Common Problems and How to Solve Them

Early days of crop planning can be difficult. Here are some tips and tricks to get you off to a good start when dealing with crop production and crop planning challenges.

1. Late Germination or Poor Germination

• Possible causes: Low temperature, dry soil, old seed, poor stacking pressure.
• Impact: Crops can be delayed in maturing and yields can be reduced
• Fix: Create a pre-check system for tray prep—weight, soil moisture, temp. Maintain a germination log to catch patterns. Check germinating crops daily to ensure they are on schedule.
• Not a Fix: Shifting harvest day to a later date. Your harvest days should be fixed and only moved in extreme situations

2. Overburdened Harvests

• Problem: You have too many trays needing harvest on a specific day – creating stress or a bottleneck.
• Impact: Hard to get all trays harvested and delivered as desired.
• Fix: Use your crop calendar to add a Harvest day and stagger harvests throughout the week. If one harvest gets too busy, shift customers to a different harvest day.

3. Missed Sowing Tasks

• Problem: You forgot to sow trays for an upcoming order.
• Impact: Crops don’t get sown!
• Fix: Refer to your crop plan every day and confirm production tasks are getting completed. You can also automate sowing task reminders (with apps or sticky notes).

💡 Pro Tip: SeedLeaf, designed specifically for microgreens growers, allows you to record when Tasks have been completed – making your records audit ready.

4. Overproduction and Waste

• Problem: You grew too much of a crop that didn’t sell.
• Impact: Crops gets wasted and thus you’re paying to grow compost.
• Fix: Make sure your expected yield figures are accurate for each crop. If they are too low you will overproduce trays. Make sure to review your expected yield regularly to ensure they are accurate. Expected yields may change from season to season.

5. Underproduction and Lost Sales

• Problem: You don’t have enough crop to fulfill your Orders.
• Impact: Loss of sales.
• Fix: Adjust your expected yield; you will under produce if it is too high. Make sure your climate is optimized for your crops.

6. Crops Maturing Too Fast or Too Slow

• Problem: Trays are ready too early or not in time for delivery.
• Impact: It is hard to keep on your desired production schedule
• Fix: Review temperature conditions. Adjust sowing date based on seasonal DTM changes. Use lighting and airflow to slow or speed up development as needed. You should be monitoring your growing conditions at all times to ensure they are in an optimum range.

7. Frequent Canceled Orders

• Problem: Customers are canceling orders too often.
• Impact: You are losing sales and ending up with excess crop too often.
• Fix: Be sure to stress your grow-to-order policy and require customers to give ten days’ notice of an order cancellation. You only need to enforce this policy if it is a ongoing issue. Customer needs can change last minute and it is good to be empathetic to this, as long as it does not constantly leave you with products you cannot sell.