Embedding a precision agriculture service into a farm management information system - ifarma/PreFer
Christos Karydas, Myrto Chatziantoniou, Kostas Stamkopoulos, Miltiadis Iatrou, Vangelis Vassiliadis, Spiros Mourelatos
Abstract
Today, bridging precision agriculture (PA) with farm management is a high priority. To answer to this challenge, a precision fertilization service for extended crops was embedded as a new module in the platform of a pre-existing cloud-based farm management information system (FMIS), namely ‘ifarma’. The new module (namely, ‘PreFer’) uses interoperable geospatial formats, to guarantee free and rapid data exchange between a server-based geographic information system (GIS) and the ifarma platform. The GIS is used to store and process the complete farmers’ geodatabases, which are fed with data from multiple sources (e.g., soil surveys, satellite data, yield monitors, etc.). It is also used to feed the machine learning algorithms of ‘PreFer’ with the required data to produce the fertilization prescriptions in the form of digital maps. All the necessary maps are transferred automatically to the platform upon their production, where they can be viewed by the farmers. The platform is used also by farmers to insert pre-known or last-minute agronomic information required to the analysis. The overall developmental experience showed that such a customized application (such as ‘ifarma/PreFer’) is the most effective solution today, compared to other alternatives, towards fully operational precision agriculture services.