To leverage Field Servers in protected horticulture, a Java application program, BixFieldRecordServer (BFRS), was developed and tested. BFRS operated on personal computers, and recorded the environment and image data using information exchange standard format on XML for plant production (BIX-pp) from some Field Servers and network cameras through the Internet or greenhouse LAN automatically. BFRS also was able to record the other agricultural producing data, which was plant growth, farm working, using agricultural chemicals, amount of products etc., into the same BIX-pp format file using manual input form and CSV format file. We could easily generate the BIX-pp format file of integrated production history information in protected horticulture by BFRS. BFRS was tested in two actual plant production greenhouses to confirm the operation. By the results of tests, it was clarified that BFRS allowed growers in protected horticulture to leverage Field Servers. The growers who own Field Servers can download BFRS free of charge at http://w3.fb.u-tokai.ac.jp/bix-pp to record their production history information.

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This paper presents our developmental study on information networks for large-scale rice fields using independent power supplies. The purpose of the networks is to provide media for agricultural communities to remotely access various data which are derived from sensors and cameras widely distributed in the fields. The required data rate is more than 10 Mbps which enables stress free transmission of real-time high-quality video stream. To supply electric power to the data transmission devices and sensors, we studied the application of wind and solar hybrid power generators and estimated their power generation capability by using meteorological statistics of the field. For the long-haul data transmission of more than 8 km, we adopted the IEEE 802.11 LAN technology and multi-hop transmission scheme, and achieved about 10 Mbps, 8 km transmission between a video camera installed on the filed and a data processing server.

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For the purpose of including consideration of environmental impact of pesticide use in decision support system, method of extracting management information, which integrated both environmental and economic indicators from selected agricultural technology, was proposed. The procedure, which outputs both environmental and economic indicators simultaneously by inputting agricultural technology information, was designed. Then risk score of agricultural technology for pesticide use (RST) as indicator of environmental risk of pesticide use was proposed in order to perform the designed procedure. RST value can be calculated by adding up the risk score of farmland for pesticide use (RSF) values about the agricultural technology. RSF value, which was estimated on the basis of the toxicity and operating density of an agricultural-chemicals active ingredient, can be calculated for the chemical substances subject to PRTR. Thereby the possibility of pesticide use impact can be quantified about agricultural technology. The designed procedure was applied to agricultural technology data on the farming-systems database and numerical result was examined. As a result, by using both of indicators integrative, it becomes possible to relate a technical selection with the load to environment by using pesticides. The proposed method in this study will offer the useful management information about the technology assessment and farm planning.

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We have developed a ROCOCO Library and a ROCOCO Google Maps which are the libraries to help creator of WWW application with Ajax which is the modern web developing technique. The ROCOCO Library has functions for XML HTTP communication, JSONP communication, bar chart view and matrix view. The ROCOCO Google Maps is the library based on the ROCOCO Library and has features for automatically generating menus to control Google Maps and overlaying the layer of filled meshes to the base map. To examine the improvement of development efficiency, two web contents have been developed with ROCOCO Google Maps for web services. The first is the Rice Diagnostics System for Kinki, Chugoku and Shikoku region, and the other one is Cropping Strategy Support System for Vegetables. We confirmed that the JavaScript source code could be greatly reduced by the use of ROCOCO Google Maps.

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