Convert the lot or start a new cycle?

We harvested yesterday. Do I have to convert the lot, or is starting a drying cycle enough?

The question reaches support in almost those words, and almost always the day after a harvest. It is a good question, because both answers are right and the platform accepts either. What changes is what can be told afterwards, when someone asks for that lot’s report.

The short answer is this: a cycle changes where the lot is and at what stage; a conversion changes what it is. If what was harvested will keep being counted the same way as before, a cycle is enough. If from now on something else will be weighed, stored and sold, it is better to convert. The rest of the note is the long answer.

A new cycle: the same lot, another stage

Next cycle closes growing and opens «Drying» in the drying room, at the same moment and on the same lot. It is as simple as it gets: nothing is created, the name does not change, no new variety has to be entered. The environmental history stays complete and continuous, and everything lives on a single page.

What does not change is the unit. The lot was 120 plants and is still 120 plants. The kilos that come out of the harvest, and the ones lost in drying, have nowhere to live as inventory: they stay in a separate spreadsheet, or in the memory of whoever weighed them.

The cycle is the right tool when what changes is the place or the care, not the material. A quarantine is a cycle in its own room; moving a lot to another room is closing one cycle and opening another. And if parts of the same lot need different care, Split separates them into new lots, each with its own cycle in its own room.

A conversion: another lot, another unit

Converting creates a new lot of another variety, with its own quantity and its own unit, and archives the plant lot, closing its cycle. The condition is that the variety be different, so the harvest has to exist in the catalogue as a variety of its own: «V-12» for the plants, «V-12 · harvest» for what comes out of them. When converting, the harvest weight is entered as the new lot’s quantity, and its drying cycle is opened from the same form.

Splitting the history across two lots sounds like a loss, but it is not: the harvest lot keeps the link to the plant lot, and its report includes the genealogy. From the product one reaches the growing cycle, the room and every task done before harvest.

What is lost in drying, as data

Here is the strongest reason to convert. With the lot in kilos, when drying ends it is weighed again and the difference is entered as a discard with the reason «Drying». The discard lowers the current quantity and leaves the initial one as it was, so the lot’s inventory tells the whole story in three lines.

A loss that used to be a calculation in a spreadsheet now lives in the lot, next to the drying room’s environment. Comparing two dryings stops being comparing two loose numbers: it is comparing two discards with their temperature and humidity alongside. And if a discard was entered wrong, the organization’s owners can revert it.

The stored product

Once drying is done, the harvest lot is stock. There are two ways to keep it stored, chosen by how much the place where it sits matters.

• With no cycle. Drying is finished and the lot becomes Idle, which in Growcast means exactly that: no open cycle and available as stock. It is the lightest option. Discards can still be recorded; other tasks cannot, because they need a cycle.
• With a storage cycle. If the store has sensors and its conditions matter, Next cycle opens «Storage» in that room. The lot stays Active, the store’s environment stays in its history and tasks can be recorded while it is stored.

When a part of the stock goes out, Extract separates it into a lot of its own and the rest stays in the store with less quantity. The genealogy keeps which lot each part came from.

Bringing productions together

Three harvests of the same variety, dried separately, often end up in the same store. Merge combines two or more lots of the same unit into a new one, with the sum of their quantities, and archives the originals. Join does the same without creating a lot: the stock lot that already exists absorbs the new ones.

Merging has a cost worth knowing in advance: from that moment the stock is one, and one kilo can no longer be told from another. What is not lost is the origin. The stock lot’s genealogy keeps the three lots it came from, and each one keeps its room, its drying and its loss. If tomorrow’s question will be «which harvest did this batch come from», it is better to merge late, or not at all.

One lot, two products

In some processes one production yields two different products. In cheese ripening it happens at the end of each batch: most wheels go out whole for sale, and the ones that came out misshapen or with rind defects go to grating, which is sold by the kilo.

No operation takes two varieties out of a lot in a single step, and the way to record it makes that clear. Extract separates the wheels going to grating into a lot of their own, and the main lot stays in its chamber with fewer wheels. Then Convert turns that lot into the variety «Semi-hard · grated», in kilos. If the whole batch is sorted at once, the first step is Split instead of Extract: the original lot is archived and each part goes its own way.

The same idea works for any industry where a production is sorted: separate first, then convert what changed form. The tree shows both branches, and each product reaches its origin.

Rules that do not change

• An operation is recorded on its date: it cannot be in the future or before the source lots were created.
• An archived lot is not operated. To operate it again, it is unarchived first.
• A completed operation is not deleted: it is part of the history of both lots.
• Split, Convert and Merge archive their source lots; Clone, Extract and Join leave them alive.

Closing

Back to the opening question: if after harvest plants will be counted, a cycle is enough. If kilos will be counted, convert. Both answers leave a complete history; the difference is which questions that history will be able to answer.

• A cycle when the place or the stage changes; a conversion when the material changes.
• The loss, as a discard with its reason, on the lot that is in the right unit.
• Stock, Idle or with a storage cycle, depending on how much the store matters.
• Merging brings stock together and keeps the origins; separating and converting gives two products with one origin.

The question is not what the platform allows, but what will be wanted six months from now.

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