The Practitioner's Playbook
128-page field operations manual for small-farm and homestead operators. Monthly calendars, decision trees, irrigation thresholds, and the integration guides you need to wire a weather station into the day-to-day decisions on your land.
What you get
Monthly operations calendars. What to do, watch, and prepare for each month of the year. Tied to weather signals, soil temperature, day length, and the actual rhythms of a working homestead - not a generic gardening calendar.
Spray-window decision trees. Wind, rain, temperature, humidity, leaf-wetness, and time-of-day rules laid out as flowcharts. When to spray, when to wait, when to call it off. The same logic our free Spray Window tool uses, written out for the field.
Irrigation thresholds. Soil moisture, ET, crop coefficients, and field-capacity rules of thumb. How much water to put on, how often, and how to read the signs that say you should have started yesterday or skipped today.
Record-keeping templates. Field-by-field input logs, harvest tallies, livestock health entries, fuel and equipment logs, and the year-end roll-ups. Designed to be filled in by hand on a clipboard or typed in at the end of the day.
Weather station integration guides. Step-by-step setups for the common consumer and prosumer weather stations - Davis, Ambient, Ecowitt, Tempest. How to site them, how to feed the data into your decisions, and how to wire alerts to your phone without paying a subscription.
Who this is for
Operators who already keep records and want to make better decisions with them. People with a weather station in the yard who suspect they should be using it for more than the dashboard on the kitchen wall. Anyone who has stood in a field at 6am wondering whether the wind is too high to spray and wished there was a clear answer instead of a guess.
If you are running a homestead, a small farm, a market garden, or a mixed-livestock operation, the playbook is built for the scale you are working at - opinionated enough to be useful, flexible enough to fit the way your year actually runs.
How to use it
Read it once cover to cover. Then live in the monthly calendars - one short pass at the start of each month, another at the start of each week. Print the spray and irrigation decision trees and keep them in the truck or on the wall by the door. Walk through the weather station integration once for the device you own and forget about the rest.
The whole manual is designed to be referenced, not read. The calendars carry the year. The decision trees carry the day. The integration guides get you set up once. The record-keeping templates run in the background.
What makes this different
Most ag-management content is either extension service material aimed at commercial scale or YouTube-grade homesteading content built for an audience. The Playbook sits between those - written for an operator, not a viewer, and sized for the scale of land most readers actually work.
The decision trees are not abstract. They are the rules of thumb a working operator uses, written down so you can argue with them, adjust them, and make them your own. The weather station guides are device-specific because we have run those exact stations and made the mistakes for you.
Built by the same person who built the free tools on this site. The Playbook is the long-form version of what we have learned running them.
File format and delivery
Format: 128-page PDF, optimized for print on letter-size paper and for reading on a phone or tablet. Includes a separate folder of single-page printable decision trees and calendars for clipboard use.
Delivery: Instant digital download. No subscription. No login.
Updates: Free updates for one year delivered by email as we expand the integration guides and add new decision trees.