Development and first tests of a farm monitoring system based on a client-server technology

It's a common knowledge that farm operations monitoring must be considered the starting point to realize a complete and integrated Precision Agriculture system. Therefore, it is necessary to collect the actors taking part to the event and the physical effects related to it. For each field process, it is essential to know: (a) what is happened; (b) where the event has been carried out; (c) who is involved in the event; (d) what and how many productive factors have been employed. An approach that can meet these goals is now offered by the so-called 'Precision Agriculture', which should not be considered only as the ability to automatically manage individual mechanized operations, but as the real attitude to apply advanced forms of farm management. This paper describes the construction and first tests of an automatic monitoring system dedicated to farms, based on a client-server logical with real time data download. To this aim, each farm tractor and/or self-propelled is equipped with a datalogger with GPS and connected to sensors that can measure main operating parameters. An internal GPRS modem downloads data on the farm server in real time. The resulting database is integrated through additional data from weather unit, milking room, level sensors on slurry storage tank. In this way, the operational component of the Farm Information System (FIS) is realized, and it allows the total operating and environmental monitoring through the control of input (slurry, fertilizers, pesticides) and products (crops, milk) flows.