Questions, answered the way we’d answer them at the elevator.

Basic is $199 a year for up to 2,000 acres. Professional is $599 a year for up to 5,000 acres. Flat annual price either way, unlimited people on the account, no per-acre meter. These are launch prices and the site says so. If you farm more than that, write to us and we’ll work out a number.

It starts the first time you actually use AcreCast — the first field you create, the first planting you record, or the first monitor card you bring in. Signing up doesn’t start it. It then runs about ten months, and if that date would land in the middle of a season you’re farming, we push it to the end of that season. A trial that expires during planting is worthless to both of us.

Your records stay. You can read them, edit them and export every one of them. We gate features, never your own data. Locking a farmer out of his own spray records is a compliance problem we aren’t going to cause.

No. Seats are free and always will be. If crew logins cost money nobody adds their crew, and then the crew alerts and the assigned work go unused — which are the parts worth paying for. We charge for acres and give away people.

Yes — export your field operations from Operations Center as ISOXML task data and drop the zip in. Boundaries, operations, and yield or as-planted maps come across where the file carries them. It’s a young feature validated against real exports: if a file of yours reads wrong, send it to us and it becomes a permanent test. Shapefile, KML and GeoJSON boundary files work from anybody, same as always.

Yes, with one honest caveat. Open the app while you still have signal, then drive into the dead spot: sprays, fuel, hours, tickets and irrigation runs all keep saving, stack up on the phone, and send themselves when you get bars back. Nothing is thrown away — a record the server refuses is kept with the reason on it. The caveat is a cold start with no signal: you get the app, but not your field list, because we cache the program and not your farm.

One button, any day, on the trial and after it ends. You get nineteen spreadsheets covering every record type, a map file of every boundary that opens in QGIS or Google Earth, and a manifest listing each file with its row count and a section headed what isn’t in this export. No fee and no phone call.

No. We don’t sell it, we don’t trade it, and we don’t take a commission on anything you buy. The subscription is the only money AcreCast makes, which is the whole reason we can afford to tell you to buy less seed.

You draw your pivot once. AcreCast pulls your soil survey live from USDA, splits the map units at the pivot’s actual edge so watered ground and dry corners are rated separately, and writes a variable-rate seeding prescription you carry to the monitor as a shapefile. It shows every assumption it made and labels each one measured, derived or assumed. Corn and soybeans get the full soil-driven model. Wheat is driven by the drilling date instead — it moves the optimum 60 to 100 per cent, more than any soil factor anyone has tested — and canola is a flat rate with a drainage suitability flag. Those two are decisions, not gaps: the published research for a soil-driven rate in either crop isn’t there, and we won’t invent it.

There’s a native iPhone app for logging work in the field — spray records, haul tickets, fuel and engine hours — but it isn’t on the App Store yet and it doesn’t have the offline queue the browser app has. Today the browser app is the one to use on a phone, and it works well there.

Farm → People on this farm → Invite. You put in their email and pick owner, manager or crew, and the screen tells you what that role will and won’t be able to see before you send it. If the server has email set up they get a link; if it doesn’t, you get the link on screen with a copy button and hand it over yourself — either way you are never waiting on us. The link works once, only for that email address, and expires in fourteen days. Seats are free, so add the whole crew.

A weather model — Open-Meteo — for your field’s location and the hour you sprayed. Wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity arrive filled in, labeled “filled from weather model — check it”, and you can type over any of them. The record stores which it was: modeled, or your own reading. The same model gives every field a rainfall log — yesterday, the last week, the season. Be clear about what that is: it’s a grid cell roughly seven miles across, not a rain gauge on that field, and it can miss a summer cell that soaked one pivot and skipped the next. It’s good enough to write a record against and to sanity-check a season; it is not a measurement of your ground, and the app never pretends otherwise. If the service is unreachable the app says so and leaves the boxes to you, rather than quietly filling in a calm, dry afternoon.

No, and it never will. If the modeled wind for that hour is over about ten miles an hour the form says so in amber and tells you to check your label. That’s all. The label is the law, the limit differs by product, and a model seven miles away has no business overruling the person standing in the field.

The weather it fills in is modeled, not a gauge standing in your field. It won’t model a fertilizer or chemical rate — see the next answer, because that one is a decision rather than a gap. Pre-harvest intervals warn you on the field card and on the haul ticket, but they don’t push a notification the way re-entry intervals do. And prescriptions are built on a desktop screen, not a phone.

It will place them; it will not invent them. Give it your agronomist’s rates and it builds the file — a flat rate over the field, the same zones as your seed prescription with new rates on them, or the USDA soil zones with a rate typed on each — every one of them split on the exact edge of your pivot, so the ground under water can carry a different rate from the corners. What it will not do is generate the numbers. A modelled nitrogen rate needs grid soil samples, tissue tests and a nitrogen response function validated on your soils for your product, and we have none of the three. Plenty of software will draw you that map anyway. The number it hands you has a decimal point and nothing behind it.

A working row-crop farmer in western Kentucky, who is also customer number one and runs his own farm on it. Every feature got argued with from the cab before it shipped. That’s why the acre totals are calculated from boundaries instead of typed, and why unmapped ground shows as unknown rather than zero.

No. It runs in whatever browser you already have, on the shop computer and on the phone. Nothing to download, nothing to update, no disc.