There are five benchmarks to meet when attempting to grow a vibrant garden. If you don’t meet them, the results can be more than a little costly. Here are the necessary steps to growing a healthy crop.
Getting the fields ready
You’ll need to consider many things when preparing fields for crops. These include picking the correct seeds and deciding which crops to plant in different fields. Farmers also need to deal with pests, temperature variations, and invasive weeds along the way, and all of these can force changes in preparation. Many farmers rely on soil sampling and crop rotation strategies to counter these obstacles, but they always need to be flexible about implementing their strategies.
Crop and equipment monitoring
Science plays a surprisingly large part in monitoring crops, and there’s plenty of big data and precision technology involved. Nutrients, watering amounts, and growth measurements all come into play during monitoring, and they’re all used in unique ways for different crops. Agriculture enthusiasts should also monitor their equipment. For example, farmers should know the factors that hurt their irrigation system efficiency so they can stop the issues before they get worse.
Adaptation
There are many situations and conditions that require adaptation to grow crops successfully. For instance, you must constantly adjust watering schedules, and it takes the right kind of weather to safely spray pesticides. The data helps, but there are plenty of twists and turns along the way to the final product.
Harvest time
Every crop has a specific timing and process for harvesting, and farmers have to be on top of every detail. They must take precipitation, weather, and moisture levels into account, and farmers also have to be aware of the visual signs that individual crops are ready.
Planning for the future
There’s no rest for the weary after the harvest. Once the harvest ends, farmers have to start planning for the following year, and they need to harvest the data they’ve gathered to help them do that.
There are always ways to improve, especially since farming is such an innate juggling act to begin with. Planning is one of the necessary steps to growing a healthy crop, and for many farmers, it starts the day after the harvest and never truly ends.
