Processing what you bought

Before you start, open these. They are all under Stock in the menu: Recipes, Production runs and Inventory Transactions.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Wet becomes dry. Raw becomes graded. Loose becomes bagged.

Every farming business changes what it buys. And that change has to be a record, or your quantities and your costs both drift.

A recipe is the formula

A recipe names its inputs and its outputs.

Two tonnes of wet beans gives you so much dry. A tonne of dry, plus sacks and twine, gives you so many bagged units.

On its own it moves nothing. It is just the statement of what it takes to make what.

Outputs is plural, and that matters in farming more than almost anywhere.

Milling gives you flour and bran. Sorting gives you grade one, grade two and rejects.

Those are all outputs. Not one output and some waste. Especially when you sell the by-product.

A production run is the act

A production run uses up the inputs and produces the outputs in one recorded action. Both sides of your stock move together, and neither can be forgotten.

It records the recipe, how many batches, the production cost, and for lot tracked output the new batch’s reference, expiry and origin.

→ Full detail in Recipes and production runs

Origin is what makes tracing possible

This is the field that makes a recall answerable.

Origin connects the batch that came out to the batch that went in.

Months later, when a buyer or an inspector asks which loads a particular farmer’s produce ended up in, that question has an answer. Instead of a guess across the whole warehouse.

It costs you a moment at production time, and it cannot be worked out afterwards. That difference is the whole argument for recording it.

Yield is the number worth watching

Record what you actually got. Never what the recipe predicted.

Drying loss changes with the weather. Sorting loss changes with the crop and with who is doing it.

Where what you got and what you expected differ, that gap is information. A wrong recipe. A process losing material. Or something going out of the back door.

Recording the expected figure because it looks tidier destroys the only signal you had.

Over a season, honest yield figures are one of the most valuable things a farming business owns. They tell you what a tonne of wet produce is really worth to you.

Cost follows through

The production cost on the run is what lets a finished batch carry a real cost instead of a guess.

Put that together with what you paid the farmer and you have your actual cost per unit sold. That is the number most farming businesses estimate, and few can actually produce.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, build a wet-to-dry recipe and run it. Watch both items move in one action.

Then run it again with a deliberately poor yield, and see what the difference tells you.