OpenAgri Digital Farm Calendar: Organising the Future of Farm Management
A smarter way to capture what matters on the farm
Every farmer knows that good decisions start with good records. Yet, keeping track of daily operations—planting, irrigation, spraying, maintenance, and observations—can easily become overwhelming. The information often ends up scattered across notebooks, spreadsheets, or mobile apps that don’t communicate with one another. The OpenAgri Digital Farm Calendar was designed to change that.
Within OpenAgri, the Digital Farm Calendar represents one of the foundational services for digital agriculture. It provides farmers and advisors with a single, open platform to record, view, and manage all farm activities in one place. Rather than introducing another complex system, the service focuses on simplicity, usability, and openness—helping farmers document what happens in the field, understand trends, and make informed choices based on real data.
Turning field data into usable knowledge
The OpenAgri Digital Farm Calendar allows users to manually record key information such as field activities, observations, parcel properties, and farm assets. Through an intuitive web interface, farmers can visualize their full calendar of operations and navigate between seasons, crops, or plots. This offers a clear overview of how each part of the farm evolves through time.
Beyond manual entry, the service is built for integration. It communicates through a REST API that provides all data in a linked-data format (JSON-LD). In practice, this means the information can be exchanged with other digital services without manual effort—whether for irrigation management, pest and disease alerts, or reporting. The calendar thus becomes the backbone of data collection across multiple farm processes.
Built on openness and interoperability
At the core of the Farm Calendar’s design is the OpenAgri Common Semantic Model (OCSM), which ensures that every piece of data—be it a spraying event, a soil reading, or a machinery update—is structured in a way that other systems can understand. This adherence to open standards guarantees interoperability across the wider OpenAgri ecosystem.
By following these principles, the Digital Farm Calendar aligns perfectly with the project’s mission to develop open, energy-efficient, and connectivity-friendly digital solutions for agriculture. Farmers retain ownership of their data, and developers can build complementary tools that connect seamlessly to the same foundation. The result is a transparent, modular environment where new innovations can grow without starting from zero.
Supporting better farm management and reporting
A digital farm calendar is more than a diary—it is a management tool that simplifies complex workflows. Having structured, accurate data allows farmers to analyse performance, plan ahead, and reduce administrative work. Advisors and cooperatives can use the same data to tailor their guidance, while policymakers and certifiers can access reliable evidence without additional reporting burdens.
Through integration with other OpenAgri services such as the Reporting Service and Gatekeeper, the calendar’s data can automatically generate compliance or certification reports. It also plays a key role in enabling the “Collect Data Once, Use Many Times” principle, which underpins the project’s approach to efficiency and sustainability.
Designed for flexibility and growth
As farms vary widely in size, structure, and available infrastructure, flexibility was a central design goal. The OpenAgri Digital Farm Calendar can run on the cloud or locally at the edge, depending on the user’s connectivity conditions. This ensures that farmers in remote areas—often excluded from digital tools due to poor network access—can still benefit fully.
Development of the service is ongoing, with continuous improvements being made based on user feedback from the project’s Sustainable Innovation Pilots (SIPs). Each iteration brings the tool closer to what farmers need: a clear, accessible, and interoperable digital record of their work.
A foundation for open digital farming
The OpenAgri Digital Farm Calendar demonstrates how openness and practicality can go hand in hand. It translates complex digital concepts, linked data, semantic models, APIs, into a tool that delivers immediate value to farmers. By ensuring that data captured once can be reused across multiple services, it sets the groundwork for a more efficient, transparent, and inclusive agricultural digital ecosystem.
Digitalisation starts with organisation. By helping farmers capture the right information at the right time, the OpenAgri Digital Farm Calendar is not just recording the season, it’s shaping the future of how farms plan, manage, and grow.