Data to drive decisions – Tillage & Soils

Matthew Traves of R & SJ Pickering, a mixed farm contracting business based near Alford Lincolnshire with 250ha arable land, started using Omnia to help keep better track of inputs and field profit margins

Two years into using the software, Matthew has found it is helping to provide a much more accurate insight into many of the important decisions on the farm, both around practical farm management and financial profitability of the business.

Having joined the business as farm manager back in 2021 from a telematics/tech background, Matthew was keen to move the predominantly then paper-based system onto a digital platform and liked what he saw with Omnia.

“We were impressed with how intuitive and easy to use Omnia was, balanced with a comprehensive range of modules or tools that we could access to help us make better use of our farm data.”

Despite not having a Hutchinsons agronomist, Matthew explains it was straightforward to set up and access on-going support to do this, though digital service specialist, Millie Taylor who works on the Omnia team.

“One of the first things we did was to access the very accurate information available from telematics on the combine, with yield data imported straight in where the software calculates the amount of each variety in the shed.

“We can then go on to record any sales; type, quantity and price received. The clever part is that this feeds into the business module, which links into the input costs for the crop, providing an accurate return on investment figure and a clear picture of how varieties have performed for future preferences.”

Matthew believes being able to look at figures in this way gives us a picture of costings at a glance, without having to wade through sheets of numbers is a real advantage.

“It provides a very quick snapshot of what is making money and what isn’t.”

On this basis he has decided to drop Graham winter wheat this year as its performance is dropping away, and it is no longer making the returns he is looking for.

“We found we needed to use a TO to keep it clean and this was costing an extra £40-£50/ ha so we are looking at trialling more robust varieties such as Dawsum, Champion or Palladium, which perhaps do not need this upfront cost.”

This year the decision has been made to drop oilseed rape from the rotation, as Matthew feels it is just too costly to grow and carries too high a risk. “If 15% of the crop is destroyed then that’s our profit margin gone.”

In 2025 Omnia underwent a significant upgrade to a full farm management system and Matthew is making full use of the modules available from the updated field diary, to the stock and spray plan module.

He is pleased that Omnia’s visual-based, intuitive design has been kept, despite the complicated layers of interconnected data behind the screen. “Other farm management systems tend to be spreadsheet based and aren’t anywhere as easy to use or as visual.”

Having just one platform is a big bonus he says. “One of the benefits of Omnia is that it’s cloud-based and operator-friendly. I can go out with my iPad and work remotely.”

19 YA 72 Mathew is particularly keen on the upgraded Scout app as this allows him to upload anyon activity directly from the field staright into thecon Field Diary, and at the same time assign costs to each field and operation. Completed tasks are then viewed in the records section making it easy to see when it was done, weather, operator, machinery, products, etc.

He uses Omnia to record all his machinery operations in the machinery shed, part of the business module. “We’ve added all the machinery and have input depreciation, wearing metal and fuel costs so that we get an accurate cost for all our operations in each field.”

In common with existing Omnia functionality, this is compatible with most popular machines and platforms.

So now, its possible to see the costs of any field activity almost as its being done, notes Matthew. “If a field is being cultivated for example, this is recorded in the scout app, linked to the Machinery shed where the type and running costs of machinery is stored, and the costs of the cultivation/ha are calculated and easy to visualise, so decisions can be made along the way based on knowing the real costs of production.

“The same principle works for spray plans, once these are sent over by my agronomist, products can either be entered as stock or go straight into the spray module which calculates all the application requirements such as litres of chemical per spray tank, number of loads etc.” As well as making it simpler to keep track of stock and spray plans, perhaps the biggest admin benefit is that the cost of product is automatically populated. “Now, the costs come through to Omnia directly which saves me time and keeps everything in one place. It’s seamless.”