Farm software for UK farm shops, veg boxes and pick your own

Most farm software in the UK is built for the field: crop records, field mapping, livestock, the paperwork that goes with them. Good packages exist for that, and we do not build another one. This page is about the other business on your farm, the one that sells direct. The farm shop, the vending hut at the gate, the veg boxes, the pick your own field and the Saturday market.

That second business tends to grow without a plan. A table at the gate, then an egg machine, then boxes for the neighbours, and suddenly there are a hundred subscribers, two collection points and a list on paper only you can read. That is the moment selling takes longer than growing. We build custom software for that part of the farm: a few screens that do what you already do on paper, faster, and without retyping orders at ten at night.

A sunny Saturday in June can bring more pickers than the field can take, and a grey one brings nobody. Bookable slots spread the day: families pick a time online, you set how many people each slot holds, and you close the field for a day when the crop needs to recover. It is a small booking system, the same kind a holiday let uses, with your rows instead of rooms.

The same booking page can take payment for an entry fee or a deposit, send a reminder the evening before and tell people what to bring. If rain closes the field, one message reaches everyone booked that day. Being found comes first, though: a complete Google Business Profile with the season's hours, photos of what is ripe and reviews that keep coming in. Our local SEO tips cover the rest.

What the farm shop website itself should do, page by page, is worked out on farm website design.

A farm sells from more places than it thinks: the shop, the vending hut, the cold store full of boxes, the market stall, sometimes a pub down the road. The same punnet of strawberries can end up in any of them. Knowing what stands where means picking better and wasting less.

We keep it simple. A scan or a tap on the phone when something moves from the cold store to the vending hut, the shop till counting along, and an alert when a place runs low. If your vending machine offers a link, it reports an empty slot or a warm chiller by itself. We build that as inventory management or as a dashboard for Monday morning. A till that works stays; an integration is usually enough.

Many fruit and veg farms rely on pickers who come in on a Seasonal Worker visa. In horticulture it lets someone work in the UK for up to six months. The worker needs a sponsor and a certificate of sponsorship, the visa fee is £340, and they need £1,270 in savings unless the sponsor certifies maintenance. A decision usually comes within three weeks. Pickers on the visa are paid at least the minimum wage, like everyone else.

The date that matters on the farm is the end date. A rota that holds each picker's visa end date flags any shift planned after it, as the board above does for Marta. It also keeps the pay right: from April 2026 the National Minimum Wage is £12.71 an hour at 21 and over, £10.85 at 18 to 20 and £8.00 under 18 or for apprentices, and the rates change every 1 April. More in staff scheduling software, time tracking and Excel or planning software.

Local pickers and returning workers apply on their phones, often in the evening. A short form that asks when they can start and until when brings in more people than a request for a CV. Why people come back to the same farm year after year is worth showing, see employer branding.

Subscribers want to know what is in their box, ideally with a recipe. Writing that email on a Friday night is the first thing to go in a busy season. Record a few voice notes in the field; AI turns them into the box contents and a draft newsletter. You read it, change what needs changing and send it.

It stays your voice and your harvest. The AI works only from what you record and what is in the orders, so it does not invent a crop that is not in the ground. More in AI for business, and on writing one people open in how to write a newsletter.

A vending hut at the gate needs something different from a farm with two hundred box subscribers and a team of pickers.

Most farms start in the second row. The biggest change is an order page with a fixed cut-off: from then on you know the evening before what to pick.

Selling food direct and hiring seasonal pickers both come with rules. These are the ones we build into the software most often.

Each site you sell food from is registered separately, and in Scotland registration goes through Food Standards Scotland. Read how to register a food business before you set an opening date. For online orders, see the withdrawal button in Shopify and WooCommerce, and for subscriber data, UK GDPR versus EU GDPR.

An order page where customers pause their own box, lists that make themselves and a newsletter drafted from your notes take most of that away. Run your own numbers in the software cost calculator, and see what a website costs in the UK in website cost UK.

A farm is not on our client list yet; a site in two languages with a booking form, an availability calendar and a small admin page is what we built for Villa Lidia. Garden centres selling plants direct are covered on garden centre software.