The Strategic Crop Plan™
The Strategic Crop Plan™ makes it easy to stay organized and make better production decisions. Allocating limited resources like time, moisture, land-base and dollars, in the most effective way possible is the underlying goal.
The process usually begins immediately following harvest, with evaluation of all available production, analytical, and yield data from the previous season. Moving forward, the annual cycle is composed of three trimesters: Strategy, Planning, and Growing.
- Strategy is built at an operational level, and defines goals, critical issues, threats and opportunities, and available choices. A good strategy considers landbase, cashflow, equipment, labor, and succession or exit.
- Planning is done with relevance to the overall strategy, and utilizes all the available production, analytical, and yield data as well as lessons learned from the previous seasons. The result is field specific planning that makes it easy to stay organized throughout the season.
Every individual Strategic Crop Plan considers all available data, all the relevant science, and is built by incorporating with all the knowledge and experience and processes 10-step
The field level planning is rolled up to build shopping lists, financing requirements, marketing strategies, equipment and labor logistics, and field or crop specific profit analyses. - Growing would ideally be a simple matter of executing the great planning, and collecting more data and observations for next year. However, monitoring and defending against the army of threats attacking every crop is also an important component of meeting production goals.
The range of In-Field Services varies according to the needs of every specific crop and every unique grower. Typical services could include:
- Soil temperature, soil moisture, early season weeds.
- Seed depth, packing, seed rate, fertilizer placement.
- Seed emergence, seed mortality, seed vigor, weed spectrum, frost symptomology.
- Root development, weed pressure rating, plant and weed growth staging, visual nutrient deficiencies.
- Stickyboard or pheromone insect traps, sweep netting, plant nutrient tissue testing, soil moisture and precipitation tracking, pesticide performance rating, plant disease inspection.
- Crop yield and quality analysis.
