Managing Farms and Fields

The portal organizes your operation in three nested levels:

Farm → Field → Plot

Get this hierarchy right early and everything downstream — prescriptions, reports, team access — becomes simpler.

The hierarchy#

A plot must lie inside its field. A field belongs to exactly one farm.

Naming conventions#

The portal doesn't enforce naming conventions, but adopting one makes everything easier:

• Farms named by your highest-level operational unit ("Smith Farms — North").
• Fields named the way your crew calls them on the radio ("North 40", "Pivot 3", "Old Pasture"). If your fields have legal/GIS names (Section/Township/Range), put that in parentheses.
• Plots named for the purpose if they differ from the field. Most of the time the plot inherits the field name.

Example:

Farm:  Smith Farms — North
  Field: North 40 (Sec 12 T8N R3W)
    Plot: North 40
  Field: Riverside 80 (Sec 13 T8N R3W)
    Plot: Riverside 80 — Soybean trial strip
    Plot: Riverside 80 — Main

Drawing field boundaries#

You draw fields inside the Map Prescription wizard:

1. Map Prescription → Create New.
2. Pick a farm.
3. Click Draw new field.
4. Click around the field boundary. The portal places vertices as you click.
5. Click the start point again to close the polygon.
6. Click Create Field, name it, and save.

Tips for clean boundaries:

• Use the satellite background. Toggle the satellite layer in the prescription wizard's layer controls to trace exact field edges.
• Click on real corners. Don't approximate — corners that look "close enough" produce drift errors in prescription overlap.
• Don't over-vertex curved edges. Five vertices on a gentle curve is usually enough; the controller resamples anyway.
• Don't include headlands if your sprayer/drone always lifts before the field edge. Drawing the boundary at the inner edge of the headland prevents wasted product near gates.

Editing a field#

Need to fix a boundary?

• Open the prescription wizard, pick the farm and field.
• Use Select / Correct to pick the polygon.
• Use Move Points to drag vertices.
• Press Alt + Click on a vertex to delete it.
• Add a new vertex by clicking along an edge.

Save by completing the wizard step — the new boundary is persisted to the field.

Plots — when to draw them separately#

Many farmers use one plot per field, equal to the whole field. That's fine — and it's the default the wizard nudges you toward. Draw a separate plot only when:

• You're running a strip trial inside the field.
• You want to exclude a portion of the field from automated prescriptions (e.g., a low spot that's always under water).
• You need multiple crop types in one field (rare, but supported — one plot per crop).

When you create a plot, you set:

• Plot Name (required).
• Crop Type (required) — Soybean, Corn, Wheat, Cotton, Sugar cane, Coffee, Rice, Beans, Other.
• Season (required) — e.g., 2025-26. The portal validates the format.

Crop type changes by season#

The Crop Type is set per plot, and is stored alongside the Season. To track crop rotation across seasons, the cleanest pattern is:

• Create a new plot each season inside the same field.
• Name the plot with the season ("North 40 — 2026 Soybean").
• Old plots become historical records.

This keeps the field permanent and the plots ephemeral, which mirrors how rotations actually work.

Importing existing boundaries#

A bulk shapefile import is on the roadmap. Until then, you'll draw fields by hand. The map background plus reliable satellite imagery means this is faster than it sounds — most farmers draw an entire operation's worth of fields in an afternoon.

What happens when a field is deleted#

Deleting a field cascades:

• Plots inside that field are deleted.
• Prescription maps tied to those plots are archived (not auto-deleted).
• Past flight reports that referenced the field keep their data; the field name appears as historical text.

Deletion is soft — your dealer can recover a deleted field for 90 days. After that, it's permanent.

Related#

• Map Management — the dedicated view for managing all your fields.
• Team and roles — who can create or edit farms/fields/plots.
• Map Prescription reference — the wizard in full.