Publications

A brief overview of the aims of the FutureFarm project from the viewpoint of WP4.

The Field Robot Event 2009, the FutureFarm demonstration of prototype robotic systems and the Joint International Agricultural Conference (JIAC) were held in parallel at the centre of Wageningen University’s campus, Wageningen the Netherlands, 6-8 July 2009.

The knowledge repository, identified as a system for delivering agricultural standards represented as encoded rules, consists of three primary elements. These elements are the catalogue server interface, through which the actual rule servers are discovered, the rule server interface and the encoding schema of the agricultural standards as rules. The encoding schema was specified as part of FutureFarm Deliverable 4.1.1. This document describes the server and catalogue interfaces and contains formal specifications as appendices.

This document describes the initial draft of a machine-readable encoding format for the definition of agricultural crop production and farm management standards. These standards may be:

This is the second year report (Jan to Dec 2009) of the FP7 project FutureFarm (212117) ‘Integration of Farm Management Information Systems to support real‐time management decisions and compliance of management standards’

In order to reliably assess compliance to agricultural management and crop production standards and regulations, a large body of data is required. In order that farmers may gather the correct data to self-check compliance, and that they can produce the necessary data in order to proove compliance to controlling bodies, it is desirable, or even essential, that the exact data required be explicitly and unambiguously defined.
Although this aim is easily defined, no simple solution is available. Two central problems may be identified:

Deliverable 6.3 is titled “Preliminary report on optimized fleet management to reduce energy consumption and costs “. Its objectives are:
a) to investigate the potential savings in energy consumption and production cost by optimising single and multiple machine (fleet) machine usage at the farm level
b) to investigate the required data, information flow and information management for optimised farm mechanization management comprising single machines or fleets of conventional, or autonomous machines.
The deliverable consists of three reports.
Report 1:

The energy flows of European farms were studied in this paper. The energy balance of two crops that can offer edible oil or oil for energy production was presented. The rape seed is one crop most adapted to the North of Europe and sunflower for the South. The energy balance showed that the energy consumption for production is generally lower than the energy output giving a positive net energy a prerequisite to use them for energy production.

Deliverable 7.1 “A typology of Precision Farming Technologies suitable for farms in the EU-nations” focuses on the development of a typology that summarizes and structures the broad and diverse set of techniques constituting precision farming technology. The typology should be applicable to EU-farms. Main characteristics of typologies were extracted and applied to PF. The typology has to cover and is restricted to relevant crops of the EU.

Previous deliverables from FutureFarm WP4 have defined an XML representation for agricultural management and production standards (D4.1.1) and two web-services, a catalogue and a rules server, allowing the definitions of the standards to be automatically retrieved via the Internet (D4.2). This deliverable provides the definition of a further component of the system which is being developed in order to manage knowledge of agricultural rules within Farm Management Information Systems.