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Excel in market gardening: why the spreadsheet cracks when the season moves

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A late frost, a bed that does not come free in time, a customer who doubles their courgette order the day before harvest: on a market garden farm, the crop plan moves almost every week. And that is precisely where Excel, the tool most widely used to plan a season, starts to show its limits.

This is not a question of skill. Many market gardeners build remarkably sophisticated spreadsheets, with calendars, rotations and yield calculations. The problem is more structural: Excel was designed to calculate stable data, not to absorb in real time the constant adjustments of a living season. Which leaves the question many people ask before making the move: what alternative to Excel is there in market gardening, and why does going from spreadsheet to software really change anything?

A tool built to calculate, not to replan

A spreadsheet excels in one specific case: data that no longer moves, to which formulas are applied. That is why it remains so popular for drawing up a forecast crop plan, what many market gardeners call their “crop notebook” in winter, when there is time to lay everything out flat.

The trouble comes in spring, when the reality of the field invites itself into the calculation. As Nicolas Brulard, a farm planning consultant, puts it, Excel makes it possible to build tracking tables, dashboards, crop calendars and work schedules tailored to each project. But nothing in its structure is designed so that moving a crop propagates automatically to the right cells. Every replanning becomes a manual entry job again: reopen the file, find the right sheet, recalculate by hand what should have updated itself.

Moving one crop means moving fifteen cells elsewhere

On paper, changing a sowing date or a plot looks harmless. In a spreadsheet built around an annual calendar, a species database and a cropping plan, that same change actually touches several sheets at once:

  • the planting calendar,
  • the seed and plant requirements,
  • bed occupancy and rotations,
  • sometimes the turnover forecast.

It is no accident that the most accomplished market garden planning spreadsheets often run to a dozen sheets linked to one another: introduction, annual calendar, cropping plan, species database, task calendar, forecast summary. That architecture works well as long as nothing changes. As soon as a crop has to be moved mid season, each sheet has to be corrected separately, and the user becomes the only guarantee of consistency between them. One correction forgotten in a tab, and the harvest forecast no longer matches what is actually in the ground.

The real hidden cost: the error you cannot see

This risk is not specific to market gardening. It has been documented for more than twenty years by the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (EuSpRIG), a group of researchers who log spreadsheet incidents in business. Their conclusion, available in their database of “horror stories”, leaves little room for doubt: more than 90% of professional spreadsheets are thought to contain errors, of which nearly a quarter are direct calculation errors.

Those errors almost always share the same origin: a formula in the wrong place, a typing mistake, a copy and paste error, or simply a badly built formula. Small gestures, repeated dozens of times a season, whose consequences only become measurable later, when:

  • the quantities ordered no longer match what was sown,
  • a bed supposed to be free is in fact still occupied,
  • a yield figure copied over from last year was never updated.

On a farm this does not translate into billions, as in the most spectacular cases logged by EuSpRIG, but the mechanism is identical on a smaller scale: an order for plants placed on out of date figures, a rotation that was not updated after a last minute change.

Sharing the information: the version that gets lost on the way

The other breaking point is sharing. A farm is almost never one person in front of one file. The market gardener plans, an employee follows the tasks in the field, a business partner adjusts the orders. As soon as several people have to read or change the same crop plan, the single file becomes a bottleneck.

With Excel in its classic version, the file sent by email the night before is already out of date the next morning. Two versions circulate, everyone edits “their” copy, and nobody knows which one counts any more. The file becomes a single point of failure, a document the whole organisation depends on, but that only its author really understands. That is exactly the point on which Google Sheets changes something. The question is whether it is enough to settle the underlying problem.

And with Google Sheets, is the problem really solved?

That is the question many market gardeners ask when moving to an online spreadsheet. The answer is mixed: Google Sheets solves part of the problem, but not the part that costs the most.

On sharing, the difference is real. Several comparisons confirm it: unlike Excel, where real time co-editing requires a Microsoft 365 subscription and synchronisation through OneDrive, Google Sheets was designed from the start for online collaboration, with automatic saving, version history and changes visible instantly to everyone taking part. A market gardener can adjust a sowing date while a business partner looks at the same document from the shed, without either version overriding the other.

But what Google Sheets does not change is the very architecture of the tool. It is still a grid spreadsheet, organised in cells and formulas, with the same sheets to be reconciled by hand. Moving a crop there calls for exactly the same chain of manual adjustments as in Excel: nothing propagates the change automatically to the planting calendar, to the seed requirements or to bed occupancy. The risk of an entry error or a badly copied formula, the one EuSpRIG documents, is not specific to Excel: it is inherent in the spreadsheet principle itself, whoever the publisher is.

Another limit, less visible but just as costly day to day: whether it is Excel or Google Sheets, the spreadsheet stays isolated from the rest of the farm’s tools (order book, invoicing, sales tracking). The result is that the same piece of data is often entered twice, once in the spreadsheet and once somewhere else. That double entry, as well as wasting time, is one more source of errors, on top of those already documented by EuSpRIG.

Criterion

Excel

Google Sheets

Sharing & working as a team

Single file, multiple versions common

Real time, one version always up to date

Moving a crop / replanning

Manual, sheet by sheet

Manual, sheet by sheet, same limit

Risk of a formula or entry error

Yes, grid structure

Yes, same grid structure

Connection with the farm’s other tools

None, double entry common

None, double entry common

Volume of data handled

Very large (more than 1 million rows)

Limited to 10 million cells

In other words: Google Sheets closes the door on the “file not found” problem and on versions that contradict each other. It does not close the door on the real subject of this article, a season that moves faster than the grid meant to represent it. Going from Excel to Google Sheets improves team coordination; it does not make the crop plan capable of absorbing its own changes, nor of talking to the rest of the farm’s tools.

Software vs spreadsheet: market gardening moves faster than the grid allows

Planning a market garden season is not a one off exercise done once in winter. As the notebooks of Petit Maraîchage set out in detail, the crop and yield records of the previous season are used every year to adjust the plan, and that adjustment carries on throughout the season, in step with weather hazards, sales and unexpected labour problems. A crop plan lives, moves and is recalculated constantly: exactly what a spreadsheet, whether local or online, was not designed for.

That is why part of the market gardening world is now turning to tools dedicated to planning, designed from the start to take these continuous changes rather than to freeze a starting snapshot. That is precisely the bet made by PermaTechnics, a Belgian solution built with and for market gardeners.

In practice, the tool is organised in three modules that follow on from one another logically. The planning module sets the crop plan, taking account of the many parameters specific to each vegetable and of the rotation constraints. The task management module adapts “dynamically according to external events”, in other words, when a late frost or a weather hazard upsets the calendar, the day’s tasks readjust instead of leaving the market gardener to recalculate sheet by sheet. The regulatory compliance module completes the set by generating automatically, from the tasks confirmed in the field, a record of the plant protection products and inputs used.

In the field, this is what Cédric Saccone, of la Ferme au Moulin, describes: he plans his whole season in winter, then steers the work day to day “with a shared schedule for the whole team”, crop protocols, workload, harvest time and yields all centralised in one place. That is exactly the double lock identified above, replanning that stays manual, sharing that gets lost in multiple versions, that PermaTechnics is trying to break open at the same time, rather than solving one and leaving the other untouched.

Frequently asked questions

Is Excel enough to run a market garden farm?

Yes, as long as the crop plan does not move: Excel remains a good tool for laying out a first forecast in winter. Its limits appear as soon as the season calls for continuous adjustments (replanning a crop, revising quantities, sharing up to date information with the whole team).

What alternative to Excel is there in market gardening?

Moving to Google Sheets improves sharing and avoids multiple versions, but changes nothing about replanning, which stays manual, sheet by sheet. The real alternative to Excel in market gardening is trade specific software, such as PermaTechnics, designed to propagate each change to the crop plan automatically.

Why move from spreadsheet to software?

Because software dedicated to market garden planning absorbs changes as they come (a crop moved, a quantity adjusted, a task reorganised after a weather hazard) where a spreadsheet, however well built, requires everything to be recalculated by hand every time.

What to take away

Neither Excel nor Google Sheets is a bad tool: they are tools badly calibrated for a use that has changed in nature. Moving from one to the other solves the problem of sharing and of versions that get lost, but leaves the replanning problem untouched, the real cost in the field of a season that never quite fits in a grid. The best Excel alternative for a market garden farm is therefore not another spreadsheet, but software designed for the trade.

Sources cited in the article

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