Pesticide Application Manager (PAM) is a project, co-financed by the German Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE) that aims to develop solutions for automating important processes in crop protection.
Due to a series of rules and legal requirements for planning, implementation and documentation, crop protection is one of the most information intensive activities in modern agriculture. One example is the legal obligation to create buffer zones at field boundaries to protect adjacent natural ecosystems and rivers. In agricultural day-to-day reality the planning and implementation of crop protection measures as well as the compliance with laws, rules and any sort of documentation is mostly the responsibility of the operator who is conducting the action. Much of this work is this still done manually and without the support of information technology. This results in high workloads as well as an increased error-proneness.
The objective of the PAM-project is, to develop tools to automate and therefore optimize the processes mentioned above by integrating data available online from different private and public sources using up-to-date technologies. This will make crop protection measures less error-prone and easier documentable.
Important parts of the project are:
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Develop an electronic system to read bar-code-labels of crop protection product (CPP) containers and connect to different public and private databases to get related information
Information about crop protection products is mostly only human-readable. An example is labels on CPP-containers. This poses the risk, that information in not considered at all or not in the right way. Manual transfer into Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) is error-prone as well. Using electronically readable crop protection product information helps users to avoid errors and make sure all relevant information is being considered.
In the PAM-project a system for electronically readable bar-code-labels is being developed in cooperation with chemical industry and agricultural engineering businesses. By connection to different private and public databases product specific information is being made accessible on site. Examples are:
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Information about miscibility of different crop protection products
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Information about legal regulations (e.g. legal buffer zones to rivers)
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Develop a web service to automatically generate machine-readable application maps that include legal buffer zones
In the scope of the PAM-project different web services are being developed. One example is a tool that automatically creates machine-readable application maps using the non-proprietary ISO-XML format. These application maps include legal buffer zones depending on pesticide and application unit. Databases from different public institutions in Germany are included to access the necessary information: The Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety, the Julius Kühn-Institut (JKI), Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants. Application maps offer the possibility to automate spraying as well as documentation.
Open interfaces are being developed to include those services in Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS). This will support farmers to comply with reporting commitments (to supervisory authorities or customers).
The PAM project is implemented by a consortium of public and private organizations under lead of the German Central Institution for Decision Support Systems in Crop Protection (ZEPP). Project partners are the Association for Technology and Structures in Agriculture (KTBL), the Julius Kühn-Institut (JKI), Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants, the Information System for Integrated Plant Production (ISIP), BASF SE and John Deere GmbH & Co. KG, Intelligent Solutions Group. The time frame is three years, from 2013 to 2016.
First results from field tests are currently being evaluated and will be specified in the full paper as well as presented on the conference.
