It has been known that Tetsuta spring water found in Tetsuta village in Okayama prefecture has some positive effects on germination and elongation of plants (radish sprout). Functional water which has a similar effect on plant growth to Tetsuta spring water can be made from Tetsuta stone (calcium rich granite) and water with the addition of an appropriate amount of organic acid. The apparent characteristics of the functional water can be determined by such conditions as processing temperature, stone size, duration of treatment (soaking time) and organic acid concentration. The objective of this study was to develop a basic processing system for producing Tetsuta functional water. Since the treatment conditions are nonlinearly related to the features of the functional water, a neural network was used to model the nonlinear relationship. Functional water produced under the neural net based processing system increased the growth of hydroponically cultured plants.

View full abstract

We have developed a labor management application for handheld computers. It is mainly aimed at large agricultural companies with a number of employees. The users, employees, input their labor data: name, operation, date and working duration, using handheld computers every day. The labor manager of the company transfers the data into a database in a personal computer regularly. The application has been improved based on an evaluation that the employees of one agricultural company cooperated with us to conduct. The application reduces time involved in labor management and makes it very efficient. We discuss why we focused on the labor data of a big company and how these data can be integrated with the other data. We also discuss the result of applying a web-based system using a cellular phone to this labor management task.

View full abstract

To investigate the possibility of weed control by living mulch of wheat and barley, shading ratio and ground cover ratio on the ground surface by leaves were estimated when two wheat cultivars and 18 barley cultivars were sown on one day and grown in greenhouse. Wheat cv. Mulchmugi, commercial cultivar for green manure, showed higher performance at the tiller number, top plant length from the ground and shading ratio when it was sown in July at a seeding density of 3.2kg/10a or more. Wide variation was shown at tiller number and top plant length of barley sown in May at a seeding density of 3.2kg/10a. Some barley cultivars showed a larger shading ratio than cv. Mulchmugi, especially it reached 74% 28days after sowing in K027. Ground cover ratio was calculated by image processing using video data of top of wheat and barley. It showed 40% in cv. Mulchmugi, whereas those of barley had a wide range of variation. There was a relationship between ground cover ratio and some characteristics of top growth such as tiller number, top plant length and top dry weight. Although the relationship between shading ratio and tiller number, top plant length and ground cover ratio was recognized, there was no relationship between shading ratio and top dry weight. Barley cultivars such as K001, K027 and K069 were thought to be processing materials for living mulch.

View full abstract

This study presents a handheld application for insect field surveys. The application is designed not only to assist in surveying insects living in spatially structured habitats but also to facilitate subsequent data analysis in a Geographical Information System (GIS). The application uses a raster map and a GPS module to show the current position automatically. The location of a survey site is recorded as a point or polygon in latitude and longitude. Recording items are predefined and just selected during the survey. The records are transferred into a database in the desktop computer in a single synchronization step. The device is small and light. The details of the application are discussed in this paper.

View full abstract

A new concept of community-based precision farming is accompanied by well-organized wisdom farmers and a technology platform. The wisdom farmers groups improve upon the conventional farming system through the management of hierarchical variability: variability among farmers in terms of motivations and cropping types as well as within-field and between-field variability. Which variability should be managed for increased total economic returns with reduced environmental impact must be considered. The technology platform organized by innovative companies develops and provides three key technologies: mapping techniques, variable-rate techniques and decision support systems which take into account rural constraints. The best linkage of the wisdom farmers and the technology platform would produce information-oriented fields and information-added products that encourage multi-functions of agriculture creating new value-chains in the agro-production-consumption system.

View full abstract

An integrated data which covers both production and finance, such as yield and price of crops, the efficiency and price of a machine, working hours, and quantity and price of input materials, is indispensable to farm planning. Existing systems do not cover such comprehensive data set, however. Development of a data base for agricultural technology systems has been expected strongly. Then, in this research, a design and prototyping of such a data base are performed. Using the data base, a system of generating farm management indicator has been developed. Based on the result, both the basic structure and the function which these systems should have, are proposed. Then the feature and validity of this system in comparison with the existing systems were considered. Moreover, as a result of comparing with several existing system, the feature and validity of the system became clear as follows; (1) the data descriptiveness of a system database is high, (2) the data descriptiveness of an agricultural technical system database is connected with these high, (3) in a farming index creation function, presumption of the required minimum machine and the number of facilities e.g. greenhouse and drier, or the cash flow according to season is possible. A future subjects are as follows; (1) improvement of the system based on actual farm examination, (2) establishing the system which manages effectively the agricultural technical system data distributed geographically by introducing a federation database and Web service, and (3) development of the new application system which utilized this database.

View full abstract