Why farms move to an FMS
Most farms run on a mix of spreadsheets, paper logs, messaging apps, and single-purpose tools. That patchwork hides costs, makes problems hard to catch early, and ties critical knowledge to specific people. A farm management system replaces it with one source of truth the whole operation shares — so a humidity spike, a delayed task, or a failing pump is visible the moment it happens, not days later.
What a farm management system does
Operations & task management
Plan daily work, assign tasks to your team, allocate resources, and track progress from planting to harvest.
Real-time monitoring
Collect readings from sensors — temperature, humidity, CO₂, soil moisture, pH, light — on live dashboards you can open from any device.
Automation & alerts
Trigger irrigation, ventilation, or lighting automatically when conditions cross a threshold, and get notified the instant something goes out of range.
Traceability & compliance
Record every input and process to generate audit-ready, lot-level reports for GlobalG.A.P., organic, and food-safety export rules.
Who uses a farm management system?
Farm management software is used across very different operations, because the underlying need — turning scattered data into coordinated action — is the same everywhere:
- Greenhouse and indoor growers managing climate and irrigation
- Vineyards tracking fermentation, water use, and quality from grape to bottle
- Vertical and controlled-environment farms running multi-zone facilities remotely
- Mushroom, truffle, and specialty crops that demand precise climate control
- Research centers and cooperatives digitizing and replicating cultivation models
How CoFarmer approaches farm management
CoFarmer is a farm management system built by Enkitek that unifies operations, IoT monitoring, automation, traceability, and autonomous field robotics in one cloud platform. It is hardware-agnostic, so it connects to sensors from any manufacturer, and it works offline by storing data locally until connectivity returns. As of Q1 2026, CoFarmer monitors 115+ hectares across 12+ farm deployments in Spain, processing 50,000+ sensor readings per day.
Frequently asked questions
What is a farm management system (FMS)?
A farm management system is software that centralizes the planning, monitoring, automation, and traceability of an agricultural operation in one platform, replacing spreadsheets and disconnected apps with a single, shared source of truth.
What is the difference between an FMS and a farm app?
A single-purpose app usually solves one task — reading a sensor or logging an activity. An FMS connects operations, monitoring, automation, and compliance so they work together, with one dataset feeding tasks, alerts, and reports.
Who needs farm management software?
Greenhouses, vineyards, vertical and controlled-environment farms, specialty crops such as mushrooms and truffles, and agricultural research centers all use farm management software to coordinate teams and turn sensor data into action.
Does a farm management system require new hardware?
Not necessarily. A hardware-agnostic FMS like CoFarmer connects to existing sensors from any manufacturer; additional sensors are added only where they make sense for your crop and setup.
Can a farm management system work without internet?
A well-designed FMS stores data locally and syncs when the connection returns, so monitoring and automation keep running during outages.
The science behind it
CoFarmer's platform is grounded in peer-reviewed research. These independent, third-party studies validate the methods behind a data-driven farm management system — they describe the science of precision agriculture, not CoFarmer's own results.
- Managing fields with site-specific data improves the efficiency of inputs and yields — the foundational case for precision agriculture, published in Science. Gebbers, R., & Adamchuk, V. I. (2010). Precision Agriculture and Food Security. Science. doi:10.1126/science.1183899
- A 2025 systematic review finds that IoT and AI let farms apply water, fertiliser and pesticides with optimal efficiency, cutting cost and environmental impact. Miller, T., Mikiciuk, G., Durlik, I., Mikiciuk, M., Łobodzińska, A., & Śnieg, M. (2025). The IoT and AI in Agriculture: The Time Is Now — A Systematic Review of Smart Sensing Technologies. Sensors. doi:10.3390/s25123583