A stack of recommendation sheets on the office printer
Your agronomist walks the crops and sends recommendations. They come as PDFs, sometimes three in a week, sometimes one covering thirty fields, sometimes an amended version of last week's with a different product because of supply. The farm manager prints them, sticks them to the office wall, and works out who is doing what tomorrow.
By Thursday the wall has recommendations for fungicides, a growth regulator, a trace element and a herbicide for one field that was not on the first sheet. Some jobs are done, some are half done, and one field was sprayed from last week's sheet, not the amended one. The operator did exactly what the sheet in his cab said.
Why recommendations and field work drift apart
The weak point is the hand-off, not the advice. A recommendation is written by field and product, but work is planned by machine, operator and day. Somebody has to translate one into the other every time, by hand.
| The recommendation says | The operator needs to know |
|---|---|
| Fields, products and rates | Which fields today, in what order, with what tank mix |
| A timing window | Whether it is urgent this week or can wait |
| Amended version, dated | That the old sheet in the cab is no longer valid |
| Notes on conditions | What to check before starting |
| Split recommendations for parts of fields | Where the boundary between the parts is |
Timing windows collide in spring. The agronomist is right about each field on its own, but the farm has one sprayer, one operator and a limited number of good spraying days. The job of turning a set of recommendations into a workable week usually falls on a farm manager who is also doing ten other things.
What a missed or outdated job costs
A field missed in a spray programme, or sprayed from a superseded sheet, is a real cost to the crop, and the agronomy side of that is for you and your agronomist. The admin side is that nobody can easily tell which recommendations have been fully carried out, which are part done and which were quietly forgotten.
There is also the time spent. Every week, someone reads PDFs, writes job lists, rings the operator, checks what got done, and then passes the same information to the office for the spray record. The same facts are written three or four times.
How we turn recommendations into a job list
What we build is a job list that fills itself from your agronomist's recommendations and tracks each one to completion.
- Recommendations are emailed or forwarded to a dedicated address. The system reads each one, whatever the layout, and pulls out fields, products, rates, timing and notes. A person checks the reading before it becomes a job.
- Each field and operation becomes a job, linked to your field list, so a recommendation for 'Barn Field' lands on the right field even if the agronomist uses a slightly different name.
- When an amended recommendation arrives for the same fields, the older jobs are marked superseded and removed from the operator's list, with the change shown.
- The farm manager sees all open jobs by timing window, grouped so jobs with the same tank mix and nearby fields sit together. Planning the day is a matter of picking from the list, not rewriting it.
- The operator sees today's jobs on a phone or cab tablet, in order, and ticks each field done, which starts the spray record for that field.
- Jobs past their timing window, or recommendations with fields not yet started, are highlighted for the manager each morning.
We do not change or second-guess the recommendation. The job list is a copy of what the agronomist said, organised so the farm can act on it.
Planning the spraying week from one list
On Monday morning the farm manager opens the job list. Two recommendations came in over the weekend and one amendment. The amended fields show as changed, and the old jobs have gone from the operator's view. The manager groups the fungicide jobs on the home block for Tuesday, leaves the trace element until later in the week, and sends the day's list to the operator.
By Wednesday night the list shows two fields left from the first recommendation, and the manager can tell the agronomist exactly where things stand without walking to the wall.
Is this how recommendations reach your team?
- Recommendation PDFs are printed and pinned to a wall or put in the cab.
- Amended recommendations sometimes do not replace the old sheet in the tractor.
- Nobody can quickly say which fields on a recommendation are still to do.
- The same details are written into job lists, spray records and the office system.
- Planning the spraying week takes the farm manager an evening.