I am building a crop planning tool in airtable for our farm.
To simplify, we crop plan with some of the following considerations:
- What crops are going in a bed (we are diversified farm, and plant multiple species together) - each crop is its own records, so a bed plan will typically have 2-3 crop plan records associate with it. In special cases, there will be around 10 (cover cropping).
- What bed they are going in
- Expected planting date and expected removal date
- What was growing previously, for crop rotation and other considerations
This would be much easier to do visually. I would like to be able to drag plans forward/back and between beds, to help them fit together.
A few difficulties:
- As we have multiple plans to a bed, each crop in a plan is it's own line in timeline. This takes up a lot of vertical space, meaning I don't have a good overview. Sometimes I can only see 3-4 beds at a time, and I need to be able to see a much higher number (we have 50 beds and growing) for this to be effective.
- Grouping crops. It's easy to "lose" part of a plan, as I can't grab them together to drag around. I've played with a linked "ID" table. Each ID record is a code, with a link to the relevant crops. This is a somewhat awkward workflow (I have to manually make sure each crop is given the right code, so there is a risk of error). The other issue is I need the planning information to be dynamic, as real world actions and plans change, and managing that key info across multiple tables is cumbersome and too prone to human error.
Is this something that interfaces could help resolve? I haven't started trying to learn interfaces at all yet..
