Re: Looking for specialised skills/product/advice (farming)

I grew up on a farm in Indiana. I decided not to be a farmer, but as the
years marched by my wife and I decided to grow most of our own food, in
other words, very small farming. We grow organically and others wanted to
buy so now it is bigger.

Back to the point, I think the task you propose is going to be very very
difficult. As others have mentioned the weather will play havoc and the
interdependencies will be unbelievably complex. I personally believe the
task is not effectively doable with software and if done will require to
much effort to maintain for anybody to want to use it.

On the other hand there is much that can be done if you want to just help
the farmer. My wife does all the planning and she lives by a calendar. She
writes down all events in it and keeps them to help her decide when to turn
the beds, sow the cover crops, start the seeds, etc. She also keeps
detailed records of vendors of such things as organic seeds, fertilizers,
pest controls and things like irrigation and greenhouse supplies. She keeps
records of customers and what they want and when. She also keeps meticulous
records of cost of supplies and mileage driven. She also keeps records of
crop yields, bed rotations and of course sales. She tracks first frost,
last frost, first hard freeze, last freeze. The list goes on.

The point I am trying to make is that she plans by reviewing her records.

There is much you could do to create a software solution to greatly aid a
farmer both large and small, but the detailed scheduling and rescheduling
and rescheduling and rescheduling is best left to the framers built in
computer.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Cheers

Russ


"Didier Gasser-Morlay" <didiergm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:47282526@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
As anyone around here got extensive-farming experience (as a developer of
course :))

I am asked by a client to come up with a good (of course) planning tool
for a group of up to 50 farms handling 25000 acres each. I could find
several products used to record what has been done after the event, but
nothing on the planning front.

For each field there are several task to undertake

Plough, Disk, Spray chemicals, Apply fertiliser, Seed, Spray chemical,
Apply fertiliser, Harvest

the Fields one one farm are not contiguous

Each task requires a certain set of resources:
- equipment (Tractor, Plougher ...)
- Possibly Chemical products or Seeds
- Always Gazole for the tractor
- Employee
- As a constraint you can plough 10 months out of 12 but you cannot
Spray when it is too windy or you do not seed in before April (there is 1m
of snow anyway) etc...


During the work season, tractors are running 24/7 so some scheduled
maintenance routine must take place etc...

Now if the weather is a problem, all remaining tasks have to be
rescheduled on a daily basis (or sooner)

These guys are considering using ms project for the task and I do not
believe that it is a proper tool for this and I wonder if any of you has
had to deal with a similar project

Thanks for any advice or idea

Didier





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