When only one person knows what was grown in Long Meadow
Ask who knows the farm's field history and most families will point to one person, often the older generation. They can tell you that the field behind the church was in grass until the dry year, went into winter wheat, then oilseed rape, and had a sewage sludge application once, probably ten years ago. They can tell you because they were there.
The written record is patchier. There is a diary per year in a cupboard, a spreadsheet started by a son who went to college, a folder of field plans from the agronomist, and whatever your crop recording software holds from the year it was bought. Fields have been split, merged and renamed. 'Top Piece' in one year's notes is 'Big Field North' in another.
The question 'what was in this field five years ago, and what went on it' takes an afternoon to answer, and sometimes cannot be answered at all.
Why field history fragments
The cause is not poor record keeping. Each record was kept for a reason at the time, in whatever tool was handy, and nobody expected to need to join them all up.
| Source | What it holds well | Where it falls down |
|---|---|---|
| Yearly diaries | Operations and dates, in detail | Handwritten, not searchable, fields named loosely |
| Spreadsheets | Crops and areas for a run of years | One file per year, layout changes, gaps |
| Crop recording software | Everything since it was set up | Nothing before that, and field changes break the history |
| Agronomist's plans | Recommendations and soil results | In their format, filed by date, not by field |
| Scheme and land parcel maps | Official parcel boundaries and areas | Parcels do not always match how you name fields |
Field changes are the biggest trap. When a hedge is removed and two fields become one, or a field is split for a scheme option, the history of the old fields does not automatically become the history of the new one. Software often starts the new field with a clean slate.
Rented land adds its own complication. Land taken on a farm business tenancy or a short let arrives with no history in your records, and land handed back takes its history with it unless someone saves it.
What missing history costs a farm business
Field history feeds decisions: rotations, where a particular weed or disease has been a problem, where manures went, which fields are candidates for a scheme option. The decisions are yours and your agronomist's, not ours, but they are only as good as the information in front of you.
It also feeds paperwork. Scheme applications, assurance audits, tenancy discussions and land sales all ask questions about what has happened on a piece of land. When the answer is in someone's head, the business depends on that person being available, and in a family farm handing over to the next generation, that is a real risk.
And there is the time. Every time the question is asked, someone goes to the cupboard.
The field register we build and fill
What we build is a single field register, and then we do the slow part of bringing your history into it.
- A map of your fields, drawn from your land parcel maps or boundary files, with each field's area, any names it has been known by, and its parcel references. Rented land is marked with its own dates.
- Field changes are recorded as events: a merge, a split or a boundary change, with the date. History is carried through, so the merged field knows what both halves grew.
- Past years are loaded from your spreadsheets directly. Diaries and paper plans are photographed, read automatically where the handwriting allows, and checked by a person, field by field, with anything uncertain marked as uncertain rather than guessed.
- Each field has a timeline: crop, variety, drilling and harvest dates, and key operations, with a link to the original source for each entry.
- Where you already use crop recording software such as Gatekeeper, we can export history from it and feed new records back, rather than asking you to change the tool your agronomist knows.
- A simple search answers questions like 'every field that has grown oilseed rape since a given year' or 'every field that has had organic manure applied', with the source shown.
The person who remembers the most gets a session where they can look at the timeline for each field and fill gaps by talking, which we type up. That memory is worth capturing while it is available.
Answering field questions in a minute, not an afternoon
When the agronomist asks what has been in a field over the last six years, you open the field on your phone and read the timeline. When a land agent asks about a parcel you rent, the history for your years of occupation is on one page. When the next generation takes over the field planning, they have the same knowledge the older generation had, written down.
And when a hedge comes out, the register records it and carries both histories forward.
Signs your field history needs pulling together
- Past cropping lives in diaries, yearly spreadsheets and people's memories.
- Fields have been merged, split or renamed and the records did not follow.
- Your crop software only holds history from the year you started using it.
- Answering a question about a field's past takes a trip to the cupboard.
- One person holds most of the history, and you worry about what happens when they step back.