Experiment Module: Applying treatments

[aislinnpearson]

In the new experiment module there needs to be an easy way of converting from experiment factors/ factor levels to plot level treatment applications as well as whole level experiment management, for example harvesting of plots.

A few key features of this would be:

• the ability to convert from treatments (e.g. rates of N per hectare) to inputs (kg of nitram per plot)
• the scientists can specify this in collaboration with the farm team (i.e. checking is involved)
• treatment rates can vary by plot (i.e. area) but be applied/ linked to a single activity (see #224, currently the farm team need to create a new log for every different rate)
• create maps of where the treatments are to be applied (linked to #27
• The ability to sign off plots as correctly applied, or flag errors where they occur. This should be possible both while driving/ applying the treatments or in bulk after the treatments have been applied depending on the complexity of the error.

This list will need to be broken into smaller issues as the planning for phase 2 of the experiment module develops, but we would hope to make progress on this by July 2023

[aislinnpearson]

Following the expansion of the Minimum Data Model in the experiment module (https://github.com/Rothamsted-Ecoinformatics/farm_rothamsted/issues/223) we would, at some point, like to be bale to create cropping plans for experiments - ideally these would convert columns labelled as 'Treatment Applications' into Quick Forms relatively easily, amending the 'As per plan' issue (https://github.com/Rothamsted-Ecoinformatics/farm_rothamsted/issues/71).

This is a significant development step, which also requires documenting standard cropping plans for UK arable crops. However, I wanted to capture it here as it does occasionally relate to other issues and it should be in the development pipeline.

One idea suggested by @paul is that we could try and describe treatment components by expanding the number of levels - so, for example, describing a variety mix as "Variety A + Variety B", "Variety B + Variety C" with each level being one of those groupings and semantically annotating these by having multiple columns in the columns level file (so two columns annotated for variety). I need to have a look at the actual data to see if this idea works in practice, but this might be a neat way of separating out treatment components and treatment applications (which would always be at an individual treatment level).