FarmQA holds your operation as a set of connected pieces: who you are, the land you work, what you grow, the plans and records you build around it, and the analysis you pull back out. This article is the map. It explains each piece and how the pieces connect. It has no steps. The articles linked throughout are where you act on each one.
You don't have to set everything up before you start. Most operations get their organization, fields, and crops in place first, scout and sample through the season, and add planning, lab connections, and analysis as they need them.
Your operation: enterprise and organizations
Your enterprise is your whole operation as FarmQA sees it, the top level of your account. Beneath it, you build a tree of organizations that matches the way you actually run: for example, growers, and farms under each grower. Your account defines which organization types you can use, so the levels carry your names, not ours.
Where people sit in this tree controls what they can see and change. You give each person a role on an organization, and you can apply it to every level below. An agronomist can have full control of one location and no access to the others.
Related: Setting up and editing your organization structure, User licenses and roles, Manage users.
The calendar: growing seasons
A growing season scopes your data to a crop year. Recommendations and application records always belong to a season, and scouting reports, tasks, and soil samples usually do too. That's what keeps this year's work separate from last year's.
Each season has a state. Draft is for setting up a season ahead of time, Active is the season you're working in, and Archive keeps the data but hides the season from your users.
Related: Manage growing seasons.
The land: fields
A field starts as a boundary that belongs to one of your organizations. The boundary carries over from year to year. Each season, the field is added to that season and gets that year's crop. This is why the same field can show a different crop in each season while its shape and its organization stay the same.
Most of what happens in FarmQA happens on a field: scouting, recommendations, application records, soil samples, zones, and tasks all point back to one.
Related: Creating fields, Assigning crops and varieties to fields.
What you grow: crops, varieties, and scouting templates
Crops and varieties are lists your account keeps. You assign a crop, and optionally a variety, to each field for the season.
Each crop can carry a default scouting template, and a variety can use its own. When someone scouts a field, FarmQA opens the template that matches the field's crop, so scouts answer the right questions without choosing a template each time.
Related: Adding varieties, Assigning default scouting templates to crops.
What you see: scouting reports and markers
A scouting report is a filled-out template for a field: the observations a scout recorded, in the template's sections and questions. Each report keeps the version of the template it was filled out with, so editing a template later doesn't change reports already submitted.
Markers are points you place on the map, such as field entrances, scouting locations, insect traps, soil sample locations, and weather stations. A marker type can open a scouting template, so a scout at a trap line fills out the trap template.
Related: Editing an existing scouting template.
What you apply: products, mixes, recommendations, and application records
A product is an input you apply: herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers, seed, biologicals, adjuvants, and more. A mix combines several products with their rates so you can reuse it.
A recommendation is your advice: which products or which mix to apply, on which fields. It can be linked to the scouting reports that prompted it. When a recommendation is completed on a field, FarmQA creates an application record for that field, the record of what was actually applied. You can also create an application record directly, without a recommendation.
This is the advice-to-application path. It runs separately from the variable-rate path described below.
Related: Adding chemical products, Working with recommendations in FarmQA.
The season ahead: crop plans
A crop plan lays out the season before it starts. You build a plan template for a crop, with the steps you expect to take. You then create a plan for an organization and season, which gives each field its own field plan. Committing the plan sets up the fields for that season.
As the season runs, each plan step can link to the work that fulfills it: a recommendation, an application record, or a task. Plan progress shows which steps are done, in progress, or skipped.
Related: Crop Planning.
The soil: sampling and results
Soil sampling runs as a loop. You mark sample locations on a field, collect samples at the depths you've set up, and bring results back from your lab, either through an import profile or through a lab connection that imports them for you. Sample locations are markers, so they show on the map like any other point.
Soil results are useful on their own, and they're also a main input to management zones.
Related: Soil Sampling in FarmQA.
Variable rate: management zones and prescriptions
A management zone map divides a field into areas that should be treated differently. You build zones in the Zone Designer from spatial data in your account, such as soil results and imagery.
A prescription is built on a zone map and sets a rate for each zone, ready to export to equipment. Formulas take this further: they turn soil results into nutrient, seeding, or product rate maps.
Related: Creating management zones and writing prescriptions.
The work: tasks
A task is a piece of work assigned to a person, with a window to do it in. Each task has a type, such as scouting, application, soil sample, review, planting, or harvest. Tasks connect to the rest of FarmQA: an application task can come from a recommendation, and a review task from a scouting report. The work list shows everyone what's theirs to do.
Tasks need your account's Tasks add-on, and each person who uses them needs a Workflow license.
Related: Overview of work and task functionality in FarmQA, Manage users.
The history: Field Journal
The Field Journal is a field's timeline. It shows planting and harvest, scouting reports, recommendations, applications, water, and harvest status events, for one season or across all seasons, and you can export it to PDF.
The journal doesn't hold anything new. It collects what's already recorded elsewhere on the field into one view.
Related: Field Journals.
The analysis: Analytics
Analytics turns your records into numbers you can track. A metric defines what to measure, and scouting questions are one of its sources. A visualization shows a metric as a chart. A dashboard collects visualizations, and you can publish dashboards for your users.
Related: Setting up dashboards.
Your own maps: map layers
Map layers bring your own maps and images onto your fields. A layer can be permanent, tied to a growing season, or time based. Map layers sit alongside the rest of your data for reference. They don't feed recommendations or zones.
Related: Adding map layers.
How it fits together
Your enterprise sits at the top, branched by your organization tree down to fields, and each person's role on that tree controls what they see. Growing seasons scope the year. Each season, a field gets a crop, and the crop's template drives scouting. Scouting leads to recommendations, which become application records when the work is done. Soil samples produce results you read directly and feed management zones, which drive prescriptions. Crop plans lay out the season ahead and link to the work as it happens. Tasks carry the actual doing. The Field Journal records each field's history, and Analytics reads across all of it.