When it comes to operations management for an agricultural operation, it's important that you understand the most effective and comprehensive platforms. WIthout the right agriculture ERP, it can be difficult to balance crop production, storage, sales, and even livestock management. Here's a look at some of the features you should be looking for when you're choosing an ERP for your agricultural operation.

Safety Tracking Integration

One of the most important factors that you should look for in your agriculture ERP is integration for safety tracking. In the current age of tracing back illnesses and outbreaks, it's important that you choose an ERP system that will allow for this in the event of a problem.

Ideally, your ERP should track all of your supplies, including seeds, fertilizer, and animal feed. It should also track the suppliers of each of these things, and which field each of the seeds were planted in. You should also be able to track which harvest each customer purchased from so that you can trace back any problems to that particular field or seed. The same applies to your livestock harvesting.

The goal is to be able to track everything thoroughly from the time it arrives on your property to the time it leaves.

Livestock Monitoring Support

Your livestock's lifespan must be closely monitored for accurate predictions of herd growth, slaughter timing, and even breeding. Many agriculture cloud ERPs allow you to track your livestock from birth to sale or death, including breeding, medical issues, medication administration, and more.

This allows you to certify antibiotic-free livestock, identify trends that could signal problems with your herds, and accurately predict your herd growth and development over time. 

Field Management Tools

It's also important that you are able to monitor your field production. Not only should you be able to map out all of your fields, but you should also be able to track what is planted in each field and what kind of production you've gotten from those fields. This can help you to identify areas where fields are more productive versus fields and areas where things don't seem to grow the way that they should.

Tracking your field planting and production also helps with crop rotation. You can avoid many of the common problems that plague excessive replanting, including blight and other issues. Set alerts that remind you when to rotate crops and which fields are best for each rotation, that way you eliminate a lot of the guesswork and potential for human error.