Modern crop farming with a varied rotation
Operations manager Benjamin Christensen leads a crew of 5-6 employees and an apprentice. The rotation runs from wheat and sugar beets to grass seed and spinach seed, so the year brings a wide range of jobs.
Without FarmBackup it would be hard to keep track of a machinery co-op our size.
The situation before FarmBackup
Before FarmBackup, everything was recorded by hand and in different places. That left the picture incomplete, and the office then spent a lot of time pulling all the numbers together. With several operators, a lot of machines and fields spread from Grænge to Vantore, it was hard to get a true picture of where the time was going. It was heavy going for the office, and there was a risk of errors, especially during harvest, when everyone is flat out.
The GPS tracker system
Today, every one of Grængegården's tractors, combines and other self-propelled machines has a GPS tracker, which mounts easily straight onto the battery. Implements without a battery, such as field cultivators and drills, have a beacon. The trackers automatically record both travel time and time spent in the field, no matter who is driving. The time is allocated by itself at field level, so the machinery co-op has a basis for its internal billing that every party can rely on.
The crew uses the live map and the route history map in both the app and the web for coordinating among themselves. Everyone can see where the machines and implements are, and where they have been, and that makes the day run more easily.
Machine cost and gross margin at field level
When the harvest year is over, all the machine hours sit allocated across fields and crops. The analyses of machine cost and gross margin at field level are now done directly in FarmBackup. The results are gone through together with the machinery advisors at Velas (formerly VKST), who help interpret them.
At VKST's DB2 group meeting in Sorø in December 2025, Grængegården and FarmBackup showed, among other things, what it costs per hectare to grow sugar beets, and how much of the total the hauling accounts for on fields a long way from the farm.
FarmBackup Task
Payroll has become easier too. The employees record their hours in the FarmBackup Task app, and the pay agreements allocate them automatically across regular time, overtime and the rest. The hours are therefore ready when payroll is figured, and in the app the employees have an overview of their own records.
During harvest, Grængegården also uses FarmBackup's new map-based straw storage management, which has just been awarded 3 stars by Agromek. For operations manager Benjamin, who runs the straw crew, it has already become an important tool. It gives him the overview out in the field while the harvest is on, and gathers the numbers at the office once the harvest is over.
