A tomato grower buys seed in February, pays for water and labour through the summer, and sells in June and July. The question that matters, whether Field A3 made money, is answered in a notebook and a bank statement, if at all.

Agriculture attaches cost to the crop cycle when it happens.

Farm, field, cycle

A farm has fields, each with area in hectares, soil and irrigation. A cycle is one crop on one field for one season: planned, then active, then closed. The database allows one open cycle per field at a time, and a cycle's farm, field and currency are fixed once created.

Each farm uses a warehouse, so inputs and produce are ordinary stock.

Two kinds of cost

Inputs such as seed, fertiliser and pesticide are issued from the farm warehouse onto the cycle, at the warehouse's moving-average cost. The cost is frozen when the stock leaves.

Other costs are things that do not come from stock: labour, irrigation, machinery and fuel. They are recorded against the cycle with a category.

Both are append-only. You cannot edit or delete an input or cost, and a closed cycle takes no new records. If you made a mistake, you record the correction and see both.

Harvest at cost

A harvest receives produce into the farm warehouse and absorbs cost from the cycle, so the produce is valued at what it cost to grow. That gives you cost per hectare and cost per unit harvested, and yield per hectare against what you expected.

For example, a 4-hectare cycle with SAR 86,400 of cost that yields 112 tonnes costs 21,600 per hectare and about 771 per tonne.

Sales and margin

Sell part or all of a harvest to a customer, for cash or on credit. The quantity leaves the warehouse at the moving-average cost, and the sale stores that cost beside the price. You get revenue, cost of goods, gross margin, net result and return on cost, per cycle and per crop, plus average selling price against break-even and the share of the harvest sold. You can also create a draft tax invoice from a sale.

The overview shows active cycles, area under cultivation and idle, harvests due in 30 days with overdue flagged, produce still unsold at cost, and what customers still owe.

Livestock

Herds and flocks work from a headcount ledger of births, purchases, deaths and sales. Feed, health and vaccination records, and milk, egg and meat production, are recorded per herd, and animal sales to customers are reported with the herd result netted.

Limits to plan for

  • A produce sale is costed at the warehouse average, not at the cost of the particular harvest it came from.
  • Sales cannot be reversed or credited in the module. Use Finance for an invoice credit note.
  • There are no individual animal records, and no weather or sensor data.
  • Multi-season crops like orchards are not accumulated across cycles.
  • Farm workers' pay is recorded as a cost, not run through payroll.
  • With Accounting on, farm costs post as expenses. There is no work-in-progress or herd valuation.

Reading it

Sort cycles by return on cost, not by revenue. A high-revenue crop with heavy inputs can earn less per hectare than a quieter one, and the cycle page is where that shows.