Next: Advanced Product Editing
At a basic level, managing and editing Crops in SeedLeaf is very easy. But the real power of SeedLeaf as a Crop planning and management tool is in customizing for Crop variants - crops grown from the same seed but with different growing parameters. You can then use these Crop variants to customize products (see next article) to pair with these Crops to make placing Orders easy and fast.
Crop variants are most useful for differentiating between Crops that will be sold as cut Products and Crops that will be sold live as live Products.
Confused? Here are a few examples.
Let's assume your business mostly cuts and packages your Crops to create Products and you grow all your crops in a standard 1020 tray.
A sunflower Crop might look like this in SeedLeaf:
Crop Name: Sunflower
Seed: Sunflower, Black Oil
Sowing Rate: 125 grams
Days to Germinate: 4
Days to Maturity (DTM): 8
Yield: 650 grams
This is the Crop you would select when creating all your cut sunflower Products - which would allow you to have small, medium, and large sizes. If you decided you wanted to add live 1020 sunflower trays, you can simply add the "tray" size to this sunflower Product without any other changes to the product details. This is the basic way to create a product from a given crop.
Now, let's say you want to add a 10 x 10 live sunflower tray to your Product line. You would need to start by first creating a new sunflower Crop, as your existing sunflower Crop, growing in the 10 x 20 trays, obviously will not work.
This new Crop might look like this:
Crop Name: Sunflower - 1010
Seed: Sunflower, Black Oil
Sowing Rate: 60 grams
Germination Days: 4
Days to Maturity (DTM): 7
Yield: -
Here we have added a "1010" modifier to the crop name to differentiate this from our existing sunflower Crop growing in a 1020 tray. You can see we have a lower sowing rate than the 1020 tray and even one less DTM (it's often better to sell live trays a little younger as they will transport better!). The yield can be left blank because we are not cutting the tray and thus SeedLeaf does not need the yield to do any sowing calculations. To avoid any errors, we will now also change the name of our existing sunflower Crop to "Sunflower - 1020 Cut".
So, we now have 2 distinct sunflower Crops to choose from when creating products:
Sunflower - 1020 Cut
Sunflower - 1010
You then decide to add a live sunflower Crop in 5x5 trays that might look like this:
Name: Sunflower - 5x5
Seed: Sunflower, Black Oil
Sowing Rate: 12 grams
Germination Days: 4
Days to Maturity (DTM): 7
Yield: -
And now we have 3 distinct sunflower Crops:
Sunflower - 1020
Sunflower - 1010
Sunflower - 5x5
For each of these Crop variants we are doing two things to make them unique:
We are giving them a unique, detailed (yet simple) name, which allows you to easily differentiate them from each other when creating a new Products
Remember: you grow a Crop and you sell a Product. So even though you are selling a live Crop you still need to create a Product for that Crop as it is Products we use when creating Orders.
We are giving each of these Crop variants unique production figures so SeedLeaf can accurately calculate their costs and production schedule. Our live sunflower Crops above show 7 days to maturity, meaning they will need to be sowed one day later than our cut sunflower Crop to mature at the same.
Using these types of modifications, you can customize Crops in many different ways to suit your production system's unique needs. The key is to give them a simple, yet descriptive name, so you can differentiate them when creating Products.
Check out the video to see some examples on screen then proceed to the Advanced Product Editing tutorial to see how this plays out when creating products from these crop variants.
VIDEO COMING SOON