Located near Tillsonburg, Ontario, Heritage Grown embodies a deep-rooted farming legacy. Officially incorporated in 2019, the family business stems from generations of agricultural experience. Farmers John and Tina Dyck joined forces with their sons, Ivan and Jonathan, merging three family farms into a thriving enterprise. This collaboration fosters growth for the entire family and extends to other regional farms who lease land to Heritage Grown.
Spanning approximately 2,000 acres, Heritage Grown produces quality fresh produce including: field tomatoes and cucumbers, specialty peppers, asparagus, and strawberries. From their on-farm packing facility near Straffordville, they pack and distribute their own delicious harvests. We're thrilled to share a customer spotlight and interview with Elana Froese, Heritage Grown's Bookkeeper.
Heritage Grown specialty pepper varieties and packline
Heritage Grown started with Croptracker in spring 2022 after Ivan Dyck met our team at the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Conference. Recognizing the need for efficient record-keeping as their land holdings expanded, Ivan began with our Spray tracking solution. Croptracker empowers Ivan to track input usage and costs across multiple farms, ensuring timely and accurate application of treatments. Digital tank mix calculations simplify this process, while searchable records make audits quick and painless– no more time-consuming travel to gather paper records from different locations.
Elena Froese joined Heritage Grown in 2021 to manage employee records, payroll, and bookkeeping for their growing workforce of hundreds of employees. In her initial year, Elena grappled with the complexities of tracking hours, resolving disputes, and ensuring accurate payroll across multiple farms. Prior to Heritage Grown's incorporation, each farm independently handled its own employees and payroll. Consolidating these processes under one umbrella presented unique challenges.
Initially, Elena received self-reported employee hours in a variety of disjointed formats: scraps of paper, incomplete timesheets, and indecipherable WhatsApp messages – requiring countless hours of back-and-forth communication to decipher and consolidate the data.
[Workers] try to go back two weeks and remember the hours you worked and then they would send me a picture on WhatsApp. And sometimes they even remember to put their name on there and then they wouldn't add up the hours. They would just be 9 to 10 or whatever and then I'd be like, 'what dates were those?' I mean, I think I've even gotten napkins with hours on them.
While discussing these challenges internally, Ivan mentioned that Croptracker has an employee management system in addition to the spray tracking system. Elena jumped at the opportunity to digitize and simplify Heritage Grown’s HR and payroll processes. After meeting with the Croptracker support and sales teams, Heritage Grown added the Punch Clock and Harvest Modules in time for their 2023 harvest season.
Each crop that is grown by Heritage Grown has its own harvesting and packing method, so Elena spent time onboarding with Croptracker support staff, developing workflows to accommodate these differences. Set up time was also devoted to ensuring several hundred employees were assigned an hourly pay rate, and harvest piece tracking was set up.
To solve the nightmare of self-reported paper hour tracking, Elena worked with Croptracker to develop the locked Punch Clock: Kiosk feature. This empowers employees to badge themselves at the start of their shift using their own devices. The effect of this improvement was immediate, with a 48 hour reduction in payroll work right away.
Before Crop Tracker, payroll processing took until Friday. Now, even on our busiest weeks, I can complete payroll from Monday morning to Wednesday afternoon. That means we've saved two full days of work each payroll cycle.
Overall, Elena has reported saving around 15 hours a week of work in HR and accounting administration tasks as a result of using Croptracker. With the Punch Clock Admin features, Elena is able to quickly add lunch breaks to work logs, edit any mistakes and keep track of absences and sick leave with a few clicks. Croptracker has also helped employee communication as workers are able to keep track of their time as it happens and are supplied with summary reports of hours worked and pieces picked.
Going forward for this season, Elena plans to make some changes to how employees clock in and out to add some more accountability and efficiency. Kiosk badge stations will be set up at key locations to help ensure employees do not start their hours until they are on location. Additionally, Elena plans to implement processes to ensure employees clock in and out for lunch, eliminating the need for her to add these breaks after the fact.
It has really reduced the amount of time I spend on nonsense… I can correct errors that people report very quickly. It doesn't take a long time.
Croptracker plans to visit Elena and the Heritage Grown team this tomato harvest season to implement a workflow that integrates their in-field scale for weight-packed roma and grape tomatoes. This will support Heritage Grown’s goal of expanding their use of Croptracker to include inventory traceability through packing and shipping.
"My favorite thing about Croptracker is it's simple. I'm a big fan...
- Elena Froese, Heritage Grown Bookkeeper
Heritage Grown's strategic embrace of technology exemplifies their commitment to efficient growth. Ivan and Elena wisely prioritized addressing the most pressing operational pain points, paving the way for further optimization and cost savings. Recognizing that farm work never stops, Croptracker delivers solutions designed to seamlessly integrate with existing workflows, ensuring uninterrupted production of high-quality produce. Our modular farm ERP system allows for flexible adoption, meeting the unique needs of each operation. We're excited to partner with Heritage Grown as they continue their journey towards sustainable success.
