IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING – Roger’s Ramblings
•  THE NUTRISENS MODULE
• agCOMMANDER ENTERPRISE Group Manager
• NEW FEATURES in agCOMMANDER  –  
  • Cropping Features
  • Livestock Features
  • Asset Manager Pro Features
  • Inventory Features
  • Mapping Features
• MIND MY ASSETS 2 
• THE N-WATCH REPORT

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING – Roger’s Ramblings

As mentioned in August ‘23 we have been extremely busy since November 2022 building integrations with other software. As you will see below, we have built a very comprehensive system known as the Nutrisens Module that is being used already in South America, Spain and Israel to monitor and chart data coming from various sources.

• Data loggers with sensors for weather data, soil moisture probes, dendrometers and nutrisens probes.
• Satellite imagery of up to 7 index types
• Forecast weather data, in particular the forecast changes in Vapour Pressure Deficit over the next 7 days
• Specialized Scouting records (Sap tests, Suction Probe tests, Fruit Loads (mass)  and Fruit Counts, Canopy %s, etc).
• Water Test results for water being used for irrigation with and without nutrients from fertigation.

The system is capable of generating Irrigation Recommendations using a methodology which has been devised and refined over the past 20 years by the highly skilled agronomist, Rafael Garrido, who has advised us every step along the way. The methodology uses Satellite Imagery to extrapolate the recommended irrigation hours or mm at the monitoring point making adjustments to the recommended hours or mm in all neighboring fields or blocks (associated areas).
It is also capable of Irrigation Scheduling using more traditional methods for those without the Satellite Imagery component.

Much of our time has been spent developing integrations with various data loggers, including Adcon, Ranch, Metos and Lattech with more in the pipeline.
For the Lattech logger (https://www.lattech.co.za), the RavahTech development team in the US have built the data warehouse to ingest and store all sensor data for the agricultural sector coming from Lattech loggers. The warehouse and associated software is ingesting vast amounts of data from loggers worldwide.

Based on the source code of the Nutrisens Module, we have created numerous software variants to suit various market niches:

• N-Watch – read about N-WATCH here: https://www.agcommander.com/n-watch
• Nutrisens-Core
• Nutrisens-Lite
• Nutrisens-Basic

At the end of this newsletter is a listing of all the other features added to agCommander since the last newsletter.

Finally I would like to wish you all a successful 2024. I thank all those who have joined us since the last newsletter and also thank all those who have provided feedback to help us to continue to improve our software.

Best Wishes

Roger Wiese

CEO & Founder

THE NUTRISENS MODULE 

Our work on what is known as the Nutrisens Module is now almost complete.
Here are some screenshots of the various tabs

Above: Satellite Imagery and numeric indexes for Leaf Area , Stress, Trend, Vegetative Difference, Vegetative Vigor and Vegetative Monitoring. The chart on the right will show year to year comparisons of each of the indexes.

Above: Charts showing the 7 day foreast for the selected area. Clients can optionally choose to pay for “intelligent” weather forecasts based on data sent to the cloud from on-farm weather stations. Using that data, the models used to calculate the forecast weather data learn and improve over time by comparing the calculated forecast weather with the actual weather that eventuated.  Machine Learning!

Above: The “Daily Tracker” chart incorporating irrigation scheduling  and trends in plant moisture uptake and average root zone soil moisture. Also on the chart is data from a dendrometer, the hourly vapour pressure deficit, applied water and rainfall. The yellow section at the top of the chart is where you set up the future dates for irrigation and where you will see the recommended hours and mm to apply for the next irrigation event.

You can also fine tune (if necessary), those hours or mm for the next irrigation event if you think that’s needed

Above: “All Sensors”. A highly user-configurable, user-friendly charting system to compare data from all sensors at a monitoring point plus scouting results and the satellite imagery derived index values.

Above: The Irrigation Recommendation screen. The data is generated automatically after some initial (optional) overriding of the recommended hours or mm of irrigation at the monitoring point.
The user can optionally alter the recommended hours or mm for each area by a percentage and the final calculated hours or mm for each area is shown in the rightmost 2 columns.
There is a “Create Work Orders” button that will generate the work orders for the areas based on the recommended and calculated dates, hours or mm

Above: The Scouting Results tab. The scouting dates for a season are listed down the side. The results are always geo-located and represented by circles coloured by the results. On the right hand side a panel can be displayed showing the scouting results over time for a selected area and can show a comparison of any number of years.

 agCOMMANDER ENTERPRISE GROUP MANAGER

A new subscription type for agCommander: “agCOMMANDER Enterprise Group Manager” (or “GM” for short) for consultants, agronomy groups and farm advisors (the Group managers) to operate and manage for their clients. Their clients will have access to their own businesses as a Sub-Client. There is no charge for the Group Manager license. Group Managers will sell the access licenses to their clients.

 Farmer (Sub-Clients) will have a choice of running agCommander in “Simplified Mode” or “Pro Mode” and will have the choice of paying an extra fee for the normal agCommander Add-ons. The Group managers will be paid a commission on the extra, Add-on, fees paid by the farmer clients.

NEW FEATURES in agCOMMANDER

There have been many minor and some very major enhancements to agCommander in the past seven months. All fixes and features are published in the program on the Information or About screen. The following is a list of the more substantial features added this year to date.

CROPPING MODULE FEATURES

NEW BUDGETING FEATURES

You can now convert all budgeted jobs for a period to work orders with one click (from the Diary View)

When Budgeting: Yield for a cropped area is added as an Expected Yield/Area. There are no Harvest Delivery Records. Any Machinery job that uses Cost Per Harvested Tonne (or Ton) will now use the Expected Yield/Area to generate a cost in the budget. For example:  This will apply if you have Harvesting Costs and/or Transport Costs set up for costing per Per Harvested Tonne (or Ton). Furthermore, if you are using an Asset in your records and the Operation is set up for costing by $/Area, but the Asset is set up for costing by $/Tonne, then your machinery costing for the job will use the Assets cost per T.

Budgeting for Perennial (Tree & Vine) crops only: An option to bulk apply expected Yields and Expected Prices to all areas in the budget has been added. Look for the new option on the “Budgets” menu: “Bulk Apply Harvest Yields and Prices to Areas”. You can filter on the Farm, Field & Variety column headings and an overall Crop filter to streamline and speed up the process of applying different yields and prices at whatever level you need.  Prices & Yields that have been applied in bulk can also be overridden on each row as the Yield & Price columns are editable.

A special new report to compare “Consumable Totals Budget vs Actual”. This report can use any of your budgets as the source of the budgeted data. Find this report under Cropping > Reports > Tabular > Consumables

When converting a budgeted event to a work order or actual event, the area selection panel now shows the Actual cropped areas, as opposed to the Budgeted cropped areas.  This means that events that were added to an area in the budget can be allocated to an actual cropped area.

OTHER CROPPING RELATED FEATURES

• The Dashboard: The Work Order Map Report now now has new options to display data for: Past Due, Pending within 2 days, 7 days, 14 days
• When converting a Work Order to In Progress, you can now assign a member of staff to the “In Progress” work order
• When splitting off individual areas when entering a job, you can now opt to split off the selected areas as a new group for the split off task, as opposed to a series of tasks with individual areas.
• The way the program handles “Spot Spraying” has been improved. Please refer to the Knowledge Base for more information. Search  “Spot Spraying”
• A new Report added – Crop Yields, Costs, Income for a Selected Season. The report includes a column showing Average Price / Harvest Unit on the Crop Incomes, Expenditure & Yields report
• View Machinery Costs split up by Operation Category. To see the split up, click on the Machinery label on the Season Summary Costs table to see a breakdown of machinery costs by operation category  The breakdown of machinery costs by operation category is also displayed on the Season Summary  Report (including Charts).

LIVESTOCK MODULE FEATURES

LIVESTOCK BUDGETING – Repeating from the August Newsletter !

Of all the new features added to agCommander in the last 6 months, the Livestock Budgeting System wins first prize in terms of the amount of work involved. Since 2001, we have built a Livestock Budgeting System 4 times. Once for AACo that was used from 2001 to 2009. We then built another one for AACo in 2010. Around 2014-15 we were asked by a group of clients: Hassad, Dunkeld Pastoral and Minderoo, to build one into PAM. We gathered together all the requirements and spent a long time discussing how it would or should work. As it happened, the PAM Livestock Budget never made it into PAM, however we are pleased to say that all the great ideas that we gathered along the way have been incorporated into the new agCommander Livestock Budgeting Module.
To understand how to use it, please read the Knowledge Base article. Just search for Livestock Budget

EXTRA LIVESTOCK REPORTS

• Labour Usage Report
• A shortcut button to view the Stocked Fields report from the Livestock Diary screen

In various places throughout, you will find buttons that link through to the relevant Knowledge Base articles.

An option to automatically “Move offspring with their mothers”. (See under the “Options” Tab)

An option to automatically move Sires in with Females when recording a mating  (See under the “Options” Tab)

ASSET MANAGER PRO MODULE FEATURES

• Filtering to hide assets without any recorded Services, Checklist Records, Overheads Records and Tyre Replacement Records records added to each screen.
• A new report: Asset Status Report showing last service date, next service date, current odometer reading, last service odometer reading, odometer at next service and days or odometer units left to go before next service.
• Inventory of Parts – Repeat Last Purchase button to save having to type in the same information when entering a list of parts off the same invoice
• The Emailed Notification of Assets with a Service Due now shows more detailed information
• A filter on the parts selector when setting up Service Packs has been added
• A filter option when applying a Service Pack – to restrict the parts applied to the service to those belonging to the currently selected asset
• Log Book Records added – to record vehicle asset usage records
• Extra columns have been added to the Inventory Stock on Hand table showing Assets, Asset Type and Part Group
• A new part Description column displayed when setting up or reviewing Service Packs
• A Serial Number has been added to the Asset attributes

INVENTORY MODULE FEATURES

When adding multiple new inventory purchases that are on the same invoice, you will now see a new “Repeat Last” button. Clicking on that button will repeat most of the items on the Inventory Purchases form to save time with data entry. Please note that the button will only appear once you have entered the first purchase for a session.

NEW MAPPING FEATURES

You can now import GeoTiff image files and overlay them over your farm maps. Only available in  Pro and Enterprise versions..

You can now import KMZ files with images

Wherever there is a map displayed in agCommander there is a new button to “Download the Map as an Image”. This will download a high resolution map as a PNG file and include an embedded legend where applicable.  In all areas except the main mapping module, the “Print” button has been replaced by this new  “Download the Map as an Image” button.  For more information, search  “Printing Maps” in the Knowledge Base

NEW WEATHER FEATURES

agCommander now supports weather data coming from Adcon Weather Stations (via the Adcon addVANTAGE Pro system) for weather and auto weather.

agCommander now has support for Ranch weather stations for weather and auto weather.

NEW SYSTEM SETUP FEATURES

On the Tools menu in the Farms Fields configuration area there is a new option to import a Zipped up SHAPE file from the John Deere Operation Center to create your Farm Maps, Farms & Fields in one pass.

MIND MY ASSETS 2

Ever since 1991 we have had a program used for keeping track of assets, their service records and other important information. A single place to keep all the engine numbers, serial numbers, next service dates, locations and a lot, lot more. A system which can be used by your team members for checklists of important things to monitor prior to operating a machine. That program was called “MAX”.
Back in 2016 we moved MAX to the cloud under the new name of MindMyAssets.
In the second half of 2023 we developed the agCommander module: Asset Manager Pro based on the MindMyAssets program. We had several requests to include that system into agCommander.

Having built the Asset Manager Pro module, we then used that part of agCommander to create a new MindMyAssets which we have named MindMyAssets 2 (MMA2). We have now migrated all our MindMyAssets clients to the new MMA2!
If you are running agCommander but not subscribed to either “Pro” or “Enterprise”, you can add on the Asset Manager Pro module for a small annual fee. MMA2 is used by many non-farming organisations including Municipal Councils,  Machinery Hire companies, Drilling companies etc.

If you know anyone who might be interested in our MMA2 program, please tell them to contact us or point them at the website: https://www.agcommander.com/mindmyassets

THE N-WATCH REPORT

N-WATCH is a world-first system designed to monitor the leaching of nutrients (Nitrate and Potassium) in soil 24/7.
As you will no doubt be aware,  nitrate leaching is harmful to the environment because it can contaminate groundwater and surface water sources. High levels of nitrates in water bodies can lead to eutrophication, which causes excessive algae growth, depletes oxygen levels, and harms aquatic life.

Below is a screenshot of the N-WATCH Report which shows the daily average concentration of N & K in ppm as well as the total N (Nitrate) leached for the selected period.

Read more about N-WATCH here: https://www.agcommander.com/n-watch

Thanks for reading!

BEST WISHES FROM THE agCOMMANDER TEAM