How do I set up Commodities?

Overview:

Within AgStudio, products include Crops, Commodities, Seed, Biosolids, Chemicals, and Amendments.

Most often, your Customer Sales Representative set up relevant commodities within your AgStudio database. This article describes how to add and edit commodities to be used in a specific domain and crop year. Only users with Administrative privileges can actually create a commodity.

It is suggested practice to add ALL commodities at the Company level, then at the Grower domain add their commodities specific to their operation (This avoids any confusion and multiple commodities down the line).

Requirements:

• Crops set up in your AgStudio Database - it is suggested practice to set up your Crops first in AgStudio, and THEN setup Commodities.

Process:

To add commodities at a higher domain:

1. From the Setup menu, select Commodities to display the Commodity Editor in which you can enter and manage your commodities.
2. In the Commodity Editor, be sure to set the Domain and Crop Year to the highest domain and crop year in which you are working.
3. Click "Add" to create a new commodity.
4. The Add Commodities tool will appear, if your commodity isn't on the list (or blank), select "New Product".                     
5. It will then bring up the Commodity Properties where you can fill in necessary information.  Information AgStudio MUST have is Commodity Name, the Crop the commodity is associated with, the Product Lot name (usually just the same as Name unless multiple commodities of this type), Inventory unit (how it is tracked) and Market Unit (how it is sold/marketed).  If Inventory unit and market unit are different, you will also want to add a Conversion that converts Inventory to Market. **i.e. Corn is inventoried as pounds, and marketed as bushels. Adding a conversion factor of pounds/bushel is necessary to calculate yield in some reports.
6. The other properties are optional, the Online Help can be used to further assist with the other properties.  Click "OK" and the new Commodity will be added to the list. 
7. For the commodities you added, select the commodity in the grid and click Edit to provide details including:
   • Yield Goal
   • Inventory, Market and Conversion Units
   • Adjustment methods, and
   • USDA crop use

To Add Commodities to Grower Level:

Now that you have commodities added at the "higher" level, you can now place commodities into each Grower's operation.

1. On the Commodity Editor ( Setup > Commodity), select "Add".
2. A list of available commodities that you added at the higher level should be seen.  You may use the filters to narrow the list down.
3. Select on the Commodity that you would like to add to the Grower, and click "OK"
4. That commodity will now be available for that Grower.
5. If you need to make any special edits for a commodity for a specific grower, click "Edit" and make the necessary changes to that commodity.

Related Articles:

How do I set up Crops?
How do I build out the Resources tree?