Mara Kestrel Booking from February 2027

Agriculture · 2021

Furrow

An offline-first harvest log for small farms, designed for wet gloves and no signal.

Client
Brackenrig Growers (sample client)
Role
Designer and developer
Team
Me, and a grower who codes at weekends
Duration
4 months
An aerial view of a tractor and trailer harvesting between rows of crops
Photo: Land O'Lakes, Inc. / Unsplash

At a glance

  • 2 h → 15 minweekly paperwork per farm
  • 0records lost in the first season
  • 11farms using it

Results are sample figures for this fictional project.

The problem

Small farms record every crate for traceability and wages. Brackenrig’s growers wrote counts on cardboard in the field and typed them up on Sunday nights, losing a few every week to rain.

A wall covered in hundreds of colourful sticky notes
Photo: Annie Vo / Unsplash
The cardboard tallies Furrow replaced, reimagined as a wall of notes.

Designed for the field

Furrow has three big buttons and one number. Targets are sized for a gloved thumb, contrast is set for low winter sun, and an undo replaces every “are you sure?”.

There is usually no signal in the fields, so offline is the normal state. The app says what is saved on the phone and syncs quietly when it finds a connection.

  1. thumb-sized for wet gloves
  2. offline is normal, not an error
  3. undo instead of “are you sure?”
Furrow in the field: one number, big targets, and a calm offline status.

It is the only app I can use without taking my gloves off.

Grower, Brackenrig (sample quote)

What changed

Weekly paperwork dropped from about two hours to fifteen minutes per farm, and no records were lost in the first season. Ten other farms in the co-operative have since started using it.

What I’d do differently

I would test in winter from the start. Our first field tests were in June; the first frost revealed that cold phones and wet screens change everything.

Sample case study: the client, team, figures and quote are fictional.

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Mara Kestrel
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Quire An accessible design system I maintain, where every colour pair ships with its contrast ratio.
Furrow An offline-first harvest log for small farms, designed for wet gloves and no signal.
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What a flood map taught me about uncertainty People trust forecasts more when you tell them how sure you are. Showing uncertainty is a design skill, and a public duty.
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