Farming requires fitness.

Here on our dairy farm in rural Australia, we constantly engage in physical activity as we milk cows in our sheds and care for our crops and pastures. Merely doing our jobs can sometimes feel like a grueling workout, with long hours, manual labor, and regular stress.

Yet that doesn’t mean we’re fit. Our crops may grow by an invisible process of osmosis, but our own bodies need deliberate attention.

The men and women who work the land must take positive steps to stay in good health.

That’s why my wife Michaela invented an app to help farming families get fit and stay fit.

Like me, Michaela has a strong farming background. She knows what it takes to run a farm. As the mother of our four kids, she also understands the duties and distractions that come with being a busy Mum and Farmer.

On Instagram, she goes by FarmFitMumma. She recently explained her enthusiasm for what she does on the social-media site: “I became a fitness coach two years ago because I’m passionate about helping farming mummas move their bodies and feel amazing. From early milking to late-night kid wrangling, I know firsthand that life on the land is a full-body workout, and your training should fit right in.”

Her workouts are short and sharp, and farmers can participate in their homes or barns. The app schedules training, offers reminders, and tracks progress.

At times, farmers can feel isolated by the nature of our work and location. This isolation presents mental and physical challenges. The app addresses this challenge by providing access to a community of other farmers who want to improve their health. We can hold each other accountable and create companionship. This app reminds us that we’re not alone.

Most importantly, it leads users through simple exercises that promote fitness.

The truth is that farmers can find it difficult to make the time to focus on themselves, especially during the peak periods of harvesting, shearing, and calving. We can get so caught up in what we’re doing that we fail to take care of our own bodies.

On our farm, we think about health all the time, for our family and our dairy cows. We work with a specialist cow nutritionist who helps us make decisions about rations and recipes that can best feed our cows to maximize their health for longevity, efficiency, and output.

The milk they produce is healthy. Full cream cow’s milk is one of the most naturally complete foods you can get. A single glass is packed with high-quality protein, calcium for strong bones, and key vitamins such as B12 and D. It’s great for growing kids as well as active workers and even older folks. Best of all, it’s real food that’s not made in a lab or derived from a plant. It’s been feeding families for generations!

So drink your milk! That’s a great way to stay healthy.

But genuine fitness requires more than just consuming the right kinds of food and performing the ordinary chores of agriculture.

Labor-intensive farm activity is not the same as purposeful exercise. Repetitive motion, prolonged bending, and lifting with your back rather than with your legs can harm your health rather than help it. In the worst cases, it can lead to injury that makes work difficult or even impossible.

Real fitness requires a proper workout—and that’s exactly what my wife’s app delivers, in a form that fits into farm life.

We showed what’s possible earlier this year, at a meeting of the Global Farmer Network in Costa Rica. My fellow farmers from across the world joined in a group video in which we lined up and did 20 synchronized pushups to promote healthy farmers. When we put it on social media, it attracted a lot of attention for a good cause.

If farmers don’t look after themselves, they can’t look after their crops, their stock, or even their families.

Physical fitness keeps us sharp and strong for the job. Healthy farms need healthy farmers.