Horticulture & Protected Cropping
Horticulture: For Farmers
What Horticulture changes for the person actually doing the work.
For the person running the business, the test of any farm software is whether it removes work or adds it. Horticulture runs on tighter margins, shorter windows and far heavier compliance than combinable cropping, with labour as the dominant cost and residue testing as the dominant risk. This module carries crop-walk records, harvest scheduling, labour planning, cold chain handover and the retailer-specific assurance evidence that a horticultural business lives or dies by.
In their words
What the job actually looks like
These are not marketing personas. Each one is a distinct job with a distinct constraint, and the module is designed so that solving one does not create work for the others.
Soft fruit grower, Kent
60 ha protected strawberries and raspberries
Needs labour and harvest planning to move together or fruit is left on the plant.
- Plan the cropping programme against contracted volume
- Propagate or plant and record establishment
- Walk crops and record pest and disease pressure
- Apply nutrition and protection within intervals
Field vegetable producer
Brassicas and roots for a multiple retailer
Needs residue and specification evidence available on demand for an unannounced audit.
- Propagate or plant and record establishment
- Walk crops and record pest and disease pressure
- Apply nutrition and protection within intervals
- Forecast maturity and schedule labour
Packhouse manager
Grading and despatch
Needs lot-level traceability that survives a recall exercise.
- Walk crops and record pest and disease pressure
- Apply nutrition and protection within intervals
- Forecast maturity and schedule labour
- Harvest, grade and pack to specification
End to end
How Horticulture runs, start to finish
The module is modelled as a state machine, so at any point the business knows exactly which stage every record is at and what has to happen next.
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1
Plan the cropping programme against contracted volume
This is where the record starts, and getting it right here removes work at every later stage.
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2
Propagate or plant and record establishment
The platform prompts only for what this stage genuinely needs, and carries everything forward.
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3
Walk crops and record pest and disease pressure
Conflicts with scheme rules, regulatory windows and existing commitments are flagged here rather than discovered later.
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4
Apply nutrition and protection within intervals
Capture works offline, so this stage is completed in the field rather than remembered afterwards.
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5
Forecast maturity and schedule labour
Everything recorded at this point becomes evidence automatically, in every format that will later ask for it.
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6
Harvest, grade and pack to specification
This is the stage most businesses currently do twice, once for the operation and once for the paperwork.
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7
Despatch through the cold chain with full traceability
Results feed the whole-farm view, so the effect of this stage is visible against the rest of the business.
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8
Reconcile against contract and analyse grade-out
The cycle closes here, and what is learned is carried into next season's plan rather than lost.
Capabilities
What Horticulture does
Every capability below is built on the same underlying record, so entering something once is enough for it to appear wherever it is needed.
Record and plan
- Crop walk records with pest, disease and beneficial counts by block and by bed
- Harvest scheduling against forecast demand, with pick-by-date and cold chain handover
- Labour planning by task, with piece rate and hourly cost modelling
Operate and monitor
- Seasonal Worker sponsorship record keeping and compliance evidence
- Residue and Maximum Residue Level compliance with pre-harvest interval enforcement
- Protected cropping environment control logging — temperature, humidity, CO2 and irrigation
Comply and evidence
- Substrate, hydroponic and soil-grown nutrition programme management
- Pollination management including managed bumblebee and honeybee hive records
- Retailer specification tracker with grade-out and rejection analysis
Analyse and improve
- Packhouse throughput, grade-out and yield recovery reporting
- Traceability from bed to pallet with lot-level recall capability
- Water use and irrigation scheduling per crop stage under abstraction constraints
Benchmarking
How this compares with businesses like yours
A cohort is only useful if it is genuinely comparable, so it is built from farm type, soil grade, region and scale rather than from whoever happens to have signed up. Your own figure is never shown to anyone else.
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Saleable yield per hectare
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 34 Median 52 Upper quartile 74
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Grade-out percentage
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 36 Median 51 Upper quartile 85
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Cost per kilogram packed
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 37 Median 61 Upper quartile 72
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Labour hours per tonne
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 37 Median 61 Upper quartile 87
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Rejection and claim rate
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 27 Median 62 Upper quartile 80
How the cohort is built
- Farm type
- Matched
- Soil grade
- Matched
- Region
- Matched
- Scale band
- Matched
- Cohort size
- Minimum 12 businesses, or no comparison is shown
Worked example
How a business like yours would use Horticulture
The problem: Needs labour and harvest planning to move together or fruit is left on the plant.
What they do
- Plan the cropping programme against contracted volume
- Propagate or plant and record establishment
- Walk crops and record pest and disease pressure
- Apply nutrition and protection within intervals
What changes
- Saleable yield per hectare
- Grade-out percentage
- Cost per kilogram packed
This is an illustrative worked example built from the module design, not a customer reference. Named case studies are published only with the business's written consent.
What we are hearing
The problems people describe to us
These are composite statements drawn from user research conversations, not attributed customer quotes. We publish named references only with written consent.
I am not short of software. I am short of one place where the same field means the same thing in all of it.
The scheme closed on a Tuesday evening. I had the application half built. Nobody told me the budget was nearly gone.
We farm on both sides of the border. Everything takes twice as long and I still cannot see the whole position on one screen.
Audit week costs me three days. Every single record they ask for is already written down somewhere on this farm.
Measurement
How you will know it is working
The module reports against these measures from the day it is switched on, so the value is demonstrable rather than assumed.
- 01Saleable yield per hectare
- 02Grade-out percentage
- 03Cost per kilogram packed
- 04Labour hours per tonne
- 05Rejection and claim rate
- 06Residue compliance rate
Free assessment
Find out where you stand in about ten minutes
A structured assessment producing a scored report with a prioritised list of what to fix first, and what it is worth fixing.