The Kankakee Nursery Co, located 60 miles south of Chicago, is a grower of ornamental shade trees and shrubs. It is a family owned business with approximately 1300 acres in nursery production, while another 1200 are in row crop production. Field grown ornamentals comprise 1250 acres, and 50 acres are in container production. There are 115 varieties of trees, 200 varieties of shrubs, 40 varieties of evergreens, and 60 varieties of perennials. Nursery stock is shipped to primarily throughout the Northern Midwest from Denver to Detroit. The number of employees range from 200 in the peak spring season to 60 in the winter months.

Jeff Franklin began his employment at the Kankakee Nursery Co, in the spring of 1992. His responsibility of tracking pesticide use first began with the Meister Agricultural Record Keeping System (MARKS). This 3-ring binder system provided a place to map individual fields and a spreadsheet to track pesticide and fertilizer applications. Eventually, the MARKS system was no longer available and he had to find another option to track fields.

Jeff discovered Farm Works software and thought it might be modified to fit their needs. He uses the software to track the different varieties of trees/shrubs in each field that is planted, the chemicals used on each variety and/or block, as well as, managing the fields from the time they are planted to the time they are harvested. This time may range anywhere from 1 growing season to 7 years.

Kankakee Nursery started using Farm Trac in the 2000 growing season, when they purchased county aerial photos and sent them to Farm Works for scanning. The aerials were downloaded from the floppy to Farm Trac for mapping. They have recently upgraded these aerial photographs with the help of Eagle View Maps. The Eagle View Maps they chose were digital photos and are compatible with Farm Works software. If you're interested log on at www.eagleviewmaps.com and check it out. Jeff added that Chuck Nichols of Eagle View maps is a great guy to work with.

Farm Trac is used to "track" a crop from planting to harvest. The fields planted are broken down into what they refer to as "blocks". These blocks can contain from 1 to 15 or more varieties of nursery stock. The size of the blocks range from 1 to 20 acres. Most of the nursery is contiguous, so they set up Farm Trac so they could view all fields from one computer screen rather than having to go to different views. There are approximately 200 blocks in production, which they can view from this one screen. They can zoom in on any field or block and see what inputs have been made over the course of its production. This is a very handy tool when you consider that a field may be in production for up to 7 years.

Farm Trac is mainly used for;
-Fertilizer inputs
-Pre-emergent herbicide application
-Significant events that may affect production
-Trial herbicides plots-Nursery layout maps

For More information about this exciting use of Farm Works Software contact Jeff Franklin at Kankakee Nursery.