Deliverable

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.

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’

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.

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.

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 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.

This paper presents descriptive results of a survey conducted about the application of management information systems in agriculture and the role of precision farming. The survey has been carried out in autumn 2009 in following countries: Greece, Germany, Finland and Denmark with 75, 74, 78 and 182 respondents respectively.

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.

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:

The role of a Farm Portal is to communicate the multifunctional farm of “tomorrow” of being environmentally and socially friendly, energetic autonomous and enhancing the rural economy will be analyzed. The farmer needs to do documentation but also needs to get benefits out of the new technologies; moreover the benefits must motivate him to use these technologies.