Farmers lack the tools to make informed decisions related to financial management of their business, taking into account cost and profit margins and profitability analysis. While there is a number of Farm Management ERP solutions on the market today these are mainly complete ERP systems, aimed for the big Farm Enterprises are not suitable nor affordable for use by the individual or family farm typical in most European countries.
For most farms, farming activities are not properly logged at least not in a systematic way so that cost analysis can be performed to find out critical cost factors that could be avoided in order to minimize costs and maximize productivity.
Individual farmers need IT tools that will enable them to log and calculate costs, plan ahead and make informed decisions on what crops to plant, what farming activities to execute and what inputs to use, based not only crop and farming requirements but also based on financial considerations.
Such tools should be able to provide a 'good enough' approximation of the cost and profitability analysis using acceptable 'default values' - typical costs per input and activity, in order to compensate for the lack of accurate data logs typical in a small size farm.
Agrostis, develops and markets ifarma, an integrated Farm Management App for both individual farmers and farmer groups. ifarma is provided as Saas both as a native mobile app and as a web-cloud based application.
ifarma features a powerful financial analysis module that includes farm profitability analysis and cost analysis at three levels: field, crop and farm.
The aim of the proposed project is to make ifarma's financial analysis module available as an App on the FISpace platform utilizing FIWare technologies. The Farm's Financial Analysis (FFA) FISpace App, will provide an interoperable service in the FISPace platform receiving field, crop and cultivation task data and using existing ifarma module as a backend service will
a) Display a profitability and cost analysis dashboard as a widget on the FISpace and
b) provide the resulting analyses as output via the FISpace platform for use by other Apps and services.
Project partners:
Agrostis - Agricultural Information Systems LTD
University of Hohenheim, Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Section of Instrumentation and Test Engineering