Improving production, energy efficiency & profitability of greenhouse crops

CropAdvice the manual for recording with CropRecord

CropAdvice

This website is of interest to professional growers of tomatoes, capsicum, cucumber and other greenhouse-grown crops. The main topics are so-called 'crop-recording', climate control and energy efficiency. For more info please scroll down.

Access is restricted to growers and horticulturists in New Zealand, in particular members of Horticulture New Zealand (HortNZ), their direct consultants and possibly some suppliers. Please register your interest here, and you will get a password sent to you by email. Normally this happens within a short while, and occasionally it may take a day or two. HortNZ members will get access automatically, while requests from others will be considered case-by-case.

Register here or if you have a password already, please login above.

What is crop-recording?

'Crop-recording' is a method to improve the production, energy efficiency and profitability of a greenhouse crop, by 'reading' the plants and steering them in the right direction. It requires particular plant measurements and data recording which you need to do every week. The observations will help you to see trends and links that you would not detect otherwise. You will see where improvements can be made. Two systems together, 'CropRecord' & 'CropAdvice' provide the tools for crop-recording. Your time and effort and the use of these systems will improve your bottom line.

CropRecord is a spreadsheet in excel for recording data such as plant growth, production, growing conditions, energy, water use, nitrogen and 'other data' in a greenhouse. The weekly plant measurements help you to accurately 'read' the plants. After you entered the plant measurements and other data into CropRecord, the system will provide tables and graphs. With crop recording you can find out if the plants are balanced or too generative or vegetative. The plant records were developed for tomatoes and capsicum, but CropRecord contains some basic recording facilities for cucumber too, while some parts of the systems are helpful for other greenhouse-grown crops as well.

CropAdvice is the short name for this website (www.cropadvice.co.nz). The first part explains what you can do with CropRecord and how to use it. A second part tells how to interpret the recorded data. Thirdly it contains knowledge and information about plant steering and more. For instance CropAdvice explains how to recognise generative or vegetative plants, and how to correct that. Further there is a wealth of information on climate control, energy efficiency and other topics. Articles that we wrote in the Grower are also available in CropAdvice.

Tested by growers. Six growers were intensively involved in developing and testing this crop-recording system. We quote some comments here from an article in the Grower of April 2007. 'CropRecord makes you look accurately at the plants and climate'. - 'CropRecord shows the effects of any mistake in climate or crop management'. - 'It is a helpful tool for decision making'. - 'The graphs in CropRecord help to see links'. - 'You analyse what is happening and you can react'. - 'We used to rely on intuition and experience. Now we make an informed decision about changing the greenhouse conditions in order to steer the plants. Some weeks later we see the required effect'. We thank the growers involved for their help and effort.

Development. CropRecord & CropAdvice are developed by CropHouse Ltd (previously called Technolutionz Ltd), with funding from Horticulture NZ and MAF Sustainable Farming Fund. The principle and the know-how come from a broad knowledge base in Europe, where so-called 'crop-registration' was developed in the 1990s. Like all computer-based systems, it has the potential to grow and develop further. Feedback (comments, compliments, complaints, suggestions) from users will be appreciated, and will assist us in improving and expanding the products. You can contact us once you're in this website via 'Contact us' or otherwise via their own website (www.crophouse.co.nz).