Matt Steiman - 2017-02-08

FARMDATA New Account Guidelines

Congratulations and welcome to FARMDATA! To set you up for success, we have compiled a list of time proven start-up tips. Please take a few minutes to review this list before you proceed.

Contents of this message:
1. Tips for success on new farm account startup
a. Info to gather
b. Steps to data entry
c. Links to users’ guide and rapid setup page
2. Tips for success – general
a. General users’ guide & regular FARMDATA access links
b. Avoiding early pitfalls
c. Farm culture & habits
d. Delegation
3. User support contacts
a. How to request user support
b. Facebook users’ group
c. How to request new features and report bugs
4. Fine print

1. New account startup:
To launch your account, you will need to load some basic information about your farm. Using the “rapid setup interface” is your best option. You can always add and edit this information through other channels later on, but to save time we’ve created an easy way to load the bulk of your information up front. To make this relatively painless, we suggest you gather the information listed below first, discuss any grey areas with your farm management partners, and then set aside a few hours to complete the setup phase. Details of what exactly FARMDATA will request are contained in the users’ manual configuration page, which is thorough and worthy of frequent consultation. The manual page for startup configuration is here: https://sourceforge.net/p/farmdata/wiki/Configure/
For starters, you will want to have the following info ready to enter.

• Your field list and specifics about field sizes – what do you call each field, how long is it, how many beds (or acres) per field, and how wide is a bed including shared pathway?.

• Harvest Units – (bunches, pounds etc). We have a basic list preloaded, you can edit and delete at will.

• Your crop list.
o The crop list used on the Dickinson College Farm is preloaded to save you some time. You should edit, delete, and add crops to fit your farm.
o Don’t worry about varieties here, but we do suggest you add subcrops. For example, yes to TOMATO, CHERRY and TOMATO, SLICER, but not “sungold” and “earlygirl” etc.
o Also this is a good time to think about your crop naming convention – when you scroll through a drop down menu, how will you find your crops? FARMDATA will list them alphabetically. Changing crop names later will cause you headaches, so try to pick something you can stick with now.

• Harvest units specific to each crop
o What is the “default” unit that you wish to see in your reports for each crop? You can log harvest records for carrots in bunches, pounds, bins or whatever, but FARMDATA will convert, store, and report that record in the default unit that you designate for each crop. Again, choose deliberately because this is hard to change later.
o Any unit conversions you may know off hand can be logged and edited at this time. For example, a quart of PEAS equals two pints of PEAS. You can add and edit units later as well.
o Invoice units: If you plan to use the electronic invoicing feature of FARMDATA, what unit will you normally use when selling each crop? You can skip this step and come back to it, or if you have that info ready to go, be prepared to enter it at setup.

• Cover Crops: We have preloaded FARMDATA with some cover crop species common to the mid-Atlantic region, plus their suggested seeding rates taken from published manuals in 2013. To save time you can use this as a starting point, or if you wish you can add, delete and edit the list to suit your farm now. You can always edit the CC info later so this is one step where we suggest simply clicking “submit all data to database”.

• Tillage implements: review the preloaded list and edit to suit your farm. It will ask you whether or not a tool is used for incorporation – this refers to working in cover crop seed, cover crop debris, or compost.

• Spray Materials: This is another editable preloaded list from the Dickinson College Farm – since manufacturer guidelines for each material change over time, accuracy of the spray rates for each product listed is not guaranteed and we recommend you cross check them with product literature. Edit now if you like, or click “submit all data to database” and come back to this step later.

• Farm info: in the final configuration step, FARMDATA will ask you for
o Your farm name
o An email signature for invoices (this could include your mailing address, phone, any marketing slogans, etc)
o An email address or addresses to connect with your electronic invoices

Final Configuration: In the last step of your rapid setup phase, FARMDATA will allow you to choose which pages and features are activated on your farm’s installation. You can edit this list at any time via the ADMIN access. Turning off unused features will save you time and confusion in data entry, and in our experience will lead to faster acceptance and adoption on your farm. We strongly suggest keeping these features turned off for now: Seed Order, Irrigation. Seed order is a useful but complex feature that has bogged down several new users in early trials, and irrigation is a work in progress. Turning off Succession Numbers and Labor Tracking will make your initial data entry experience faster – you may wish to turn these on once you are up and running.

After you click submit on the final configuration page, you will be ready to go!

When you have your info together and are ready to get started, go to this URL to run through the setup steps. https://farmdata.smallfarmcentral.com/setup One final note before you begin: After updating your data on each setup page, click “Submit all data to database” to move on to the next step. To use preloaded data without editing, also click “submit all data to database”. You may also skip any step in the process by clicking the “skip” button, but then those tables in your system will be left blank. It is possible to run the setup program more than once, but you will get some error messages that can be confusing – so your best bet is to budget a few hours and bang through your farm’s data setup all in one go. A good reason to start FARMDATA in the off season!

If you have any problems or questions in the setup phase please contact user support through the channels outlined below.

  1. Tips for success, general

• Set reasonable goals: We strongly encourage you to set achievable goals for your farm’s records collection, and to gradually increase your data collection intensity over time. If you come out of the gate planning to record every last detail on FARMDATA, it is likely that you will get bogged down and burn out before you get too far along. At the Dickinson College Farm, it took us a few years to achieve full records capture for some of the core functions of FARMDATA, and even several years in we are not recording everything. Take it easy on yourself and your crew. If you (the human side of your database) know which aspects of your data are 90-100% accurate and which ones are more of a snapshot, you can take that into account when making management decisions based on your records. A reasonable goal might look like: “We intend to capture 90% of our direct seeding, flat seeding, transplanting and harvest records this year. We intend to log all of our spraying, and at least 75% of our cover cropping activities. We intend to log complete tillage records for a few select fields, but not all. All of our wholesale invoices will be through FARMDATA. Whatever else we can log in this first year will be gravy. “ This suggestion comes from experience – we’ve seen other users with high aspirations crash and burn in their first year, probably because they took on too much.

• Delegate Data Entry! This cannot be overemphasized. Find a few key people on your farm who carry smartphones, and empower them with the responsibility of data collection. If you put it all on the top manager you are very unlikely to succeed. Key personnel could include harvest crew leaders, greenhouse managers, packing house or delivery personnel, sprayer operators, etc. At the Dickinson College Farm at least half of the data entry is done by student workers and interns.

• Culture and mentality: Try to develop the habit of data entry on your farm. Teach your crew that a harvest is not done until the data are logged. Managers can spot check records after harvest or planting days to verify that data entry is getting done. Some jobs like tillage or compost application are best logged while the tractor is cooling down before you shut it off… a record put off till later is often forgotten! You and your farm business will be rewarded more and more over time as your data set becomes more complete – so try to place value on your data and keep at it!

• Field check your planting data monthly: Every farm has its emergency plantings and crunch time. If you can spare a crew member for an hour or two once a month on a slower day, send someone out with a smartphone, measuring wheel, and maybe a clipboard, to spot check planting data and bring it up to date.

• Use the Backdater Interface to catch up: FARMDATA has a very helpful table format called “Backdater”, located under the ADMIN tab. Use this spreadsheet data entry format on your desktop machine for quick updating of old records, rather than the one-by-one interface designed for field record keeping from the smartphone.

• Read the Users’ Manual! FARMDATA’s developers spent many good hours writing up the users’ manual. Please do your user support volunteers a favor and look at the manual before firing off an email request. If the user manual does not clear it up then by all means drop us a line. The general FARMDATA users’ manual is here: https://sourceforge.net/p/farmdata/wiki/Manual/

Ready to go? After you’ve gone through the initial setup phase, its time to start logging some data in your database! The general access page for FARMDATA at Small Farm Central is https://farmdata.smallfarmcentral.com/ Bookmark this page in your smartphone and save your password for quick login on the fly!

To change your password, log in to FARMDATA, click the Admin tab, then Edit/Delete, then Other, then User. Select your Username, click "Reset Password", enter your new password twice, select Yes for Admin, then click "Submit". Please be sure to select Yes for Admin - otherwise, you will lose your administrative rights to FARMDATA and will be unable to add crops, fields, more users and so on. You can add new users to your database at this point, via ADMIN > ADD> OTHER > USER. Users set up with admin status can edit and delete and send invoices, while normal staff users cannot. You can change another user’s status in the future via ADMIN EDIT, OTHER, USER.

FARMDATA pages are organized on an INPUT FORM / REPORT format. Data are mostly entered through input forms, and the data in the database is called up through reports. These will become intuitive pretty quickly. To see a database that is well populated and to get a feel for running reports, visit the Dickinson College Farm database guest page. When running a report (for example, harvest or labor), enter the report page, then set the data range to include a “from” date that goes back a year or two. Choose some specific parameters, or leave things set to “all” to see all the data under that date range. The Dickinson College Farm guest access is http://farmdata.dickinson.edu/guest.php

Your first step should be to log any plantings you have started this year through the SEED tab – use the direct seeding and tray seeding tabs as appropriate. If you have a big backlog of seeding records, check out the Backdater pages under ADMIN.

You will need to log your field plantings before you can harvest them. FARMDATA only allows you to harvest from annual crops planted in the current calendar year, or perennial crops set up to be harvested in the current year. If you have perennial plantings, you can log these through the regular planting input forms and just backdate the seeding dates.

Quick workaround tip – Currently FARMDATA does not allow you to “transplant” a crop unless a flat seeding record has been logged. To update existing field plantings of transplanted crops, it can be much speedier to log these through the direct seeding interface (a single step instead of two), and just leave yourself a note in the comments box of each entry. At the Dickinson College Farm, if we go to harvest a crop that has no planting record, sometimes we will create a “dummy” planting record on the fly – for example logging 1 row foot of CARROTS seeded in field A on today’s date will allow us to log a harvest for the carrots that are in field A – then we can go back and correct the seeding record later.
Ready to go? Again, your starting point is https://farmdata.smallfarmcentral.com/
Have fun and log some data. Please keep in touch via the user support contact options listed below.

  1. User Support:
    • For problems needing immediate attention, please email us. As volunteers we will make a sincere effort to get back to you within two business days maximum. Remember we are volunteers and have full time jobs, so a little patience and understanding is appreciated. Email Matt Steiman at steimanm@dickinson.edu and copy Daniel Grover at support@smallfarmcentral.com For speedy reply please use the subject heading “FARMDATA USER SUPPORT”

Support continues below:
• Join the FARMDATA users group on Facebook. Whatever your opinions about facebook it is a handy way to communicate with a broad group of people. We plan to post occasional feature tutorials there, and may post an answer to questions common to multiple users. To join, click here and then send a request to join, which we will approve: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1408906732746605/

• If you have a suggestion for another way to communicate with the group (google groups, etc) please feel free to email us that request.

• Bug fix requests and new feature requests: At this time we cannot guarantee bug fixes and are not promising any new feature development, but we are collecting such requests for the future. If multiple users request the same feature it will rise to the top of the to-do list, so please chime in. You can do this via email or the facebook group. We have worked most of the bugs out of FARMDATA, though a few vestigial issues persist no doubt.

• Contribute to the Sourceforge Opensource development: create an account on sourceforge and request a “ticket” under the farmdata heading… with luck somebody in the coding community will pick it up.

Finally, the fine print: FARMDATA is open-source software, so it comes with no warranty. Please read the licensing information here:
https://farmdata.smallfarmcentral.com/setup/gpl-3.0-standalone.html

By using FARMDATA, you agree to this license. Additionally, we make no guarantee as to what will happen at the end of the free Small Farm Central pilot program. Small Farm Central may simply stop offering FARMDATA, may start charging a subscription fee, etc. If you like FARMDATA send your comments to Small Farm Central to encourage continuation. We do pledge to help you transition your data to another server if the program is terminated, or even if you just decide to install FARMDATA on your own web server.

OK That’s it! Good luck and please let us know how you make out. We encourage you to put in some time, get set up, and make use of this powerful tool for farm management and efficiency!

Stay in touch.
Sincerely

Matt Steiman (Farmer, Dickinson College Farm)
Dr. Tim Wahls (Technical Developer, Dickinson College Computer Science)
Daniel Grover (User services, Small Farm Central)