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Independent farm operations / built for the next shift

Alerting

The pH alert lands in the channel your crew already watches.

The alert email went out at 2:14 p.m. It is sitting unread between a seed catalog and an invoice, and the reservoir has been drifting for three hours. On a farm with more than one person, the question is never just "did the system alert?" It is "did the person on shift actually see it?"

Teams that respond fast share one habit: the alert arrives where the conversation already is. If your crew coordinates in Slack, the alert belongs in Slack, next to the person who can act on it and the thread where they say they did.

How it actually works

FarmHub posts alerts into a Slack channel you choose, using a bot token you control.

  • Conditions checked every five minutes. FarmHub evaluates alert conditions on a five-minute cycle. When a threshold trips, the alert posts to your channel with the metric, the system, and the severity.
  • Resolutions update the original message. When an alert resolves, FarmHub edits the original Slack message in place rather than posting a second one. The channel shows current truth, not a scroll of stale alarms your crew learns to ignore.
  • Corrective actions post too. When a corrective action is resolved in FarmHub, the channel hears about it, so the team sees the loop close.
  • One channel per connection. You configure exactly which channel receives alerts. The bot posts there and nowhere else.

Email and push notifications are built into FarmHub already. Slack is for the farm where the fastest way to reach the person on shift is the channel they already have open.

WHAT YOU CAN COUNT ON

What you can count on

The mechanics underneath:

  • Your bot token, encrypted. You create a Slack bot with chat write and channel read scopes and paste its token into FarmHub. The token is stored encrypted per connection.
  • Real failure detection. Slack reports some failures inside an HTTP 200 response. FarmHub reads the actual response body, so a revoked token or archived channel registers as a failure instead of a false success.
  • Delivery retries with backoff. A delivery that fails on a transient error retries automatically. Alerts do not vanish because Slack hiccupped.
  • Kill switch and hash-chained audit rows. Disable the connection instantly, and every delivery attempt is recorded in a tamper-evident audit log.

What we do not do

What this integration does not pretend to be:

  • FarmHub does not read your Slack messages. The flow is outbound: alerts in, nothing out except the channel list you pick from.
  • Slack delivery does not replace on-call escalation. A message in a busy channel can still be missed. For alerts that must wake someone, pair this with our PagerDuty or Twilio SMS integrations.
  • FarmHub does not manage your Slack workspace, users, or channels.

Setup, honestly

You need a Slack workspace and permission to install a bot in it.

  1. Create a Slack app with a bot token that has chat:write and channels:read scopes, and invite the bot to your alerts channel.
  2. In FarmHub, open Integrations, choose Slack, and paste the bot token.
  3. Pick the channel that should receive alerts.
  4. Send the built-in test message and confirm it lands in the channel.

Questions farmers ask

How quickly do alerts reach Slack?

Alert conditions are evaluated every five minutes. When one trips, the delivery to Slack is immediate, with automatic retries on transient failures.

What happens in the channel when an alert resolves?

FarmHub updates the original alert message in place, so the channel reflects the current state instead of accumulating stale alarms.

What Slack permissions does FarmHub need?

A bot token with chat:write to post messages and channels:read to list channels for setup. FarmHub does not read message history.

What if the bot token is revoked or the channel is archived?

FarmHub reads Slack’s actual response body, so revoked tokens and unusable channels register as delivery failures you can see, not silent losses. Email and push notifications in FarmHub continue independently.

Is Slack enough for critical overnight alerts?

Honestly, no. A channel message does not wake anyone. For alerts that must break through, use PagerDuty escalation or Twilio SMS alongside Slack.

READY FOR THE NEXT SHIFT

Put the alert where the crew is

Connect Slack and the next threshold breach posts itself into the channel your team already watches, then marks itself resolved when the water comes back in line.

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