For farmers, by farmers

Intecrop was conceived on our family farm, Goede Hoop, in the Hex River Valley in the early 2000s when, late one evening, my father, a very admin-averse table grape farmer, gathered my mother, my siblings, and me around the kitchen table to help him transfer a season's worth of informal spray records scribbled in his diary onto a stack of EUREPGAP spray instruction template printouts in preparation for an audit the next day. It was a painful mess and I swore that we'd never do it the same way again.

I was in high school at the time, and I had just started to learn the Java programming language. I was eager to try it out on all kinds of problems and soon produced SpuitProg, a highly complicated and completely unusable spray recording desktop application. It took a couple of iterations to get close to something useful. I had no intention to go commercial — I just wanted to solve the problem for our farm.

Then I did a complete rewrite and called it JSpray, which doubled as my matric project. Dawid started as production manager on the farm around this time and became my first user. With his feedback, I was able to turn JSpray into something that we could actually use on the farm — and sell. We were at the right time at the right place with a simple solution and soon onboarded the majority of the farms in the Hex River Valley.

While studying towards a degree in Biotechnology, I continued to develop JSpray and Dawid continued to grow our customer base. Maintaining a desktop app soon turned into a nightmare, and I finally decided to rewrite the app as a web application. I built the first version of Intecrop using Django and we launched it in 2015 when Dawid and I officially started Intecrop as a company.

It served our customers well for years, until it didn't — around 2022 I couldn't make the improvements they needed without tearing it down and starting over. It was a huge effort and I would not have been able to finish it without the help of several ex-colleagues and dear friends — I am forever indebted. We finally relaunched Intecrop in 2025 with a completely new codebase, a completely new design, and a bunch of new features. The response from our customers has been overwhelmingly positive.

Our kitchen table was never used for paperwork again.