Cross Timbers · Apps

A field notebook for the whole homestead.

The Homestead app is what we actually use to run Cross Timbers. Tasks, animals, eggs, garden, finance, and the ten other little things you swore you'd remember. On your phone from the field, or from a browser at the comfort of your computer — no account required, no subscription, just the farm.

Home screen

Every module, one tap away.

The home screen is a grid of modules you choose. Turn on the ones you use, hide the ones you don't, and arrange them in the order your brain works at 6 a.m. The order is per user, so Mike's grid and Amy's grid don't have to argue.

The Homestead app home screen — a grid of farm modules

Why it's different

Deeper than a notebook app, simpler than farm "software."

Rotational grazing on a real map

Move Mode logs each grazing strip right on satellite imagery and colors every paddock by how long it has rested — fresh through ready-to-graze. The strips follow your actual fences, not a generic grid, and you can walk the boundary by GPS or draw it on the map. Rainfall since the last move rides along too.

Records built for real livestock

Sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, quail, chickens — each with the fields that actually matter: breed and lineage, birth and weaning weights, scrapie tags, registration, and FAMACHA and fecal-egg-count scores for parasite management. Not a one-size-fits-all "animal" box.

A garden that helps you plan

A built-in crop database fills in spacing and days-to-maturity, a planting calendar anchored to your frost dates, companion-planting and crop-rotation warnings, and harvest tracking down to fresh, canned, frozen, sold, or gifted.

Your data, no lock-in

Export everything to CSV, import from a spreadsheet, and walk away whenever you want. No subscription, no account required to start, no tracking pixels — just a tool built by a working homestead, for working homesteads.

See it with real data

Built to be looked at, not just filled in.

Rotational grazing on a satellite map — strips colored by rest days, sitting inside the real pasture fences
Rotational grazing on a real map. Each strip is colored by how long it has rested and tucked inside your actual cross fences — see the whole rotation at a glance.
Per-animal roster cards with breed, lineage, weights, and health history
A card for every animal. Breed, lineage, weights, tags, and a full health history — one tap to log a weight, a treatment, or a lambing.
Visual garden bed planner with plantings from seed to harvest
A garden you can see. Lay out your beds, plant them, and track every crop from seed to harvest.

What's in it

Modules for what's actually on the farm.

Pick the modules that match your operation. Run sheep but no pigs? Hide pigs. Add goats next spring? Turn them on then. Each module stores its own simple records — date-stamped, searchable, exportable.

Tasks

Farm to-do list, owned by whoever's on the boots today.

Shopping

What's needed at the feed store, plus what actually got bought.

Activity Log

Catch-all journal for events, purchases, and the little stuff that adds up.

Garden

Visual bed planner, planting lifecycle from seed to harvest, companion planting guide, Zone 8a planting calendar, crop rotation history with crop-family warnings, and harvest tracking with disposition — fresh, canned, frozen, sold, or gifted.

Eggs

Daily egg counts so you can spot the slow week before the customers do.

Meat Birds

Broiler batches from chick to freezer.

Beekeeping

Hive inspections, splits, and honey pulls.

Incubator

Hatch tracker with setting date, lockdown date, and results.

Pigs

Feed conversion, weights, and notes from the pen.

Sheep

Flock management, lambings, and movement between pastures.

Baking & Canning

Sourdough batches and jars on the pantry shelf.

Orchard

Trees, varieties, and what they actually produced this year.

Finance

Income and expenses by category — homestead-flavored, not corporate.

Per-animal rosters

Named birds, sheep, pigs, goats, cows, horses, rabbits, turkeys, quail.

Medical & Observations

Per-animal health events and the random notes you'd otherwise lose.

Pastures & Paddocks

Paddock sizer and rotational grazing tracker. Move Mode logs where your animals are today, how long each strip has rested (amber/green/blue), rainfall since the move, and a GPS boundary walk so you can see exactly where they grazed on a satellite map.

Import and export — every module as CSV, with blank templates

Your data, your barn

No lock-in. Ever.

One of the things that drives us crazy about most farm apps is that they treat your records like a hostage. You enter five years of lambings, and then the company gets bought, the price goes up, or the export button quietly disappears.

  • Export anything as CSV — every module, or one big combined dump of everything you've ever logged.
  • Download blank templates for any module so you can prep records in a spreadsheet and import them back.
  • Import from CSV — bring records over from another app, a spreadsheet, or your old notebook.
  • Walk away whenever you want. Your data goes with you, full stop.

Honest small print

Built for ourselves, shared carefully.

We built this app for our own homestead in Cleburne, Texas. It runs the sheep, the pigs, the chickens, the garden, the orchard, and the ledger. It isn't a venture-backed platform pretending to wear boots — it's a tool we needed, that we're sharing with friends, family, and a few other small farms.

Things will change. Some screens are still a little rough. But the data is yours, the focus stays on small farms, and the focus stays on simple tools for real operations — not on upselling you into features you don't need.