Farm Base — Quick Start Guide

Welcome! Farm Base keeps your whole operation in one place — grain bins and loads, field maps, crop scouting, spray records, and more. This guide walks you through the basics in about ten minutes. No computer skills needed.

1. Put Farm Base on your phone

Farm Base is a web app — you won’t find it in the App Store or Play Store. Instead, you add it to your home screen from your web browser. After that it opens with one tap and looks just like a regular app.

On an iPhone or iPad

1. Open Safari (the blue compass icon) and go to the Farm Base web address your farm uses — for example app.farmbase.ca.
2. Tap the Share button — the little square with an arrow pointing up, at the bottom middle of the screen.
3. Scroll down the list and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Tap Add in the top corner. Done — the Farm Base icon is now on your home screen.

On an Android phone

1. Open Chrome and go to the same web address.
2. Tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner.
3. Tap Install app (on some phones it says Add to Home screen), then confirm.

On a computer

In Chrome or Edge, look for a small install icon at the right end of the address bar and click it. You can also just use Farm Base in the browser — nothing needs to be installed.

2. Sign in

Open the app and sign in with the email address and password you set up (or that were sent to you). If you were given an invite code instead, tap Sign up, create your account, and enter the code when asked — it connects you to your farm.

You stay signed in on your phone, so you won’t need your password every time.

3. Find your way around

The Dashboard is your home page — a quick look at bins, loads, and recent activity. Everything else lives in the menu. On a phone, tap the menu button (three lines, top left) to open it.

The menu is grouped so related pages sit together:

• Grain & Inventory — Bin Map, Bins, Incoming and Outgoing Loads, Transfers, Contracts, Temporary Inventory.
• Agronomy — Observation Report, Field Maps, Seeding, Spray Apps.
• Equipment & Notes — Maintenance records and the Notes & Checklists board.
• Operations and Financial — reports on fields, storage, inventory, and money.
• Settings — farm setup: products, fields, crop years, and users.

4. Set up your farm — the Setup Wizard

The first time you open a brand-new farm, the Dashboard shows a welcome message with a Start Setup Wizard button. The wizard walks you through eight quick steps and builds your whole farm — crop years, crops, fields, yards, bins, and buyers — in a few minutes.

Here’s what each step asks for:

1. Farm name — what shows at the top of your pages and on reports.
2. Crop years — the harvest years you want to track (this year is already suggested). Add last year too if you plan to enter old records.
3. Products — the crops you grow or store. Tap the ones you grow — Wheat, Canola, Barley, and the other common crops are one tap each, and each comes with the correct test weight built in (wheat 60 lb/bu, canola 50, barley 48), so the app can convert truck weights to bushels for you.
4. Fields — a name (like “Home Quarter”), the legal land description if you know it, and the acres. You can draw the actual boundaries on the map later — that’s covered in section 7.
5. Yards — the places your bins sit, like “Home Yard” or “South Farm”. One yard is fine to start; each yard gets its own bin map.
6. Bins — the fast part. Tell it how many bins you have, the starting bin number, and a typical capacity, then tap Generate Rows — it creates them all at once. Fix up any bin that’s different (a name, a bigger capacity) right in the list.
7. Buyers — the elevators and buyers you haul to. These become one-tap choices when you record a delivery.
8. Summary — a count of everything you just created. Tap Finish and you’re set up.

Where it all lives afterwards

Your lists — Products, Varieties, Buyers, Fields, and Crop Years — live under Menu → Settings → Master Data, each with its own Add button. Missed a field or a buyer? This is where you add it.

Bins are the one exception — they live with your grain, not in Settings. Bought a new bin? Open Menu → Grain & Inventory → Bin Map and tap + Add Bin, then drag it into place in your yard right there.

5. Record your grain loads

This is the day-to-day heart of Farm Base: every load of grain that moves gets a quick entry, and your bin levels, field totals, and yields stay right automatically. The three load pages are under Menu → Grain & Inventory:

• Incoming Loads — grain coming into a bin, usually off the combine at harvest.
• Outgoing Loads — grain leaving the farm, usually a delivery to an elevator.
• Transfers — grain moved from one bin to another.

Recording an incoming load

1. Open Incoming Loads and tap + Add Load.
2. Pick the bin it went into and the product.
3. Enter bushels — or the truck weight in pounds, and the app converts it to bushels using that crop’s test weight.
4. Under Source, pick the field it came off. This is what builds your per-field totals and yield — worth the extra tap.
5. Add moisture and temperature if you have them, and tap Save.

Deliveries and transfers

An outgoing load works the same way: pick the bin it came out of, the buyer, and the bushels, plus dockage and price if you know them. A transfer just asks which bin the grain left and which bin it went into.

Grain contracts

Signed a contract to deliver so many bushels at a set price? Put it in Farm Base and it does the bookkeeping for you. Open Menu → Grain & Inventory → Contracts, tap + Add Contract, and fill in the buyer, the crop, the crop year, the committed bushels, and the price per bushel — plus the delivery deadline if there is one.

From then on, every delivery you record to that buyer for that crop counts toward the contract by itself — no extra steps when you add the load. The Contracts page shows each crop’s committed bushels and what’s still to deliver, and each contract fills up as you haul — so you always know what’s left to move before the deadline.

Watch your bins fill up

Every load updates your bins live. Menu → Bins shows every bin with a fill bar; the Bin Map is the same thing as a picture of your yard.

6. The Field Map — what all the buttons do

Open Menu → Agronomy → Field Maps. This is the satellite map of your land: field boundaries, scouting observations, soil sample pins, and recommendations all live here.

The buttons on the map

The toolbar

With the side panel open you’ll also see a narrow toolbar of drawing tools, grouped by colour:

7. Field boundaries — add, draw, and fix them

Bring boundaries in from a file

If you have boundary files from another program (John Deere Operations Center, Climate FieldView, your agronomist…), you don’t need to redraw anything. Farm Base reads Shapefile, GeoJSON, KML, and KMZ files.

1. On the Field Map, open the side panel and tap the green Import tool at the bottom of the toolbar.
2. Choose the file on your phone or computer.
3. Farm Base shows every shape it found. For each one, choose: match it to a field you already have, create a new field, or skip it.

Draw a boundary by hand

No files? Use the Field tools and walk the corners on screen, then give the boundary a name when asked. A field can hold more than one parcel — for example a quarter split by a road — and each parcel can have its own name. Use the Inner tools to cut out sloughs and yards; the field’s acres update to the real seeded area.

8. Record what you see in the field

Observations are your scouting notes: weeds, insects, disease, crop stage, hail — anything worth remembering, pinned to the exact spot.

From the map

1. Tap the orange Obs marker tool. A 📍 Tap map message appears — tap the spot where you found the problem. (Or use the GPS crosshair tool to drop it right where you’re standing — no tapping needed.)
2. The form opens. Pick a category like Weeds, then search the list — type “koch” and Kochia pops right up. No scrolling through long lists.
3. Add how bad it is, how widespread, a note, and photos straight from your camera.
4. Press Save. The marker shows on the map for everyone on your farm.

From the Observation Report page

Menu → Agronomy → Observation Report lists every observation on the farm. The blue + Observation button at the top adds one without any map tapping — it simply applies to the whole field. This page is also the best place to look things up later:

• Set the As of date to see the farm as it was on any day.
• Tap Options for more filters — date range, fields, crops, varieties, and minimum severity.
• Tap any observation to edit it or jump to its spot on the map.

9. The agronomy tools people miss

Along the top of the Observation Report there’s a tab strip — Observation Report Soil Samples Field Operations — three tools worth knowing about:

• Recommendations — a spray or fertilizer plan for a field: products, rates, water volume, and the window to do it in. Add one with the green + Recommendation button on the Observation Report, or from a field’s panel on the Field Map (+ Add Recommendation). Great for agronomists — the farm sees it right on the field.
• Soil Samples — keep each field’s soil test numbers (N-P-K-S), what was applied, and what’s recommended for next year, side by side. Sample pins on the map link back to these records.
• Field Operations — log tillage and other passes that aren’t seeding or spraying, so the field’s full history is in one place.

On a computer, the same tab strip also shows a Workspace — a big-screen console with filters down the side and a colour-coded timeline of everything that happened on each field: seeding, scouting, sprays, soil, and field ops.

10. No cell signal? It still works

• Before heading out, open the Field Map and use the Map tools to download offline satellite imagery for your area.
• Out of coverage, keep scouting like normal. Anything you save is kept on your phone — look for the “saved on this device” note.
• When you’re back in signal, it all sends to the farm automatically.

11. Get help

Stuck, or something looks wrong? Scroll to the bottom of any page and tap Help & feedback to send a message — screenshots welcome. You’ll get a reply right in the app, and a banner appears when an answer is waiting.

Happy farming! 🌾