January 31, 2025 Software Update

Yesterday we released a new version of the FarmBot web app. Here’s what’s new:

New crop search

The FarmBot web app no longer uses OpenFarm to power it’s crop search. While OpenFarm has served us well since the early days of FarmBot, it has not been actively worked on in the last few years both on the software development side and when it came to improving the data itself.

Over time, crop entries have had the tendency to be edited in ways that serve the editor’s needs while sometimes unintentionally degrading the usefulness of the data for the wider community. The architecture and infrastructure of OpenFarm was never developed enough to accommodate this properly, and we admittedly did a poor job of communicating best practices around editing.

Furthermore, while OpenFarm has always had a large catalog of crop names, the vast majority of entries had very little to no other information attached to them, leading to FarmBot search results that often felt hollow. This also made it difficult to find crops with one of our 200+ beautifully designed icons, leading to a garden layout and plant list filled with the same fallback generic plant icons.

Now, the FarmBot web app has its own catalog of crops - one for every crop we have an icon for. This makes for a richer and faster search experience, eliminates the problem of data degradation over time, and ensures that most plants you add to your garden will have a unique icon and corresponding information such as a description, image, and sowing/growing recommendations.

And for those cases where you want to plant something specific that we don’t have in the catalog, anytime you enter a search term that has no hits, there is a dynamic custom crop option available with the name set to your search term.

Refreshed crop info panel

In addition to updating the backend of crop search, we also improved the frontend display of crop information. Information is now consistently organized into info boxes which offer clearer separation between curve graphs and more.

Refreshed plant, point, and weed panels

We’ve also updated the look of the plant, point, and weed panels to match the new info-box layout.

Behind the scenes

In addition to the improvements mentioned above that you can see and use today, we’ve also been making steady progress on integrating all required functionality for the new 3D farm designer. This will be the biggest update yet coming to the FarmBot web app and we can’t wait to deliver it to you later this year. And of course, this release also included various dependency and security updates.