Developing Your Own Farm Management Software Is Easy! … Or Is It?

AgroVIR often encounters the question from prospective partners: why should they buy AgroVIR instead of developing their own system, since that would only require a one-time development effort on their part?
In this article, we aim to debunk the myths and explain why it is advisable to choose a dedicated software solution from an external provider.
It’s similar to how we don’t develop our own spreadsheet software, but use the well-known Microsoft Excel instead.

AgroVIR has more than 17 years of experience in farm management and has become a market leader in the Central and Eastern European region during this time. The software is used for daily operations on over 700,000 hectares across Hungary and six other countries.

What Does a Company Face Before Developing Its Own Software?

Before development, it is essential to thoroughly map out the daily processes that need to be digitalized. These must be identified and the required functions, as well as their interconnections, must be planned.

It’s not just about coding — developers usually don’t understand agriculture, so the professional knowledge must come from the client. The company must specify the functions, design their operating principles, and set up the workflows.
In addition to agricultural expertise, this also requires in-depth knowledge of accounting, finance, legal regulations, and administrative processes.

The company must also decide whether to build an in-house development team or hire an external firm. Both options require long-term cost and risk analysis, since a complex system is not built in a few months and needs continuous maintenance, testing, and updates.

In one real-life case from one of our clients, their key internal developer — the central figure of the project — left the company for a higher salary during the operational phase. As a result, all the invested time, money, and effort were lost, leaving the farm without a working solution.

Why Do Those Who Once Tried Developing Their Own Software End Up Choosing AgroVIR?

Developing your own software often starts promisingly, but soon turns into a complex, resource-heavy challenge. By contrast, AgroVIR offers:

• A market-tested solution developed based on feedback from thousands of users.
• Ready-made integrations with major machinery manufacturers, irrigation systems, weather service providers, accounting software, and fleet management systems, enabling two-way automatic data exchange.
• Real-world expertise, as a significant part of our consultancy team consists of agricultural professionals, ensuring that development directions are based on real-world practice rather than theory.
• Rapid development, with up to 30 new features added each month, keeping pace with legal, technological, and administrative changes.
• Benchmarking capabilities, allowing farm performance to be compared with other farms at regional or national levels, helping identify best practices and supporting strategic decisions.
• Compliance with official reporting requirements, ensuring that data is ready for legal submissions in multiple countries.

Automatic Administration and Connectivity

One of AgroVIR’s greatest advantages is automated data processing, enabled by a connection network built over years. Integrating platforms is always a common goal, and we continually seek to discover and expand integration possibilities.

Currently, AgroVIR can connect to and exchange data with all major agricultural machinery software, irrigation systems, weather services, grain analyzers, accounting software, and fleet management systems. These data can be automatically integrated into the system — enabling the creation of farm and spraying logs, as well as accurate cost tracking, with minimal human intervention.

Building such connections requires compliance with dozens of legal, technical, and quality assurance conditions — often after years of negotiations. For an individual company, creating this is nearly impossible, or at least disproportionately costly and time-consuming.

Agriculture is constantly changing — new regulations, subsidy requirements, and technological expectations emerge. AgroVIR updates continuously and can respond instantly to such changes. In a custom-built system, every change would require additional dedicated resources, and the reaction time could be much slower.

Community Knowledge Sharing and Decision Support

AgroVIR is not just software — it’s an active, knowledge-based community. Our benchmarking feature is particularly valuable, as it enables farmers to retrieve and analyze their own data in a standardized format.

Production and procurement data can be analyzed at regional or even national levels, providing an objective picture of farm performance. This information highlights areas where targeted improvements can yield significant efficiency gains.

Flexible Development

If a partner requests a unique feature that could also be beneficial to other farms, AgroVIR will build it into the system at its own expense. Thanks to community feedback, everyone benefits from new developments. Farmers can discover features they didn’t initially think they needed but that ultimately provide great value.

The system can be flexibly customized, and even individual development requests are possible — with predictable and transparent costs.

The Bottom Line

Developing your own software is undoubtedly an exciting idea — but in the long run, it is not sustainable for companies whose core business is not software development.

AgroVIR is not just a system but a community, a knowledge base, and a continuously evolving platform that can meet the challenges of the future.

Focus on what you do best — and we’ll provide the best digital foundation for it.