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Featured on the New York Times

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — One day in 2011, Jesse Vollmar’s uncle was complaining about how difficult the family farm’s new data management software was to use. Despite taking a course taught by a software provider, he still couldn’t figure out how to get it to keep track of seeding dates, rainfall, field yield or any of the other functions that mattered most.

Mr. Vollmar, now 26, thought that he and his partner in a local website design business could do better. Four years later, thousands of farmers worldwide use their app, FarmLogs, to record planting dates, watering schedules and crop yield. In addition, subscribers can receive data from FarmLogs about rainfall and soil health that is tailored to their fields.

It is a striking departure from just a few years ago, when farmers had to travel to their far-flung fields, scribble such data in notebooks and input it into hard-to-use software that resided on a specific desktop computer. The FarmLogs app allows them to enter the information on mobile devices and to share it easily via the web. Certain bits of information, such as rainfall accumulation and crop health, are gathered automatically by the FarmLogs app, saving farmers time and miles.

“In 2011, the Internet had changed the world but hadn’t yet changed farming,” Mr. Vollmar said recently, clad in a gray hoodie and sneakers as he showed off the company’s second-story office of weathered hardwood and exposed pipe that overlooks the Ann Arbor farmers’ market but would fit neatly in Silicon Valley.

As of this spring, Mr. Vollmar said, some 70,000 row-crop farms of 100 acres or more in the United States are using some elements of the FarmLogs software to keep tabs on vital information of the growing season. This spring, the three-year-old company introduced ways to remotely monitor soil health and crop yield.

The app compares real-time satellite images of every five square meters of field with the last five years of satellite imagery to detect whether a particular area is distressed. If so, farmers receive push notifications urging them to go to that spot and see for themselves why the plants are struggling compared with previous years. This option is available free this year; it is likely to require paid subscriptions in 2016, Mr. Vollmar said.

In fact, most of FarmLogs is free for now, with the exception of the Automatic Activity Recording package, a $300-a-year offering in which the app detects when certain work is taking place in the field and logs information without the user needing to input it manually.

Michael Morris, whose family farms 2,600 acres of corn, wheat and soy in Deerfield, Mo., last year tried several apps but said only FarmLogs could handle his volume of data. “We can do better nutrient placement decisions throughout the year with this technology,” he said. “No other program really offers that.”

Like the leaders of many tech start-ups, Mr. Vollmar, the chief executive of FarmLogs, speaks in lofty terms of the change-the-world importance of this technology.

“The problem we’re solving is that the world needs to feed nine billion people by 2050, and we’re not going to get any more farmland,” he said. “We can help get more out of our natural resources, make our land more productive, lower the cost of food production and build a healthy viable technology business at the same time.”

Mr. Vollmar, a fifth-generation soy and corn farmer near Saginaw, Mich., spent many summers hoeing fields and driving tractors. But his passions lay in exploring new technology. In 2004, while in high school, he began selling fellow students space on a computer server to upload their school papers so they could access the files from any web-connected computer, an early and localized version of what’s now known as the cloud. By his senior year, he and Brad Koch, a friend, started building websites for local companies in Michigan’s rural Thumb region, an enterprise so lucrative they put themselves through college at Saginaw Valley State University with its proceeds.

Mr. Koch, 25, FarmLogs’ chief technology officer, came from a family two generations removed from agriculture but was, nonetheless, surrounded by farms.

“We grew up around all these people, we knew how this business worked and we saw this is an opportunity to work on cool technology that could make a really, really big impact on all those lives,” said Mr. Koch, whose father is a chemical engineer at Dow Chemical in Midland, Mich. “We just understand what the farmers need better than someone sitting in an office in Silicon Valley.”

The pair began tinkering with early ideas for FarmLogs in 2011 and won a berth in a group of start-ups to receive seed money, technology advice and living quarters for three months in Mountain View, Calif., from Y Combinator in 2012. Alumni from earlier Y Combinator groups include Dropbox, Airbnb and Reddit.

After the Y Combinator stint, Mr. Vollmar and Mr. Koch moved their company to Ann Arbor to be closer to the agriculture industry and to tap the University of Michigan’s vaunted computer science programs for employees. By fall 2012, FarmLogs had opened for business as a web-based data management tool and drew $1 million in seed funding from the Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners. In 2014, the business received an additional $14 million from Hyde Park and other sources.

Mr. Vollmar said he quickly realized that farmers did not only want a more convenient way to handle and gain access to the data they generated. They also wanted a supply of easy and digestible information about their farms that would help improve their yields. By summer 2013, FarmLogs began offering rainfall data collected for each square kilometer of farmland in the nation by the National Weather Service, information that could tell farmers more precisely where rain had fallen on their land and approximately how much.

That data would soon be augmented by soil health data collected by the Department of Agriculture and, more recently, proprietary satellite imagery with spectrometry that can assess plant health.

“When you sign up to FarmLogs today, you get 10 years of rainfall data, 10 years of thermal conditions on your field and now five years’ worth of history on these fields from the satellite to build up a baseline,” Mr. Vollmar said. “We monitor that field all season long, and whenever there’s a problem, we alert the farmers and pinpoint the exact spot on the field that needs their attentions.”

Not everyone is a fan. An agriculture economics professor, Steve Ford of Sewanee University in Tennessee, is skeptical about FarmLogs and the entire crop of emerging apps of its sort. He contends that the company overstates the number of active users as opposed to casual ones and that his experience showed that FarmLogs’ rainfall data is, at best, imprecise. The app, even with all of its information sources, can’t know many variables, such as field irrigation infrastructure and fertilizer and herbicide choices.

Mr. Vollmar was dismissive of such criticism. FarmLogs is growing rapidly, having increased its staff to 32 full-time employees now from about 15 last fall, he said, and will have 60 by year’s end. He noted that providing free access to many tools and inviting varying levels of engagement is common among technology companies. If the software is useful, he predicted, farmers will subscribe in coming years.

“There’s always going to be people who love to pick on new technology,” Mr. Vollmar said. “Any time you’re doing something new, people challenge it and find little nitty-gritty details to pick on. We try to be transparent to farmers about what the data is and how accurate we think it is. And they seem to be happy with it so far.”