Hi,
I’m trying out farmOS for use within our small scale permaculture farm. I started by keeping track of our poultry enterprise (mostly ducks) and now I’m trying to evaluate its benefits before moving forward. We already keep track of trees in a homegrown GIS based system and it’ll be a nontrivial amount of work to migrate, so I want to make sure it’s worthwhile.
This post is a braindump of the current situation and is part a request for help/ideas, and part feedback from a new farmOS user perspective, should it prove useful.
What I want to do for the poultry tracking:
- keep track of the birds and their lineages (for breeding purposes)
- keep track of inputs (mostly feed)
- keep track of harvests (eggs and meat)
- keep track of their grazing
- have a straightforward way to run queries on the data above: feed usage vs egg production, animal-days per paddock, etc.
What I’ve done so far:
- Added grazing paddocks
- Added a bunch of animal assets. Some represent individual birds, some represent flocks of birds via the inventory mechanism.
- Added a bunch of groups, many of them nested into each other (e.g. females from a specific clutch → all females of a given breed → all egg laying females → the egg laying flock).
- Imported the breeding and harvest history data from the existing ad-hoc spreadsheet
- Started using farmOS as the source of truth for harvest, input, and movement records
Issues encountered:
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The UI feels rather cumbersome. There’s a lot of clicking around and scrolling past fields I don’t use at the moment. The quick forms (I use the Eggs and Movement ones) help a lot, though.
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The inventory mechanism feels both very powerful (measure/value/units) and limited at the same time:
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Here’s an example log entry where a clutch of ducklings were split into 3 groups (males to keep, males to harvest, females) – I wish there was some type and quantity checking to ensure no animals were lost, created, or turned into bags of feed:
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When logging inputs (bags of feed going to specific groups of birds), I wish the asset picker for the inventory decrement target would either filter or sort the asset list using the material type (i.e. don’t decrement the kilos of feed from an animal asset inventory or something equally absurd):
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There’s no simple way to figure out how many animals I have. It seems like at least part of it is due to this issue. Ignoring the group inventory stuff, the only way I found was to go to the animal assets page and look for the “Displaying 1-X of Y” text at the bottom. Is there no better way to get a report?
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It looks like the group location logic only expands one level deep, so most of the birds end up with no location due to the nested group structure. In the example below, I’d expect the “Khaki females” asset to be located in “Strip 4 east”, but instead it has no location at all:
- “Duck flock - laying” includes “Duck females - laying” and they are both in “Strip 4 east” as expected:
- “Duck females - laying” includes “Khaki females”:
- However, “Khaki females” has no location:
Next steps?
This is where I’d love your input.
- I suppose I could try to address some of the issues above – any advice regarding getting up to speed with Drupal development? There seems to be a nontrivial amount of boilerplate involved in even the simplest of modules.
- What about running the more elaborate queries mentioned above? Is there some reporting module I should be using?
- I suppose one could use the API or the database directly, although that seems overkill
- Am I just holding it wrong? How do people use farmOS in practice? It would be useful to read about concrete case studies.
Thanks!
