When Clayton Carter left his job as a software developer to start farming in 2006, he found little in the way of software to keep track of the multiple crops and tasks on his diversified vegetable farm.
“Our first year of growing, the largest obstacle I had was making sure I could keep track of what to do and when to do it,” he said.

Although he set up an Excel spreadsheet for his tasks, he found it was hard to extract clear, simple information. So he applied for and received a USDA-SARE grant to develop crop planning software, and worked on it during the winters of 2007 and 2008.

His program is now available online free at http://code.google.com/p/cropplanning/. The grant funding has run out, and Clayton is accepting donations for the software, but at present he continues to refine it without compensation. “It’s certainly far from complete, but it’s usable,” he said. “We’ve been using it on our farm for two years, and it’s been downloaded more than 1,000 times.”

The software has three core areas:
A crop database. You enter all the information for your crops such as variety name, seed source, whether the crop is direct seeded or transplanted, plant spacing, and other cultural information. “It does not come with a starter data set,” Clayton said. So the more careful and complete you are when entering crop information into the database, the more useful the program will be in the future.

A crop plan. You enter the crops you want to plant and the software will draw in the cultural information you entered in the database. At that point, you can specify how much you want to plant. You can enter a number of beds or row feet and the program calculates how many transplants you need. Enter a desired yield, such as 100 heads of lettuce per week, and the program tells you how many row feet or beds to plant. Enter your desired harvest date and the program estimates when to plant.

Weekly to-do lists for the greenhouse and the field. Based on your crop plan and the information in the crop database, the software can produce a file of all the crops scheduled to be seeded or planted this week. You check off items as you complete them, and if you print out the list again, it won’t print the things you’ve already done. It also keeps track of future tasks; for example, if you entered into the database that you wanted to seed a crop in the greenhouse on March 1 and plant it out five weeks later, that crop will show up in the field planting list when the time arrives. It also will remind you of the things you didn’t get done in previous weeks.

There are several things the software doesn’t do but Clayton would like to add when he gets the time: estimated seed amounts, estimated labor requirements, and tracking annual yields. He also would like to develop some “sanity checks” such as warnings about planting tender crops before the frost-free date, and scheduling too many plantings for the land base or greenhouse space.

The key to using it successfully is to enter the most complete information possible at the outset. 
“It comes right now as a blank slate. For a lot of new growers, that’s probably a detriment, but for experienced growers it’s not a problem,” he said.