The Resources of the System
makes use of a set of resources available within the system. In the case of the gardening system the resources available may be grouped into four main cathegories:
a) Human Resources
b) Material Resources
c) Plant Resources
d) Management Resources
Recalling that in our model we have two compartments or subsystems,
that is Garden and Gardener (Diagram 1), a),b) and d) are taken as parts of the Gardener sub-system while c) as part of the Garden one. Human resources, using
the Material resources act upon the Plant resources according to the information from
Management resources.
The first group includes obviously the Gardener and gardeners; the second
includes machinery,equipment,tools and gardening products and the third the existing plants and their arrangements. Management Resources is less well defined: it includes
some structure for decision making (so that the Gardener is also included here) and some structure for data collection and processing. In the most simple case both structures are merely the Gardener's brain with the aid of a few notes and memos while
in more sophisticated outfits this takes place in a separate compartment with accountants, clerks,computers with special software and even a secretary for making and serving tea. (for even more sophisticated outfits see Parkinson C.N., Parkinson's
Law, John Murray Publ.,1960)
An important item in resources is technical know-how; the question arises
whether to include it in human or in management resouces. Certainly, part of it is
an attribute of the personnel and as such to be included in human res. However,
equally important is knowledge that doesn't necessarily reside in the gardeners brains.
This is literature material about plant resources (including data banks) and about
material resources which, in my opinion, should be included within the management
resources, I would add also here consultants, whether governmental or private, which
are approached from management res. One of the main problem of know-how resources is its accesibility and here again a well designed computer program that includes data about the resources of the system and that could be connected to
a celular phone of a gardener will solve this problem.
We will deal now in a cursory way with each type of resources; when it
is necessary we will provide links to a more in-depth discussion. The corresponding
items will be designed as Ri, with i from 1 to 4 for the four types of Resources
and Rii for the corresponding variables.
a) Human resources: Here we include the gardeners classified in cathegories
dependent on expertise, which may be general or especialized (i.e. prunning, weeed
control, etc.) The available human resources of the system may be described through
a list of workers, each with symbols or numbers indicating expertise level in given
operations and cost per hour. The end result of such list is amounts of man hours
per week or per month and labour costs. Thus:
R1A: Amount of man-hours per month of workers of grade A
R1B: " " " " " B
R1C: " " " " " C
These variables could give sub-variables according to grade of expertise in particular operations. Since usually workers of the same grade receive similar salaries
it is a simple matter to transform man-hours per month into cost per month.
We should keep in mind that the variables under discussion correspond to
human resources available for the jobs or missions to be performed within the
system; whether or not these resources are used efficiently will depend on decisions
taken at the management level .
A number of indexes have been proposed to relate the human resources
to the work to be done. The index most commonly used is the ratio between the
total area of the garden and the monthly or yearly amount of total man-hours available , that is SUM(Riii) for all cathegories. This and other indexes for efficiency of use of
human resources will be discussed in the management section
It is common practice with extensive gardens to contract work with outside
companies to suppplement lack of man-power, equipment or expertise. Contract work
altough external in origin, properly belongs to the System and not to Surroundings.
The answer to the criterion questions 1) and 2) in the Environment section
is YES-YES; within the System, it's a matter of choice whether it is included in Human or Material Resources; a useful criteria for the choice is whether manual labour or
equipment are the main items in the contract costs.
As stated earlier we include here all sorts of equipment
, tools and substances. Equipment may be classfied as heavy (tractors, lawn mowers,
motor sprayers, trenchers,etc) or light ( all sorts of manual tools powered by 2cv engines, back sprayers, fertilizer dispensers, etc.). Under tools we include all sorts of devices without engines or wheels; even a reduced list of tools may take a few pages to
ennumerate. I would risk the opinion that gardening stands in the forefront of all
professions in respect to the more than substantial variety of tools and equipment that is
apparently required to perform the job. Just a casual glance at one of those attractive
gardening catalogues will reveal at least a 100 artifacts for prunning, another 100
for raking and hoeing and so forth and so forth. Besides the incredible variety in equipment and tools, another characteristic is that most of them stand iddle about 95%
of the time. To keep all this parnaphernalia, wide and well organized stores are required
together with storekeepers for order and maintenance. As a result material resources
are a substantial item of the total budget, irrespective of whether they are used or not.
Much the same could be said about the incredible variety of gardening products which include among others chemical herbicides,fertilizers fast,slow and medium, fungicides, insecticides, bactericides, soil conditioners, etc.,etc.,etc...
To be honest I cannot visualize any method of analyzing such a variety of material
resources without using a huge amount of specific variables and I am not
sure that the effort will justify the result. Suffice to say that a set of variables
R2iii... will be used to represent the various kinds of material resources for particular operations.
In the case of heavy equipment and power tools a good computer program for
storing data could be extremely useful. The relevant data could include particulars
about maintenance and service, spare parts changed, hours of use,etc. From the data-
sheets the cost of the equipment used in given jobs may be calculated.
The plant resources may be visualized as list of the various plants of the garden, their numbers and pertinent charachteristics. The actual usefulness of such a list is questionable (however, properly framed and displayed could
be a nice office decoration). Instead the plant resources may be studied in terms of the
Garden Units already discussed . These are the basic units, holons or environs, of the sub-system Garden. As holons they are in term composed of constituent elements: the individual plants. Each GU has or is assumed to have a function and hence are more suitable for describing resources. Adjacent GU's may be grouped into Blocks and neighboring blocks into Sections.
In order to describe a GU in a management computerized program we ought to state a serial number, its coordinates in the garden map and the corresponding Block and Section. In addition, a list of the constituent plants, approximate sizes,
dates of planting, susceptibility to given plagues, rates of growth, etc. Here again
as in all the other Resources, the danger is to fall into endless detail. The criteria
for recording or not a particular item of information should not be based on the
item's importance ( all information is important, as any bureaucrat could tell you )
but to whether it is likely to be used at all. The real question is not: do we need it?,
because the answer is always YES, but rather: how and when are we going to use it?
In my opinion a much better procedure for recording data about Plant Resources is at hand with the advent of digital photography. Photographs of GU's
could be stored in photo albums (like those provided by Yahoo or Zing); these albums,
which function as files or directories can be easily organized according to date of photo
for the same GU or for GU's of the same Block at a given date. The photos could be zoomed in or out at will, for greater detail, we do not need a list of constituent plants,
relative sizes and so forth, because they are in the picture. Finally it's a unique way
of recording the evolution of a GU, its ups and downs, the effect of seasons, the way
pests affect them, etc. All that is needed is a digital camera and a decent computer.
With facilities like those of Driveway or similar companies, the albums could be stored
outside the computer and moreover the access can be shared with other
gardeners. Since in the near future mobile phones are likely to include digital cameras,
the gardener will be able to photograph and send from the spot to the central PC without wasting time downloading photos at the office.
