Cereals, Oilseeds & Pulses
Combinable Crops: For Advisers & Agents
What Combinable Crops changes for agronomists, agents, vets and consultants.
Advisers need scoped access, defensible records and a way to work across a client base without re-keying. A crop-specific layer over the cropping record, carrying the agronomy, market specification and scheme interactions particular to each combinable crop. It answers the questions a general farm management system cannot: whether this variety will hit milling protein on this soil, whether the break crop is worth it against the rotation, and what the malting contract will actually reject on.
In their words
What the job actually looks like
These are not marketing personas. Each one is a distinct job with a distinct constraint, and the module is designed so that solving one does not create work for the others.
Tenant farmer
150 ha FBT
Needs to justify cropping choices to a landlord with a documented margin case.
- Set the rotation and crop mix
- Select varieties against market specification
- Budget inputs and set the nutrition target
- Drill and establish
Maltster procurement lead
Contract sourcing
Needs traceable, in-spec barley with a verifiable provenance and carbon figure.
- Select varieties against market specification
- Budget inputs and set the nutrition target
- Drill and establish
- Protect and monitor through the season
Grain trader
Regional merchant
Needs reliable, early sight of tonnage and spec to build a book.
- Budget inputs and set the nutrition target
- Drill and establish
- Protect and monitor through the season
- Harvest to specification
End to end
How Combinable Crops runs, start to finish
The module is modelled as a state machine, so at any point the business knows exactly which stage every record is at and what has to happen next.
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1
Set the rotation and crop mix
This is where the record starts, and getting it right here removes work at every later stage.
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2
Select varieties against market specification
The platform prompts only for what this stage genuinely needs, and carries everything forward.
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3
Budget inputs and set the nutrition target
Conflicts with scheme rules, regulatory windows and existing commitments are flagged here rather than discovered later.
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4
Drill and establish
Capture works offline, so this stage is completed in the field rather than remembered afterwards.
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5
Protect and monitor through the season
Everything recorded at this point becomes evidence automatically, in every format that will later ask for it.
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6
Harvest to specification
This is the stage most businesses currently do twice, once for the operation and once for the paperwork.
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7
Store, allocate and market
Results feed the whole-farm view, so the effect of this stage is visible against the rest of the business.
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8
Reconcile contract performance and rejections
The cycle closes here, and what is learned is carried into next season's plan rather than lost.
Capabilities
What Combinable Crops does
Every capability below is built on the same underlying record, so entering something once is enough for it to appear wherever it is needed.
Record and plan
- Crop-by-crop agronomy libraries for wheat, barley, oats, oilseed rape, beans, peas and linseed
- Milling and malting specification tracker with protein, Hagberg, specific weight and nitrogen targets
- Variety performance comparison filtered by region, soil type, drilling date and disease pressure
Operate and monitor
- Break crop economics comparing rotational benefit against direct margin
- Flea beetle and cabbage stem risk model for oilseed rape establishment decisions
- Pulse nitrogen credit calculation carried forward into the following crop nutrition plan
Comply and evidence
- Grain contract manager with tonnage, spec, movement window and premium tracking
- Forward selling position tracker across contracts, pools and spot sales
- Storage allocation by bin, by spec and by contract
Analyse and improve
- Rejection risk alerting when store conditions drift outside contract specification
- Cover crop and stubble management options mapped to scheme actions and payment rates
- Nitrogen use efficiency reporting per tonne of grain produced
Benchmarking
How this compares with businesses like yours
A cohort is only useful if it is genuinely comparable, so it is built from farm type, soil grade, region and scale rather than from whoever happens to have signed up. Your own figure is never shown to anyone else.
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Tonnes marketed in specification
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 20 Median 56 Upper quartile 83
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Premium captured per tonne
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 21 Median 61 Upper quartile 78
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Rejection rate
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 25 Median 53 Upper quartile 77
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Nitrogen use efficiency
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 34 Median 45 Upper quartile 72
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Break crop contribution to rotation margin
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 33 Median 52 Upper quartile 86
How the cohort is built
- Farm type
- Matched
- Soil grade
- Matched
- Region
- Matched
- Scale band
- Matched
- Cohort size
- Minimum 12 businesses, or no comparison is shown
Worked example
How a business like yours would use Combinable Crops
The problem: Wants to know which fields will make milling spec before committing the extra nitrogen.
What they do
- Set the rotation and crop mix
- Select varieties against market specification
- Budget inputs and set the nutrition target
- Drill and establish
What changes
- Tonnes marketed in specification
- Premium captured per tonne
- Rejection rate
This is an illustrative worked example built from the module design, not a customer reference. Named case studies are published only with the business's written consent.
What we are hearing
The problems people describe to us
These are composite statements drawn from user research conversations, not attributed customer quotes. We publish named references only with written consent.
I am not short of software. I am short of one place where the same field means the same thing in all of it.
The scheme closed on a Tuesday evening. I had the application half built. Nobody told me the budget was nearly gone.
We farm on both sides of the border. Everything takes twice as long and I still cannot see the whole position on one screen.
Audit week costs me three days. Every single record they ask for is already written down somewhere on this farm.
Measurement
How you will know it is working
The module reports against these measures from the day it is switched on, so the value is demonstrable rather than assumed.
- 01Tonnes marketed in specification
- 02Premium captured per tonne
- 03Rejection rate
- 04Nitrogen use efficiency
- 05Break crop contribution to rotation margin
Free tool
Run the numbers for your own holding
Enter your figures and get an answer you can act on, with the method shown so you can check it. Save the result to your account or take it away as a PDF.