Crop-matron not working

The crop-matrons must be +1, 0, or -1 block in level from the crop blocks (not the dirt!). The videos you see are probably misinformed.

Some more other tips on crops:
- Never cover the top of the crops. They should be open to sky, as far as possible. Try to keep the spaces around and above crops as empty as possible (not just directly above). This increases air-quality. Some crops do have special light conditions to grow/survive (some high, some fairly low), so try to adhere to this as far as possible.
- Swamp, followed by Jungle, is the best biome for growing crops. This increases the Ambient Humidity.
- Grow crops at Y-level 240+ to increase air quality.
- NEVER USE WEED-EX. Weed-EX immediately marks the crop down deep in the code, and that will make the crop and it's offsprings' growth severely reduced permanently. It is far more efficient micromanaging crops rather than waiting a few hundred more generations to make up for the growth reduction.
- Start cross-breeding only when the parent plants have reached the final 3 stages of their growth. Otherwise, you'll just be wasting cropsticks and risking weed infestatons. By the way, try to keep empty cropsticks as few as possible.

Quote from Andarkelben

Yeyh, I moved the Crop-matrons up one block, and presto! they work. I also removed all the weed-ex. Next step is to remove the covers over the beds, to improve air-quality. My reason for putting them there was to prevent people from trampling the crops, since most players on my server has powersuits, with easy step, that treats a single block as stairs, and thus it's very easy to accidentally walk on the beds...

You will have to ban them from using Powersuits, or breed up a high Resistance value on your crops (5 is decent, 10 is enough, above that will bring negative impacts).

By the way, you will have to break and replace all the crops if you have already used Weed-EX on them as Weed-EX's detrimental effects are PERMANENT and cannot be erased without third-party programs.