The situation before
Riveridge deliberately spreads its orchards north to south. Planting early varieties on the southern sites and later ones further north lets harvest move in one direction, and it spreads the risk of hail and weather. The trade-off is distance. Some farms are an hour and a half north of the home base, and a new site four hours north on the Leelanau Peninsula is due to be planted in 2028.
Each region has a lead who assigns the tractor work to his crew. To find out whether a block was sprayed or a tractor was free, Dan had to call the lead, who checked with his crew and called back. With different tank mixes going to bearing and non-bearing trees, apples and cherries, that game of telephone ran all through spray season. Tractors also moved between farms as people needed them, so a machine that was due for service could end up on another farm without anyone knowing.
The farm is one of four parts of Riveridge, alongside a fruit marketing business that supplies major retailers across the eastern US, a packing operation and a large cider business. About 150 of the farmed acres are sweet cherries, with a new cherry line going in, and the rest are apples.
When you're spread out, it gets more and more valuable. I can't physically be at a farm an hour and a half up north all the time. This is my way to keep an eye on things, so I know who's finished a block and who can start the next one.
Why they chose FarmBackup
A fellow grower in the Riveridge network recommended FarmBackup. Dan was not shopping around, but the fit was clear. The fleet is a mix of green, red, blue and orange tractors, many of them older machines with 10,000 to 12,000 hours that the farm keeps running because they are simple to fix. A brand-tied system would not cover them. A plain GPS tracker on each machine does, it was affordable, and the same unit can be moved from an idle sprayer to the fruit truck at harvest.
What changed
Fewer phone calls. The live map is the feature Dan uses most. He can see which block a sprayer has finished and which it can start next, on every farm, without going through the regional lead.
Oversight of distant farms. Dan can't be at the northern farms every day. The map lets him keep an eye on the regional lead, and lets the lead keep an eye on his own crew.
Timestamped spray work. Food safety audits such as PrimusGFS ask for accurate chemical application records. Dan now checks his spray records against FarmBackup's timestamps, so he can show when each job was actually done.
Every tractor accounted for. When a machine moves between farms, its location shows on the map, including the ones that are due for maintenance.
What's next
This winter Riveridge plans to map its field boundaries in FarmBackup. Once the blocks are in, the system can work out tractor time per block for the season just finished. Dan wants to put a cost on that time and diesel, the part of profitability per block that is hardest to pin down, and to estimate when each tractor will reach the end of its working life. He also plans to bring the shop manager in on maintenance reminders and to give more of the team access next season.
