Concept of Horticulture Ambient Intelligence System

In the context of climate changes, there are predictions about the lack of rainfall and water to satisfy the needs of population and farmers. The sustainability of these resources determines watering efficiency in agricultural and horticultural activities. These activities include irrigation and watering. There is scope for the application of intelligent systems for the sustainable management of water resources

Augmented Reality As a Working Aid for Intellectually Disabled Persons For Work in Horticulture

The main focus of this article is to verify experimentally the possibility of using Augmented Reality as a platform for display educational materials in the field of horticulture in the real world for people with intellectual disabilities. Experimental verification was attended by eight people with varying levels of mental disability. The educational material was presented to the research participants in the form of a video, which was accessible via Wikitude platform based on the specific GPS coordinates. To find and display the content, participants used iPad2 and Android tablet devices. Despite the great potential of Augmented Reality technology, on the basis of undertaken studies it is still not possible to recommend this type of education for people with intellectual disabilities

Determinants of the result of economic activity of agricultural businesses of legal entities in the Czech Republic

This article deals with the result of economic activity of agricultural businesses of legal entities in the Czech Republic within the period of the years 2004–2010. First, the main factors that affect the result of economic activity are identified, and subsequently their effect is quantified. The analysis is based on sectional data from the databases of the Creditinfo company monitor and HBI Czech Republic; on average, 2314 businesses were examined within each year. The analysis showed a significant effect of only some factors, which were indicated as the main determinants of the result of economic activity. In the long-term, the decisive factors affecting the result of economic activity of agricultural businesses of legal entities in the Czech Republic can be considered to be primarily the level to which the business is equipped with assets and capital, and the capital intensity in general

Knowledge Support of Information and Communication Technology in Agricultural Enterprises in the Czech Republic

Presented article deals with issue of knowledge support of managerial decision making of entrepreneurs with regards to knowledge management principles. Basic idea of proposed solution is such a concept of information management of ICT/IT that would provide appropriate knowledge to decision makers. The core line of the approach is capturing of explicit knowledge relevant to given business activities into multidimensional databases that would become part of utilized ICT/IT. These issues are demonstrated on the agriculture domain where the need to computer storage of relevant knowledge and provide them on-demand is very up to date. Recently, it has become very necessary in frequently discussed agriculture technique called precision agriculture

Do Digital Public Services Matter? A Comparative Study of the Czech Republic and the Republic of Kazakhstan

Provision of quality public services has been in great concern of many governments for longer period of time. An interesting fact could be observed that, as to the demand and supply of digital public services, some developed European countries could lag behind some upper-middle-income countries. The paper explores differences in digital public services provision (supply side) and use (demand side) between the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan. A document analysis was done and a comparative study based on secondary data was elaborated. We can confirm that even a country from outside of the EU (Kazakhstan) can provide a better organized supply of digital services than an EU member state (Czech Republic) at least on the national level. According to the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) benchmarking, there are also significant discrepancies among national, regional and local services in the EU. The same phenomenon is also reported from transitional countries like Kazakhstan

Fair Label versus Blockchain Technology from the Consumer Perspective: Towards a Comprehensive Research Agenda

Many small farmers and workers on plantations in poorer countries constantly live on the poverty threshold. Those people suffer from rising commodity prices and trade structures that pass price pressure to the weakest link. Farmers are at the mercy of these structures and must comply as they have no other choice. On the consumers' side of the supply chain, it is often hard to recognize agricultural products' fairness and originality, especially in processed food. Many organizations – through food labelling - partially inform consumers about products' provenance and fairness. Whereas several studies confirm that food labels positively influence the consumers' intention to buy food, the vast number of organizations and labels are hard to evaluate and distinguish. A technology that could be a gamechanger in sustainable and fair global agriculture could be Blockchain Technology (BCT). With the help of BCT, the need for a central authority like a "fair label" agency may become obsolete, with the same or even better results. This conceptual article surveys subject matter literature and concludes that there is a noticeable research gap in the possibility of BCT replacing or enhancing fair food labels. Thus, the paper shows the potential of BCT to improve fairer agricultural supply chains and make them transparent for customers. By doing so, some research areas and research questions will be derived. Furthermore, specific directions for future research will be shown

Measuring the Similarities of Twitter Hashtags for Agriculture in the Czech Language

Our paper presents first analysis of Czech Twitter content within the agriculture context. We deployed textual analysis of more than 240,000 tweets over 2014-2019 hashtags that were, according to Google Trends, most trending and related to Czech agriculture such as #dotace, #repka, or #bionafta – both in Czech and English language. Besides descriptive statistics of the tweet dataset, we visualized keyword correlations which revealed strong focus of the discourse on rapeseed, biofuel and the prime minister Andrej Babiš. Owing to inherent political context of the given hashtags, we found spikes in topics which followed the public attention to the topics in mass media. We also found several accounts that produces high traffic for certain hashtags in Czech, yet those accounts were located abroad. Consistent with other studies, a high proportion of tweets was generated by unverified accounts that might be bots – automated accounts. We propose to conduct semantic analysis of a broader dataset over the main social media platforms in the Czech Republic

Evaluation of electronic public services in agriculture in the Czech Republic

The goals of the paper are to analyze the uptake and to evaluate the quality of electronic public services among Czech agricultural enterprises. A sample of 119 entrepreneurs in the agriculture from different regions in the Czech Republic was chosen. This research is based on the application of scientific analysis, synthesis and deduction. Descriptive statistics were calculated from the data obtained in the questionnaire survey. There were fifteen different electronic services examined in the survey. Respondents made a plain ordinal-scaled evaluation of all used services in terms of the frequency of use, usefulness, importance and quality. Working hypotheses about dependencies among rates of use of particular services and five factors (plant production, animal raising, hectares of land, number of employees, subsidies) were examined with regression analysis. Eleven statistically significant dependencies were proved between the number of hectares and electronic services, which means that with growing number of hectares of land the rate of use of particular electronic services increases. Electronic services provided at eAGRI Portal run by Czech Ministry of Agriculture were utilized the most among agricultural enterprises (each by more than 50 %) and electronic mail (79 %). eAGRI Portal services were assessed the best in terms of importance, usefulness and quality. Farmers and agricultural businesses in the Czech Republic are currently not obliged by any law to use any electronic service, and they can still opt for traditional paper mail or personal visit

Towards Future Oriented Collaborative Policy Development for Rural Areas and People

Rural areas in Europe are at risk due to depopulation, failing generation renewal, and a multitude of influences ranging from market-based, regulatory, to societal and climate changes. As a result, current rural policy is no longer keeping pace with these changes. We propose an advanced rural policy development framework in order to deliver more accurate foresight for rural regions, contributing to new and enhanced policy interventions. The proposed framework combines new quantitative and qualitative epistemological approaches, previously unused unstructured data with traditional research information, grassroot perspective with expert knowledge, current situation analysis with forward looking activities. We argue that by using the proposed methods, policy teams will be able to enhance the effectiveness of their policy making processes, while rural stakeholders will be given the opportunity to become valuable policy influencers and solution co-creators. The ability to quickly experiment and understand the impact of a variety of policy solutions will result in saved time and costs. The framework is part of an ongoing experimental verification and testing in twelve pilot regions across Europe and Israel