If you search for "sugarcane farm management software," you will find things. FarmLogs, AgriWebb, Granular, Trimble Ag — polished products with good screenshots and feature lists. None of them are for you if you farm sugarcane in the Philippines.
They're priced in USD. They assume an internet connection in the field. They track grain, cotton, and soy — not plant cane and ratoons. They don't know what a quedan is. They've never heard of a mill delivery queue. "Hacienda" is not a unit they recognize.
I spent time looking at all of them before I started building. Not because I thought I'd find something close enough to adapt — I knew I wouldn't. I looked because I wanted to understand exactly why nothing existed, not just confirm that it didn't.
The Tools That Were Built — and Who They Were Built For
The biggest names in farm management software are built around the business model of large commercial operations in Australia, the United States, and Europe. AgriWebb, for instance, targets Australian and UK livestock and mixed farms. CanePro Estate — probably the most direct comparator for sugarcane — serves 28 large operations managing over 300,000 hectares across Queensland. That's one product for 28 customers. Not one product for 80,000 farmers.
The economics of that model make sense for them. Each of those 28 operations has an IT manager, a budget for software subscriptions, reliable internet access, and farms large enough that a $500/month software cost is noise. The Philippines has around 80,000 registered sugarcane farmers. Roughly 85% of them farm under 10 hectares. The median farm in Negros Oriental is not a large commercial operation. It's a family managing four to eight hectares across one or two sites, often with a ratoon field or two, manual harvest, and a single worker roster that gets written in a school notebook.
That farmer is not a potential customer for CanePro or AgriWebb. They never were. The platforms weren't designed to say no to them — they were designed without them in mind at all.
What Philippine Sugarcane Farming Actually Looks Like
I farm in Negros Oriental. My family has farmed here for two generations. The rhythm of the work is not complicated — but it has specific shapes that no existing software understood.
A planting cycle runs 12 to 18 months for plant cane, then one or more ratoon cycles of around 11 to 12 months each before replanting. Every field tracks differently: different variety, different planting date, different yield history. When you have four fields at different stages, you're managing four separate timelines from a single farm.
The mill relationship defines a lot. Your quedan — the milling share document — determines your allocation and your payment schedule. Delivery is queued and scheduled by the mill. Your cash flow depends on when your cane is cut, how it's weighed, and what the weekly sugar price does. None of that is abstracted cleanly into the "crop revenue" fields that Western farm management tools assume.
And the day-to-day record-keeping is labor-based more than anything. Worker-days, daily pay rates, who came, what they did, which field. That's what farmers here need to track. Not just crop input costs — labor is the cost. The existing apps track fertiliser applications and spray events. The notebook on the kitchen table tracks workers.
The Specific Problems That Needed Solving
When I started thinking about what a useful app would actually do, I worked backward from what I needed to stop losing. These were the gaps:
Field stage tracking. What is each field at right now? Plant cane month four? Second ratoon approaching harvest? Which fields are ready for fertiliser? The answer lived in my head, updated constantly. There was no system for it that worked without internet.
Worker-day records. Who worked, what they were paid, what they did — per day, per field. This is payroll for an informal labor pool. It's also the input expense record you need at year-end. I was writing this in a notebook that got wet and lost.
Expense tracking by field. Total farm expenses at the end of a season are not useful. Expenses by field, by category, by month — that's what lets you understand which plots are actually worth keeping in production.
Offline operation. There is no mobile signal in parts of my farm. That's true of most farms here. An app that requires internet to open is not an app for us. Whatever was built had to work completely offline, syncing when signal returned.
Pest outbreak documentation. This one came into focus during the RSSI outbreak in 2026. Farmers across Negros were watching their crops deteriorate. They couldn't document what they were seeing in a way that satisfied the SRA's validation process for calamity assistance. The gap between 17,000 hectares reported and 1,571 hectares validated in Negros Oriental alone was a documentation problem. Farmers couldn't prove what was happening to them.
Why I Built It Instead of Waiting
I am not a professional software developer. I learned to code because I wanted to fix a specific problem — my own — and the tools I needed to do it had become accessible enough that the barrier was effort, not training. I spent evenings and weekends on it.
The RSSI outbreak made the waiting feel absurd. Farmers in Kabankalan, in Bais City, in Iloilo were losing crops and couldn't document it. The reason wasn't that the damage wasn't real — it was visible to everyone — but that the documentation system depended on a process (SRA field validation) that moves more slowly than a pest that spreads by infected ratoon transport. A community-reported map, where farmers log sightings directly, could have given the picture that manual validation takes months to build.
That feature — the community pest declaration map — is in the app now. It costs nothing to use. A farmer can declare an RSSI sighting in under a minute. The aggregate shows up on a shared map that any other farmer in the system can see.
What the App Actually Does
Sugarcane Farm Manager is a free, offline-first progressive web app. It runs on any smartphone — no install required, no account required to start. Here's what it tracks:
Field records — crop stage, variety, planting date, yield estimate, pest status, fertiliser history. One entry per field, updated as the season progresses.
Worker roster — daily attendance, tasks, pay rates, field assignment. Photo-based logging for farms that want a visual record alongside the numbers.
Expenses by field — labor, fertiliser, irrigation, hauling, other inputs. Categorised and exportable at season end.
Work calendar — scheduled tasks, irrigation logs, weather data layered in for the farm location.
Community pest map — declare a sighting, see other declarations in your district. RSSI and eight other common Philippine sugarcane pests.
Field boundary mapping — trace actual field outlines on satellite imagery. Useful for verifying claimed areas, planning fertiliser runs, and just seeing what you own.
Cloud sync — optional. Data lives on the phone first. When signal is available, it backs up. Read-only share links let a cooperative manager see farm data without giving them edit access.
| Feature | SFM (this app) | FarmLogs / AgriWebb | CanePro Estate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free to use | Yes — ₱0 | Paid subscription (USD) | Enterprise pricing |
| Works offline | Yes — fully | Requires internet | Requires internet |
| Sugarcane crop stages | Yes | Grain/cotton/soy focus | Yes (enterprise scale) |
| Worker-day roster | Yes — with photo log | No | No equivalent feature |
| Community pest map | Yes — cross-farm RSSI map | No | No |
| Designed for PH smallholders | Yes — only this one | No | No |
Where It Is Now
The app is live at app.lmreyna.com. It's been running since early 2026. Farmers in Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, Iloilo, Capiz, and Bukidnon are using it. I'm the one answering messages when something doesn't work.
It's free. It will stay free for individual farmers. The one thing that was always clear to me is that the people who need this most are also the ones with the least margin to pay for it. Charging a monthly subscription to a farmer managing six hectares in Negros would guarantee the tool never gets used by the people who need it.
The question of whether this was worth building has been answered. The harder question — whether it will reach the farmers who still don't know it exists — is the one I'm working on now.