fieldmesh
Animals, bees, flowers and fertilizers — and what mixes with what#
2026-10-08. A plan, saved for later — nothing here is built yet. The companion to plant-conditions.md. The same idea, extended: every living thing on a farm, and every input, has conditions it does best in, and the farm has conditions fieldmesh can measure or look up. And they interact — some combinations help each other, some harm each other — so the useful answer is not a list of things that suit the site but a set that suits the site and each other.
| list | what is in it |
|---|---|
| plant-list.csv | 473 plants in 97 families — including cut flowers, edible flowers and bee forage; tree farms and erosion plantings are in trees-and-conservation-planting.md |
| animal-list.csv | 99 entries — bees (honey bee races, stingless bees, bumble bees, managed solitary bees, wild crop specialists), meat, egg and dairy animals by breed, waterfowl, camelids, aquaculture, insects, guardian animals |
| fertilizer-list.csv | 60 — synthetic N, P and K, liming and pH, micronutrients, manures by animal, organic fertilizers, and rhizobia inoculants matched to legume groups |
The animal list's last column is what each breed is commonly described as suited to — "heat-tolerant", "cold-hardy", "parasite-resistant" — and is marked to verify. Breed claims are where folklore lives.
Bees#
What decides which bee, and whether bees thrive at all:
- Climate. Winter length and cold decide which honey bee race overwinters well — the frugal Carniolan and dark European bees for long winters, the Italian for warm ones; stingless bees only where it does not freeze. Daily minimum temperatures (NASA POWER) give the site side.
- Forage through the whole season. A colony needs something in flower from first flight to last. USDA PLANTS carries a bloom period for each plant, so the plant list can be laid out as a bloom calendar for a farm and its gaps found — the early spring and late summer "hunger gaps" are the usual ones.
- What the crops need. Crops range from needing no pollinator (wheat, rice, maize) to depending on one entirely (most cucurbits, kiwifruit, almonds). USDA's 2017 Attractiveness of Agricultural Crops to Pollinating Bees rates US crops for honey bees, bumble bees and solitary bees, nectar and pollen.
- Nesting. Most native bees nest in the ground or in hollow stems. Squash bees nest in the soil under the very plants they pollinate — and prefer tilled soil to dig in — so it is deep tillage over nests already dug that harms them; mason bees need tubes or stems; alkali bees need bare alkaline ground.
- Pesticides. The largest conflicts are with the farm's own practices: insecticide on bloom above all, which is why the extension advice is to mow flowering weeds before spraying and to spray bloom, if at all, in the evening (PNW 591).
Flowers#
Three roles, all already in the plant list:
- A crop. Cut flowers have the same soil, water, climate and light needs as any crop, and several are ruled by day length — chrysanthemums flower as days shorten — which is why sunlight is its own dimension in the plant plan.
- Bee and beneficial-insect forage. Flowering strips feed pollinators and the insects that eat crop pests.
- Food. Edible flowers, and crops whose flowers are eaten (squash blossoms, roselle).
Meat, egg and dairy animals#
What decides which animals, and which breeds:
| dimension | the animal side | the site side |
|---|---|---|
| Heat | heat-stress threshold, commonly expressed as a temperature–humidity index (THI); for dairy cows the commonly cited onset is around 68–72 | daily temperature and humidity from NASA POWER → THI, and hours above it |
| Cold | cold hardiness; housing needed | daily minima, wind |
| Feed | dry-matter intake per head; grazer, browser or omnivore | pasture productivity from the forage plants on the list, rainfall and soil; feed bought in |
| Water | litres per head per day, rising with heat and lactation | wells, ponds, rainfall |
| Parasites and disease | resistance: hair sheep and Kiko goats to worms; N'Dama cattle and West African Dwarf goats to trypanosomiasis | warm, wet climates favour gut worms; tsetse zones; ticks |
| Predators | vulnerability | local predators; guardian animals |
| Purpose | meat, eggs, milk, fibre, draft, pest control | market, household |
Fertilizers#
What decides which fertilizer:
- What the soil has. pH, phosphorus, potassium, organic matter and cation exchange
capacity — from a soil test first, the soil survey (
tools/soil_survey.py, SoilGrids) second. pH decides whether lime or sulfur comes before anything else. - What the crop takes. USDA PLANTS' fertility requirement, and nutrient removal per unit of yield.
- The soil's texture. Nitrate leaches through sand; split applications there.
- Legumes and the right inoculant. A legume fixes nitrogen only with its own group of rhizobia — soybean with Bradyrhizobium japonicum, alfalfa with Sinorhizobium meliloti, and so on; the list maps each inoculant to the legumes on the plant list.
- The animals. Manure is where the animal list feeds the plant list. Its nutrient content varies so widely that it should be tested, or taken from the NRCS tables.
- Rules. US organic certification (7 CFR 205) allows some inputs, restricts others — raw manure must be composted or applied 90 or 120 days before harvest — and prohibits synthetic nitrogen.
What mixes with what#
Represent each interaction as a record: this affects that, for better or worse, by what mechanism, under what condition, according to which source. Species-level interactions already exist in the open: GloBI (Global Biotic Interactions, CC BY 4.0) has plant–pollinator and many other records. Farm-practice ones mostly do not, and would be this project's contribution.
Well-known examples. Each is now sourced, row by row, in
interactions.csv (the citations live in CURATED in
modules/advise/interactions.py), and the tables below are worded to what the sources support.
| mixes well | mechanism |
|---|---|
| maize, beans and squash (the "three sisters") | more food energy and protein per hectare than the same crops grown apart |
| a legume cover crop before a cereal | nitrogen left in the soil |
| cattle with sheep | most gut worms are specific to one host, so grazing together dilutes the larvae: about half the worm eggs, about 40 g a day more gain in the lambs |
| fish in rice | fish eat rice pests; leftover fertilizer and feed cycle between them |
| pigs in oak woodland | finishing on acorns and grass, at a stocking rate the trees can bear |
| goats on multiflora rose and other invasive brush | they kill it where cattle barely dent it |
| guardian dogs, llamas or donkeys with sheep and goats | protection from predators |
| bees with orchards, cucurbits and almonds; clover, buckwheat and phacelia for the bees | pollination; forage |
| black soldier fly on manure, feeding poultry and fish | waste becomes feed, where the law allows what the larvae are grown on |
| silkworms and mulberry | the silkworm's food |
| windbreaks and livestock; riparian buffers and streams | shelter from cold wind; nitrate and sediment held back |
| mixes badly | mechanism |
|---|---|
| insecticide on bloom, and bees | kills foragers |
| deep tillage over squash bee nests | fewer bees emerge, and later |
| chickens with turkeys | chickens carry blackhead (Histomonas), which kills turkeys |
| sheep and copper | sheep are poisoned by copper levels other livestock tolerate — feeds, minerals, orchard copper sprays |
| goats and young trees | they strip bark |
| black walnut, and tomatoes and their relatives; black walnut shavings and horses | juglone |
| wilted cherry and other Prunus leaves, and ruminants | cyanide |
| lush legume pasture (alfalfa, clover) and cattle | bloat — a USDA PLANTS field |
| acorns in quantity, and cattle, sheep or horses | tannin poisoning (goats are relatively resistant) |
| waterfowl alongside chickens | a reservoir for avian influenza |
| Bombus terrestris outside its native range | invasive where introduced |
| poultry litter applied repeatedly | phosphorus builds up and runs off |
| raw manure on food crops | pathogens — the organic rule's 90/120-day interval exists for this |
| claimed, not shown, or mixed | what the evidence says |
|---|---|
| poultry following cattle, to break up dung pats and eat fly larvae | in a controlled trial broilers never foraged in the pats and face-fly larvae survived as well (laying hens untested) |
| ducks in rice | weeds controlled and income up, but planthoppers rose, because the ducks also cut the spiders that eat them |
USDA PLANTS already links the lists. Its characteristics include Bloat, Toxicity, Palatable Graze/Browse Animal, Nitrogen Fixation, Known Allelopath and Bloom Period — plant-to-animal, plant-to-plant and plant-to-bee facts, in the public domain, for every plant it covers.
Sources#
| source | gives | licence |
|---|---|---|
| USDA PLANTS characteristics | the plant side, plus the links above | CC0 |
| USDA, Attractiveness of Agricultural Crops to Pollinating Bees (2017) | crop × bee type, nectar and pollen, pollination need | US government work — to confirm |
| GloBI | species interactions, including plant–pollinator | CC BY 4.0 (credit the original datasets) |
| NRCS Agricultural Waste Management Field Handbook, chapter 4 | manure quantity and nutrients by animal | US government work |
| 7 CFR 205.601–606 | inputs allowed, restricted and prohibited in US organic production | US regulation, public domain |
| NASA POWER | temperature, humidity → THI; cold; rainfall | CC BY 4.0 |
| FAO DAD-IS | livestock breeds by country | terms not found; FAO's default is non-commercial — to check before any reuse |
| Klein et al. 2007 (Proc. R. Soc. B) | pollinator dependence of the world's crops | a paper — cite the figures |
Build order, after the plant plan's#
- The interaction records, starting from the USDA PLANTS fields that already encode them, then GloBI for pollinators.
- Bloom calendars for a farm's plants, with the hunger gaps marked.
- Heat stress for a farm's animals from NASA POWER — hours above THI thresholds by month.
- Fertilizer from soil test + crop demand + manure available, with the organic rules
as a filter. Built 2026-10-09 as a balance: nutrients.py sets the
manure the farm's animals supply — as it leaves each handling system, per the NRCS
Agricultural Waste Management Field Handbook's Table 4-16(b) — against what the harvests
remove (its Table 6-6), and says how many acres the manure needs at the crops' nitrogen
removal, or their phosphate removal where a soil test reads phosphorus high. With
--organicit adds the federal rule for raw manure: 120 days before a harvest whose eaten part touches the soil, 90 otherwise. It reproduces the handbook's worked example (130 bu of corn removes 117 lb of nitrogen). It is not a recommendation: first-year nitrogen availability and a soil test's interpretation are state-specific, and the state's nutrient management plan governs. Both tables are public domain and were transcribed by hand, every row checked against the handbook's other units.