Tracking Microgreen Grow Data: What to Record and Why It Pays Off
If you have followed us on YouTube from the early days, or you have read our book, Becoming a Microgreen Master, you already know we have always been big on tracking our grows and our harvest weights. We have been growing microgreens since 2018, and the habit that has never changed is recording what went into a tray and weighing what came out of it.
Tracking sounds like extra work until the first time it answers a question you were about to guess at. Why did this batch of radish come in lighter? What does a tray of broccoli really cost to grow? Is that new seed lot worth buying again? This post covers why tracking your grows is worth the effort, what it does for hobby growers and for anyone selling, what to record, and how to keep those records without hand-building a spreadsheet.
A quick note if you sprout seeds in jars at home: sprouting is a different crop and method from growing microgreens in trays, so it gets its own app. Sprouting Tracker is coming very soon, and it will include tracking too, so you can log your sprouting grows the same way this post describes for microgreens.
Quick Answer: What to Track and Why It Pays Off
Track your grows because your own numbers answer questions memory cannot: which crops earn their shelf space, what a tray really costs, and what changed when a tray went well or badly. Start by recording five things for every tray: what you sowed and how much, what it grew in, how you watered and lit it, when you harvested, and what the harvest weighed. You can keep those records on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in Microgreen Tracker, which is how we do it now, and the data should always be yours to take with you as an Excel or CSV file. Every new grower starts with a 7-day free trial of the whole app.
What Grow Data Actually Means
Grow data is just the story of a tray told in numbers. Some of it goes in when you plant, and some of it comes out when you harvest. The value is in having both sides of the story for the same tray.
What goes in
- Crop, variety, seed supplier, and seed lot
- Sow weight and sow density (milligrams per square inch)
- Growing medium, tray size, and fertilizer
- How you watered: mist, top, or bottom, and how often
- Light hours and the days spent in blackout
- The date you sowed and the date you harvested
What comes out
- Harvest weight in grams, ounces, pounds, or kilograms
- Yield ratio, which is how much harvest you got from the seed you sowed
- Days from sowing to harvest for each crop
- A quality grade for the harvest
- Cost per tray and cost per gram
- Which trays failed, and why
Write both halves down for the same tray and patterns start to show up that no amount of memory will give you. That is the whole idea behind everything below.
The Hobby Grower Case: Tracking Is Fun
You do not need to sell a single tray for tracking to be worth it. Most home growers lose track of what they did by the second or third tray. Was that batch seeded heavier? Did you switch seed lots? When did you last water it? A short record answers all of it, and it turns a hobby that feels random into one where you can see yourself getting better. Even if you are only growing for your family, knowing your expected yield and cost helps you plan how much to grow next time.
The easiest way to start is with a fast crop. Radish microgreens are ready in about 6 to 10 days, and broccoli microgreens take about 8 to 11, so you get a full cycle of results back quickly. Grow the same crop a few times while recording the basics and your second tray will start to look different from your first for reasons you can name.
Tracking is also just fun. You chase personal records, like your best harvest from a tray of radish. You can set two varieties side by side and see which one you actually enjoy growing. And you get to watch the total build. In our own account after 18 trays, 501 grams of seed became 4.3 kilograms of greens, and Grow Stats in Microgreen Tracker turns that into a picture you can scroll through, with a square for every tray you have sown.
It can also put what the same weight would cost at a store, at a price you set, next to what it cost you to grow. That is a number you enter and a comparison you decide on, not a promise of savings. And if grams and costs sound like more than you want, Simple Mode keeps the app to a plain task list and tucks the numbers away until you want them.
The Selling Case: Know Your Cost Before You Set a Price
If you sell microgreens, or you are thinking about it, tracking stops being a nice habit and becomes the way you find your price and know what you can honestly promise a buyer. Without a real cost per tray, a price is a guess. With one, you can see whether a restaurant quote, a farmers market price, or a wholesale rate leaves room for the cost of being in business. Our guide to selling microgreens and the Sell Microgreens hub cover pricing, permits, and customers in depth. The data is what makes those prices your own.
What actually goes into cost per tray
Whether you use a calculator, a spreadsheet, or an app, a real cost per tray counts five things:
- Seed, from the lot the tray was planted with
- Growing medium, with reusable mediums spread across the grows they serve instead of charged to a single tray
- Fertilizer, based on how much you actually mix per gallon
- Electricity, from your light wattage, hours per day, and your rate per kilowatt hour
- Overhead, such as rent, insurance, licences, market fees, paid help, and anything else it costs to be in business, spread across the trays you plan
It is common to stop at seed and medium. The last three are where the real cost hides, and they are the hardest to work out by hand, which is a big reason we built Microgreen Tracker to do that math from the costs you enter.
A quick example of the math
These are made-up numbers to show how it works, not our costs and not a price to charge. Say seed, medium, fertilizer, and electricity add up to $3.00 for a tray. Your monthly expenses are $120 and you plan 60 trays, so overhead adds $2.00 per tray. The tray costs $5.00 all in. If it yields 200 grams, that is $0.025 per gram, or about 71 cents an ounce. Leave overhead out and the same tray looks like about 43 cents an ounce. That gap is how a price that feels comfortable can end up not covering the cost of being in business.
Which crops earn their shelf space
Once you have a few weeks of harvests logged, your numbers show which crops are slow, light, or fussy for you, and which ones quietly do the most work. That is how you decide what to grow more of and what to quit growing, based on your own space instead of someone else's opinion. Our list of the best microgreens for restaurants is a good place to start when you are choosing crops for buyers.
Quoting what you can actually deliver
Wholesale is quoted in pounds and ounces. If you know what a tray of each crop typically weighs at harvest, you know how many trays an order needs and when to sow them, and you avoid promising a chef more than your shelf can deliver. The same records help you match up grow times so different crops finish together, and they show which seed to stock up on before you need it. Microgreen Tracker plans backward from the harvest date to tell you when to sow, and it plans production only. Orders carry no prices or payments, so you invoice however you already do. Our free tray-specific seeding guide helps when you are turning an order into a seed weight. Seed lot and date records also make it easier to answer a buyer who asks where a batch came from.
Perfecting Your Grows
The best use of tracking might be the quietest one. When a tray goes well, you want to repeat it. When it goes badly, you want to know why. Both need a record of what you did.
Change one thing at a time and write it down. We ran this approach in our 4-tray weight experiment and in the tray comparisons behind our microgreens versus mature vegetables post. Anywhere you have a question, the recipe is the same: keep the seed lot, medium, and tray size steady, change a single variable, and compare the harvest weights.
Good variables to test, with a guide for each:
- Light hours and distance, covered in our lighting guide
- Water method and volume, covered in our watering guide
- Fertilizer type and dilution, covered in our fertilizer guide
- Seed lot and supplier, covered in our seed quality guide
- Sow density, with starting points in the free seeding guide above
Failures are data too, and we have had plenty. A lot of our failed grows paved the way to our successful ones, because we wrote down what went wrong. Mark a failed tray and note why, whether that was mold, damping off, poor germination, or overwatering. Over time that becomes a record of what actually goes wrong in your space, and our mold guide and growing mistakes guide help you read what it is telling you. Honestly, if it were not for tracking our data, we would not be On The Grow. It is how we perfected our grows, and it is a big part of how we made the videos y'all love so much.
Seed lots matter more than people expect. Note the lot on every tray and a bag that underperforms shows itself quickly. For the physical side, our tray clip labelers keep trays identifiable on the shelf.
Handwritten Notes, Spreadsheets, or an App?
Before Microgreen Tracker, we went through a few ways of keeping records. For the longest time we handwrote our data on a digital pad, which was nice until we had some issues with it. After that we moved to Excel sheets, and a basic whiteboard stayed in our rotation for a long time too. All of it worked, and it kept us in the habit, but each had limits. Notes pile up and are hard to search. The math, like cost per gram or yield, gets done by hand later or not at all. And nothing connects a harvest weight back to the seed lot, medium, and watering that produced it.
The next step for many growers is a spreadsheet, and we have been down that road ourselves. A spreadsheet is flexible and it is yours. But you build every column, write every formula, and keep them working as your setup changes. Cost per tray is the usual breaking point, because each cost needs its own formula and one new column can quietly throw the totals off.
Here is how the three approaches compare in daily use:
On a phone, swipe the table left and right to see every column.
| In daily use | Handwritten notes | Spreadsheet you build | Microgreen Tracker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting set up | Nothing to build, nothing organized | You build the columns and formulas | Guided setup before you reach the dashboard |
| Logging a harvest | Write it down, find it later | Type it into the right row | Enter the weight and the yield ratio shows as you type |
| Cost per tray | A calculator at the end of the month | A formula for every cost, kept up to date by you | Worked out from the costs you enter |
| Reminders | Your memory | Your memory | Push reminders for watering and harvest |
| Spotting trends | Flip back through pages | Charts you build | Grow Stats, ready when you open it |
| Taking your data with you | Retype it | Already yours | Export to Excel or CSV |
A spreadsheet still wins on flexibility. If you love building your own, you can export from Microgreen Tracker and keep going in Excel. For most of us, though, the value of tracking comes from doing it on every tray, and the easiest tool to keep using is the best one.
One of our growers, Niki A., told our community group she was excited to keep track in the app and "get rid of all my pieces of paper." That is the first win. The data that builds up behind it is the second.
Why Exporting Your Data Matters
Records are only as useful as your ability to use them. A tracker that keeps your numbers locked inside one screen is a closed book. That is why export matters, and why we built it into Microgreen Tracker from the start.
Here is what you can do once the data is a file you own:
- Hand a clean record to a bookkeeper or accountant at tax time
- Build your own charts and comparisons in the spreadsheet you already like
- Sort and filter every tray by crop, seed lot, or date
- Keep your own backup of your history
- Check your numbers against any pricing you quote outside the app
You can export to Excel or CSV from your Grow Stats and harvest history, your tray data, an individual order, and the calendar. The Excel file is built to open ready to sort, filter, and total, with a guide to every column, so you are not cleaning up a data dump before you can use it.
One honest limit: export goes out, but there is no import. The app cannot read a spreadsheet you already keep, so the best time to start recording is now.
How Microgreen Tracker Keeps It Simple
We built Microgreen Tracker because we wanted our own tracking in one place. It is a web app that works in any phone or desktop browser and installs to your home screen, with no app store involved. For the data side of growing, it handles the parts that make tracking by hand a chore:
- Logging a harvest with a weight, a quality grade, and a yield ratio that shows as you type
- Working out cost per tray and cost per gram from the costs you enter
- Turning your harvests into Grow Stats, so trends show up without building a chart
- Sending reminders for watering and harvest, so your records and your tasks stay current
- Exporting to Excel or CSV whenever you want the data in your own hands
Guided setup asks what you grow and how you want to track before you reach the dashboard, and Keep It Simple is there if you want less. Our full walkthrough of the app covers everything it does, and How to Set Up the Microgreen Tracker App and Plant Your First Tray walks through your first tray step by step.
Every new grower starts with a 7-day free trial of the complete app, including Grow Stats, cost analytics, and export. Guided setup ends on the plan screen, where you pick a plan and add a card. Nothing is charged until the seven days are up, and you can cancel before then. Everything you record during the trial stays on your account.
Where to Start If You Have Never Tracked Anything
You do not need to track everything on day one. Start with five data points on your next tray and add more as the habit sticks:
- Crop, variety, and seed lot
- Seed weight and medium
- The sow date
- The harvest date
- The harvest weight
Start on a notepad, a spreadsheet, or the app, whichever you will actually keep using. The habit matters more than the tool. Pick one crop and grow it a few times so you have something to compare. If you need seed, True Leaf Market is our default seed source (shop seed here), and a digital scale is on our Harvesting Tools We Use list. For a deeper look at how we choose seed in volume, see our post on buying microgreen seeds in bulk.
You can find more of our grow and harvest videos in the On The Grow Video Library.
FAQ
What should I track when growing microgreens?
At minimum, track the crop and seed lot, seed weight, medium, sow date, harvest date, and harvest weight. As you go, add watering, light hours, quality, and any failures. Those few fields are enough to compare trays and spot patterns.
Is tracking worth it if I only grow at home?
Yes. Even a few trays of records show you which crops and varieties you enjoy growing, what a harvest actually weighs, and what changed when a tray did better or worse. It also makes the hobby more fun, since you can watch your totals and personal records build.
How do I work out the cost per tray?
Add up seed, growing medium, fertilizer, electricity, and a share of your overhead, then divide the total by the harvest weight to get cost per gram or per ounce. Microgreen Tracker does that math from the costs you enter.
Why use an app instead of notes or a spreadsheet?
Handwritten notes are quick but hard to search, and they leave the math to you. A spreadsheet is flexible, but you build and maintain every column and formula. An app like Microgreen Tracker is already set up, works out yield and cost per tray from what you enter, sends reminders, and still lets you export your data to Excel or CSV.
Can I export my grow data from Microgreen Tracker?
Yes. You can export to Excel or CSV from Grow Stats and harvest history, tray data, an individual order, and the calendar. Export is included in the 7-day free trial.
Is Microgreen Tracker free?
Every new grower starts with a 7-day free trial of the whole app. You choose a plan and add a card on the plan screen, and nothing is charged until the seven days are up. After that, plans start at $3.95 a month or $39.95 a year.
Can I import my existing spreadsheet?
Not at this time. Microgreen Tracker exports your data but does not import it, so we suggest starting fresh with your next tray and letting the records build from there.
Final Thoughts
We have been weighing harvests and writing things down since the start, and it is still the most useful habit we have. Hobby growers get a clearer picture of their progress and a lot of small wins to watch build. Sellers get a price built on a real cost and a better sense of what they can promise a buyer. And anyone chasing a better method gets an honest record of what changed. You can track on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in an app. If you would rather not build and maintain the system yourself, Microgreen Tracker is the one we built for exactly that, and it lets you take your data with you.
Ready to Start Growing?
- Start tracking today: Start My Free 7-Day Trial. The trial is the whole app, not a demo, and nothing is charged until the seven days are up.
- New to microgreens: grab our Beginner's Guide to Growing Microgreens or browse the On The Grow Learn page.
- Want the full course: the Microgreen Masterclass covers everything we have learned growing microgreens since 2018.
- Sprout in jars at home: Sprouting Tracker, our separate app for jar sprouting, is coming very soon, with tracking built in so you can log your sprout grows.
Related Blogs You Might Enjoy
- How to Start Growing Microgreens: A Beginner's Guide
- How to Grow Microgreens: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide From Microgreen Experts
- How to Grow Sunflower Microgreens: Complete Step-by-Step Guide
- How to Grow Pea Microgreens (Pea Shoots): A Complete Guide
- 7x14 Microgreen Tray Kit: Complete Growing Guide for Beginners
- Coco Coir vs. Reusable Grow Medium: Sunflower Microgreens Case Study
- What Works Best for Harvesting Microgreens: Knife vs Scissors vs Electric Trimmers
- Will Microgreens Regrow After Harvesting?
- Disadvantages of Microgreens
- Inside the On The Grow Microgreen Masterclass: What's Actually in the Course
- Becoming a Microgreen Master: The Complete Microgreens Book Guide
Accounts, subscriptions, billing, and support for Microgreen Tracker are handled at microgreentracker.com, and for Sprouting Tracker at sproutingtracker.com, not onthegrow.net.
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we use and recommend. See our Affiliate Disclosure.
The information in this blog is based on our personal experience and is for educational purposes only. The cost figures in the example are made up to show the math, and pricing, costs, and results vary by grower. Local food safety, licensing, and business requirements vary by location, so always verify current rules with your local health department and department of agriculture before selling.
The results and opinions shared in this post are based on our own first-hand testing in our specific, controlled grow space. Your climate, water, seed, and setup are different from ours, so your results can vary. We always encourage you to run your own experiments and see what works best for you.
— On The Grow®, LLC
Happy growing!