Step 2 - Adding plantings

There are three ways to add plantings in VeggieCropper, you can read about all three here and check out the video below.

This video will be updated soon, to add plantings using projections see Step 3.

Once you have plantings in the system you can compare them to your sales projections using the Harvest plan and Sales projections - Bed feet graph.

Optional - More on creating plantings to match sales projections

Next: Step 3 - Making it all fit in your fields

Pro tips

Use all three strategies to add plantings
Mix and match planting strategies to suit to find what works. We still advocate for creating detailed sales projections but you can use 'Succession builder' or manually ad plantings to match your sales projections. Then check the Harvest plan and Sales projections - Bed feet graph' to make sure everything makes sense. 

Blocking plantings together to save time and money
Consider moving planting dates by a week or two to organize plantings into blocks of crops so that you can (at least try) to do larger amounts of similar bed prep and irrigation setup on similar timelines. For example, try moving direct-seeded plantings to the first and third weeks and transplant plantings to the second and fourth weeks of the month.  This will result in creating bigger 'batches' of similar work tasks for bed prep, irrigation setup, and management before and after planting to increase efficiency by reducing task transitions.

Tweak everything on any planting
Whether using the 'Succession builder' or 'Generate from projections', both tools are great at getting your plantings sketched out. You can change any details of any planting at any time. Consider increasing your last planting to create a storage carrots harvest or combining successions when it no longer makes sense timing-wise as the season slows. Or changing the weeks to harvest at the shoulders of the season or to accommodate a different variety. Check the 'Planting timeline' graph to make sure you've got harvests rolling in when you want them.

Cold storage crops and winter sales
When you add sales projections for winter markets,  'Generate from projections' will calculate and create plantings into the winter for the cold storage crops you plan on selling. However, these plantings are too late to be grown with such a late calculated planting date. The solution is to note the bed feet for each of the plantings that are too late and delete these plantings. Add the bed feet or manually create a planting when you want to plant that crop for a winter storage harvest. This will ensure you have the right amount of bed feet grown at the right time and then stored and sold all winter and still match your sales projections (with an increased manually added fudge factor for storage losses). 

Making your customers your farm consultants
Any production, harvest, and marketing choices a farm makes are ultimately paid for by the customers. What would customers say if you were explaining the pros and cons? Customers have a big apatite for high-quality food grown at a reasonable cost and they want the farms they support to be profitable (or they should if they knew what was good for them). For example, growing 25 varieties of tomatoes adds a significant cost to managing that crop. What about asking the customer "Are you interested in paying more for extra varieties across the board or you happy with the ones that perform well, lower our costs and taste delicious?" In exchange, the customer gets a less stressed farmer and increased quality and yield. At the end of the day, the customers have the final say on everything a farm does from variety selection, packaging, logistics, and branding. Indirectly, these things are up to them and the better a product or service matches the needs and wants of a customer, the happier the customer.