Browsing by Author "Blackburn, D. W. K."
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Item Open Access Exploratory study into the acceptance of 'on farm' automated traceability systems(Cranfield University, 2009) Pegurara Gasparin, Carla; Godwin, R. J.; Blackburn, D. W. K.The increasing pressure from retailers and consumers require that all farmers collect traceability data regarding the crops they produce and the name and application rate of the agrochemicals that they have used to produce them. In order to achieve this, automated traceability systems could be used to assist farmers in collecting the data required throughout the food chain to the market place. An Automated Agrochemical Traceability System (AACTS) was designed and developed at Cranfield University (Peets, 2009). This system is capable of automatically identifying and assisting in the precise weighing of the agrochemical loaded into a sprayer. The actual amount applied to crops growing in any given section of the field would then be recorded from the application maps obtained using precision farming methods. This work aims to identify the factors that inform the development of and the potential market uptake of the AACTS. Interviews with representatives of the interest groups in the food chain were conducted in order to identify their perceptions regarding traceability systems. Moreover, ten farm sprayer operators were asked to judge the sprayer with AACTS against sprayer without AACTS in terms of ease of filling, data management, investment cost, operator safety and accuracy of the data. The food industry supports the need for the AACTS and will accept the new technology if it reduces cost, time, business risk and increases value of certified produce. It was found that the weighted ranking of the sprayer with AACTS was greater than the sprayer without the AACTS at 0.68 opposed to 0.32 respectively. Peets (2009) showed that the AACTS has a resolution within 1 g with the engine switched off and 3.6 g when it is not. Furthermore, there is no significant difference in speed of operation between the AACTS and the manual method including loading and record creation time at the 5% probability level. The system would also automatically create the record of the agrochemicals used, their application rate and field distribution pattern. The price that a farmer would be willing to pay for the AACTS is positively related to the size of arable holding land, the cost of sprayer and the perception of the need towards the AACTS as found using an online questionnaire. Out of 119 respondents, 42% of the respondents perceived the need for the AACTS. This study estimated thedemand curve of the AACTS, according to this curve 4% of the farmers would buy the AACTS if it costs £3,500, 54% would buy if it cost £1,500 and 100% would buy it if it cost £200. According to the demand curve and production cost, the highest profit for the manufacturer of the AACTS could be obtained with retail price of £2,000 in Europe. Twenty seven face to face interviews were conducted with farmers in England to identified the perceived main benefits, these were; the potential improvement of stock control in the chemical store, the avoidance of use of incorrect agrochemicals, the reduction of time in the office for record keeping and improved accuracy when filling the sprayer in terms of both the correct chemical and the dilution rate. However, in order to fulfil the farmers’ requirements the AACTS should allow more rinsing space to wash out 10 and 20 litre containers. Furthermore the software and appropriate database should be programmed to enable the identification and loading of the corresponding generic agrochemical products. The existing traceability systems of three different types of farm enterprise: fresh produce, onion production and a conservation grade cereal farm were analysed and suggestions for improvements were explored. It was demonstrated that the AACTS can avoid market and financial loss for relatively small cost. The operation cost of the AACTS for an area of 900 hectares is £1.29 per hectare. Furthermore, there is a potential time and financial saving if the agrochemical application records are received electronically. However, the savings will depend on the capability of the computer and its reliability. At Clements, the production manager spends around 600 hours per year typing the agrochemical application records into the computer. A range of social science methods were used to estimate the market uptake of the AACTS. These included face-to-face semi-structured interviews with members of the food chain and farmers, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to evaluate the prototype system of AACTS, and a Contingent Valuation (CV) questionnaire to estimate the farmers’ willingness to pay for the AACTS. The information gathered from their collective use showed that they provided a valuable suite of methods for product development.Item Open Access Specification, Design and Evaluation of an Automated Agrochemical Traceability System(Cranfield University, 2009-05) Peets, Sven; Godwin, R. J.; Blackburn, D. W. K.Traceability through all the stakeholders in food production is an issue of increasing importance, being specifically required by the regulations for food safety and quality (EC 178/2002), and for compliance with environmental protection. The agricultural market perceives a need for systems and technologies to automate the currently manual process of producing records of agrochemical inputs loaded into a spraying machine. A novel prototype Automated Agrochemical Traceability System (AACTS) to identify and weigh agrochemicals as they are loaded into crop sprayer has been designed, constructed, fitted to a machine and evaluated with commercial operators. The functional blocks of the system are a 13.56 MHz RFID reader, 1.4 litre self cleaning weighing funnel mounted on a 3 kg load cell, a user interface with a screen and three user command buttons (Yes, No, Back), and a progress bar made of 8 coloured LED’s (green, amber, red). The system is able to trace individual agrochemical containers, associate the product identity with national agrochemical databases, quantify the required amount of product, assist the sprayer operator and control workflow, generate records of sprayer inputs and interoperate with (recommending extensions to) task management standards as set out in ISO 11783-10. The evaluation of the quantity weighing has demonstrated that with such a system, the principal noise component is in the range of 33–83 Hz, induced by the operating tractor engine. A combined 3 Hz low pass digital filter with a second stage rolling mean of 5 values improves performance to allow a practical resolution of 1 gram (engine switched off) to 3.6 grams (sprayer fully operational) with a response appropriate to suit human reaction time. This is a significant improvement over the ±10 grams of the work of Watts (2004). An experiment with 10 sprayer operators has proved that in the majority of cases (92%) an accuracy equal or better than ±5% is achieved regardless of dispensing speed. The dispensed amounts (100.36% of target) and recorded (100.16%) are in accordance with prescribed values (100%; LSD(5%) 2.166%), where amounts dispensed by manual methods (92.61%) differ significantly from prescribed and recorded value (100%). The AACTS delivers a statistically similar work rate (211.8 s/task) as manual method (201.3 s/task; Δt = 10.5 s/task; LSD(5%) 28.2 s/task) in combined loading and recording cycle. Considering only the loading time (181.2 s/task) of manual method, the difference is 30.6 s/task (LSD(5%) 30.1 s/task). In practice this difference is believed to be marginal compared to the time required to load the water, random external events during the spraying session and in time moving, checking and storing paper records. The integrated weighing funnel concept is another significant improvement over previous work. Using this system, the mean duration of measuring per container for all tasks (34.0 s) is approximately half the time (68.5 s) achieved by Watts (2004). The AACTS was rated to be safer than the manual method regarding operator health and safety and risk of spillage. All operators who evaluated the AACTS were interested in purchasing such a system. The work confirmed that an RFID system was an appropriate media for agrochemical identification performing more than 250 product identification operations during operator tests without failure, with a speed of operation <1 s per cycle and reading distance of 100 mm. A specific format for RFID tag data is proposed for adoption, using low cost tags, that combines item level traceability with identification of products independently without access to worldwide databases. The AACTS follows ISO 11783 task management logic where a job is defined in a prepared electronic task file. It is proposed to extend the ISO 11783-10 task file to integrate the records provided by AACTS by handling the tank loads as individual products resulting from loading task and allocating them to spraying tasks. It is recommended to produce a production prototype following the design methodology, analysis techniques and performance drivers presented in this work and develop the features of user interface and records of tank content into software for ISO 11783-10 cabin task controller to deliver business benefits to the farming industry. The results with RFID encourage the adoption of RFID labelling of agrochemical containers. The reader may wish to read this thesis in parallel with Gasparin (2009) who has considered the business and industry adoption aspects of the AACTS.