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Creative ways to use Calendar View

by May 18, 2010SMS™ Software

Crop Milestone recorded on SMS Advanced Calendar, click to enlarge.

How many of you keep track of rain or other weather events on a calendar throughout the growing season? That information (when recorded) is very valuable and easy to reference.  However, what about two years ago? Can you find the information for that season to help remember if it was wet, dry or average?  Some of our SMS Advanced customers are using the Calendar View to track significant weather events and crop milestones.  A few examples include crop emergence, ear fill and fertilizer/chemical applications. It's pretty obvious how recording weather and crop milestones can help with managing your crop enterprise, but there are others items that can impact farm operation efficiency. A few examples include  marketing decisions, equipment service and significant dates (crop insurance deadlines, government reports, seed/input discount deadlines, etc)

.Calendar management filter, click to enlarge.

Additionally, users that do a lot of spraying, have found that it can be beneficial to use the Daily View to see the order of fields sprayed for liability claims. This is especially helpful if there is a question regarding tank clean out.  You can filter the data in the calendar as well, making it easier to find information. Any time you log field operations, such as planting or spraying, and read that data into the software, they are entered on the calendar as well.  You can further filter this information by field, operation or product to help see more details, summary or map information about the events.  This is a unique feature to SMS Advanced and allows you to visualize data in a different way than the traditional Management Tree.

Calendar Day View, click to enlarge.

As things get busy in the spring or fall, you can even look back and see what happened in each field on a particular day, as well as see the statistics for that day – sometimes making you tired all over again. There are many other items you can use the calendar for, all it takes is a right click on the day in the calendar and select Add Event, and you are ready to make an entry to track what's important to you.