Since having this new Grazing Plan module activated on my farmOS instance just last night, i am wondering how i can use it to support my Holistic Planned Grazing practice.
This practice involves moving animals (sheep in my case) through defined paddocks on a certain schedule, and then making adjustments to schedule (not paddocks: these remain defined through successive rotations) based on how the grass responds to the impact of n_animals for n_days (ADA’s, or Animal Days per Acre, is the key metric). The implication here is that geolocation of paddocks, and precise measurement of the area they contain, is fundamental… But i’m not seeing on the Grazing Plan form any connection to the geographic objects that are defined under Areas, as a rule -unless i’m missing something.
Yet: i see in IRC where @mstenta said “Grazing plans do use calculated area of paddocks,” so obviously i am missing something, so… Would appreciate if anyone could shed some more light on this issue.
Hi @walt - Thanks for starting this thread - it will probably be helpful for others who are trying out this module as well. So I’ll add some info here (and may duplicate some things I tell you in chat, so pardon if I repeat myself - it’s also for future readers).
After enabling the Grazing module, you will see a new “Plans” dropdown in your main menu, and under that a new “Grazing Plans” item.
Plans are intended to be a higher-level way to organize logs and assets, with a specific purpose in mind, and often with a prescribed workflow. As I described in this comment, farmOS itself doesn’t yet provide any plan types of its own, but some other modules (like the Grazing module) do - and that is how we are experimenting with the ideas and architectures around plans more generally. I hope to see farmOS providing plan types of its own in the near future, like Crop plans and general repeating tasks plans.
The first step to creating a new plan is to go to Plans > Grazing Plans and click the “Add grazing plan” button. This will look similar to a log/asset form - just start by giving the plan a name (eg “2019 Grazing Plan”) and a date range, and then click save. After that, you will be able to open the plan and see additional tabs for defining your paddocks, animals, and movements.
When we completed the initial phase of development (end of 2017), documentation was written in a Word document (if I remember correctly), but never made it up to farmOS.org. I will see if I can find that document and post it here, then we can make a todo to add it to farmOS.org.
(@walt and I are walking through the setup of a grazing plan in chat right now, which is logged here, if anyone is interested in following along now or in the future: http://irc.farmos.org/bot/log/farmOS/2019-07-19)
Hi, I am new to farmOS. the log of the Grazing plan walk thru is really useful to understand FarmOS to a good extent. Thanks for creating a wonderful application.