5 Proven Practices to Scale Up Your Plantation Management Successfully
Plantation management is a highly convoluted agricultural practice. With widely spread agricultural fields and simultaneous operations across every plot, plantation management involves a plethora of intricacies. Agribusinesses can overcome these complexities by making smart additions or modifications to their plantation activities. Organising and operating end-to-end agricultural functions accurately can guarantee ramped up plantation management as well as higher returns for your agribusiness.
Agribusinesses can gain more control over their medium to large-scale plantations by properly planning and scheduling all of their plantation practices. Enterprises can take the productivity of your plantations to new heights by ensuring adequate utilisation of water and fertilisers.
Crop rotations can be beneficial in enhancing the soil health of your field by effectively breaking pest and disease cycles. Adhering to data-driven decisions is also necessary to reap qualitative and accurate agricultural outcomes. Here are the top 5 ways through which you can revamp and reinforce your plantation management successfully.
1. Plan Your Plantation Operations Perfectly
With plantations spread across hundreds and thousands of acres, planning the field activities becomes one of the major challenges for plantation enterprises. Massive threats associated with labour shortage, climate change, absence of technology, etc also make it imperative to have appropriate plantation plans in place. A well-devised plan envisages all possible risks and helps you strategise your operations accordingly for enhanced plantation management.
When it comes to medium to large-scale plantations, proper agricultural planning strategies are a critical differentiator that guarantee better results for your agribusiness. Right from assessing soil and weather conditions to estimating labour and machinery requirement, everything goes into formulating the perfect plantation plan.
With a smart planning module, you can create and follow a specific crop schedule to ensure that every action you take is in your best interest. It can also be useful in boosting your labour and machinery efficiency, thereby fortifying your plantation management. Not only does this improve your control over your plantations but also empowers you to capitalise on every opportunity successfully.
2. Prefer Crop Rotations Over Monoculture
For widely spread plantation fields, repeated cultivation of a single type of crop can drain the soil of specific nutrients and make it less fertile. Prolonged planting of the same crops can also enable pests and pathogens to adapt and persist in the soil for longer durations. Crop rotation can act as an effective remedy against these issues and propel the productivity of your plantations.
Routine crop rotations can help in keeping the land fertile by replenishing necessary nutrients and preventing the exhaustion of any specific nutrient. Alternating between crops with deep roots and shallow roots can also be advantageous in strengthening soil stability.
Crop rotation prevents the proliferation of pests and pathogens, and protects your plantations from dangerous diseases. It can also improve soil structure and reduce the spread of weeds, which effectively bolsters your plantation management efforts. Furthermore, diversified cultivation can help you reap better returns by not being reliant on a single type of crop.
3. Incorporate Intelligent Irrigation Management System
In the case of large farms or plantations, making wise use of water is vital in order to achieve the objectives of sustainability and cost-efficiency. Both overwatering and underwatering can have a detrimental impact on the quality and quantity of yields.
Monitoring and analysing weather conditions as well as soil and plant moisture is thus essential in crafting effective irrigation management strategies. Smart irrigation is not just about how to water the crops wisely but also about watering at right time, in the right amount, and in a proper manner.
Scheduling your irrigation can help in increasing the quality of your crop outcomes by enhancing your plantation management. Real-time tracking can help in capturing water usage for each and every plot precisely. This can enable growers to boost their agricultural water conservation efforts through smart irrigation management.
4. Rely On Data-driven Decisions for Accuracy
With the ever-increasing global population, the demand for food production is skyrocketing every day. This is coupled with rapidly depleting resources, which is compelling plantation owners to bring precision into their agricultural functions. However, this accuracy in plantation management can only be achieved by resorting to data-driven decision making.
Data-driven agriculture can provide you with an unprecedented level of control over your plantations. Plot-wise and crop-wise financial reports can also enable farmers to make better decisions in order to cut costs and conserve resources.
An efficient plantation management software platform can provide vital insights into crop performance, weather, soil health, and many other parameters. This can help you to measure all aspects thoroughly to make strategic and profitable decisions for your agribusiness. Relying on this information can guide you to implement precision farming and ensure more productivity and sustainability for your plantations.
5. Protect Plantations With Precise Chemical Usage
Food crops are subjected to dangerous attacks by various species of weeds and pests, which can have a disastrous impact on your plantations. Lack of essential nutrients in the soil can also damage the quality of your crop outcomes significantly.
Pesticides and fertilisers can enable farmers to grow high-quality food by preventing external attacks and replenishing the nutrients in the soil. However, these chemicals need to be used in an appropriate manner. This is because both, the over and underutilisation of these chemicals can influence crop health, thereby affecting the food we consume.
Optimal use of chemicals in plantations can prolong the life of crops while also preventing critical post-harvest losses. It can also help you to make your plantation management activities more sustainable through the judicious use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
Incorporate and implement these procedures with the help of FarmERP to elevate the potential of your plantation management. Get in touch with us to know more about our plantation and farms pack. Cultivate high-quality plantation crops seamlessly with FarmERP’s plantation management software.