The bioenergy farm project: Web applications for the assessment of biomass production and logistics

Agriculture faces new and rapidly changes: increasing cost of technical means for production, new machinery and new crops (e.g. biomass crops), new low-input techniques, EU policies and contribution. On the other hand new information is requested by the market or by public agencies: energy balance and life cycle analysis of crop cultivation, labor budget, etc. This situation challenges the farmers, which need standard data and procedures in order to compare the cultivation systems, and to make all the requested assessment. The aim of the research is contributing to knowledge which can be exploited in designing and evaluating biomass production system, within a standardized system approach. An IEE project, named Bioenergy Farm (IEE Contract N°: IEE/09/637 S12.558213), has been financed with this aim. The proposed WEB application, developed with ASP.NET®technology with a SQL server database within the frame of the IEE Project Bioenergy Farm allow the user, in anonymous way, to compute its own crop cultivation costs (allowed currencies are EUR, USD, PLN, etc.), including the use of machinery, manpower, and production factors in order to compare different biomass production systems. In this way a single farmer or a consultant could compare crop performance in different situation, farmer performance from one year to the next and so on. The application represents a step toward the standardization of data and calculation procedures for working time, energy balance and operation costs assessment. The comparison can be carried out among farmers in different EU states. The interface to the application is provided in English, Italian, Polish, German, Nederland, Estonian and French languages. The data provided are general (to allow comparison of scenarios between biomass production processes within the EU) but there is also a local dataset that allows the user to do calculation with country specific data (e.g. yield range, fuel cost, energy coefficients and so on). The application also allows detailing the type of field where the cultivation takes place (different yield, irrigation type, field shapes and distances). In this way the user could compute average or field specific performance of its farming activities. The results include cost evaluation as well as crop/field energy balance. The short rotation forestry and the forestry activities are integrated into the web application as well.