Abstract
A field management system has been developed for large-scale rice production farms. The system efficiently manages the production management information of a large number of distributed fields. The system features a field map, with geographical coordinates, as the main user interface and management data such as operations, materials and etc. are inputted and displayed on a field basis by manipulating the field map. The fields are painted in different colors according to their attributes, which helps users to know the progress of operations at a glance. The system provides an editing function that lets a user make his or her own field map. The field map can contain more than a hundred thousand of polygons. For labor management, all staff members' labor data can be inputted by PDA devices and easily summarized to account for labor productivity, greatly reducing the time that such summarizing previously required. Meteorological data obtained through MetBroker, their temporal changes and accumulated values are made available to users. Since all these basic functions are common to management systems for other crops, the system can be applied to those crops with only a small number of modifications. The system was successfully evaluated by a large-scale agricultural production company, demonstrating that it could reduce the burden of managing the information associated with a large number of fields.
