Production Cycle Data Model

The production cycle is the central organizing entity in most farm management software, representing the full stocking-to-harvest period for a given batch in a given tank, pond, or cage, and every other record type, feeding events, water quality readings, treatments, grading events, ultimately rolls up to a cycle so that performance metrics (FCR, survival rate, days to market size) can be calculated and compared across cycles rather than existing as disconnected daily logs. Designing the cycle entity correctly means deciding what starts and ends one: a cycle might begin at stocking and end at full harvest, or a long grow-out might be modeled as multiple linked sub-cycles across sequential systems (nursery cycle, grow-out cycle) with defined handoff points that carry biomass and cost forward rather than resetting to zero. Benchmarking depends entirely on cycle boundaries being consistent: comparing FCR across cycles that were cut short by an early partial harvest against cycles run to full term without normalizing for that difference produces misleading performance comparisons. Well-designed systems let a farm close a cycle formally (locking its data for reporting) while still allowing corrections through an audited adjustment process rather than silently editing closed historical records.