9:00 Business Theme Plenary

Tuesday 3rd July

9:00 Business theme plenary

Keynote presentation

Dr. Kristian Moeller,

Secretary EUREPGAP, The Global Partnership for Safe and Sustainable Agriculture

Managing Director FoodPLUS GmbH, The Global Body for EUREPGAP

Biography:

Dr Moeller’s main interest areas lie in the fields of Agricultural Economy and Agribusiness Management. He is Secretary of EUREPGAP an organisation which has created and implemented a series of sector specific farm certification standards whose aim is to ensure integrity, transparency and harmonisation of global agricultural standards. This includes the requirements for safe food that is produced respecting worker health, safety and welfare, environmental and animal welfare issues. Dr Moeller was educated at the Universities of Paderborn and Kiel, Germany and also at Purdue University in Indiana, USA. Following a years basic agricultural training on farms in Germany and the UK he went on to manage several important projects at European level (1996-1998). He was appointed as the Senior Consultant for Quality Assurance (1999-2000) at the EHI-EuroHandelsinstitut (Cologne, Germany) with specific responsibilities for the areas of: Food, Fresh Produce, Meat and Dairy Products. He became the Secretary of EUREP in 1997 and has been the Managing Director of FoodPLUS since 2001.

11.00 Environment

UML Constructs to Support the Development of Land Cover/Land Use Information Systems. Y. Fernandez-Ruiz & Jesus Soria-Ruiz

The development of sustainable development, in particular of sustainable agriculture proposals and policies, demands many different kinds of information. Land cover/land use changes constitute important phenomena in the context of sustainable agriculture. The understanding of these phenomena relies on the possibility to access and analyse vast amounts of data.. In this paper we highlight the combined application of use-cases and activity diagrams to derive user and system requirements for interaction with the stored data. From the formal specification of requirements we derive the objects; structure and dynamics that support the implementation of query and update mechanisms. We report on our latest developments of the COSEMEx system which gathers land cover/land use information at the state level in Mexico. /

Assessment of the Environmental Sustainability of a Traditional Brazilian Coffee Farm. Y. Ogura, B.F. Giannetti, C.M. V. B. Almeida & S.H. Bonilla.

The Cerrado, a savannah region, is Brazils second largest ecosystem after the Amazon rainforest and is also threatened with imminent destruction. A graphical tool was employed to assess the environmental performance of the production of Brazilian coffee in a traditional farm in Cerrado region, Brazil. The graphical tool was developed in Microsoft Excel 2002 (10.2614.3501) SP-1, using the graphic capacities of Visual Basic for Applications. The present study presents the environmental assessment performed in the farm located in Coromandel, Minas Gerais, Brazil and compares the obtained results with the coffee production in Nicaragua. Results indicate that Brazilian green coffee production is more sustainable than that performed in Nicaragua and the contribution of green coffee to Brazilian economy is three times higher than the contribution of green coffee to Nicaragua economic system. /

A comparative study between precision agriculture and biodiversity modeling systems. F.S. Santana, E. Murakami & A.M. Saraiva

Biodiversity modeling systems and precision agriculture seem not to be related problems. However, both problems involve a great variety of techniques and data analysis, different data sources, formats and transmission requirements, besides sociological barriers, user profiles and other relevant aspects, leading to the conclusion that the adoption of information systems are essential for them. Service-oriented architectures seem appropriate starting points for developing frameworks that fulfill the exposed software requirements. As software requirements of precision agriculture and environmental modeling generation systems are related, their architectures can also be related. This paper starts from a reference architecture proposed for a precision agriculture infrastructure and, after identifying similarities, suggests a service-oriented architecture for biodiversity modeling systems.

Municipal environmental-monitoring system. F. Speiser, I. Magyar, R. Jamniczky & Á. Rédey

Within the Faculty of Engineering of University of Veszpram a unique economic unit was established called “Sustainable Development Environmental an Informatics Cooperative Research Centre”. This centre started an R+D project on the main topic of environmental protection and its technologies. This work is about the environmental informatics sub-program, which targets to work out the measurement methodologies of environmental pollution data, then measuring (monitoring) these. The main goal of the project is to make it possible to build and deploy an information system based on the collected data, that can publish environmental data trough the internet as a web service.
In connection with the information system above, the local government/authority can elaborate an attractive, informative, up-to-date information service that provides data of the state of their environment for the inhabitant’s purpose. /

Community information systems based on Unified Modelling Language to create a participatory monitoring tool on the environmental impact of agriculture. M. S. Barzman & C. Cornu

Community information systems (CIS) were designed to monitor environmental change in given agriculture-dominated areas. They serve both as information resource centres and as fora for exchange and coordination among local stakeholders. In 2004, the French Agriculture and Fishing Ministry asked CIRAD (Agricultural Research Center for Developing Countries) to assist in the set-up of CISs. This paper reports on our experience. Two years of setting up CISs has allowed us to develop methods and recommendations for the set-up of such systems. We identify the factors that favour local and collective ownership of a social device based on data management. We discuss the extent to which CISs allow a diversity of stakeholder groups to collectively address the multiple perceptions and interests and to tackle the complexities inherent in the agriculture-environment relationship.

11.00 Business – DSS development

A macroeconomic (simultaneous equation) model of the Estonian grain sector. R. Pauldaru, J. Roots , A-H. Viira , & R. Värnik

The primary objective of the present study was the creation of a macroeconomic (simultaneous equation) model of the Estonian grain sector. Simultaneous equation modeling provides a new approach to the economic analysis. This paper outlines the linkage between the grain and input sectors. The Estonian grain model consists of 27 equations 18 stochastic equations and 9 identities. variables are run out over seven year period. Effects of various different policy simulations are then gauged against a no policy change or “baseline” result. Example equations are used as illustrative examples. Some results from the simulation of the model are then presented. Perspective implementation of Estonian grain sector model is considered. The experimental econometric grain model for Estonian agriculture may be used for projection and analysis purposes. /

A strategy for incorporating plant diseases coupled with leaf sensor measurements into CERES-Wheat. K. Gröll, S. Graeff & W. Claupein

The maximum yield of plants is seldom achieved because factors such as insufficient water or nutrients, adverse climatic conditions, insect damage and especially plant diseases will limit growth at some stage. The development of pesticides has improved the possibility to reduce pests, but in today’s crop production there is an increasing pressure to reduce the use of pesticides, to decrease the environmental impact and to lower potential production costs. The advent of direct injection sprayers and computer based information systems allow farmers now to site-specifically treat patches of weeds or diseases. The quantification of these risk elements would be a vital practical step in rationalising pesticide use. The basis for a site specific application of pesticides is however the spatial registration of the pathogens and agronomic decision rules and production functions to support fungicide spray decisions. /

Metamodel approach to grain acceptance, storage and processing system design. S. Arhipovs

At the traditional approach to designing systems all requirements are formulated over again, and then they are realized in the final system. The system is static in the sense that its structure is constant during all life cycle. Attempts of change of requirements while in service lead to big problems in system realization of new structures and functions. This paper describes an approach based on modelling and metamodelling. The technology of dynamic configuration and compilation of classes libraries allows to define “on spot” assembly in memory, to create modules for it, to define new types for modules, and also to generate new functions for realization of quality parameters logic and technological operations. Such separate compilation of system enables creations of new types during program execution. It leads to increase abstraction level of the system on the one hand and to decrease of complexity of created model on the other hand.

An approach based in text-mining for knowledge acquisition phase in diagnostic systems. S. M. Silveira Massruha, R. Marchi , L. M. Cunha da Silva, K. X. Sampaio de Souza, L. H. Mendonça de Oliveira, S. Robson de Medeiros Oliveira & M. A. B Morandi

The reliability of a diagnostic expert system depends on the quantity and quality of knowledge that it handles, i.e., the number of diseases it can diagnose and the appropriate knowledge representation constructed by the domain expert. However, the knowledge acquisition is the bottleneck in the development of any expert system. In this paper, we discuss an approach where we use text mining technique during the acquisition process to extract knowledge from unstructured data in texts and generate a numerical matrix. After that, methods used in data mining which work with structured information can be applied such as machine-learning methods. In our case study, we worked with a knowledge base of 41 disorders (D) that can occur in a corn and compared the results with those obtained in an expert system previously constructed. Finally, we discuss the results of this work as well as the future work in our research project. /

Irriguide: a decision support tool for drainage and irrigation scheduling. M. Silgram, D. Hatley & R. Gooday

The IRRIGUIDE model calculates runoff, evaporation, transpiration and drainage on a daily basis given field-level information on soil type, cropping, irrigation, and daily weather data. The model is unusual in that its use spans both agri-environment research and consultancy for UK government and its agencies, as well as the provision of field level advice to over 500 individual farmers. IRRIGUIDE is used to predict soil moisture deficit (as a Decision Support Tool for irrigation scheduling), and to estimate daily drainage volume (for hydrological budgeting, and in combination with leachate chemistry to derive estimates of fluxes in pollution mitigation studies). This paper focuses on a new version of the model (version 4.1) which has recently been released

11.00 Business – e-Marketing

ICT in agro-alimentary products promotion. P. Jure & A. Vacchieri

Argentina’s economy is again trusting in agriculture as the engine of regional development and as a privileged resource for a reinsertion of Argentina into the global markets. But, to make it possible modernization and the implementation of information systems, in order to adopt international standards of management, quality certifications and traceability are also required. The aim of this work consists of the research and consolidation of a set of known principles about practices of promotion and marketing of agro- alimentary products using ICT, as an expression of new ways of virtual management for organizations. As part of the initiatives of SECRETARIAT OF AGRICULTURE, LIVESTOCK, FISHERIES AND FOOD, this text intends to provide support for strategies of regional integration using ICT, the constitution of virtual associations for the agro-alimentary products promotion and the development of new chains of value.
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Designing an Observatory of Agricultural e-Markets. N. Manouselis & C. Costopoulou

The role that information technology plays in today’s business activities has led to the emergence of electronic commerce (e-commerce). This development undoubtedly affects the agri-food sector, since a large number of agricultural firms are demonstrating or are expected to demonstrate e-commerce activities. In most occasions, these activities include the use and/or deployment of electronic markets (e-markets). This paper presents the design of an online observatory of Greek agricultural e-markets. The observatory will serve users that search for agricultural e-markets according to characteristics such as their products and services or their geographical coverage. For this purpose, a large number of Greek agricultural e-markets will be identified and described, using the elements of a specially developed metadata schema, the Dublin Core for E-Markets (DC-EM). /

RES-AGRI: for a networking agriculture… the farm at the centre of agricultural information exchanges. B. Prepin, G. Cheruy & G. Waksman

To meet the requirements of their business and administrative partners, farmers are spending more and more time collecting and transmitting all kinds of information within their business activities. At the end of the day, there is a time conflict between information management and agricultural production tasks. At the same time, all actors are developing information systems to manage and control the growing information flows. The development of these complex IT systems supported is paving the way for e-Administration and e-Business and is offering the opportunity to achieve a networked agriculture. In this context, the objective of the RES-AGRI project is to propose a simple, cheap and operational solution to enable farmers to exchange information with all their partners, that would make interoperability of all existing agricultural IT tools possible for a targeted cost of 5 € per farm per month.

Agritourism And The Role Of Ecommerce In The Agribusiness Evolution: Evidence From A Regional Survey. S. Ammirato

Agritourism represents an important entrepreneurial strategy for rural communities in supporting the diversification of farms economy. In this sense, the adoption of effective eCommerce web interfaces by agritourisms can play a significant role in improving farms revenue streams. This study introduces a method able to evaluate eCommerce web interfaces of a sample of agritourisms. A particular attention is devoted in searching for statistical evidence relating web interfaces evaluation and agritourisms services. Furthermore, the paper presents the key findings of a survey of 176 agritourism firms carried out in Calabria (Italy) during 2006 using the proposed method. /

Marketing competency and market orientation for Internet-Marketing: empirical results and implications for the agribusiness. J. Voss

The Internet, which is increasingly being used and integrated into firms marketing activities, has been detected as a key business source. Its tools can assist in gathering essential information and communication in building strong customer relationships. It is widely expected that the agribusiness industry is ideally suited to the use of internet applications. This study has two goals: To analyze current internet activities in German agribusiness industries and to identify user typologies and their requirements. The results of this study are based on a Desk-Research as well as a written questioning. In summary the study points out how web applications and contents can be adapted at the demands of the agricultural customers. There from implications for e-business strategies for companies within the Agribusiness arise having the objective to strengthen customer satisfaction and retention.

11.00 Business - Traceability