Getting your producers onto Farmshare is the difference between a scheduling tool that lives on your office computer and a system your whole book works from. When producers book their own drop-offs and their buyers fill in their own cutsheets, the chasing stops being your job.

This article covers what your producers see on their end, an email you can send them, and what tends to make a rollout go smoothly or badly.

Most of what confuses producers is invisible from your side, because you never see the screens they see. Here is the whole journey.

Producers and buyers do not sign up for Farmshare and they do not set a password. Their account is tied to their contact details, and you already hold those.

To sign in, a producer enters the phone number or email address you have saved for them. Farmshare sends a six-digit code to that phone or email, they type it in, and they are through.

Where this goes wrong, and it causes more "it does not work" calls than anything else in the platform: if a producer signs in with a phone number or email you do not have on file, Farmshare starts a second account. They land in an empty one, see no jobs and no orders, and conclude the platform is broken. Nothing has been lost, but nothing is visible either.

So when a producer tells you they cannot see their animals, the first question is not whether they got an email. It is which number or address did you sign in with.

Once they are in:

If a buyer has no Your Orders section at all, they have either signed in under contact details you do not have, or they were never assigned to a split.

One more thing worth knowing: notifications carry the full message. If you send a manual chat from Farmshare, they get a short note telling them to open Farmshare to read it.

See How Producers and Buyers Log In to Farmshare.

Producers book from your scheduling page. They pick a date, and the calendar shows your real availability: green for days with room, red for days that are full. They enter how many animals, the species, and the inspection level, then send you a booking request that you accept or decline.

They can enter their ear tag numbers in the Producer Identifier field, which is worth encouraging. It is the fastest way to keep animals straight at intake.

A producer booking through your public scheduling link for the first time will not find their own name in the list. They add themselves with their name, phone, email and ranch name, and from then on they are in the dropdown. Those are the details they will need to sign in with afterwards, so it is worth making sure they match what you have.

Where this goes wrong: your weekly capacity isn't set up the way you run your days, so producers book onto days you can't take. Set your capacity before you share the link. If your capacity is already set and a day still looks too full, it's usually a job your own team added over the limit, or By Weighted Animal Unit counting a mix of species against one combined limit. See Setting Weekly Booking Capacity, or message us in chat.

Once you have assigned splits, each buyer gets a link. They sign in the same way a producer does, with the phone number or email you sent the request to, and their share appears under Your Orders. From there they click Fill in Cutsheet and work through ground size, roast size, steak thickness, steaks per pack, individual cuts, offal and trim.

Three things are worth telling them in advance:

If you have built house cutsheets, buyers can pick a preset and be finished in under a minute. That is by far the smoothest version of this step.

Copy this, fill in the brackets, and send it to one producer at a time. Sending it individually and addressed by name works noticeably better than a bulk announcement. Check the contact details you hold for that producer before you send it, because the whole thing assumes they are correct.

Subject: Quick help with booking and cutsheets

Hi [Producer name],

We book drop-offs and collect cutsheets through Farmshare. A few people have told us the first time through is confusing, so here is the short version. None of these steps should take more than a couple of minutes.

Signing in

You do not need to sign up for anything, and there is no password to remember. We already have an account set up for you.

When you sign in, enter the phone number or email address we have on file for you. Farmshare sends a six-digit code to that phone or email. Type the code in and you are through.

The one thing to get right: use the same phone number or email address our messages come to. If you sign in with a different one, Farmshare will start a second account for you, and it will look like you have nothing booked at all.

Once you are in, your animals are under Your Jobs.

Step by step: How Producers and Buyers Log In to Farmshare

Booking a drop-off

Go to [your scheduling link] and pick a date. The calendar shows what is open: green means we have room, red means that day is full. Then tell us how many animals, what species, and whether you want USDA or exempt.

There is a box called Producer Identifier. Put your ear tag numbers there. It helps us keep your animals straight once they are here.

Step by step: Schedule a Job with your Processor
First time booking: Getting Started as a New Producer

Cutsheets

Once your animals are here, whoever is getting the meat gets a link from us. They sign in the same way you do, with the phone number or email we sent the request to, and their share shows up under Your Orders. From there they click Fill in Cutsheet and answer the questions: ground size, roast size, steak thickness, steaks per pack, and which cuts they want.

Two things worth knowing before they start:

Step by step: Filling out a Cutsheet as a Buyer
New to buying a whole or half animal: Understanding Your Beef Cuts

If you get stuck

Call us at [your phone number]. We would much rather spend two minutes on the phone than have you guessing, and we can do any of this for you from our end.

Thanks,
[Your name]
[Processor name]

Swap the cuts guide for the species you are sending: pork, lamb and goat.

Get your contact details right before you do anything else. Because a producer's login is their phone number or email, an out-of-date record does not just mean a bounced message. It means they cannot get into their account at all, or they create a second one by accident. A quick pass through your customer list is the highest-value hour in the whole rollout. See Editing Customer Contact Info.

Set your capacity before you share the link. If your weekly booking capacity is not configured, the calendar cannot turn anyone away and you will spend the first week undoing bookings. See Setting Weekly Booking Capacity. If you have one producer who brings in twenty or thirty head at once, block those days out first so nobody books on top of them.

Start with two or three producers, not the whole list. Pick the ones who are comfortable with a phone and who bring in animals regularly. You will learn where the friction is on a small group, and those producers become the ones who tell the others it is fine.

Turn on your producer-facing notifications, then check the volume. Processors who run ten or more notification types switched on see far higher producer self-booking than those running a handful. The notifications are what pull producers into the platform rather than back onto the phone. But do check your per-split settings: a buyer who is on several splits of the same job can receive a great many messages, and that is the fastest way to lose the goodwill you just built. See Processor Notifications and Configure Notification Preferences at the Customer, Job, Animal, and Split Levels.

Walk the first split assignment through on the phone. Assigning buyers to splits is the step capable producers most often cannot finish alone. Fifteen minutes on a call the first time saves a week of back and forth, and the producer can do every one after that unaided. See Assign Splits, Split Types, and Buyers as a Producer.

Watch for buyers who share an email address. Farmshare keeps one contact record per person, so a producer splitting an animal between family members who all use the same email will hit a wall. When that happens, assign the splits to the one contact and note the rest, or give the others a phone number instead.

Build house cutsheets early. A preset your buyers can select in one click removes the single biggest source of confusion. It also gives you a sensible default for the buyer who never responds.

Put your scheduling link where producers already look. Your own website and your Facebook page work better than anything sent by email. Producers who find the link themselves tend to use it without being asked.

Confirm cutsheets arrived rather than assuming. Check for missing cutsheets on your dashboard a few days before cut day instead of on the morning. See How do I know my cutsheet has been received?

Do not present this as replacing phone calls. Producers hear "use the website" as "stop calling us," and in a relationship business that lands badly. What Farmshare removes is the repeat calls, the chasing and the retyping. The producer who wants to talk to you can still call.