Greenhouse management software for commercial growers

Your climate computer runs vents, screens and heating minute by minute, reacting to sun, wind and temperature as they change. Greenhouse management software holds the crop plan, the readings by zone and the record of what was done, so the season can be reviewed and the next one planned. The two run side by side, each doing the job it suits.

Vent position and screens are neither read nor driven by BeeGrow AI today. They stay with your climate computer, and the temperature, humidity and CO₂ either side of a screen decision remain on the crop record, so the effect can still be reviewed against the positions in your climate computer’s own log.

Other supported equipment can come under recipe-driven control once commissioned, one zone at a time after a read-only period. Each connection is confirmed before anything is promised, and if your hardware needs a gateway or an adapter, you hear that during scoping rather than after.

Where control is commissioned, the active recipe sets the targets for the zone, and the platform drives supported heating, cooling, humidity, CO₂ and dosing equipment towards them, with lighting run on its schedules. Fixed limits sit below the control loop, and no recipe can raise them. An emergency stop takes the zone out of automation. PID safety refusals are written to the control log with their reason. If you only ever want monitoring, the platform stays there.

Crop plans carry BBCH stages, each with its own environment and nutrient targets, so the setpoints move as the crop develops rather than being set once and forgotten. Readings land by zone against the targets for the stage the batch is in, so you can see whether the house delivered what the plan asked for, and where it did not.

Scouting is structured, so one week compares with the next. Observations use sentinel, sample, targeted and comprehensive types with defined canopy positions, and pests and diseases are recorded as named classifications with counts, severity and location rather than as free-text notes. Incidents are tracked from open to resolved, and spraying is recorded as a crop operation with the quantity applied. Every observation carries the person, the zone, the batch and the timestamp, so a recurring problem traces back to the round it was found on.

Rotas are built from reusable shift templates with their break rules and skill needs, and check-in, breaks and check-out record the hours worked against the plan. Cover compares the places you planned with the people assigned to them, and a swap request passes through a colleague and a manager, with each step recorded.

At harvest, yield, quality grade and defects are recorded by crop and zone, with washing, packing, labelling and storage steps and one batch number that stock and order lines can carry. A plan’s actual yield is recorded when the plan completes, and a customer query about a batch leads back to the zone and crop it came from.

Where daylight falls short of the DLI target, enter the shortfall as the target. The hours the lights need then follow from the PPFD the lights alone deliver at the canopy, by the same arithmetic as in a vertical farm: the shortfall multiplied by 1,000,000, divided by the product of PPFD and 3,600. You enter the lighting load, and each price period on the site’s intelligent electricity tariff is then tried as a start time, with tariffs compared on the cost of running that load.

The pricing sits beside the crop requirement, and the grower makes the call. A cheaper window still has to suit the crop: intensity and the light and dark periods matter, and some crops will not tolerate their hours being moved at all. Light from the fixtures is uneven across the house, so the PPFD you enter should represent the crop rather than one bright spot under a fixture, and the shortfall itself moves with the weather and the season. The energy and tariff optimisation page explains the method, the grow light running cost calculator prices a shortfall on your own figures, and it is worth measuring consumption and crop results during a trial before counting a projected figure as a real one.