Setting the seed spreadsheet

A change of plan today with Glorious Grasslands. Tom called me yesterday to tell me his harvester had broken, so not everyone was needed to collect today since we were down to one. So instead I went to the barn to help get the spreadsheet in order to track this year’s haul. We did a similar exercise last year, but ended up with quite a complicated spreadsheet which tracked individual bags of seed. This was really the wrong approach – the key thing that needs tracking is the overall weight of seed collected from sites, and how that gets allocated to the demand from recipient sites. So, I started with a very simple toy example where we built a model based on 3 donors, 4 recipients and 2 mixes (a mix is a combination of donor sites to create a new blend before it’s allocated to a recipient). I used the principles of double entry book keeping, so the transaction ledger simultaneously decrements one account balance and increases another. This made it possible to track movements of how…