I’m hoping someone can expand a bit on Beds vs. Fields with regards to planting sometime like fruit trees. I originally setup my Fields and then created a sub-asset for the rows of trees and started creating trees belonging to the rows. Our rows have 10-60 trees in them and since they’re in very evenly spread out rows I thought this made sense.
I saw a very cool add-on for mapping out beds by a user named @Symbioquine and wasn’t sure if that’s a better way to organize evenly distributed trees.
I’d love to hear what other users are having luck doing. So far the experience has been fantastic and I’m glad to have found this community!
Additionally I’d love to hear how folks are using seasons with fruit trees. Since the trees last many years and have multiple harvests I wasn’t sure if this piece made sense to use. I would love an easy way to track our planting dates which I didn’t see.
Sounds like you’re on the right track! There are some other forum threads related to managing orchards with farmOS. Maybe you’ve already seen them, but I’ll drop a few links here for anyone else who finds this thread in the future.
It’s up to you how you use the “Land type” designation on Land assets, depending on how you think about your operation. If it helps for you to organize your assets into Fields (Land asset) > Beds (Land asset) > Trees (Plant asset), that’s a good option!
The way you model your assets in farmOS largely comes down to the question: how granular do you need your records to be? If you anticipate recording logs against individual trees, then perhaps you want 1 asset per tree. If you only plan to record logs against rows of trees, then perhaps you only need 1 asset per row. If that’s the case, I would probably suggest making a Plant asset for each row (rather than a Land asset), and think about them as “sets of trees”.
The “Season” field on Plant assets is optional, and might not be useful for trees. You don’t need to use it. It is more relevant in annual plantings and is useful for sorting/filtering purposes.
This should be recorded with a log (probably a Transplanting log - which you can add via the Transplanting module - it isn’t enabled by default).
This transplanting log can also be used to assign the location/geometry of the trees.
For example:
Create a new Plant asset: “Cherry tree 1”
Create a new Transplanting log: “Transplant Cherry tree 1”
Set the log’s date to the date that the tree was transplanted.
Reference the “Cherry tree 1” plant asset in the log’s “Assets” field
Reference the Land asset (field or bed) that the tree was transplanted in in the log’s “Location” field.
Optionally set a specific point geometry for the tree’s location within that bed/field in the log’s “Geometry” field.
Click the “Is movement” checkbox in the log.
Mark the log as “Done” (not “Pending”)
This will “move” the location of the tree asset to the field/bed, and give it the geometry you drew in the log’s map.
More information on how movements and location work in farmOS:
We have been using FarmOS for a couple of years now. We’ve applied the platform to our orchard of cherry, pear and peach. For us, we organized around blocks. Blocks for us are defined as fields that may have multiple varieties of cherries or pears or peaches, but will receive the inputs and activities at the block level (measured in acres for us). If I need to log an activity of a specific area in the block, I simply pinpoint it within the block land asset. For record-keeping, I did associate certain rows within our blocks as lines that characterize specific varieties. Once you set up the land assets (we defined them on the map with the draw tools, then they become a permanent part of the log infrastructure and make it easy to associate all activities with those pre-defined areas.
This is great feedback and answers a ton of my questions! For us I want to try to move towards managing the tree assets and it’s exciting to me that FarmOS allows it. My guess is most of the heavy lifting will be in the setup which I’m hoping to be able to script at least some of since we are managing ~15,000 trees. Once that’s done it’s a few replants a year unless we are replanting a whole block which is rare.
That’s exactly the tradeoff. The more granular you want to get, the more data entry/management is required. Automation (including bulk imports) is the best solution to that! But it does require getting your hands dirty with scripting sometimes.
If you’re familiar with Python, you can really unlock a lot of power with the farmOS API!
