How to view member farms in Farmeter Cooperative

A cooperative that wants to know how its member farms are doing usually has two options: phone every farm, or wait for paper forms to come back. Both are slow, and both give you numbers that are already old by the time someone adds them up.

Farmeter Cooperative is the part of Farmeral's Farmeter family built for this problem. Farmers keep recording their animals in the phone app they already use, and the co-op sees the combined picture in a web portal. This post answers the questions co-op staff and managers ask most often: who the portal is for, how you get in, what is on the screens, and what your member farmers see from their side.

I'll use the button and menu names as they appear in the portal, so you can follow along on screen. The phone app's screens are in Thai; for those I use the wording from the app's own English translation.

   /\                                                  /\   |   
  [__]                                                [__]  ┴   
 FARM A·                                             FARM B     
        ····                                       ···          
            ····    ┌                      ┐   ····             
                ···· ┌────────────────────┐ ···                 
                    ·│   CO-OP DASHBOARD  │·                    
                     │                    │                     
                     │ herd   ███░░░░░░░░ │                     
                     │ weight ████░░░░░░░ │                     
                     │ events ██░░░░░░░░░ │                     
                    ·│ 5 farms            │·                    
                ···· └────────────────────┘ ···                 
            ····    └          ·           ┘   ····             
   /\   ····                   ·                   ··· /\       
  [__]··                      /\                      [__]      
 FARM C                      [__]                    FARM D     
                            FARM E                              
                                                                

Who is Farmeter Cooperative for?

Farmeral describes it as a web platform for cooperatives, organisations and agencies that want to see their members' data as a whole, analyse production trends and manage a network of farms (Farmeter Cooperative page). The same page lists the situations where a network needs it rather than a single-farm plan:

• you look after two or more independent farms;
• your farms have more than 200 active animals in total;
• you need a central dashboard;
• you need to connect existing systems, move data in, or get organisation-specific reports;
• you need an SLA and a dedicated contact person.

If none of these apply, for example one family farm with a small herd, that page says such a farm can start with the self-service plans of Farmeter Buff, the buffalo app.

In short: the farm app is for the people who handle the animals. The co-op portal is for the people who look after many farms at once.

How does a co-op get access?

There is no sign-up button for co-ops. Access starts with a conversation:

1. Request a Demo. The Farmeter Cooperative page has a demo request form. It asks for a contact name, organisation, phone, LINE ID, operating area, a rough number of member farms and team size, and which topic you want to try first: combining member farm data, tracking production and trends, organisation-level reports and analysis, managing permissions and members, or pricing and getting started. When you submit, it opens your email app with the details filled in so you can check them before sending.
2. Get a quote. Pricing for co-ops is a quote for each organisation, based on its size and the actual scope of work. The page lists what a quote is made of: a yearly platform fee for the organisation, a fee for member farms actually connected during the contract, a one-off setup, training and data migration fee in the first year, and any custom integration work (an API, for example), which is estimated separately. No baht figures are published for co-op plans, so I won't guess any here.
3. Sign in. Once the account is set up, staff sign in at coop.farmeter.app with an email and password. The page offers "remember me" and "forgot password" options.

A detail co-op finance staff tend to ask about: according to the FAQ on the same page, the member farms counted in a contract are the independent farms connected and actually in use during that contract period. Farms that connected once and then stopped are not counted.

What is on the dashboard?

The left-hand menu groups the dashboard under Analysis, with four views: Overview, Livestock, Scoreboard and Events. Farmeral's published screenshots show three of them.

Overview

The Overview is the "how are we doing" page. In Farmeral's published screenshot it shows how member farms are spread across provinces on a map, the total livestock split by age group and by sex, a short list of farms that need attention, and a table of the latest recorded events with the farm, the animal and the person who recorded it.

Livestock

Livestock summarises the animals across the network: the total count, males and females by age band, and a chart of animal numbers over time. This is where a co-op can see whether the network's herd is growing, shrinking or ageing, without asking each farm for a headcount.

Scoreboard

The portal's Scoreboard (titled "Cooperative Scoreboard") uses buffalo data and compares growth by average body weight at a chosen age: birth, 240, 400, 600 or 720 days. It looks at this three ways: the farms inside your co-op ranked against each other, areas (from sub-district up to country) ranked using only your co-op's farms, and your co-op ranked against other co-ops. The page itself notes that comparing your co-op with others by area is not available yet.

Events

Events (titled "Farm Activity Monitor" in the English interface) tracks what is being recorded across all member farms. Events are grouped into categories such as reproduction, health, measurement, movement and life cycle, and include things like a measurement recorded, estrus detected, a mating recorded, a pregnancy check, and a calving. You can filter by date range, which makes it easy to see a busy week (a weighing day, say) as a spike on the timeline.

The Farmeral home page sums the portal up as combining member data for planning, with an overview of the whole network and dashboards for yield and trends. The cooperative page also lists Farmeter Connect, for linking data across farms, as part of an organisation contract (Farmeter Cooperative page).

How do we manage the network?

Under the Cooperative menu group you'll find the pages for people and farms (the shared lists and announcements described below sit in the same group):

• Member Farms: the list of farms linked to your co-op, with a Link Farm page for adding one.
• Farm Members: the people who belong to those farms, with their role on the farm (owner or member).
• Cooperative Members: your own staff who use the portal.
• Manage Roles: build roles from a small set of permissions.

The permissions are deliberately few, so it's easy to see who can do what:

A field officer might only need View Reports, while the person who signs up new farms needs Manage Farm Links. If someone without that permission opens Link Farm, the portal shows a "No Permission" message instead of the form.

Linking a farm works like this: the farmer gives you their Farm ID, you enter it on Link Farm and press Search, the portal shows the farm and its owner so you can check you have the right one, and then you press Confirm Link. If the farm is already linked to your co-op, the portal tells you so.

What are the shared catalogues for?

A co-op often wants every farm to pick from the same lists, so that "the same vaccine" is written the same way everywhere. The Cooperative menu group also holds these co-op-level lists:

• Vaccinations: vaccine entries farms can pull in later, without the co-op writing directly into any farm's or animal's record.
• Health Catalog: shared health items.
• Semen Catalog: semen entries farms can choose from, without adding them to one particular farm.
• Manage Sires and Manage Dams (Parentage Buffalo): sire and dam records farms can refer to later.
• External Personnel: people from outside the farm, kept at co-op level so farms can select them without adding them as farm members.

On the farmer's side, items that came from the co-op are protected: the app tells them "Cooperative items cannot be edited". That keeps the shared lists consistent.

Two more tools round this out. Announcements (shown to staff with the Manage Settings permission) lets the co-op write a notice with a title, subtitle, image and link, and set a start date and an optional expiry; each notice shows as draft, scheduled, active or expired. "Announcements from the cooperative" to member farms is one of the organisation features on the pricing table. The Events Log and its ranking pages, linked from the Events and Livestock views, show which farms and which users record the most data changes, and which farms lead in phenotype measurements. I find this the quietly useful part: it shows where record-keeping is strong and which farms might need a visit or some help.

What does the farmer see on their side?

This is the half of the story co-op staff often miss, and it matters for trust.

Linking starts with the farmer. In Farmeter Buff, the farm's ID is under Farm profile → Farm information → Farm ID (UUID). When the farmer copies it, the app first asks them to confirm, explaining that the ID lets outside organisations such as a partner co-op access the farm's data, that it should only go to organisations they trust, and that copying it means consenting to its use under the personal data protection policy (PDPA). So a co-op can't link a farm unless the farmer chooses to share that ID.

Comparing with the co-op. Both store listings describe connecting to Farmeter Cooperative so a farm can follow its own performance against the whole co-op (App Store, Google Play). In the app, the analytics charts have a Show cooperative average switch, and the Scoreboard compares average buffalo weight within the same age range.

The Scoreboard has an In cooperative summary card showing your farm's position in the co-op, and two tabs: Co-op farms and By area. The By area tab carries a privacy rule written right on screen: "Farms outside the cooperative only show rank and average." A farm outside your co-op appears as "Farm ranked #3" with its average, never by name.

 ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ 
 │  SCOREBOARD   Co-op farms  [By area]         \_/   │ 
 │  outside co-op: rank + average only          _|_   │ 
 │────────────────────────────────────────────────────│ 
 │                                                    │ 
 │  #1  Farm ranked #1      avg 418 kg                │ 
 │                                                    │ 
 │  #2  Co-op farm B        avg 405 kg                │ 
 │                                                    │ 
 │  #3  Farm ranked #3      avg 398 kg                │ 
 │                                                    │ 
 │  #4  Your farm           avg 391 kg    ◀           │ 
 │                                                    │ 
 │                                                    │ 
 │  average weight · same age range                   │ 
 └────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ 

A few practical notes from the app itself:

• A farm must be in a co-op before any rankings appear, and the Free plan does not include farm rankings.
• The By area tab compares by sub-district, district or province; region and country levels need the Professional plan, and Farmeral lists wider regional and national Scoreboards as a coming feature on its pricing page.
• For a farm in a co-op, plan changes go through the co-op: the app shows "Manage via cooperative" on the plan buttons instead of letting the farm change plans itself.

Farmer side vs co-op side

Does it cover beef farms too?

Yes, on paper and with one caveat. Farmeral's FAQ says Farmeter Cooperative supports both species: buffalo farms use Farmeter Buff, beef cattle farms use Farmeter Beef, and both send data into the same central dashboard (Farmeter Cooperative page). The caveat is that Farmeter Beef is labelled Beta and open only to partner farms. A co-op with beef members should ask about this during the demo rather than assume every beef farm can join today.

Where to start

If you run a co-op or a farm network, the honest first step is small: request the demo, bring a short list of the questions you currently answer by phone, and ask to see them on the Overview, Livestock and Events screens. If your members already use Farmeter Buff, ask them to find their Farm ID in Farm profile before the meeting, so linking can happen on the day.

Sources

• Farmeter Cooperative product and pricing page, Farmeral Technology
• Farmeter Cooperative sign-in page
• Farmeral Technology home page
• Farmeter Buff product page, Farmeral Technology
• Farmeter Beef (Beta) page, Farmeral Technology
• Farmeter Buff on the App Store (Thailand)
• Farmeter Buff on Google Play