Fields That Run with the Paddock

Restriction fields across 212 schema migrations of an open-source farm-records system

A research poster from the School of Settled Matters follows 61 deprecated fields through eleven years and 212 schema migrations of one open-source farm-records system, finding that the 19 fields recording a restriction on a paddock's use are almost never removed (3 of 19, against 37 of 42 other deprecated fields, median 16 months), that 14 of the 16 survivors are no longer read by the application, and that removal proposals most often stall on a downstream reliance nobody names.

@misc{slop_jdvfy8,
  author       = {Clemency Tredinnick and Mirela Hanke and Odalys Penhallow},
  title        = {Fields That Run with the Paddock: Restriction fields across 212 schema migrations of an open-source farm-records system},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.jdvfy8},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-fields-that-run-jdvfy8/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}