Knowing the Functions of the Field Planning and History App

The Field Planning and History app is a tool to plan growing seasons per field. The outcome of that planning process is a crop zone. Crop zones can be viewed and maintained, as well as kept as historical records.

A crop zone is an entity that identifies an area where a specific crop/variety is grown during a specific season. KPIs can be maintained on crop zone level, such as planned and actual yield, which can help keep historical data and enable performance analysis. Having an overview of and full transparency on your crop zones is crucial for the decision-making process. Therefore, historical data on crops, varieties, fields, areas, and seasons can be customized and displayed in a way that users can get a clear perspective of their current, previous, and planned seasons in one view, streamlining crop management.

In the initial screen of the Field Planning and History app, select Create Crop Zones to start the seasonal field planning process.

There are two options for creating a plan, either using a Cropping System or manually. If a predefined cropping system is selected, some information will already be mapped (for example, crop, variety, and if they were specified, crop purpose and production type). For the manual plan, data will need to be entered manually. The next figures show the two approaches (Use Cropping System and Create Manual Plan).

If you choose Use Cropping System, the existing cropping system(s) will be available for selection.

When the desired cropping system is selected, you will have the option to configure the different elements by adding details. Click on the arrows on the left to open each element and see the prefilled information, and to make edits. You must specify where the Planned Start Date, and the Farm, Field and Area should be used.

When this is done, choose Configure to move to the next step, or select Configure and Add New to configure the cropping system for another Farm, Field, Area and start date.

The remaining steps in the process are the same as those related to creating the plan manually and will be detailed next.

If Create ManuaI PIan is selected, you have the option to create different types of crop zones – Annual, Perennial, and Fallow by selecting the + icon.

For each type, you must specify the required information:

Annual Crop Zones

Select the crop, variety and season, as well as Farm, Field and Area from the available drop-down options.

Perennial Crop Zones

Select the perennial and the season. You also have the option to indicate if this is the last season for the perennial. Since the perennial already includes location information (Farm, Field, Area), this information will be populated automatically when the perennial is selected. Perennials will be described in more details in the next lesson.

In both cases, Crop Purpose and Production Type are optional fields.

Fallow Crop Zones

Specify in which season the field should not be used/planted.

More than one of the crops can be added by clicking on the + icon in the upper-right corner of the table. It is also possible to remove crops using the x at the end of each row.

At the bottom of the screen, you can choose to go to the next step or back to the previous step.

The Crop Zone Name is filled in automatically based on the information entered in the previous step, but can be edited if needed. A description can also be entered, but it’s optional. Assigned KPIs can be added by selecting the penciI icon, or if there are multiple crops zones, by clicking the check box Select All on the top right to assign KPIs to all the selected Crop Zones.

The same process can be followed for the Perennial Crop Zones. Fallow Crop Zones do not have KPIs.

Available KPIs can be selected.

When all of the information is entered, select Preview at the bottom of the screen to move to the last step.

The Preview screen gives you an overview of all the details entered and the Crop Zones that will be created. It’s still possible to edit most of this data. Otherwise, save the Plan by selecting Create at the bottom of the screen.

After receiving a confirmation message that the Crop Zones were created successfully, you will be navigated to the Field Planning and History Overview page, which is where the new crops zone(s) will be listed.

The following data is maintained during the creation of the plans:

• Crop zone: A crop zone is an entity that identifies an area where a specific crop/variety is grown during a specific season. Create and/or view and maintain crop zones using the Field Planning and History app.
• Crop Zone Group: The crop zone group can be selected. This is a group element (Crop Zones can be associated to a Crop Zone Group).
• Season*: Select a predefined season to start the farm planning. The season is an entity to describe a defined timeframe during which agricultural activities are executed.
• Crop*: A crop is an entity to identify different categories of plants cultivated by farmers. Crops can be cultivated as annual crops or perennial crops. Crops do not need to strictly follow scientific taxonomies but can be defined based on organizationally established terms. Multiple varieties can be maintained per crop with the associated variety entity.
• Crop Variety*: Select a predefined crop variety maintained in the system. Crop varieties can be a set of variety characteristics, that describe the specific attributes of a variety - for example, if it is frost resistant, genetically enhanced, and so on.
• Crop Purpose: Select the predefined crop purpose maintained in the system to associate to the farm planning. A crop purpose defines the purpose of the respective crop in the cropping system.
• Fallow Crop Zones: This is a check box that can be selected or unselected to indicate the given field will be fallow during the planned season.
• Description: The user can maintain a detailed description for the crop zone.
• Production type: Select a predefined production type maintained in the system to associate to the farm planning. A production type distinguishes different general styles of agricultural production (for example, organic).
• Cropping system*: Required when creating a Crop Zone using a predefined cropping system. A Cropping system represents an abstract sequence of crops or can also be crop combinations like intercropping or mixed cropping.
• Cropping system element: Select a predefined cropping system element during the creation of a cropping system.
• Farm*: A farm needs to be associated to the Crop Zone and previously setup in the system.
• Field*: A field needs to be associated to the Crop Zone and previously setup in the system.
• Area: An area is already associated to a field, and once the field is selected, the area will be automatically defined. Generic entity to identify an area or terrain based on organizational, environmental attributes or operational needs. Areas can be hierarchical. Area definitions also can be time dependent. Areas can be specified with a geo shape (required for a lot of use cases), or abstractly by giving an absolute area (for example 5 hectares), or a relative area (percentage of another area). Examples of these are as follows: field boundaries, or soil zones.
  Note

  To learn more, consult the following link:API Guide for SAP Intelligent Agriculture - Area