Typology, classification and characterization of farms for agricultural production planning

Agricultural activity in Galicia, North West Spain, is carried out on farms that are characterized by a diversity of land use and production models, a variety of farm sizes, and considerable geographical dispersion. Any attempt of Agricultural Production Planning aimed at characterizing production models requires a method of analysing data and obtaining technicaleconomic results from farms in the different areas. Models based on average statistical data are limited because they represent farms that do not exist in reality. This study develops a methodology to characterize and group dairy farms into different types according to the following basic variables: land use, size classes and production systems. The information used in this study was microdata from the 1999 Census of Agriculture. The methodology developed was also applied to microdata from the 1989 Census of Agriculture, thus obtaining significant information about the evolution of agricultural activity. The tools used in the analysis were Microsoft Access and Excel, and an application that was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic. The methodology presented can be used to analyse the evolution of the sector or to model future trends

Manual GPS guidance system for agricultural vehicles

In this paper, the performance of a manual GPS guidance system to assist farming operations is evaluated. The distribution of granular fertilizer was simulated in order to discretize areas with excessive application of fertilizers and areas with fertilizer application rates below the intended rate. The path of travel followed by a tractor with the manual GPS guidance system was analysed and compared with a commercial parallel tracking system and without guidance assistance. In addition, the analysis evaluated how the use of manual GPS guidance systems improves the performance of field operations that require large distances between passes. Under the experimental conditions used, the best results were obtained using a commercial parallel tracking system but, for our purposes, small differences were observed between the results obtained with the commercial system and the results obtained with the developed manual GPS guidance system, getting pass-to-pass average error values of 0.26 and 0.73 m, respectively. The results obtained with both systems were significantly better than the results obtained when no guidance assistance was used. In our trials, area with appropriate fertilizer rate was clearly increased when guidance assistance was used. Values of area with correct fertilizer rate applied ranged between 87% with commercial parallel tracking and 59% without guidance assistance. The use of the manual GPS guidance system presented in this paper has proved sufficient to obtain good results for mechanical fertilizer spreadin