Field monitoring: nine questions buyers ask

Money: price and payback

1. How much does monitoring cost?

Pricing depends on acreage, modules, deployment model and implementation scope, and is fixed in the proposal and contract. There is no public price list. Migration from another platform is included in the contract.

2. When does it pay for itself?

Planva does not promise a payback period. Use your own repeated passes, fuel, and time spent on reconciliation to test the case. The crop protection break-even example is an illustration, not a customer result.

3. We farm 500 hectares. Is this for us, or for holdings?

There is no published hectare range for a farm that is large enough. Compare the proposal with your own costs for reconciliation, repeated work, and recordkeeping. What farming without monitoring costs gives you a checklist.

Product: what it covers and who uses it

4. What does Planva do day to day?

For field crops, Planva keeps the field register and crop rotation, agroplans with plan and actual, machine tasks with tracks, fuel refills and drains, real-time alarms, and a reconciliation report. For orchards, it covers the garden down to the row, with shift plans, harvest labels and weighing. Inspections run in the web app.

5. Will our agronomists actually use it?

The agronomist’s daily work is short: open the field, check the rotation, set the next agroplan or inspection task. Test adoption with the first-season playbook, and judge it by completed agroplans and closed tasks, not by logins.

6. Who else on the team uses it?

The dispatcher issues machine tasks, follows alarms and reconciles tasks with agro operations. A machine operator sees the machinery map and their own machine tasks. A manager sees plan and actual and the season reports.

Data: storage, access and exit

7. Where is our data stored?

There are two delivery models. In the cloud, by subscription, data stays in-country. On-premise, the platform runs on the farm’s own servers under a perpetual licence.

8. Who can see our fields?

Access is granted per user, with roles such as dispatcher, agronomist, machine operator and brigade lead. Each user sees what the role allows. Field groups tie machines, drivers and users to the fields they work on.

9. We use another platform today. How does the move work?

It is a seamless move to Planva from your current platform: you choose the reference lists to bring across, and the status and record counts are visible for each. Read how the move works.