The idea to construct Pasture Coach came about over a Christmas dinner. Chris Lewis a dairy farm consultant was looking for an easy to use computer tool for pasture that his farming clients could use. Dave McIver (brother in law) was looking for a programming challenge.
With administrative support from Rachael and Gail our respective life partners, we agreed to “give it a go”.
AgSoft Solutions is the family company established and operated to deliver the developed software. Pasture Coach started as stand-alone software distributed on CD and moved into the cloud as a subscription service in 2014. The app followed soon after and has proved very popular.
Evelien Baas from The Farm Office is the fifth partner in the company. As a rural bookkeeper, providing software support and training has always been part of her business. She had been selling and supporting Pasture Coach from its infancy, so becoming part of Agsoft made total sense. As a partner she continues to support and promote Pasture Coach and she runs the Facebook page.
Our core value is Keep It Simple. We could see farmers wanted to manage and utilise their own pasture management data with a robust tool so that anyone in the farm team could use it. Pasture Coach was developed on a database platform with this in mind.
Over time Pasture Coach has had new features added with tools that enable farmers turn pasture data into short term management support. These changes have often been derived from clients' suggestions and will continue to use your feedback.
As we continue to develop this tool we will stick with our core principles – Keep It Simple and Make it Work for Everyone.