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
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
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.
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
- Farming (to sort)
- Crop
- Equipment
- Farm
- Fence
- Field
- Gate
- Livetock
- Forestry
- Fire
- Harvest
- Plant
- Silverculture
- Horticulture
- Customer (v2)
- Bookmarks
- 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
