same application, without having to export data or needing multiple points of contact. Analogue comparisons of offers are a thing of the past, as well as painstaking documentation of various sources of invoices and order quantity confirmations.

The chosen technology stack is absolutely state-of-the-art. Additionally, the goal of guiding the user through an intuitive user interface and a well thought-out UX was achieved. Early user feedback has been strong and has highlighted the transformative nature of improved efficiency and intuitive functionality of NEXT Farming.