General Tips to Enhance your Cropping Module agCommander Experience

The "take home message" from this article is... The time taken to configure your agCommander accurately and well will pay you back over and over in both agCommander desktop and mobile applications and in the quality of the information provided when using reports.

There are two tabs on the cropping module that allow access to agCommanders cropping configuration; Configuration Tab and Options Tab.

Setup your Crops and their Varieties via the Crops tab for all crops including annuals, perennials and Orchards.

Annual (or Non-Perennial) Crops

To setup annual crops you must first create the Crop type (E.g. Apples, Wheat, Barley etc) by clicking on the +Add button:

Then fill in the crop details:

Crop Name: The On-farm name given to a type of crop.

Crop Type: The type of crop drop down list with such as for example as; Legume, Citrus, Berry, Tree Nut etc

Harvest Unit: The Unit of Measure for a given crop types harvesting; E.g. Each, Kilograms, Tonnes etc

Indicator Colour: This is the identifying colour for a crop on list views or season views (is optional).

Account Code: Optional financial code for a crop variety.

Uses Special Harvest Units: Tickbox to indicate there are user defined measurements for harvesting this type of crop.

Is Perennial: Tickbox to indicate if crop type is Perennial. For Annual crops leave unticked.

After setting up a crop type, you will then need to enter all the crop varieties under the Crop Varieties Tab:

Click the +Add button under varieties:

Enter details for the Crop Variety

You should now see the new variety on the list:

Perennial Crops

Refer to this article to setup perennial crops.

Orchard Setup

Refer to this article to setup Orchards.

To setup Consumables such as Chemicals and Fertilisers, click on the Consumables tab within the Configuration menu.

When setting up consumables, always set up a Default Rate and Rate Type

For Fertilisers, make sure you set up the Nutrient Percentages to ensure you get useful reporting by nutrient applied 

For Chemicals, a combination of default rates and tank mixes can save a lot of time. 

Chemical tank mixes can be created within the Configuration section of the program, but can also be created on-the-fly when entering spray jobs. Look for the "Save as New Tank Mix" button when adding a job. 

Chemical brand association and ingredients

Associating chemical brands with your chemicals. You are advised to associate at least one chemical brand name with each chemical because agCommander uses a lookup process to determine the active ingredients for each of your chemicals... it looks up the active ingredients of the first chemical brand name associated with a chemical.  For more information search for 'On-Farm Chemical Names, Associated Brands' in this Knowledge Base here.

Setting up sprayer configurations will save you having to add in all the sprayer details for each spray job. Search this Knowledge Base for 'Sprayer Configurations and Assets' to see how to set up Sprayer Configurations or click this link

Operations

Machinery operations are required, while assets are optional.

Machinery Operation Categories are built into agCommander. We figure the list will cover all your needs. Certain categories: Chemical Application, Fertiliser Application, Harvesting, Hay Making and Planting are used by the program to filter your user-defined Operations when you choose one of those operation types.

TIP: Set up a Default Area Per Hour for each operation. By doing that, agCommander will calculate the hours for a job based on the area of the fields you've chosen. You can alter the calculated hours if you need to.

Running Costs

You can assign a cost per area, hour or item to operations.

Assets

Setting up assets and using assets in machinery events is optional.

If you do set up assets, it is important that you assign operation to those assets so that your list of assets is filtered by operation when adding your machinery event records.

Running Costs

If you assign running costs to an asset, those costs will be used in reporting in preference to your operation costs.

What you might like to do is set up costs for your operations but not for your assets. That makes sense for jobs involving multiple assets. A tractor and an implement for example.

Fuel Consumption and Costs

Fuels are set up under Consumables and costs maintained like all other costs in the Input Costs Management system.

If you want to record fuel consumption and costs, you need to set up assets and assign them a default consumption per hour.

Should you set up fuel consumption data for Tractors or Implements?

As tractors can potentially be used for many jobs, both light duty and heavy duty, it might be best to assign the fuel consumption to your implements. Of course for self propelled machinery (sprayers, harvesters, etc.) just assign the fuel consumption settings to those assets.

PLEASE NOTE: For Irrigation Records

A water source or pump is set up as an asset for irrigation records and if you want to record the costs of operating that water source you will need to assign either a cost per hour or per unit of water for your water source assets.  

Saving a job as a Template is the best way to save on your data entry time going forward. Be sure to name your template well as over time you will find yourself saving many  and there will come a time when you will forget what they are for. You can maintain templates and add a long description to them to remind you what they are for under Cropping > Configuration > Activity Templates and Scenarios.

Well constructed templates can save you a lot of data entry time. 

Search for 'Templates & Scenarios' in this Knowledge Base for more information.