A few months ago we tore apart two of our most‑used products - while they were taking off. 😅 🤯
In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, I once read about Jobs' belief that "if you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." It was the thinking behind the iPhone - which Apple built knowing it would cannibalise their own best‑seller, the iPod. We're not quite Apple yet 😉, but the principle stuck: if our tools have the potential to be far better, we'd rather replace them ourselves than wait for someone else to. So we did. A couple of weeks ago, we launched the result: Nutrient Nerd.
If you're not in farming, "nutrient planning" sounds dull. It isn't - it's one of the fiddliest, highest‑stakes jobs for farmers or agronomists, as the latest season of Clarkson's Farm shows. Each field needs the right amount of fertiliser & manure: too little and crops suffer, too much and you waste money & risk polluting rivers. And it all has to fit within a tangle of rules - NVZ, FRfW, RB209, SFI. Get it wrong and you risk your soil, your yield, or a failed inspection. 😬
Our team spent four months 💪 pulling the whole job into one place: build a recommendation, plan the manure and fertiliser, and watch live compliance checks tell you whether you're passing and what to fix if you're not. ✅ All on the latest 2026 figures, ready to turn into a clean report for a client or inspector in a couple of clicks. 📋
We were determined to get every detail right, too: our own Sabrina Sookramanien even sat the FACTS (agronomist fertiliser) exam. She not only passed but has been nominated for the Award for best FACTS candidate🏆. That's the same award won last year by John Twyford, who - with literally hundreds of other agronomists - has fed ideas into this over the past year. 🙏
What's struck me most, though, is that the buzz hasn't changed. I still remember our very first sale 2½ years ago, when Soil Sage launched and the team was just Henry, Benjamin and me (our first paying customer was Tod, and we were over the moon. 🎉) I felt that exact same buzz two weeks ago when the first Nutrient Nerd upgrade came through - again, on launch day itself - thank you, Dave 🙏. The team's bigger now, we have 15% of English farmland using the platform, and our tools are far more advanced - Claude Code and a couple of years of hard‑won lessons have ensured that - but that feeling when someone chooses to use what you've built never gets old.
We took Nutrient Nerd to Cereals Event this month and the feedback was brilliant. Although - full disclosure - our most viral moment there had nothing to do with the software: it was a clip of someone very pleased with our free stash 😅. It's attached, for your amusement. Watch it, then come and see what we've actually built 👇
👉 Free webinar tomorrow, 1pm - a relaxed intro and how to get started. (Link in comments.)
🌾 Or find us at Groundswell Agriculture next week, stand G15 - beer and biltong from 4:30 on the Wednesday 🍺.
