Among the meager farm management solutions, I found farmOS, it seems a robust platform for farm management, huge plus that it is an open source. I’m just starting to learn the system.
I’m from Russia. Confused a little in terms and concepts, it’s hard to start logging without any experience, example date I think would help me. Can you advise something?
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I agree it would be nice to have a public example farmOS set up - if anyone wants to help with that I’d be happy to provide hosting for it.
In the meantime, try starting with the Quick Forms. The Planting quick form demonstrates how to create and manage planting assets and how they relate to logs like seedings, transplantings, harvests, etc.
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And of course the user guide! https://farmOS.org/guide
Yea, I’m happy to help you set up an example farm
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@Skipper, are you still interested in this? I need some fake-farm-data so that we can make demo/training videos.
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Yea, can do. I did start with something last year, but completely forgot about it
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Awesome 
Could we start by collecting some CSV files somewhere in GitHUB? @mstenta, which repo would you like us to work from?
Sure thing @kirsten_mc - I think it would make sense to start a farm_demo repository, which could eventually become a full Drupal/farmOS module. If you or @Skipper want to start one in your own GitHub accounts, we can work together on it there and then move it over to the farmOS organization when it’s ready. Or if you prefer I can make a repo in my personal GitHub account and give you both access - whatever you prefer. 
OK, never done that before, so hopefully it’s set up correctly! You can find the repo under https://github.com/kirsten-mc/farm_demo. I went with the GPLv2.0. @Skipper, are you happy to try creating a pull request?
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Yea, you should also be able to add collaborators to the repo, under the repo settings>Manage access. (I’m “Skipper-is”)
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Thank you, @Skipper, you’ve been added.
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We probably need to set out what/where this demo farm is. So we can have some KML field boundaries that people can import.
There was also the version on Farmier that mstenta set up a while ago, which should probably mirror this. Last time I was on there though, we were looking for a site to put our ‘farm’, so I don’t know whether it got any further than that
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Yes! We set up https://demo.farmos.net - but didn’t get very far with it, if I remember correctly. I still think this would be a great place to host a demo! Happy to give logins to any of you if you need one.
Perhaps the farm_demo module should provide the area geometries itself too. In addition to assets and logs.
The thought being: someone could install a fresh farmOS instance, and then install this farm_demo module to populate it with demo data. We could do exactly this on https://demo.farmos.net, and even perhaps automatically wipe and reinstall it on a daily/weekly basis.
This module would also be useful for automated testing. I can imagine having an integration test for Field Kit or the Aggregator which spins up an instance and installs this module, so that integration tests can be built to use the example content.
The Devel module from Drupal 7 comes with a Devel Generate sub-module, which can be used to generate content automatically. I’ve never used it myself, so I don’t know exactly how it works, but perhaps we should start by exploring that.
And with regard to the upcoming farmOS 2.x development, we can take a look at this module: Default Content, which uses JSON files to provide default content. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it… We will eventually want to have two branches in the farm_demo module repository: 7.x-1.x (for farmOS 1.x based on Drupal 7 using Devel Generate) and 2.x (for farmOS 2.x based on Drupal 9 using Default Content).
I think this is a really important aspect since a json schema which can be used to reproducibly represent the areas/assets/logs in a farmOS instance would also be useful as part of import/export/migration tooling too…
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Ok, so sounds like the actions (for now) are:
- identify some land for the demo-farm (because everything else can be faked, but it has to be real land with real owners)
- option 1. choose some random locations in national parks, Antarctica or something - obviously fake, but no one can be offended
- option 2. ask for someone to volunteer boundaries on their property (understanding that the rest of the data would be pulled from multiple, other sources)
- option 3. something I haven’t thought of!
- create the kml files; load them into demo.farmos.net and farm_demo/raw_data
- identify what assets / logs we’ll need for the areas and generate some reasonable sounding ones.
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FYI I’m continuing to research this.
Some of the parishes within England (eg Brighton) share kml files of all the council-owned agricultural land, which we may be able to use as a starting point. I’m not sure how receptive the council will be!
I’ve also found that here in the UK there was an extensive survey of all farmland in 1943. I may shell out to get the details about the land that I am purchasing now - I’m not sure how much it has been subdivided over the years, but I’m on friendly terms with most of the neighbours. This could be a nice way to get some boundaries that are realistic without being relevant.
Other software sites do have a caveat in their videos / screenshots / etc. that this is example data, not a real farm.
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One approach that might work would be to find a publicly managed location that is being operated as a farm. For example, there seem to be a few living history museums built around historical farms. We could try reaching out to https://alhfam.org or a similar organization to see if they know of a historical farm with an existing rich GIS dataset in the public domain or with a permissive license. (From either historical or present-day farming activities.)
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I was wondering about Universities / Colleges as well - most have research farms and may have datasets that are public use.
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@Symbioquine, sorry to be daft, but what do you mean by “rich GIS dataset” ? There seem to be lots of public domain GIS datasets (https://freegisdata.rtwilson.com/, https://gisgeography.com/best-free-gis-data-sources-raster-vector/), so I would like to understand what I should ask for a bit better!
Or are you referring to GIS as the super-set for KML?
It would be a good starting place if they’ve even just mapped the fields/beds/pastures/etc - example planting/husbandry data could be invented to fill those areas. However, it would be even better if there are real records for the areas in question.
It’s possible that one of those public organizations is using a GIS application - like QGIS or ArcMap - to track the same sorts of data that farmOS is designed to track. e.g. What was planted/harvested for each field by year or animal grazing rotations.
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