Having trouble keeping track of inventory on the farm? How about equipment maintenance logs? If so, there’s an award-winning company based in Indiana that can help with tracking everything on your farm.
“We basically walk onto a farm and help them do what we call operational tracking,” says Tracey Wiedmeyer, Co-Founder and CEO of Gripp. They started out by collecting maintenance information on combines, trucks, and tractors.
“Farmers quickly told us, ‘We have trouble tracking everything we own.’ It wasn’t just the powered units—it was inventory, fuel, seed bins, pivots, you name it. So, what we essentially do is put a QR code on anything you want to track. It makes it dead simple for the operator to scan it, access service history, log issues, fill out checklists, or view DOT information. What’s unique about us is that every single item has its own conversation thread with it.”
And that conversation thread can live in one place instead of in someone’s text messages that might get lost with their grocery list or whatever else.
“A lot of times you go onto a farm, especially if there’s bilingual folks, they’ve been admiring these issues for a long time. And so now they scan, take a picture, in their native language describe what’s going on, put their phone away. That notification goes to somebody who can actually fix it instead of like, “Hey, I’ve texted this to the boss so many times. It gets lost in a sea of texts, and nothing happens. Now I’m frustrated.’”
Wiedmeyer says one of the biggest issues Gripp has helped with is parts inventory.
“You don’t necessarily think that’s a big issue. It’s such a frustration because every farm has a mezzanine with $10,000, $20,000, $40,000 worth of parts if you’re the big guy, but they never know how much is in there. So, they send one guy in over Christmas, try to log everything because they’re going to buy a ton of stuff in January. And so, we help them scan that UPC with their phone, track it in, track it out, at any point they can look up inventory and it’s there for them.”
Gripp won $100,000 in American Farm Bureau’s Ag Innovation Challenge last year. You can learn more about Gripp at gripp.ag.
