What the farm knows,
kept with the farm
A neighbour tells you the hens lay better in dark nest boxes. The agro-vet says spray before nine. It is good advice, and by next season it is gone: in a notebook you can't find, a chat you can't scroll back to, or nowhere. Notes keeps it beside the batches and the plantings, where you can find it again, and where the assistant can read it back to you.
Just the words. Who told you, which enterprise and tags are optional, and one tap each.
One search box over everything. Half a word is enough, and "chickens" finds Poultry.
The assistant reads the notes that match your question and tells you what they say.
Get it down before it's gone
The note itself is the only thing you must write. Everything else helps you find it.
Advice is only worth keeping if you remember who gave it, so there is a place for that: "Mzee Okello", "the agro-vet in town". Tap the enterprises it is about. A note about chicken manure on the maize is both Poultry and Crops; a note about asking for receipts is neither, and sits under General.
Tags are your own words, and Famu tidies them as you type, so "Feeding", "feeding " and "FEEDING" become one tag rather than three. Try it below.
Untick every enterprise and the note becomes a General one.
Find it with half a word
Search covers the title, the note, the tags, who told you, and the enterprise.
You rarely remember a note's exact words. So the search matches the start of each word you type ("toma" finds tomatoes) and every word has to be there somewhere. Each enterprise also brings its everyday words, so "chickens", "hens" or "birds" find a note tagged Poultry even if it never says so.
Then narrow it: tap an enterprise, General, or one of your tags. Pinned notes stay on top. Type "chick", "toma", "vet" or "dip" below.
Ask, and it reads the notes that match
Not every note, every time: the few that share words with your question.
When you ask the assistant something, Famu looks for notes that share the meaningful words of your question, ranks them, and sends the best few with that one question. The assistant answers from them and says whose advice it was. A question that matches nothing sends no notes at all. A question about your notes in general ("what is in my notes?") sends the newest.
A note is what someone told you, not a checked fact. If one conflicts with safe practice, a drug dose or a spray, the assistant says so and suggests checking with a vet or agronomist. Pick a question below and watch which notes are sent.
The rules that keep it the farm's
Shared with the farm team
A note belongs to the farm, so what the manager learnt can be read by the person feeding the birds. Who wrote it is shown on every note.
Who can do what
By default admins and managers add, edit and delete notes; workers read them and add their own. The farm can change this on Roles.
Never another farm's
Nobody on another farm can see your notes, not in the list, not in search, and not through the assistant.
The assistant sees only what you can
It reads notes as you. If your role cannot open Notes, no note goes to it. At most eight notes travel with a question, each cut to a sensible length, and they are not kept afterwards.
Your own AI app can save one
If you connected Claude or ChatGPT to Famu and allowed changes, you can ask it to save something as a note, within what your role allows.
A notebook, not an encyclopaedia
What it does not do yet
Notes are words only: no photos or voice notes yet. They are shared with the farm team, so there is no private notebook. The assistant in the app reads notes; the WhatsApp assistant does not yet.
Search works on words. It handles English endings (tomato, tomatoes) and the start of a word, but a word spelt differently, or in another language, only matches as you wrote it. And because the assistant reads only the notes that match, "summarise all my notes" covers the newest few, not every one.
Earns its keep for
- Farmers who learn from neighbours, field schools and the agro-vet
- A team where the manager's know-how should reach the workers
- What worked last season, ready for the next one
Does little for
- Things that already have a record: a spray, a vaccination, a sale
- Dated jobs: those are tasks, schedules or milestones