Why I built this

I raise meat birds regularly and keep a flock of egg layers year round. I do my own processing, and I am learning to process more animals as I take on more at home.

I garden too, though that is the part I struggle with. The planning is what gets me. Remembering when to start things, keeping track of my frost dates, keeping seeds organized, and knowing what can and cannot go near each other.

I am also a software engineer, with a background in quality. I have built things for other people for a long time, and not always the way I would have liked. For the homestead I have used spreadsheets, calendars and plain paper, and I still do sometimes. But I wanted to build something for me, the way I actually work. When I am using it and something is missing that would make my life easier outside, I add it.

Some of what I add will not be for everyone. I am a data person, so there are analytics in here. They are there because I want to know where my time and money go, and get better at this.

Why it works the way it does

I am a dad of five. There is sports, dance and club nights, and I want to be at them. I have a full time job I put a lot into. So I needed homesteading to be more fun and less tedious, because the time I get for it is limited.

Every feature here is aimed at that. Take out the tedious part, keep the part worth doing.

Bed planner. Lets me plan before I step outside. I can see what seeds I already have, and it warns me if I have put something in a bad spot.

Animal logs. I just log it. What I fed, what I added, what died, what I processed.

Talking to an assistant. This is the one I think is genuinely useful, and I have not seen it anywhere else. I have watched engineering change a lot in the past year. I have taken up parts of the AI boom and stayed skeptical of others. What this does is turn logging into a conversation instead of a chore. I talk to my phone, tell it what happened, and it does the logging and checks my work. I can ask what feed cost me this month against last month, and let it go through the data instead of me sitting in front of a screen after a long day. How that works.