North Wales Farmer's App Innovation Tackles Farm Efficiency.

North Wales Farmer's App Innovation Tackles Farm Efficiency Crisis

Sam Pearson, a farmer from north Wales, has co-developed an Agri-tech app called Tirlun that aims to revolutionise staff training and knowledge retention on his farms, directly boosting efficiency and profitability. Initially developed to work within his own business, Pearson Farming, he hopes that this innovation will change how farms nationwide manage their workforce.

Sam manages two farms, over 500 beef and dairy cattle, and around 20 employees. He struggled to delegate and train his team while handling daily operations, a challenge worsened by high staff turnover. “We want to retain the knowledge and experience gained on the farm,” Pearson explains. “In dairy farming, many stay for two years and then move on, taking their skills with them. Retraining new staff takes significant time and investment.”

The solution came from a collaboration with UK-based, Nigerian Agri-tech entrepreneur Johnson Badda on LinkedIn; the two realised they shared similar struggles with staff management. Their research found a gap in the market for a dedicated farming-specific training and management platform, resulting in the development of Tirlun, a Welsh word meaning ‘landscape’. With the help of regional grant funding and support from Innovate UK, they set out to build a platform that could be a central hub for all farm-specific training and operational knowledge.

The app's premise is simple yet powerful: empower farm owners to create their own training courses. “You forget how much there is to know just to run the farms,” Pearson says. “All those things take 10 minutes, half an hour to teach. It's been a compromise; either time is gone, or stuff doesn't get done.” Tirlun allows managers to upload short videos of standard operating procedures, which the app's AI then uses to generate written instructions. This process standardises tasks across the team and creates a permanent record of on-farm knowledge.

The results have been immediate. Launched to an initial two hundred users in April 2025, the app is already being actively used by 170 people. “It takes time to record the videos, but my approach is to do it as I do the job on the farm,” Pearson explains. “The ones we have used have already enabled me to save time by assigning them to new team members.” This newfound efficiency has helped Pearson's business manage a recent transition to a new block calving system, which has improved the farm’s financial success.

While Tirlun's creators have considered a shared video library for users, they are cautious. “We have to ensure farm owners take responsibility for what they teach their employees,” Pearson notes. The team is exploring partnerships with industry bodies and agricultural colleges to produce standardised training videos for generic tasks and collaborating with professionals for videos of common procedures.

With early positive reception, plans are underway for further development of the app as the user base grows. Priced between £300-£500 with no limit on the number of workers, the app is appealing to farming businesses of all sizes.