Dairy Crest Direct

Dairy Crest Direct (DCD) offshoot Agri assist aims to provide DCD farmers with added-value services to improve the network as a whole. After working with DCD in the past, Go Tripod was approached to implement an online carbon footprint tool which was to be accredited by the Carbon Trust.

The brief stated that farmers should be able to complete a survey about various aspects of their farm and farming practises. A wizard-style interface was to be combined with clear visual cues, enabling farmers with little experience of web applications to easily complete the survey. After all data is collected, reporting tools were to be provided alongside an attractive at-a-glance overview of the farm's carbon footprint.

Our chosen toolset was the Ruby on Rails framework and a MySQL database. These open source tools provided us with a cost-effective way to rapidly work on design iterations with the client. We used RubyGems to bolt together basic tried and tested functionality, and implemented custom code on top of this to bring the application together. A data modelling layer processed the information provided by farmers into a view of the carbon footprint - this modelling layer was developed in tandem with staff from the Carbon Trust.

Our application provided two key benefits: to allow DCD and Agri assist to add value in their offerings to farmers; to assist in the reduction of the carbon footprint of hundreds of UK farms. We continue to work with DCD and Agri assist to improve the application, refining existing aspects after receiving user feedback, and adding new functionality to accommodate specific groups of farmers.