FieldLog: A Working Memory for Every Field

By the time a fall soil test comes back, the questions about a field are specific. When did the cereal rye go in, and at what rate? Were the cores pulled before or after the fall fertilizer? Which strips in the trial were the checks? The answers exist somewhere: in a pocket notebook, a text thread, a seed invoice, a spreadsheet on someone's laptop. They are rarely in one place, and rarely attached to the ground they describe.

FieldLog keeps them together. It holds a farm's tasks, field work, inputs, soil samples, observations, yields, and trial layouts with the field each one belongs to, so a season can be read back as one account. FieldLog is one of the platforms the Soil Health Exchange team is building. When the conversation turns to soil, with an adviser, a certifier, or your own crew, it can start from the record instead of from memory.

The screens below follow a sample 2026 season on five fields: corn and soybeans, cereal rye seeded behind the combine, a four-treatment cover crop strip trial, and a small field in organic transition.

Start with the plan you already have

Most operations begin the season with a plan in a spreadsheet: jobs by month, field, crop, and product. FieldLog imports that CSV or Excel file, matches its columns to tasks, dates, fields, crops, and rates, and lets you correct any column it reads differently. Each row becomes a task that moves through not started, in progress, done, overdue, or skipped.

The Today view opens on what needs attention. On October 4, that means a tile outlet on Creek Field two days overdue, corn harvest under way on West 80, and cereal rye to drill once the combine is out. A seven-day forecast for the fields sits beside the list.

A field can start as a name and a crop. Drawing its boundary on satellite imagery, or importing one as GeoJSON or KML, adds acreage, a map, and local weather. Plot outlines follow the boundary, so a crew can find a plot and its records while standing in it.