Takemi Machida

An Agricultural Field work Management System for Rural Farmers in Sri Lanka

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has created a new opportunity to increase the food productivity by introducing a number of online applications. The online agricultural information on the relevant crop to the field would be a great support for the rural farmers to make the decisions without delay. Moreover, timely application of agricultural fieldwork is necessary throughout the farming process and delaying fieldwork due to various reasons can reduce the agricultural production. A combination of internet and cellular phone technologies can be utilized to develop a crop information system. This system can be used to provide the latest agricultural information such as crop production, diseases, varieties, pesticide, irrigation, harvesting etc. Furthermore, the same system can be used as a simple and portable application to remind the expected fieldwork on time. The purpose of this application is to provide the agricultural information to the farmers who are in remote area of Sri Lanka. Internet enabled cellular phone is an appropriate device to use for this, because it is one of the most common devices used by everybody. To access some components of the system (latest crop information/fieldwork reminding) farmers are required to be subscriber of this online service and during the registration; the farmer should specify the crop name. Therefore, the crop name will be the key word to find relevant information. System was designed to send most up-to-date crop information to the relevant user even without any reminding message. To develop this system, MS Access database, ASP, HTML, VBScript, IIS web sever and some graphic application and WAP technology were utilized.

Stochastic Scheduling for Mechanical Sugarcane Harvesting

Abstract Weather has been one of the problems affecting sugarcane harvesting operation. This research aims at developing a scheduling method for mechanical sugarcane harvesting in order to minimize the effect of the weather. The amount of daily harvesting is decided by minimizing the expected cost due to cane loss during storage, the expected penalty cost due to lack of cane supply for the factory, and the operation cost.