01 / Agritech ecosystem
Silver Fern Farms
Four disconnected tools, one design system — the digital backbone for NZ's largest meat exporter.
The problem
Farmers, processors and meat buyers were stitched together by paper forms, phone calls and a dated portal. Animal-status declarations were filled by hand, calf pick-ups were booked over the phone, and live-stock data never reached the people who needed it. On-farm, connectivity is patchy and digital confidence is low.
What I did
As lead designer I owned the information architecture and the shared design system across four products: the Silver Fern Farmer app, the Calf Booking app, the Store Stock marketplace and the Customer Portal — taking each from research to shipped UI.
Key decisions & trade-offs
- One component library, not four bespoke UIs.Slower to ship v1 — but every product after it inherited patterns, accessibility and speed for free.
- Offline-first flows for on-farm use.Chose cache-and-sync over a connection-dependent app so a farmer in a dead zone never loses a booking.
- Replaced the paper ASD with a guided, step-based mobile flow.Plus QR hand-off — turning a dreaded multi-page form into a 2-minute task.
4→1
Products on a shared system
100%
Paper ASD forms digitised
Self-serve
Bookings moved off the phone
