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Workspaces for Agriculture

Mike's Notes

This is where I will keep detailed working notes on creating Workspaces for Agriculture. Eventually, these will become permanent, better-written documentation stored elsewhere. I'm looking for a better name than this working title.

This replaces coverage in Industry Workspace written on 13/10/2025.

Testing

The current online mockup is version 3 and will be updated frequently. If you are helping with testing, please remember to delete your browser cache so you see the daily changes. Eventually, a live demo version will be available for field trials.

Learning

I was a member of the AgriTech NZ Geospatial Working Group in 2021-2022. It was a great learning opportunity to be part of an experienced team. There is an excellent GitHub repository storing the results of this work, and much of it is used here.

I'm a member of the Waituna Catchment Group, with many working dairy farmers.

Why

Many of my friends are working farmers or rural workers, so anything that makes their lives easier must be a good thing. They feed us.

"Tools rather than rules"

Resources

References

  • Geospatial Interoperability Working Group
  • AgriTech NZ Data Specifications (GitHub)
  • AgGateway

Repository

  • Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
  • Home > Handbook > 

Last Updated

25/03/2026

Workspaces for Agriculture

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 8/11/2025

Open-source

This open-source SaaS cloud system will be shared on GitHub and GitLab.

Dedication

This workspace is dedicated to the life and work of Nikolai Vavilov, who gave his life to preserve scientific agriculture. He was one of the innocent millions who died at the hands of Stalin and his thugs.


Nikolai Vavilov
Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/03/08/nikolai-vavilov/

"By the end of the decade, Vavilov had completed numerous ethnobotanical expeditions to collect hundreds of thousands of seeds from five continents, including many places where no scientist had set foot before. He was quietly building something unexampled: the world’s first seed bank — a living library of biodiversity that would come to the rescue of the people of any land whose crops were decimated by a drought or a blight. There were 600 kinds of apples and more than a thousand varieties of strawberries among its quarter million plants — a lush repository of resilience, housed at Vavilov’s institute in Leningrad.

...

Over the next eleven months in jail, Vavilov was interrogated and tortured hundreds of times, sometimes for thirteen hours a time, for a total of 1,700 hours, with the intention of coercing a confession of sabotage and espionage. He remained adamant that his research had been only in the service of science and human welfare." - Maria Popova

Change Log

Ver 2 includes aquiculture, farming, forestry, and horticulture.

Ver 3 includes the simulation model (beta)

Introduction

This workspace now has a customer waitlist. The workspace could provide management software and tools for farms, catchment groups, pest contractors, forestry, and aquaculture. An MVP will be developed where interest is greatest to enable rapid experimentation and learning, and, over time, more features can be added using no-code, based on demand.

Modules from other workspaces can easily be dragged across and included, for example.
  • Transport
  • Nature Conservation
  • Health

Actions

  • An application to attend the Sprout Accelerator 2026 spring intake is being made to kickstart this rapid development process.
  • A large landcare group with IT capacity and complex needs is being approached, with an offer to serve as a teaching customer and a free build to explore what a live platform could do using GIS, databases, mobile access, open API, LLM integration, etc.

Existing products

Features

This is a basic comparison of features found in agricultural software.

[TABLE]

Industry Links

Ontologies

An Ontology of Soil Properties and Processes

Data Model

words

Database Entities

  • Facility
  • Party
  • etc

Entity Diagram

Spatial Model

Holding > Site > Plot

  • Holding (Operating farm)
  • Site (Land management unit)
  • Plot (Paddock, block, crop)

Spatial Diagram


Spatial Geodatabase

(To come)

Standards

The workspace needs to comply with all international standards and, at the same time, work with local standards in any part of the world.

  • (To come)

BMP+ Processes

(To come)

XSD

(To come)

API

(To come)

Scenario Modelling

Many thanks to Tristan Kromer for letting me play in his cool beta simulation platform. It's really good.


Digital Twin Variables

Forestry logging.

Note that this simulation did not use realistic min, max, mean and std deviation for these calculations. The model itself was the result and will undergo further work and testing using industry data to refine it.

Source: Krombar.ai simulation platform (beta)

Node Name Type Estimates / Formula
Transport capacity utilisation Input Variable beta distribution
Transport cost per log Input Variable Normal(μ=60.0, σ=59.30408874022408)
Transport capacity Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Fuel cost Input Variable Normal(μ=6.0, σ=5.930408874022408)
Loading labour cost Input Variable Normal(μ=17.5, σ=18.532527731320023)
Process and de-limb logs Calculation Step Logs processed (cutting phase)
Cutting cost per log Input Variable Normal(μ=60.0, σ=59.30408874022408)
Transport logs to the timber mill Calculation Step min(Logs processed (cutting phase), Transport capacity)
Chainsaw fuel cost Input Variable Normal(μ=10.0, σ=7.41301109252801)
Logs delivered to the mill Calculation Step Transport logs to the timber mill
Safety equipment cost Input Variable Normal(μ=20.0, σ=14.82602218505602)
Transport cost Calculation Step Logs delivered to mill * Transport cost per log + Fuel cost + Loading labour cost
Cutting/felling cost Calculation Step Logs processed (cutting phase) * Cutting cost per log + Chainsaw fuel cost + Safety equipment cost
Logs processed (cutting phase) Calculation Step round(Cutting trees and logs * Logs per tree)
Logging crew size Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Trees felled Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Logs processed per person Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Logs processed and de-limbed Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Logs processed Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Safety checks per person Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Trees identified per person Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Trees identified and marked Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Trees felled per person Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Crew size Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Trees identified Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Felling efficiency Input Variable beta distribution
Trees marked Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Logs per tree Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Cutter productivity Input Variable Normal(μ=12.5, σ=11.119516638792014)
Cutting crew size Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Cutting hours Input Variable Normal(μ=8.0, σ=5.930408874022408)
Available trees Input Variable Normal(μ=2750.0, σ=3335.8549916376046)
Set up crew size Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Safety checks per crew Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Trees to harvest Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Identification rate Input Variable beta distribution
Felling rate Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Site permit fee Input Variable Normal(μ=8500.0, σ=9636.914420286412)
Number of setup crew Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Hours per crew member Input Variable Normal(μ=9.0, σ=4.447806655516806)
Trees marked per person Input Variable Normal(μ=20.0, σ=14.82602218505602)
Hourly wage Input Variable Normal(μ=27.5, σ=18.532527731320023)
Equipment rental cost Input Variable Normal(μ=650.0, σ=518.9107764769607)
Permitting fees Input Variable Normal(μ=1100.0, σ=1334.3419966550418)
Number of crew Input Variable discrete_normal distribution
Hours per crew for setup Input Variable Normal(μ=10.0, σ=8.895613311033612)
Setup labor cost per hour Input Variable Normal(μ=25.0, σ=22.239033277584028)
Set up hours per crew member Input Variable Normal(μ=7.0, σ=7.41301109252801)
Permit fees Input Variable Normal(μ=6000.0, σ=5930.408874022408)
Other setup expenses Input Variable Normal(μ=12500.0, σ=11119.516638792014)
Logging site setup Calculation Step round(Number of setup crew)
Conduct safety checks Calculation Step round(Logging site setup * Safety checks per person)
Identify and mark trees Calculation Step round(Logging site setup * Trees marked per person)
Cutting trees and logs Calculation Step round(Identify and mark trees * Felling rate)

Simulation notes

Formula used

  • Beta Distribution =RAND()*(100-0)+0
  • Log Normal Distribution =RAND()*(100-0)+0
  • Discrete Normal Distribution =RAND()*(100-0)+0

Community testing

  • At the Southern Field Days at Waimumu in February 2026, 15 agritech firms expressed interest in helping test this workspace, with several keen to use it as part of their software stack, providing farm support software.

Support

There will be extensive free documentation sets tailored for users, developers, and data scientists.

Ajabbi will provide free support to developers with a paid DevOps Account who are supporting end users of Workspaces for Agriculture.

Workspace navigation menu

This default outline needs a lot of work. The outline can be easily customised by future users via drag-and-drop and tick boxes to turn features on and off.

  • Enterprise Account
    • Applications
      • Agriculture v.2
        • Aquaculture
          • (To come)
        • Farming (to sort)
          • Crop
          • Equipment
          • Farm
          • Fence
          • Field
          • Gate
          • Livetock
        • Forestry
          • Fire
          • Harvest
          • Plant
          • Silverculture
        • Horticulture
          • Crop
          • Fertiliser
          • Harvest
        • Customer (v2)
          • Bookmarks
            • (To come)
          • Support
            • Contact
            • Forum
            • Live Chat
            • Office Hours
            • Requests
            • Tickets
          • (To come)
            • Feature Vote
            • Feedback
            • Surveys
          • Learning
            • Explanation
            • How to Guide
            • Reference
            • Tutorial
          • Settings (v3)
            • Account
            • Billing
            • Deployments
              • Workspaces
                • Modules
                • Plugins
                • Templates
                  • Beekeeping
                  • Farm
                  • Orchard
                  • Vinyard
                • Users
        ,

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