Privacy policy
Version 2 · in force from 31 August 2026 · replaces version 1 of 12 August 2026
The short version
FieldFriend is run by Field Friend Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (number 17120050). We are the data controller for the information described here.
- If you are a farmer, we hold your name, phone number, where your farm is, and what you tell us about how you farm. We use it to build your season plan and to answer your questions.
- We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising.
- Some of your questions are answered using an artificial intelligence system. It gives advice, not instructions, and it can be wrong.
- Your local agent, the FieldFriend team, and the cooperative, buyer or project you are registered with can see your record. Nobody else can.
- You can ask to see, correct or delete what we hold at any time. Write to james@fieldfriend.africa or tell your local agent.
The rest of this page is the full detail, which UK data protection law requires us to give you.
- 1. Who we are and how to contact us
- 2. If you only visit this website
- 3. If you are a farmer using FieldFriend
- 4. If you are a field agent
- 5. If you work for a partner organisation
- 6. If you write to us
- 7. Our lawful bases
- 8. Who else sees your information
- 9. Where your information is held
- 10. How long we keep it
- 11. Artificial intelligence and automated decisions
- 12. Your rights
- 13. Security
- 14. Children
- 15. Changes to this policy
- 16. How to complain
1. Who we are and how to contact us
Field Friend Ltd, trading as FieldFriend, is a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17120050. We are the controller of the personal data described in this policy, which means we decide why and how it is used.
For anything to do with your data, including a request to see, correct or delete it, write to james@fieldfriend.africa. If you are a farmer and prefer to speak to someone in person, tell your local FieldFriend agent and they will pass the request on.
We are not required to appoint a data protection officer and have not appointed one. Requests are handled by the company director.
2. If you only visit this website
This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and contains no advertising or tracking technology. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
Our hosting provider, Vercel, keeps short-lived server logs that include your IP address, the page you asked for and your browser type. These exist so the site can be served and so we can see if it is being attacked or is failing. We do not use them to build a profile of you.
The page uses typefaces served by Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google and Google receives your IP address as part of that request. If you would rather this did not happen, a browser or network-level content blocker will stop it, and the site will still work.
Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in running a working, secure website.
3. If you are a farmer using FieldFriend
What we collect
- Who you are: your name, your phone number, and the language you prefer.
- Where you farm: your state, local government area and community, and, if you choose to share it, the GPS position of your field and how accurate that reading was. Sharing GPS is optional. If you share it, we look up publicly available soil and weather information for that place.
- How you farm: your crop and variety, the size of your field, your planting date, and your answers to the questions we ask when building your plan, such as what inputs you can get and what you did last season.
- Reporting details: your sex and your age band, where a project or funder you are enrolled in requires it for their own reporting. You do not have to give these to use FieldFriend.
- What you ask us: the questions you send to the FieldFriend companion, the answers it gives, and any photographs you send us for a pest or disease check.
- What happened: what you tell us about your harvest and your season, so that later advice can take it into account.
- Service records: which messages we sent you and when, whether you have opted out of messages, which agent registered you, and the record that this policy was read to you or by you.
What we use it for
- Building and updating your season plan, and sending it to you by app, SMS or WhatsApp.
- Answering your questions about your crop.
- Sending you timing reminders and alerts that relate to your own plan.
- Letting the cooperative, buyer or project you are registered with see that you are enrolled and how your season is going.
- Improving the advice FieldFriend gives, using your data in a form that does not identify you.
- Keeping the service secure, and preventing duplicate or fraudulent registrations.
We do not sell your information. We do not use it for advertising. We do not share it with anyone outside the list in section 8.
Sensitive information
We do not deliberately collect information about your health, your religion, your politics, your ethnicity or your trade union membership. If you happen to mention something of that kind while asking a question, it is held only as part of that conversation and is not used to categorise you. Please do not send us medical or financial details.
4. If you are a field agent
We hold your name, phone number, the area you cover, the farmers you register, your check-ins and field visits, and any photographs you upload as part of a visit. We use this to run the agent network, to attribute registrations, to calculate any payment or incentive due to you, and to check the quality and honesty of the data being collected. Some of this is visible to your supervising organisation and on internal leaderboards.
Lawful basis: performance of our agreement with you, and our legitimate interest in supervising the quality of field data.
5. If you work for a partner organisation
If you have an account as a staff member of a processor, cooperative, buyer, NGO or project, we hold your name, work email address or phone number, your organisation, and a log of your activity in the dashboard. We use it to give you access, to support you and to keep the account secure.
Lawful basis: performance of our contract with your organisation, and our legitimate interest in account security.
6. If you write to us
If you email us, we keep your message and your email address so we can reply and keep a record of the conversation. Our email runs on Google Workspace.
Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in answering people who contact us, and in keeping business records.
7. Our lawful bases
UK data protection law requires us to have a specific reason, called a lawful basis, for each thing we do with your data.
| What we do | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Build and send your season plan, answer your questions, send plan reminders | Performance of a contract with you. This is the service you asked for, and we cannot provide it without this information. |
| Collect and store your GPS position | Your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. The service still works without it, with less precise advice. |
| Record your sex and age band for a project's reporting | Your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. |
| Show your enrolment and season progress to the cooperative, buyer or project you are registered with | Our legitimate interest, and theirs, in running the programme you joined. You are told which organisation this is at registration. |
| Improve FieldFriend's advice using data that does not identify you | Our legitimate interest in making agricultural advice more accurate for everyone. |
| Keep the service secure and prevent fraudulent or duplicate accounts | Our legitimate interest in protecting the service and the people who use it. |
| Send you messages about FieldFriend that are not about your own plan | Your consent. Every such message tells you how to stop them. |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed our interest against your rights and concluded that ours does not override yours. You can ask us for that reasoning, and you can object (see section 12).
8. Who else sees your information
Inside FieldFriend, access is limited to the people who need it: the FieldFriend team, and the field agent who registered you or supports you.
Outside FieldFriend, your information is shared with:
- The organisation you are registered with, if any. That is the cooperative, processor, buyer, NGO or project that enrolled you. They see only their own farmers.
- Suppliers who run parts of the service for us. They act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes. They are:
| Supplier | What they do |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Holds the database and manages sign-in |
| Vercel | Hosts the website and application |
| Anthropic | Provides the AI model that drafts answers to your questions. Your inputs are not used to train their models. |
| Meta Platforms | Delivers WhatsApp messages, where you use that channel |
| Our SMS gateway | Delivers text messages to your phone |
| Resend | Sends email notifications |
| Google (Workspace) | Runs our company email |
We will also disclose information if the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. If FieldFriend is ever sold or merged, your information may pass to the buyer, and we will tell you before that happens.
9. Where your information is held
FieldFriend is run from the United Kingdom, and UK data protection law applies to everything described here, wherever you live.
Some of our suppliers are based outside the United Kingdom, mainly in the United States and the European Union. Where we send personal data to a country the UK has not judged to provide adequate protection, we rely on the safeguards UK law allows: the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, together with an assessment of the risk in that country.
If you are in Nigeria and are enrolled with a Nigerian organisation, your record is visible to that organisation in Nigeria on the same basis.
You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a particular transfer.
10. How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, farm details and plans | While you are registered, and for 24 months after your last activity. Then deleted or stripped of anything that identifies you. |
| Your questions and the answers given | 24 months |
| Message delivery logs | 12 months |
| The record that this policy was given to you, and which version | 6 years after your account closes, because it is our evidence that we did so |
| Season and yield history in a form that does not identify you | Kept indefinitely, so that advice keeps improving |
| Website server logs | As long as our hosting provider retains them, typically about 30 days |
If you ask us to delete your record, we do so, but we keep the minimum needed to show that you were once registered and that you asked to be removed.
11. Artificial intelligence and automated decisions
Parts of FieldFriend are automated. Your season plan is assembled by software from agricultural research, your farm details and local weather. Answers to your questions are drafted by an AI model working from a library of agricultural guides.
Two things follow from that, and we would rather say them plainly.
- The advice can be wrong. It is guidance to help you decide, not an instruction, and it is never a guarantee of a yield or an income. Always check anything that involves spending money, applying an agrochemical, or a risk to your health.
- You can always reach a person. Nothing in FieldFriend makes a decision about you, by itself, that has a legal or similarly significant effect. We do not score you for credit, and we do not decide on anyone's behalf whether you get a loan, an input or a contract. If a partner organisation ever wants to use FieldFriend data that way, we will tell you first and explain your rights before it happens.
If you think an answer FieldFriend gave you was wrong, tell your agent or write to us. We want to know.
12. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
- ask what we hold about you, and get a copy;
- have anything wrong corrected;
- have your information deleted;
- ask us to stop using it while a dispute is sorted out;
- object to our using it on the basis of legitimate interests;
- receive the information you gave us in a portable format, or have it sent to another provider;
- withdraw your consent at any time, where we relied on consent. Withdrawing it does not undo what was lawful before.
To use any of these, write to james@fieldfriend.africa or tell your local agent. We answer within one month. There is no charge. We may ask you to confirm your identity, usually by a code sent to your registered phone number, so that nobody else can get at your record.
To stop receiving messages, reply STOP to any SMS, or tell your agent. Messages that are essential to a plan you asked for will stop too, so tell us if you only want the promotional ones to stop.
13. Security
Access to the database is restricted by row-level security rules, so an account can only reach the records it is entitled to. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to production data is limited to the FieldFriend team. Photographs uploaded by agents are held in a restricted store.
No system is perfect. If a breach happens that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will tell the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours of finding out, and we will tell you directly if the risk to you is high.
14. Children
FieldFriend is for adults who farm. It is not designed for or directed at children, and we do not knowingly register anyone under 18. If you believe a child has been registered, write to us and we will remove the record.
15. Changes to this policy
We version this policy and record which version you were given. If we change it in a way that affects you, we will tell you through the app or by message, and we will not apply a new purpose to information already collected without a proper basis for doing so.
16. How to complain
Please tell us first, so we have the chance to put it right: james@fieldfriend.africa.
If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.
If you are in Nigeria, you may also complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission at ndpc.gov.ng.