Potatoes & Root Crops
Potatoes & Roots: For Advisers & Agents
What Potatoes & Roots 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. Root crops carry the highest working capital and the highest storage risk in UK arable farming. This module runs the full cycle — seed provenance, planting, blight programme, desiccation, harvest, grading and long-term store management — with the store treated as an active, monitored asset rather than a shed the crop goes into.
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.
Pre-pack buyer
Procurement
Needs provenance and store condition evidence with the load.
- Select seed and verify certification
- Plan rotation against soil-borne disease risk
- Plant and record
- Run the blight and nutrition programme
Storage manager
Multi-site store operation
Needs alarms and audit evidence in one place across sites.
- Plan rotation against soil-borne disease risk
- Plant and record
- Run the blight and nutrition programme
- Desiccate and manage skin set
Sugar beet grower
Contracted tonnage
Needs to understand contract value before harvest logistics are committed.
- Plant and record
- Run the blight and nutrition programme
- Desiccate and manage skin set
- Harvest with bruising risk managed
End to end
How Potatoes & Roots 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
Select seed and verify certification
This is where the record starts, and getting it right here removes work at every later stage.
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2
Plan rotation against soil-borne disease risk
The platform prompts only for what this stage genuinely needs, and carries everything forward.
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3
Plant and record
Conflicts with scheme rules, regulatory windows and existing commitments are flagged here rather than discovered later.
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4
Run the blight and nutrition programme
Capture works offline, so this stage is completed in the field rather than remembered afterwards.
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5
Desiccate and manage skin set
Everything recorded at this point becomes evidence automatically, in every format that will later ask for it.
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6
Harvest with bruising risk managed
This is the stage most businesses currently do twice, once for the operation and once for the paperwork.
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7
Grade, load stores and monitor continuously
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
Market, despatch and reconcile store losses
The cycle closes here, and what is learned is carried into next season's plan rather than lost.
Capabilities
What Potatoes & Roots 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
- Seed provenance, certification grade and physiological age tracking
- Planting record with seed rate, spacing, bed system and depth
- Blight risk modelling with Hutton criteria alerting and spray interval management
Operate and monitor
- Desiccation planning under current authorisation constraints
- Harvest scheduling with soil condition and bruising risk assessment
- Grading and out-grade analysis by size, defect and specification
Comply and evidence
- Store environment monitoring — temperature, CO2, humidity and sprout suppression
- Store loss modelling with weekly shrinkage tracking against benchmark
- Sugar beet contract management including tonnage, sugar percentage and dirt tare
Analyse and improve
- Free-living nematode and PCN risk mapping by field with rotation constraints
- Store audit pack assembly for pre-pack and processing customers
- Rotational interval enforcement to protect against soil-borne disease build-up
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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Saleable yield per hectare
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 24 Median 45 Upper quartile 85
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Store loss percentage
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 37 Median 50 Upper quartile 84
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Out-grade percentage
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 23 Median 61 Upper quartile 80
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Blight incidence
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 20 Median 51 Upper quartile 70
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Cost per tonne into store
Your figure appears hereLower quartile 27 Median 47 Upper quartile 85
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 Potatoes & Roots
The problem: Needs store losses visible weekly, not at marketing.
What they do
- Select seed and verify certification
- Plan rotation against soil-borne disease risk
- Plant and record
- Run the blight and nutrition programme
What changes
- Saleable yield per hectare
- Store loss percentage
- Out-grade percentage
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.
- 01Saleable yield per hectare
- 02Store loss percentage
- 03Out-grade percentage
- 04Blight incidence
- 05Cost per tonne into store
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.