Getting Started

Key Concepts

Understanding Heirloom’s key concepts will enable you to use the app more efficiently. Users who grasp these concepts typically achieve better results faster.

Crops

Crops in Heirloom refer to the various types of plants that a user cultivates on their farm for any given season. Crops are generated by the Heirloom team in order to ensure that they are standardized and possess valid agronomical chart data. Users can modify a crop’s name and create customer cultivars. User-created cultivars are private and not shared with other users.

Plantings

Plantings are specific instances of crops being sown or transplanted in the field or in a greenhouse. A planting is time-based, which means it has it is planned for a certain date and has a lifetime through the year (or multiple farming years). When you create a planting, you can specify many details like the number of successions or the surface area in different units.

Plantings can have tasks that are attached to them, which will be automatically generated into your Tasks list and can be managed in the Tasks Charts. The data specific to the planting like the days to maturity (DTM), the harvest period, the revenue per unit, is automatically generated using the Charts data, although one can override those values on a per-planting basis.

Game Plan

The Game Plan acts as a dynamic calendar that outlines the timing and sequence of all plantings throughout the season or even across multiple seasons. It helps growers visualize and manage the different states of their plantings thanks to available filters, sorting tools, and drag and drop functionality.

Crop Map

The Crop Map is a visual tool that displays the physical layout of your farm’s field blocks and greenhouse with detailed information about what is planted where. The y-axis represents the month of the year while the x-axis represents the bed number.

This map is interactive, allowing users to visually manage their crop placements and understand spatial distributions by dragging and dropping their plantings around.

Many rules govern the algorithm behind the crop map assignment feature so pay attention to the planting’s length, planting date and location type as these variables have an impact on the validation of the crop map assignment.

Crop Charts

The Crop Charts is the central database of values that are used throughout the application. From Days To Maturity (DTM) to calculate when the planting is read to be harvested, to sowing distance values, tasks list per crop or harvest value per surface, the Charts data is key in automating many decisions in Heirloom. Every values in the Charts can be specified on a per crop, per cultivar or per planting basis.

Farm Map

The Farm Map offers a comprehensive view of how your field blocks and greenhouses are placed on your entire farm. This is where you create each field block or greenhouse, with specific information such as the number of beds and the length of the beds.

Once you create your blocks in the Farm Map, they will become available in the Crop Map for the plantings assignments.

Tasks

Tasks are central in Heirloom for they can be synchronized with all your plantings so you don’t have to think about them. Tasks plans can be created in the Tasks Chart where a number of tasks can defined for each of your crops. By using this feature, you will ensure all of the tasks assign to the crop are automatically generated when you create a new planting of that crop.

Also, tasks assigned to a planting are synchronized between each of them, which means when you move one of those task (for example the nursery date is postponed), all of the subsequent tasks will also be postponed. You can also create a simple custom task that is dependant on a planting’s lifecycle.