Trying to figure out how I can take four different plantings/seedings of different plants and varieties and aggregate them up into a single product.
Lets say I planted red romaine, baby spinach, radicchio, green romaine. and harvested all of them. Post harvest I want to blend them all together and make a single item as Spring Mix.
Is there some workflow or way that I could take my four plantings/seedings and turn them into a single “spring mix” item post harvest?
Great question @mbillion. The “best” way to represent this, in my opinion, is with a new “Product” asset type. We don’t offer this feature in core farmOS yet, but it is something we have been considering and working towards for a while. The idea is: the planting assets themselves are not the product, but they “transform” into product assets.
We are thinking about this generally, so that the same idea can be applied to any asset type. Imagine a Planting asset that is harvested and packed into various size boxes - you may want to have separate assets to represent each size box, and how many you have of them at any given time (inventory management). Similarly, you may have milking cows that create milk product inventory. Or beef cattle that become meat products. Or maple trees that create sap/syrup products.
Some of this thinking is talked about in this related thread about ecommerce: eCommerce integration
So that’s the plan we have in mind to be able to represent what you describe. 
Well you kind of predicted where I was going next after this one. But I assume if there was a flexible module it could handle all of it. We do our own packaging, labeling and distribution;
So the next thing I was going to ask was the converse. Now I have aggregated up all this lettuce so I can mix it, can I then deaggregate it into something like 100 64oz clamshells of spring mix.
I will check out the discussion in the ecommerce thread. Is there similarly a place to find out about timelines of these developments, or when we could potentially start seeing functionality come online?
Yes! Ultimately the “product” asset type will allow for true seed-to-sale traceability, as it would use logs to link the whole chain together, ideally.
As for timeline, this isn’t something that is currently being funded/sponsored, but we are in the process of laying a lot of the groundwork in the farmOS 2.x branch right now. We will have more flexible inventory management, and it will be easier to create new asset types. The bigger task will be augmenting the data model and UI/UX to make it possible/easy to record/represent these kinds of “transformations”. Hopefully there will be interest in funding the time on that when we get there! Or hopefully someone takes the baton and starts working on it as a contrib module! That’s the other question, is whether or not this should be farmOS core, or if we should let it evolve and experiment in “contrib” land for a bit first to iron out the kinks.
I’ve seen more traffic regarding the seed traceability and in part, i’ve seen that you can add a seed lot number to a seeding which is associated with a planting (my wording might be a bit off there); for my purposes that mostly solves any reporting requirement I have regarding what seed lot was associated to a planting and a seeding. Although If I was living in dreamy hypothetical land, there are some pretty wild things one could do with traceability and immutable record keeping.
The data model stuff is of particular interest to Munch; we picked FarmOS in large part because you
seemed to be very responsible data stewards. UI/UX is important, however we have considered whether developing our own environment on top of your backend to join our other systems or working to integrate into your UI/UX makes the most sense. Were an indoor vertical Hydro/aero farm so there will always be some key differences in UI/UX where FarmOS just doesn’t apply (the map feature for example). We vetted these against your backend and realized we can massage the system to do what we want, but it’s likely in communities best interests not to go down the route of FarmOS incorporating 3d custom “maps” to reflect our 3d farm.
Regarding contrib v. farmOS core. I would have to self deploy a FarmOS locally in order to do contrib work right? While deployed on farmier I would not be able to dev on my model? My board and other business leaders were pretty adamant that while I could host this myself and I could do dev work that as a business we need to be hosted and use supported features, although this doesn’t preclude me deploying and developing on the side. We are in the thick of 2021 budget season right now and have some discussions on development spend this evening so I will push to see what we have for development, although I am not too excited about things - Covid crushed us as our sales majorically came from high end restaurants and we did a fairly expensive retooling of the grow facility while things have been slow. Ill keep you updated though.
Regarding contrib development work, we have a partnership with ASU and are bringing on a handful of computer science interns soon and I would not be against having them spend some of their time dedicated to doing contrib work on modules that positively impact our organization.
Either way - the inventory stuff being rolled out for plants instead of just animals, traceability, and the mixing/packaging stuff are high on my priority list
All great thoughts @mbillion!
we have considered whether developing our own environment on top of your backend to join our other systems or working to integrate into your UI/UX makes the most sense
Cool! I think that’s a great route to consider - and should be doable simply using the farmOS API.
I would highly recommend developing against the upcoming farmOS 2.x API, however, and not invest too much into 1.x moving forward. It will be a much more enjoyable experience, and you won’t need to worry about updating when 2.x is released. The 2.x API is relatively stable already, and we hope to really finalize it in the next month or two. I am just about to merge in a big branch of changes that adds support for “Location assets” (which replace the concept of “Areas”). Happy to help get you up to speed if you’re starting development soon.
Regarding contrib v. farmOS core. I would have to self deploy a FarmOS locally in order to do contrib work right? While deployed on farmier I would not be able to dev on my model?
Depends… if you need custom modules, then yes you would need to do the development locally, but I do offer hosting of custom modules on Farmier. They just need to go through a standard security/code review process. Happy to discuss that if you want - send me an email or private message.
That said, maybe you don’t need custom modules at all, and you can simply build what you want alongside farmOS using the API. Farmier will start offering 2.x hosting soon.
Feel free to join the next monthly call if you want to discuss possibilities!
I will be there and I have made leadership at my company aware of the call as well. I have created an invite for up and coming members of my team as well! see you tomorrow