Privacy Policy

How FarmFlow handles your personal information, and the rights you have under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

1. Who we are

FarmFlow is a dairy farm management web application built and operated by Keshav Poudel, a sole trader trading as FarmFlow (NZBN 9429053816931), based in Ashburton, New Zealand. We provide software-as-a-service to dairy farmers and their teams under the farmflow.co.nz domain.

When this policy says "we", "us", or "FarmFlow", it means Keshav Poudel trading as FarmFlow, together with the small FarmFlow team who help run it. Keshav Poudel is responsible for your personal information and is our privacy officer (see section 12).

2. What we collect

The personal information we collect depends on how you use the service.

2.1 Visitors to farmflow.co.nz

Our marketing site does not load any third-party analytics, tracking pixels, advertising networks, or social-media trackers. The Netlify edge that serves the site logs basic request data (IP address, request path, timestamp, user agent) for its own infrastructure operations — we do not use those logs and they are managed under Netlify's own privacy practices. The site's fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, so your browser's IP address is seen by Google when the page loads. If you use the farm-address box on the trial form, what you type is sent to OpenStreetMap's address search to suggest matches.

2.2 People who request a free trial or contact us

Our trial-signup form collects: your name, email address, phone number (optional), farm address (optional), and farm name (optional). Our contact form collects your name, email, and the message you send.

2.2a People who try the satellite pasture demo

To send you a one-time demo link we collect your name and email address. In the demo you choose an area — by sharing your device location, searching an address, or tapping the map — and optionally draw your farm boundary. We keep the spot and the area you choose (coordinates, the shape you drew and its size in hectares), together with your name and email, so the FarmFlow team can follow up with you. The demo page tells you this before you choose. We also count how many looks your demo link has used, so the look limit applies to the link rather than to one browser. To show the satellite view we send the area's coordinates to the Copernicus satellite service, your browser loads map images of the area from Esri, and address searches go to OpenStreetMap.

2.3 Registered users of the application

Once you sign up for an account at app.farmflow.co.nz, we collect and store everything you enter into the application as part of running your farm. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Account details: name, email, hashed password, role, last-login timestamp.
• Farm details you record: paddock layouts, grazing records, milk production, cow herd information, supplement inventory.
• Employee records you record: names, addresses, phone numbers, pay rates, timesheets, payroll calculations, leave balances. If you choose to record employee bank or tax (IRD) details inside FarmFlow, those are stored too.
• Health & Safety: incidents, hazards, chemicals, inspections, training.
• Finance: account categories, transactions, balance-sheet items.
• Files you upload: spreadsheets, CSVs, fertiliser map PDFs, your own backup files.
• Photos you choose to have read automatically (for example an ear-tag photo, or a photo of a plate-meter screen or cover sheet), and task names you ask FarmFlow to suggest hazards for — see "AI features" in section 4.
• If you connect a Google Sheet for grazing or roster sync: the sheet's link, and the rows FarmFlow reads from it.
• If you subscribe to a paid plan: your plan and subscription status. Your card details are entered on Stripe's secure page and are never stored by FarmFlow.

2.4 Information collected automatically while you use the service

• Login events: timestamp, IP address, the country the IP address belongs to (looked up with IPinfo), user-agent string of your browser. If your browser asks and you allow it, the device's more precise location is recorded with the login and turned into a place name using OpenStreetMap.
• An activity log of logins, logouts and the changes made in the app (who, when and what — for example adding a cow, editing a roster, restoring a backup). The farm owner can see their own farm's log; the FarmFlow team can see all of it for support and security.
• Browser security reports: if your browser blocks a script on a FarmFlow page (part of our protection against malicious code), it automatically sends us a short technical report — the page address and a snippet of the blocked code. We use these only to find and fix problems. They are held in the app's memory until it next restarts, and briefly in our hosting provider's server logs.
• Session cookies (see section 10).

3. Why we collect it

We collect personal information for the following purposes, and no others:

4. Where it's stored

Your information is stored across a small number of carefully chosen services:

5. How long we keep it

• Active account data: for as long as you continue to use FarmFlow.
• Free-trial accounts: a trial runs for 30 days from signup. When it ends the account is paused — you can't use the app until you choose a plan or we extend your trial — but your data is not deleted, so it's all there if you continue.
• Per-farm backups: up to 30 daily snapshots per farm are kept; oldest are automatically pruned. These are stored inside the same primary database as your live data.
• Off-site backup copies (once switched on): an encrypted copy of each daily backup is kept in Cloudflare R2 and deleted automatically after 35 days.
• Audit log + login log: we currently retain these for the lifetime of your account; we are introducing a 12-month retention window.
• Deleted farms: when you move a farm to trash, all data stays recoverable until you permanently destroy it. When you permanently destroy a farm, every record connected to that farm — including all backups — is removed within the same transaction. Encrypted off-site copies (if switched on) are deliberately write-only, so that someone who broke into our server could not erase them; they expire automatically within 35 days.
• Satellite demo requests (name, email, spots and areas looked at): kept for up to 24 months so we can follow up, or until you ask us to delete them.
• Email logs at Resend: Resend retains delivery metadata according to its own retention policy (typically 30-90 days).

6. Who has access

• You (and any team members you invite, scoped to the permissions you set).
• The FarmFlow team operating the platform — for support, debugging, and platform operations. This access is logged in the audit log.
• Railway support staff, if we open a support ticket that requires them to look at the database. We will do this only when there is no other way to resolve a problem.
• Resend, for the limited purpose of delivering the emails we ask it to send.
• The other service providers in section 4, each only for the specific job listed there.
• We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to anyone, and we don't share it with anyone except the service providers that run FarmFlow.
• We do not use your farm data to train AI or machine-learning models, and we will ask for your explicit opt-in consent if we ever want to.

7. Overseas disclosure

Under Information Privacy Principle 12 of the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 we have to tell you when your personal information leaves New Zealand. As section 4 sets out, your information is stored on infrastructure located in Singapore (Railway — the database and application), and parts of it are processed in the United States (Resend, Stripe, Anthropic, Google, IPinfo, Esri, Sentry), the European Union / United Kingdom (Copernicus, OpenStreetMap), Germany (cron-job.org), on Netlify's global CDN (marketing site), and — once off-site backups are switched on — in Cloudflare R2 data centres chosen by Cloudflare (encrypted backup copies only). FarmFlow's servers are not located in New Zealand.

We rely on each of these providers' contractual commitments to handle data to a standard comparable to the Privacy Act. By using FarmFlow you accept that your information will be processed in those jurisdictions.

8. How we protect it

We apply the safeguards required by Information Privacy Principle 5:

• All web traffic is encrypted with TLS (HTTPS).
• The HSTS preload list is requested for our domain, so browsers refuse plain-HTTP connections.
• Passwords are stored only as a salted scrypt hash — even we cannot read them.
• Accounts lock for 15 minutes after 5 failed login attempts.
• Login attempts are rate-limited per IP to make credential-stuffing attacks impractical.
• We log a separate audit entry for every significant administrative action (backup, restore, destroy, permission change).
• Daily backups protect against data loss. Once switched on, an encrypted copy of each backup is also kept off-platform in Cloudflare R2, so a copy survives even if our main hosting is lost.
• Database access requires authentication via Railway-managed secrets that are not stored in source code.
• HTTP responses include the standard set of security headers (Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy, Strict-Transport-Security).

No system is perfect. If we ever experience a security incident that is likely to cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner as required by the Privacy Act (within 72 hours of becoming aware of the incident).

9. Your rights

The Privacy Act 2020 gives you the following rights. We honour them all:

• Right of access (IPP 6): you can ask for a copy of all the personal information we hold about you. Owners can download a complete JSON export of their farm via the "Backup" button in Settings; if you want the data in a different format, email us.
• Right of correction (IPP 7): you can edit any information you have entered, directly inside the application. If you cannot reach a field, email us.
• Right of deletion: you can permanently destroy your farm (and all data tied to it) from Settings. Once destroyed, the data cannot be recovered.
• Stopping marketing emails: every trial reminder or marketing email has an unsubscribe link, as required by the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. You can also email us.
• Right to complain: if you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, you can complain to us (section 12) and to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner on 0800 803 909 or via their online form.

10. Cookies

We use the minimum cookies needed to operate the service:

We do not use cookies for advertising, analytics, or cross-site tracking. The marketing site at farmflow.co.nz does not set any cookies of its own.

11. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when we change what we collect, how we use it, or who we share it with. Material changes will be announced via email to registered users at least 14 days before they take effect.

12. Contact us

For privacy enquiries, data-access requests, or correction requests:

• Email: privacy@farmflow.co.nz
• Privacy officer: Keshav Poudel
• Business: Keshav Poudel, sole trader, trading as FarmFlow (NZBN 9429053816931)
• Postal address: 978 Frasers Road, Lagmhor, Ashburton 7778, New Zealand

If we cannot resolve your concern, you can complain directly to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner: privacy.org.nz · 0800 803 909