We developed an agricultural computer game to encourage young people, accustomed to games, to be interested in agriculture. In this system, the user becomes a heroine (or a hero) in a virtual game space and can experience both farming and farm village life as a “new entrant”. Farming can be understood visually by using the image of laboring in farming crops. The user gains a rudimentary knowledge of agriculture through events that occur in the game. A questionnaire administered to game users showed that the game was effective in rousing interest in agriculture. Finally this paper discusses the following important points for further consideration: (1) the balance of game and reality and (2) enhancement of content concerning farm management and crops.

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An agricultural chemical use risk management system has been developed. This system has been designed to enable actual business use on farms. The main feature of this system is that it judges the propriety of agricultural chemical use at multiple stages and according to multiple standards. These standards include the Japanese Agricultural Chemicals Regulation Law and an original standard published by an agricultural cooperative association. The propriety is judged at several stages from agricultural chemical registration through to control work before chemicals are applied in the field. The system can automatically register details of the location where judgments are being made and which agricultural chemicals are being used (5W1H) including images of pests through the use of a camera-equipped GPS cellular phone. The system was trialled in an actual business setting in a proof of concept at a Tendo City agricultural cooperative association. This confirmed the effectiveness of the multi standard and multistep judgment method.
In related work, a study compared the relative merits of providing a judgment on agricultural propriety before or after recording agricultural chemical use. In an approach using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) agricultural chemical use history was registered first, and its propriety was judged afterwards. In a cellular phone-based approach, the propriety of agricultural chemicals use was judged first, and the agricultural chemical use history was registered afterwards. Although the OCR method is being widely adopted in the present environment, our study suggests that the cellular phone method will increasingly gain favor.

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In this study, we sought to identify potential wheat growing areas by considering five factors. The factors were wheat productivity, harvest timing, labor sufficiency ratio, economic relative value and potential profit. Productivity and harvest timing were derived from a wheat simulation model, while the other three factors were calculated from data consisting of labor availability, the prices of agricultural commodities, and agricultural production costs. The labor sufficiency ratio was defined as the ratio between the number of required laborers and number of available laborers during the wheat growing period. The relative economic value was calculated as the ratio of the potential profit gained from wheat growing to the profit gained from a major existing crop, while potential profit was calculated as the difference between potential revenue and production cost. To allow for spatial variability in these criteria, we applied spatial compromise programming (SCP), an enhanced method of compromise programming (CP) by integrating a conventional CP with geographical information system (GIS) tools.
The best compromise solution is indicated by a minimum Lp metric value, the cumulative distance of all criteria from ideal values. The value of this metric depends on the weighting applied by decision makers to each criterion. Lombok Island was chosen as the study area. By using default weighting values, it was found that potential wheat growing areas were located in the middle of the island.

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We developed a mobile phone-based application to judge and record appropriate pesticide use for farmers based on a research project on navigation system for appropriate pesticide uses (Nouyaku-navi). The application, “Nouyaku-navi Goyoboshi-kun”, has been implemented as a Java-based “i-Appli” for FOMA model mobile phones (NTT DoCoMo). The i-Appli executes on a mobile phone, and only accesses the Internet as required, improving the responsiveness of the user interface and minimizing data charges based on packets sent and received. The overall application structure is a client-server system consisting of the client application (CA) for farmers and a server application (SA) to manage master data and pesticide use records. The master data include data of crops, varieties, and pesticide use rules. The master data are set up on the SA before the users can input pesticide use records in the fields with the CA on their mobile phones. The CA only accesses the SA when it needs to receive master data or submit pesticide use records.
In cooperation with JA staff and vegetable farmers in Nobeyama, Nagano Prefecture, we conducted an evaluation test on this system to judge and record appropriate pesticide uses, from June to October 2005. The JA staff appreciated being able to access pesticide use records through the SA in order to check when each farmer's fields could be harvested. Some of the farmers who had used the CA said that they did not feel that their own use of it was merited, but that it might be useful for farmers who were inexperienced in pesticide use. And some of them said that the CA was difficult to operate and that they had to modify the estimated harvest date on the CA if growing conditions of their crops varied. The farmers requested the following enhancements to the CA: to display the estimated harvest date and the days before harvest when they input their fields and pesticides, to improve the display of pesticide use records, and to register the pesticides used by each farmer in the master data.

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The purpose of this study was to develop decision support systems for environmental conservation farming which can evaluate and justify optimal cropping combinations and cropping areas. To be useful, these tools need to sustain high levels of agricultural gross income and be able to calculate the volume of greenhouse gas emissions. Decision support systems developed by the authors of this paper have been enhanced with the functions that calculate the volume of greenhouse gas emissions according to “The guidelines for calculation of greenhouse gas emissions from industry”, create greenhouse cropping plans and that can calculate heating expenses. Experimental farming models for Niigata prefecture with multiple management approaches for rice paddy farming and greenhouse cropping were used. Farming plans and the associated volume of greenhouse gas emissions were evaluated. Heating expenses were forecast for various cropping combinations. The variation in working hour availability was captured by allowing a selection between having the cropping season early, in the middle or late in the month. The increase ratio of the agricultural gross income comparing to the standard cropping plan was expected to be up by 10% (1.78 million yen). Suppressing the volume of greenhouse gas emissions by 10% or 20% reduced agricultural gross income by 0.1% (128,000 yen) and 0.5% (781,000 yen) respectively in comparison with a standard cropping plan. It was shown that garland chrysanthemum (winter harvesting) was the most environmentally friendly crop and the profit margin of greenhouse gas emissions in this cropping type was the highest among the various cropping combinations.

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Kansei engineering aims to translate feelings and impressions into product parameters. Research and development projects with “kansei” as a keyword are becoming more numerous, including a small number of proposals in the fields of agriculture, food and green amenity, etc. In our current research we aim to develop new agricultural products and food which have color, form, scent, etc. which consumers evaluate favorably, and to design, develop, and evaluate office, house, urban and rural spaces with a comfortable nature or curative effects. In the research reported in this paper we aimed at introducing kansei information in design, development, and evaluation in the food and environmental fields by performing facial expression analysis. We acquired images of facial expressions with kansei information and analysed them using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). FACS enabled us to pinpoint the tendency and attention area for every face part. The important face feature points and change between nodes in face node images were able to be obtained.

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The purpose of this study is to detect jamming in sealing aluminum packages for food material. Two types of package are examined; one is an unpigmented silver package and the other is orange colored. The detection algorithm developed in this study consists of the following methods: capturing image data of the package seal area; 24 bit decomposition of RGB components (8 bits each channel), delineation of the seal area, FFT processing, image denoising by a mask operation, IFFT processing and binary conversion by a brightness threshold. The optimum brightness threshold is calculated by discriminant analysis. The combined optimum brightness thresholds for the detection of jamming in the unpigmented silver packages are an overall brightness threshold of 15 and a red component of 8. The discrimination ratio for jamming packages is 100% using the above thresholds. For orange colored packages, the optimum brightness thresholds for detecting jamming are an overall brightness threshold of 28 and a blue component of 8, which provides a discrimination ratio of 100%. It was shown that it is possible to reliably detect jamming in sealing food package using the detection systems developed in this study.

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