IESE: Internet-based system for managing farms

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Farmers now spend less time planting and tending crops and more in front of a computer managing the farm. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany, have developed an information and communication infrastructure, agroConnectrlp in collaboration with the Competence Centre for Innovative Information Systems at the University of Applied Sciences in Bingen and the region’s Rural Service Centre, to support farm management.

“This simplifies the farmer’s administrative workload and supports data communication processes in the agricultural sector,” says IESE project manager Björn Snoek. The infrastructure is based on standardised business processes that make administrative tasks more efficient. Users have all of the relevant farm management data at their fingertips, including land husbandry data, soil analyses, and official land registry data on land use.

For example, a farmer can call up previously stored data to fill in an online order form to book to harvesting services. It is no longer necessary to meet a company representative to walk the fields concerned because the coordinates in an electronic message.

The researchers are now adapting agroConnectrlp for use in other applications including consumer protection. If pesticide residues are detected in potatoes, it will be possible to identify the farm where they were grown, in which particular field, and what pest control measures were carried out there.