Crop planning Session
Participants
- Maureen – gardener planner
- adrien – farmer – planner
- Mars – former farm manager, grad school research
- Gwyn – carried out crop plans
- Julia – develops software – help people plan agroecosystems
- Samuel – crop planning
- Mike – marketing an dplanning
- Kat – crop planning spreadsheets
- Rob – farmer-crop plan, sales marketing
- Bar – uvm – interested in integration of climate mitigation environment
- Deo – tree species, planning
- Westpm – software developer – crop planning interest
- Brandon – engineer, watershed planning,
- Ankita– developer – making better tools to help farmers – science to farming – cover crop
- Reginald – researcher, remote sensing.
- Mike – farm OS – interested in crop planning being integrated
- Jamie – Farm OS – web and cell phone integration, interfaces, pressing concerns of users
- Matt – comanger of farm, farmer developer of field logs
Organizing the discussion
How do people feel about amassing our group knowledge to developers to get a sense of what is needed?
Interest in a crop planning and sales
So interest in keeping a single group
- looking at financial planning
- leads to planning
Matt -
vegetable farmer – direct marketing
larger farms – commodities – cotton, corn, soy etc.
How much to plant? (per crop)
market 1 ---- demand (units of crop) /yield/are =area to plant
When to plant (calendars)
area tplant – recurring plantings , dates,
Some variables
- frost dates
- pest timing
- weighting based on markets
- days to maturity+ season
- weather
- harvest window
- when the crop is ready to sell
- market demand
Farmer takes this info and channels into
interest in keeping the conversation on small scale, diversified production – there is more complexity in terms of planning
the goal is to get to a calendar that becomes a plan for planting
-gh plan
- transplant plan
- planting out plan
- grouping planting
- abiding by growigng habits
- irrigation needs
- disease and pest management
- eg spraying
- families – for crop rotations
- time in fields
- genetics pesticides
- types of cultivation – simimlar calibrations
- companion planting
- soil type and texture
- crop families – perennial and annual
- size of crop, spread, physical growing habits that might effect neighbouring plants
- harvesting protocol – frequency,
- maintainence and needs
- client involvement and consumer participation
- seasonality
These move into a merged group and potential calendar
with this information the next task is to find out how to get it into the field
Where to Plant
- where can we plant this year – short sighted
- where are we in the crop rotation – long term planning that works on planning and strategy
Question
what are the features and needs of a crop planning tool?
- Excell sheets and books exist on crop planning that can be used as a format
- some people like to plan on a on the fly method
- Mike FarmOs – wanting to keep it general, but wants to put in some specialized tools
Ankita –
- goals
- time
- space
- physs space
a program called tend.ag – seems to be working well according to Rob
focus on market goals – but we need to look at crop rotation and ecosystem piece…building more on the ecological problems that are needed to be addressed.
Maureen - is there something missing that is a niches that needs to be filled
Matt – has a contact that developed a crop rotation tool
OpenSource crop plans
the need to share plans and information – open source overlays of data
‘recipe of planning’
but there can be reticience about sharing years of hard work that is ‘proprietary’
openfarms.cc – building recipes for growing that can be shared
moving the info from the ‘black book’ of managers into software – people have the info and knowledge and it needs to understood.
Marketing
Wants to see demand or spot forcasting for customers – is there a way to plan with customers
plannign specifically for outlets
A lot of the issue ofs smaller diversivied vegetable farms that cannot gaim
tracability built into the planning – produce safety module for farmOS
inputs need to be traced
cooperative and marketing in sharing – where different users could overlay their production to group purchase
looking for a followup on sales and marketing
Harvesting Data
do tools pull from weather data? Woudl this be useful
ie) sensors and environmental data – for
what about pulling data from farm extension, etc, (like downy midlew) and how could this be integrated into it.
Some of these services would have to charge to stream these services
we need more connectivity.
How much time do farmers have to do this…?
We need to build on farmers needs
Farmers start with a plan… but then there is the actual practice… the difference between a farmer with one year experience and 20 is record keeping
Interoperability
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interoperability session and UX discussion could be good followup oppertunities
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Do tools adjust with the unforseen circumstances?
-
FarmOS – is suggesting that it does
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Repurposing planning tools – like trello – to plan for problems… project management tools
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Robbie, a participant here, isworking with OOdo
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A wishlist online where the farmers could say what they would like to see in a tool
Where do we go from here?
See session on Sales and Marketing