Why weed control contractors are flocking to use the STA logger

It is easy to understand why government organisations, or large private firms might like the STA logger. But it might surprise you to know, that some of our most loyal customers are weed control contractors. As of writing, approximately half of our customers are small, private land management contractors performing tree planting and weed spraying for their clients.

So why do they use it? Why do contractors spend the extra money to use the STA logger. Well, we’ve asked them to find out, and here are their answers:

Winning new work

It is a competitive world, and it is hard to stand out from the crowd. Particularly when pressured to continually provide better prices and better value to your clients. What we have found is that contractors that use the STA logger, and provide evidence of their work as a value add to their clients, are winning more contracts.

If a handful of competing weed control contractors are bidding for the same scope of work, and most other things like quality, resources, safety record and price are equal, the team with the STA logger wins every time simply because their clients love the accountability and the data. It helps them demonstrate the on ground impact of their budgets and helps them secure more funding for the future. Everybody wins!

Accountability

As mentioned above, the STA logger shows that you not only sprayed an area, but if you didn’t find the target species, you can demonstrate that you scouted the area for weeds too, thus justifying why it may have taken many hours of work to locate and spray one small clump.

Furthermore, the internal accountability is valuable as supervisors can have confidence that the team did what they said which leads on to the next point …

Project management

Through maps and data, supervisors and clients can make informed decisions about a project. If a team member comes down sick, the whole team still knows the status of the job, and can bring it up on their phone while in the field.

Furthermore, everyone on your team has universal access to the same point of truth. The data shows what happened and can’t be miscontrued.

Evidence

A lot of weed control contractors seem to have the frustrating experience of their client calling them, telling them there has been a report of some native vegetation, or a landowners orchard dying back and it is believed it is from the herbicide your team applied. Your team wasn’t even there on that day, but how do you prove it? Wouldn’t it be good to know exactly when and where every drop of herbicide was applied? “Hey, we weren’t even there that day, here’s the data” or, “yeah we were near there, but over a mile away”. Having that evidence is invaluable in these circumstances.

Maintaining existing work

It’s not all about winning new contracts. Sometimes as a contractor you need to fight tooth and nail to keep the ones you have. The competitive tendering process is not fun for anyone, but if you can articulate how the STA logger will benefit the project, you’re on a firm footing.

Consider these mock tender questions:

[Tender] Explain how you will be reporting under this contract?

[Contractor 1] We will provide monthly written reports. But we’ll charge you to prepare them, and they’ll take half a day per month.

[Contractor 2] We will download and send STA logger data showing how much we controlled and when we did it. It will come in the same format every month. It’ll take 5 minutes to send.

[Tender] Describe some of your organisations innovative strategies?

[Contractor 1] We are constantly researching innovative ways of reporting weed works like using app 1, app 2 and app 3.

[Contractor 2] We trialled and eventually adopted the STA logger system, which records all weed management works. The data can be supplied as maps or data in a variety of formats with the click of a mouse.

Responsible use of herbicide

Quite critically, shouldn’t we all demand higher standards for tracking where herbicide has been applied in our landscape?

A small scale, easy to use GIS

GIS software can be expensive. Most contractors don’t have the time or money to learn to use a sophisticated GIS software. Nor do they really need to. Their needs might be quite minimal compared to the lofty abilities of some software. But the STA logger system comes with a scaled back, web-based GIS. You can view the data, publish maps and export data too. What else do you need? We generally say if you can use Google Maps, you can use our platform.

So there you have it. The main reasons why land management, particularly weed control, contractors use the STA logger. If you want to know anything more about how the STA logger might benefit your particular organisation, feel free to reach out.