Abstract
We developed a shared version of FieldServer equipped with sensors and a wireless wearable terminal that tracks a farmer’s activities to test the possibility of revealing relationships between a farmer’s usual activities and the associated environmental data. This system represents a first step the effort to develop tools that allow farmers to share their activities with the local agricultural community. The system accumulates environmental data from the farm, farmer’s voice data, and video data before his eye by the wearable terminal camera. The environmental data recorded in the system are the temperature, relative humidity, and soil electrical conductivity. We have accumulated data from about 2 years of field trials, starting in September 2010, at a farm in Sapporo, Japan. With this system, the farmer’s past activities can be found from the environmental data accumulated in the system. By using the history of the farmer’s activities, recorded and monitored using the wireless wearable terminal, it was possible to study the planting of Chinese cabbage and determine the relationship between the farmer’s activities and the associated environmental data. Pictures stored by FieldServer showed that the product grown at each location changed from season to season to avoid problems related to continuous cultivation of a single crop. We also compared the recorded environmental data with data from the Sapporo district meteorological observatory.
