Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
regional, and global companies offering similar types of services to a wide variety
of customers.
A few more application examples include, but are not limited to, preparation of
data for supporting zone management, variable-rate fertilizer application, yield mon-
itoring, and mapping. Precision application of agricultural inputs was commonly
implemented by dividing a field into smaller management zones, and such a man-
agement zone was defined as “a portion of a field that expresses a homogeneous
combination of yield-limiting factors for which a single rate of a specific crop input
is appropriate” (Doerge, 1998). Thus, the determination of production inputs to those
management zones is an essential task of precision farming services.
3.5.3 I
NFORMATION
M
ANAGEMENT
T
OOLS
For making use of the collected spatial/temporal precision farming operation data,
there is an imperative need for farmers to have handy tools specifically designed for
precision farming data collection, process, and analysis. Many equipment and/or
service providers have also made a few precision farming software tools commer-
cially available to fill the need. For example, Trimble has introduced a range of field
and office software solutions, such as the TerraSync™ software, for fast and efficient
field GIS data collection and maintenance, and for mapping and GIS applications
(Trimble, 2011). Another example is Deere & Company, which has launched an auto-
mated water management solution, iGrade™, for generating operation plans for crop
field leveling, ditching, and grading based on acquired field terrain data (Deere &
Company, 2011a), which provides an excellent example of what the agricultural info-
tronics technology could provide to farmers: a handy tool for converting collectable
data to actionable data. CNH also offers Case IH AFS
®
Desktop Software to record
fuel usage, individual operator performance, and other field operation data; to gener-
ate yield maps, as-applied maps, and prescription maps; and to manage, view, and
edit the collected precision farming data (Case IH, 2011).
3.6 SYSTEM INTEGRATION AND APPLICATIONS
The workstation of a typical agricultural infotronic system (AIS) is integrated by
data collection, communication, and computation electronics with data management
software. One of the early conceptual AIS systems proposed in late 1990 illustrated
the major elements and their integration principle (Figure 3.3) (Zhang, 1998). This
proposed AIS consisted of three subsystems to implement “on-tractor” information
management: a tractor LAN subsystem, a service LAN subsystem, and a farm office
monitor subsystem. The tractor LAN subsystem was centered at a tractor-PC and
networked with on-tractor precision agriculture electronics and sensors, electrical
control units, monitor(s), and a wireless local area network (WLAN) node. Among
those elements, the tractor-PC would play the key role in communicating with all
other subsystems/elements, controlling the collection of data from both on-tractor
sensors and service center databases, and converting collected data to operation
instructions. The service LAN subsystem would provide the infrastructure neces-
sary for information services, and the farm office monitor subsystem would perform
