If you grow vegetables on anything from a quarter acre to ten acres, you have probably run into the same wall a lot of small growers hit: most farm management software was not built for you. It was built for row crop operations measured in hundreds or thousands of acres, where the unit of work is a field and the unit of profit is a bushel of corn. Bushel Farm is one of the better-known tools in that category, and it comes up constantly when growers search for a free way to keep farm records. CropsBook comes up in the same searches for a different reason — it was designed from the start around beds, successions, and harvest logs rather than acreage and grain contracts.
This comparison is written to help you figure out which side of that line you fall on. Both apps are free to start. Both will keep records. But they were designed for different farms, and picking the wrong one usually means months of fighting the software before you quietly go back to a notebook. Below is an honest look at what each does well, where each falls short, and who should pick which.
Quick Comparison
Here is the short version before we get into detail.
| Feature | CropsBook | Bushel Farm |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free tier; paid tiers for advanced features |
| Works Offline | Yes — 100% offline, all features | Limited — cloud sync expected, needs connection for most functions |
| Account Required | No | Yes — email signup and login |
| Best For | Market gardens, CSAs, small diversified vegetable farms, serious home growers | Commodity grain and row crop operations tracking acreage, inputs, and grain marketing |
| Platform | iOS (iPhone and iPad) | Web, iOS, Android |
| Key Features | Bed and plot tracking, planting records, succession planning, harvest logs, task notes, crop history | Field mapping and boundaries, acreage tracking, input and application records, yield data, grain contract and marketing tools, machine data integrations |
| Data Privacy | Data stays on your device; no account, no server copy | Data stored on company servers; governed by their privacy policy and terms |
Pricing
Let us be precise here, because “free” means different things.
Bushel Farm offers a genuinely useful free tier. You can map fields, log activities, and track basic records without paying. That is not a trick, and it is more generous than many competitors in the row crop space. Where cost enters is at the upper tiers: advanced grain marketing tools, deeper integrations with equipment and agronomy data, multi-user access, and premium reporting typically sit behind paid plans. For a 2,000-acre corn and soybean operation, those paid features are often worth every dollar — a single better-timed grain contract can pay for a year of software. For a market gardener, they are features you will never open.
The second cost is subtler: the free tier is free because your farm data has value to the platform. That is a normal business model and not a scandal, but it is a real trade compared with an app that never sends your records anywhere.
CropsBook is free with no paid tier, no subscription prompt, and no account. There is nothing to upgrade to, which also means there is nothing being held back from you.
| Time Period | CropsBook | Bushel Farm (free tier) | Bushel Farm (paid features) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 | Varies by plan and acreage |
| 1 Year | $0 | $0 | Varies by plan and acreage |
| 3 Years | $0 | $0 | Varies by plan and acreage |
| Account required to use | No | Yes | Yes |
| Data leaves your device | No | Yes | Yes |
On pure dollars, this is close to a tie at the entry level and that is worth saying plainly. The real difference is not price — it is what you give up to get the free tier, and whether the features you are getting match the farm you actually run.
Save money. Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
What Bushel Farm does well. Field-centric management is its strength, and it is genuinely good at it. You draw or import field boundaries, get accurate acreage, and attach records to those fields: what was planted, what was applied, at what rate, on what date. It pulls in weather and rainfall by field, which matters enormously when you are trying to reconstruct why one 80-acre block underperformed. It connects to grain marketing — contracts, prices, positions — so you can look at your break-even against current bids. For operations where a handful of large fields produce a handful of commodities sold into a market with public price discovery, that is the correct design.
It also handles the paperwork side of commodity farming: input records that satisfy crop insurance and compliance documentation, yield records tied to harvest, and reports you can hand to a lender or an agronomist. If you are financing inputs and reporting to a bank each spring, that structure saves real hours.
Where it strains for vegetable growers. A market garden does not have five fields — it has sixty 100-foot beds, and each one might hold three different crops across a season. Acreage is close to meaningless when your unit is a bed foot. Succession planting, the core scheduling discipline of market gardening, has no clean analog in a field-mapping model: you are not planting a field once, you are planting lettuce every twelve days from March through October and needing to know which planting is due for harvest this week. Grain contracts are irrelevant when you sell at a farmers market and to three restaurants. You end up with a well-built tool aimed at a different problem.
What CropsBook does well. The organizing unit is the bed or plot, not the field. You record what went in, where, and when; you track successions so you can see the staggered sequence of a crop rather than one planting date; you log harvests as they happen, which over a couple of seasons becomes the yield history that actually informs next year's plan. Crop history per bed makes rotation decisions concrete instead of remembered — you can look at a bed and see that brassicas were there two seasons running before you put them back a third time. Task notes let you capture the small operational details (row cover on, drip line repaired, flea beetle pressure heavy) that never fit in a structured field record but are exactly what you want next April.
It is deliberately simpler. There is no equipment telematics integration, no grain marketing module, no multi-user permission system, no field boundary mapping from satellite imagery. If you need those, CropsBook is the wrong tool and you should say so out loud rather than force it.
CropsBook is also part of a small family of apps built on the same philosophy for different livelihoods — if you run livestock alongside your vegetable operation, Barnsbook handles herd records, breeding, and barn management the same way, and if you keep bees for pollination or honey, HiveBook covers hive inspections and apiary management. Diversified small farms often end up running two or three of these rather than one bloated platform that half-covers everything.
Want to try CropsBook for free? Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
This is where the two apps genuinely diverge, and it is not a marketing point — it is a daily practical difference.
Cell coverage on farmland is unreliable. Most growers know exactly which corner of their property drops to no bars. Cloud-first apps handle this with varying grace: some cache, some queue, some simply show a spinner. The failure mode matters because the moment you need to log something is the moment you are standing in the field with dirty hands, and if the app stalls, you tell yourself you will enter it tonight. You will not. That is how record-keeping dies.
CropsBook stores everything locally on your device. Every feature works with the phone in airplane mode, in a high tunnel, in a back field, in a walk-in cooler. There is no sync to wait on and no degraded offline mode with half the functions greyed out.
The privacy side follows from the same architecture. No account means no email, no password, no profile. Your planting dates, yields, and harvest records stay on your phone. Nobody aggregates them, nobody can subpoena them from a server, and nobody can lose them in a breach. For some growers that is a philosophical preference. For growers in contentious water districts, in areas with active land-use disputes, or anyone who has watched an ag data platform get acquired and change its terms, it is a practical one.
The honest counterpoint: local-only data means you are responsible for backups, and it means no seamless multi-device access or team sharing. If two or three people need to enter records simultaneously from different phones, a cloud platform is the right architecture and Bushel Farm handles it better.
Who Should Use Bushel Farm
Bushel Farm is the better choice if you recognize yourself here:
- You farm row crops or commodities — corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton — measured in acres rather than beds
- Field boundary mapping and per-field acreage are central to how you plan and report
- You market grain and want contract, price, and break-even tracking in the same place as your production records
- You report to a lender, crop insurance adjuster, or agronomist and need structured input and yield documentation
- Multiple people — family, hired operators, an agronomist — need access to the same records
- You want machine or agronomy data integrations rather than manual entry
- Reliable connectivity is not a problem for you
If that is your operation, do not pick CropsBook out of loyalty to simplicity. You will miss features you actually need.
Who Should Use CropsBook
CropsBook fits when:
- You grow vegetables intensively — market garden, CSA, small diversified farm, or a serious home plot
- Your unit of planning is the bed, row, or plot, not the field
- Succession planting drives your calendar and you need to track staggered plantings of the same crop
- You sell direct: farmers market, CSA shares, restaurants, farm stand
- You are a solo operator or a two-person operation — no permission tiers needed
- You work where cell service is unreliable and need records to work regardless
- You would rather your farm data not live on someone else's server
- You have tried heavier farm software before and abandoned it because setup took longer than the record-keeping it replaced
That last point deserves weight. The most common reason small growers have no records is not that they do not value them — it is that every tool they tried demanded an onboarding session they never had time for. An app you can open and use in the first minute, in the field, gets used. One that asks you to define your operation structure before logging a single planting does not.
The Bottom Line
Bushel Farm is a capable, well-built product that is honest about who it serves. It is aimed at commodity grain and row crop operations, and for those farms the field mapping, input documentation, and grain marketing tools are exactly right. Nothing here is a knock on the software — it is a knock on using it for a farm it was not designed around.
CropsBook is aimed at the other end: the grower with sixty beds and forty crop varieties who needs to remember what went where and what it yielded. It is free with no tier above it, it works with no signal and no account, and it stays out of your way. What it gives up is real — no team access, no integrations, no cloud sync, iOS only — and you should weigh that honestly rather than take our word for it.
A reasonable test: open your last season's notes, whatever form they are in. If they are organized by field and measured in acres, use Bushel Farm. If they are organized by bed and measured in row feet, trays, or bunches, use CropsBook. The software should match how you already think about your ground, not force you to think a different way.
Ready to switch? Download CropsBook on the App Store — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.