Design and Application of Farming Visualization System FVS for Human Resources Development in Agriculture

In modern farming, it is indispensable to monitor the field environment, crop conditions, and farming operations. To support these activities at farm level, we have developed several types of farm operation monitoring systems based on various needs of farms. FVS (Farming Visualization System) is one of such systems and designed in order to record and replay all the information of farming operations based on combinations of data from several kinds of sensors including GPS, RFID readers and CCD cameras. These systems can be applied for various application fields of agriculture. One of the major fields is to record precious and detailed farm operations history for good agricultural practice and food traceability. Another major field is the training and education of both farming operators and farm managers. These applications fields of FVS are especially important in agricultural company as well as advanced family farm. In this paper, first, the NoshoNavi project, in which FVS has been developed, is outlined after explanation of background of the research. The objective of this national project is to visualize three types of the farming information mentioned above and extract know-how of farming skill using the integrated data. The project is expected to give useful tools for human resource development in agriculture. Second, design, structure and function of the latest version of the systems are descried. Finally, the results of a trial run of the systems in real farms including 150ha rice farming company are given and implications of the application are discussed with future research topics in this research field. The smart phone system is simple to use with a low initial cost. On the other hand, the PC system can monitor many kinds of information with high accuracy. Both types of the systems have advantages and disadvantages. Suitable tasks for each type of system are clarified. A data exchange framework, called FarmXML, among related systems is also proposed.