FutureFarm
Meeting the challenges of the farm of tomorrow by integrating Farm Management Information Systems to support real-time management decisions and compliance to standards

Projektleitung: Centre for Research & Technology Thesssaly (CERETETH), Griechenland

Förderung: EU FP7

Kooperation:

Zeitraum: 01.01.2008-31.12.2010

Einordung:
Institut: Professur Geodäsie und Geoinformatik

Projektbeschreibung:
Developing codes of good farming practice, diversifying markets and production systems as well asEuropean standards of sustainable agricultural production systems require implementation of moreelaborate management strategies. These have to respect specific ecological conditions, demands fromthe rural regions and those from the value-added chains. On top of that, these strategies have to besimple, but flexible enough to be adapted easily to changing economic or environmental conditionsand they need proof of their compliance. Beyond that, the demand for information about the productionprocesses is growing, both from the perspective of the value-added chains (traceability) as well asfrom regional stakeholders in order to fulfil multifunctional objectives by farming. An important prerequisitefor farmers to comply with all these different demands is to easily have sufficient and timelyinformation available for decision making or providing documentary evidence. The rapid developmentof technologies for information and communication, new sensors as well as the vast potentials forproviding geo-referenced data (remote-sensing, on-line sensors, public databases etc.) also allowsfarmers to access new and high quality data and use them as specific information in decision makingor process documentation. With automated data acquisition and handling in an on-farm managementinformation system the farmers can be seen to comply with a rapidly growing demand of standards inthe management of the production processes.

Precision Farming (PF) in Europe uses new technologies in information handling and management aswell as in managing the spatial and temporal variability found on all farms. Such explicit informationuse improves economic returns and reduces environmental impact. Precision farming is very data intensiveand historically linked with site specific activities and management on the field. It has becomevery clear in recent years that PF is not limited to site-specific farming. The use of techniques andmethods that form precision farming can provide a wealth of information and tools to handle and applyinformation properly for any type of farm in any region. This information-driven approach can beused to help improve crop management strategies and proof of compliance through documentation.The introduction of advanced ICT technologies into agriculture will also be a significant progress inall efforts for measurements oriented payments within agro-environmental programs and related effortsto enforce environmentally sound systems in land use within the EU. This also includes the BestManagement Practice according to the cross compliance scheme.

Crop products going into the food chain must show their certified provenance through a recognisedmanagement strategy and subsidy payments to farmers are now linked to respect of the environmentthrough compliance to standards. To this end, an integration of information systems is needed to advisemanagers of formal advice, recommended guidelines and implications resulting from differentscenarios at the point of decision making during the crop cycle. This can be achieved by integratingreal-time modelling (a crop growth and development model linked to sensors within the growing canopy),with expert systems that have been configured with the guidelines from a recommended managementstrategy (e.g. organic, ICM, IPM, factored risk etc) as well as legal guidance (such as healthand safety and environmental protection). This will directly help the farm or crop manager to makebetter decisions. Expert knowledge in the form of models and expert systems can be published andmade available in a machine readable form on the internet or made available as web-services to be dynamically bound into the end-user software. As the relevant farm data is already in the proposedinformation system, or may be automatically integrated using standardised services, documentation inthe form of instructions to operators, certification of crop province and cross compliance of adoptedstandards can be generated more easily than with current systems.

Crop products can also stay on the farm - besides traditionally fodder this will be in the future theinternal use of biofuels or bio energy. That would boost the possibility of moving towards a highlyenergy-efficient or even energy-neutral farm. This is supported by the significant reduction of energyrequired by small smart machines that can work by themselves while intelligently targeting inputs.

Bearbeiter: Nash, Wiebensohn, Born

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