The rate is one division, and everything else follows it
Thirty tiers on a 30 day round trip — 28 days in the crop and two standing empty — means one tier comes due every day, which is seven a week. That is the whole rate calculation: tiers times seven divided by the round trip. The round trip is the bit people forget to include the turnaround in, and two days of stripping and washing on a 28 day crop is a 7 percent error in the rate if it is left out.
The same division gives the start interval. Thirty tiers over 30 days is one start a day, which is a real constraint on the propagation side rather than a curiosity — somebody has to have a tray of transplants ready every single morning.
Where the busy day comes from
Seven tiers a week across two harvest days is 3.5, and half a tier does not get cut. Over an eight week window that is 56 tiers across 16 harvest days: eight days of four tiers and eight days of three. The page spreads the extras evenly through the window rather than piling them at the front, so the pattern alternates rather than front-loading, but the total is fixed and so is the swing.
At 26 lb a tier the busy day is 104 lb and the quiet day is 78. That 26 lb difference is not a rounding artefact — it is a whole extra tier of cutting, washing, packing and box space, on half the harvest days, all year.
Why the table has seven rows
Harvest days a week is one of the few things in a rotation that can be changed without changing the crop, so it is worth seeing all seven options at once. With the defaults, one harvest day a week divides exactly — seven tiers every Monday — and so does seven days a week, at one tier a day. Everything in between is uneven.
That does not make one day a week the right answer. Seven tiers in a day is 4.08 hours of changeover work, two hours each for a crew of two, and it puts a week of produce into one packing session and one delivery. Most growers cut twice a week because that is when the boxes go out, and the uneven day is the price. The point of the table is to make the price visible rather than to recommend a pattern.
What breaks it
Everything here assumes tiers are interchangeable and cycles are exact. They are not. A cycle that runs three days long in January changes the rate, the start interval and the split all at once. A tier that misses its day pushes the tier behind it, and the push travels. And a crew that is one person short on a busy day does not cut fewer tiers, it stays later.
The honest use of this page is not to predict a schedule but to find out how much slack the schedule has. If the busy day already fills the shift, the rotation has none, and the first cold week will show it.
Questions people ask
Should I count the turnaround days in the cycle?
Enter them separately, in the turnaround field. The page adds them to get the round trip, which is what the rate divides by. Leaving two days of stripping and washing out of a 28 day crop overstates the rate by about 7 percent, and the error compounds across a planning window.
Why does the busy day alternate rather than come first?
Because the extras are spread through the window rather than stacked at the front. Eight extra tiers across sixteen harvest days lands one on every second day, which is the pattern most rotations actually settle into. A real schedule will drift from it, but front-loading would be a worse model of what happens.
Does one harvest day a week really work?
It divides exactly at the default rate, which is not the same as working. Seven tiers in a day is four hours of changeover for a crew of two, a week of produce through one packing session, and no slack anywhere if something goes wrong that morning. The table gives you the arithmetic; the delivery schedule usually gives you the answer.
What if my tiers do not all yield the same?
Then the weight figures are an average and the swing is understated, because a busy day that happens to catch the good tiers is worse than a busy day that catches the poor ones. Use the tier counts as the reliable output and treat the pounds as indicative. The labour figures hold up better, since a poor tier takes the same time to strip.
Can I use this for a propagation rotation?
Yes, with different numbers. The arithmetic does not care what is in the tier: a rotation of trays with a germination and a growing-on stage has the same rate, the same start interval and the same division problem. Run it twice, once for each rotation, and check that the start interval on one matches the finish interval on the other. That is where staggers usually come apart.