Update highlights: Define existing assets on areas, advanced row alignment, plan individual tree strips and alleys, crop rotations, agroforestry implementation tracking, improved budgeting and soil testing support for improved context profile.
RegenWorks Plant 2021.1 has been released and with it a long range of improvements. Especially features for agroforestry system mapping and budgeting have been greatly improved which makes planning of specific use cases such as alley cropping, orchard diversification and multistory agroforestry a lot better.
Add existing tree assets, rows and areas
In some projects existing tree assets, rows and sub-areas are already present. In these cases it’s important to define these to take them into account when designing the new agroforestry layout and find the right type intervention. It is now possible to ad existing tree assets, rows and sub-areas on individual fields.
In cases like coffee, cacao or olive groves where agroforestry interventions often integrate with the existing assets, this new features greatly improves the ability to design suitable agroforestry systems.
Define and plan individual sub-areas
With the new update it’s now possible to define and plan individual alleys, margins and trees grass strips for the agroforestry system layout.
It’s possible to calculate the size of each sub-areas to quickly assess required seeds, management and make changes accordingly.
Define cropping plans on sub-areas for up to 30 years
Similar to the way that the succession of individual tree rows can be managed over time, sub-areas crop and pasture cycles can now be managed with the rotations tool for areas.
This can be used for traditional crop rotations with cover crops and cash crops or more advanced systems like pasture cropping or long-term cropping plans (up to 30 years) that take into account the changes in availability of light, water and nutrients as a result of the maturing trees and shrubs in the agroforestry system.
This could be 5 years of summer wheat based rotation, 5 years of winter wheat rotation and then conversion to permanent pasture for the remaining time. This unleashes a new level of detailing that enables the design and budgeting of even more attractive agroforestry systems.
Advanced row alignment
The layout alignment options have been expanded to make it easier to plan agroforestry systems with alignments that are not have traditional north/south or east/west bearing.
This can be relevant in various different cases either for aligning tree rows with existing cropping alignment or to optimize the spacing and tree row placement on the field.
Advanced row sequences
It’s now possible to plan tree/shrub row sequences for individual rows. This enables anything from block design over to highly complex alternating row sequences in multistory agroforestry systems.
This new advanced feature integrates seamlessly with the new automated budgeting tool to make really fast budget iterations even on highly complex agroforestry systems.
Multistory agroforestry system visualization
When designing complex multistory agroforestry systems it can be quite hard to plan each story/strata and get a good overview of what is going on in each layer.
To assist with better planning of multistory agroforestry systems it’s now possible to toggle strata based color indicators on a per-tree basis and show species names on the layout map.
Track implementation tree-by-tree
With the expanded mapping capabilities it’s now possible to track and visualize implementation of agroforestry systems on a row/tree and sub-area basis.
The implementation tracking also integrates directly with the RegenWorks Grow management solution, so that once all rows/trees have been implemented the digital agroforestry twin that has been created can be used to manage the agroforestry system on a tree/row basis.
Automated budgets and integration of sub-areas and individual rows
The integrated budgeting tool have seen a couple of improvements.
The software now have integrated budgeting guides that assist setting up establishment and cash-flow budgets based on the agroforestry system layout, establishment activities, management practices and planting material such as specific species varieties/root stock.
The budgeting tool includes crop rotations of individual sub-areas and sequences of individual tree rows which gives a whole new level of detailing of the budgets.
With the possibility of mapping out existing assets on the project area, it’s now a lot easier to take these into account in the budgeting step to more accurately assess financials of interventions where there is existing assets such as orchard diversification or alley cropping system implementation.
Soil testing
Soil is a vital part of regenerative land management. With the new support for soil samples, two areas of RegenWorks Plant see improvements.
First of the context profile that is used in the initial planning of suitable agroforestry systems will benefit from the addition of soil information.
Second, the regenerative assessment of the planned agroforestry systems are now also improved, since it can use the soil information as a baseline for assessing the potential for various regenerative improvements such as increase in SOM and soil health in general.