Overview:
Did planting a cover crop on your field reduce your costs in fertilizer or chemicals for your main crop? With Traction Enterprise you can better evaluate how your cover crops are impacting your bottom line on a field-by-field basis, giving you more confidence in your farming strategy.
Requirements:
- You need Cover Crop enabled as a Crop in your account. Contact Support to get this added.
- Add seed inputs in Setup>Inputs for Cover Crop seed.
Process:
You can allocate the cost of your cover crop to your main crop by adding a second Planting Task on a Crop Plan - one for the cover crop and one for the main crop.
For example, if you plan to grow oats as a cover crop in the winter, and then corn as your main crop in the summer, you will need to create separate Planting Tasks for each of those crops, and can apply both to a Crop Plan.
- Navigate to Operations>Plans>Crop Plans. Create a new Planting Task using your cover crop. You will want to check the "Cover Crop" box to signify that this is not the main crop for the field.
TIP: View this article on getting started with Crop Plans for a refresher on creating and adding tasks.
- Click Save. Now drag & drop this cover crop Planting task onto a future Crop Plan.
Note: Since cover crops are often intended to prepare the soil for future planting, it is best to add the cover crop planting task as the first task in a crop plan. For example, a cover crop applied to a field November of 2019 should be placed on your cash crop's 2020 {lan appearing at the very top of the plan (versus last, after harvesting).
You can track the profitability of each field associated with these Plans within the Profit Analyzer page, filtering by the Field Boundary or Crop Plan. The cost of planting the cover crop will be included in the financials for that particular field and crop plan, allowing you to analyze the benefits and cost savings from planting a cover crop.
Related Articles:
How can I quickly modify my Crop Plans?
How do I change or merge a Field Plan?