Since its establishment in 2012 by Val Harker and Fritz Wesson, Farm Costing Solutions (FCS), a South African agritech company, has developed a powerful hardware and software system that enables farmers to monitor and manage labour performance in real-time. “Clients report that, thanks to the substantial cost savings, the system typically pays for itself within the first or second season,” says Val Harker, co-founder of Farm Costing Solutions. Over 700 farms, large and small, in South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, and Australia are using their system to collect productivity data and generate their wage bill.

“It’s not only a clocking system, it’s a management tool developed over thirty years. We learned a lot from corporate farmers, and we put it all into this system. Labour remains one of the most significant and complex costs in fresh produce production.”

A key benefit, she says, is operational discipline. “Employees are responsible for their own clock-ins, improving punctuality and accountability.”

Real-time management of running labour costs
The solution is designed to be plug-and-play, with the entire installation and configuration process done remotely from the Cape Town office. Hardware is shipped internationally, and setup is customised via TeamViewer to suit the client’s cost structures and reporting needs.

“Each employee has an RFID tag with which they will clock in on the device. It captures the data of time and attendance, the hours they’re working, along with overtime,” explains Lourens van der Merwe, technical manager. “In-field tracking with RFID technology includes time and attendance, piecework and productivity monitoring, job costing, and unscheduled breaks in packhouses.”

He continues: “Our reader, the V5 Portable Reader, is robust and can withstand temperatures up to 50°C in the field where we collect data for time and attendance, piecework, and we can also do unscheduled work stoppages.”

“Through our cloud-enabled platform, FCS gives managers global visibility over farm operations, making it ideal for farm owners, managers, or investors managing remote or cross-border operations. You can log in from anywhere and see exactly what’s happening on your farm,” says Harker. “You can even compare seasons — for example, matching current weather patterns to previous years and using that to plan your labour needs.”

It allows for real-time control of the labour budget, to enable early corrective actions, while offering instant reports for attendance, lateness, productivity, and overtime which hugely simplifies payroll activities, especially helpful in dismissal cases, Harker remarks.

Val Harker and Lourens van der Merwe at Berlin Fruit Logistica, 2025

Data integrity
“Data integrity is obviously crucial when you’re handling wages. You don’t want a situation where an employee can discredit paid wages. An RFID tag will either work or not,” he says. “The chances of an RFID tag going faulty are slim. With biometric systems, there is still a chance that someone can claim that it didn’t want to detect their finger, for argument’s sake.”

Through various mechanisms, the data is irrefutable. Data can be extracted to the Farm Costing Software (FCS) by various means, depending on connectivity. The software is a Windows-based application, cloud-enabled to be accessed from anywhere. “There was a lot of thinking that went into the development of the hardware around that as well. Our hardware is unique,” Van der Merwe says.

“It is the simplicity of the system that makes it so successful. It is a complicated system, but it runs in the background. We have made it very simple so that people can be trained easily,” says Harker.

Van der Merwe adds that they are always working on new features. “We’re never going to stop developing. We’re going to always expand the functionality of the software.”

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For more information:
Val Harker
Farm Costing Solutions
Tel: +27 21 556 2561
Email: https://farmcostingsolutions.co.za/