The software and the orchard share an address
AgCore is written at Arriga, on the Atherton Tablelands west of Mareeba. The farm the software runs on first is ours: mango and lychee rows, a homestead, a shed, and a crew that grows from a handful of people in the quiet months to a full picking team at harvest. Every feature ships to our own season before it ships to anyone else's.
That changes what gets built. A feature that looks clever in a demo and useless at 6am in the rows does not survive the week. This is the story of one season — what we used, where it helped, and where the farm pushed the software back.
Before the crew arrives: the map
The season starts on the map. Our blocks are drawn as real boundaries — polygons with area, not names in a dropdown — so when we plan the harvest we are planning against hectares we can see. The Queensland lot-and-plan lookup meant the property outline came from the cadastre rather than from tracing satellite imagery by hand.
By the time the first workers were booked, every block had its crop, its rows and its records attached. When someone asks "how many hectares of lychee came off block three last year," the answer is on the record, not in someone's head.
Signing the crew without the paper chase
Onboarding used to be a folder of photocopies. This season each new picker got a link to the farm's employment agreement as an eForm — their details, their right-to-work documents, their signature, from their own phone. The agreement is ours, between the farm and the worker; AgCore just carries it. By the first morning briefing the folder was a screen.
Picking weeks: counts in the field
Through the peak weeks the crew logged piece counts as the bins filled, and the rosters and timesheets lived in the same record as the counts. The part we lean on hardest is the floor check: piece earnings sit next to hours as the day accumulates, so a picker trending below the Horticulture Award floor shows up on Tuesday — while there is still time to fix the rate, the row, or the ripeness call — not in Friday's payroll.
AgCore does not decide anyone's pay. It shows the numbers side by side and we confirm every pay run — that is the deal, and it is the right deal.
Friday, without the retyping
Payday used to mean re-entering the week into the payroll system. Now the week leaves AgCore once: confirmed timesheets, with piece earnings carried alongside the hours, in the shape the farm's payroll system consumes. Payroll stays the payroll of record; AgCore's job is done when nobody has to type the same week twice. The hours the crew worked, the counts they logged and the record we keep are one thing — which is the whole idea.
What the farm pushed back on
Not everything survived contact with the season. Screens that needed two hands died in the rows. Anything that assumed reliable reception died at the far end of block five. The farm is the harshest product reviewer we have, and it works for free.
Start a season like ours with AgCore — the first 60 days are free — or read the rest of the stories from Arriga.
Sven — Founder, AgCore. Building AgCore from Arriga to consolidate fragmented farm management for Australian agriculture.