AMACA: Agricultural MAchine Cost Analysis app

Machinery and equipment are major cost items in farm businesses since many years in different countries. In the last years, moreover, high power machines, new technologies, higher prices for spare parts and energy contributed to the rising of the machines costs.The possibility to know in advance such costs is strategic for the farmers, but the agricultural machine cost determination available by internet applications are lacking of a mobile app.Aim of this work is to fill this gap with an easy to use mobile app, to determine the real machineries costs in different field operations and makes them available via web mobile application using a cross-platform approach.This paper describes the features of the web mobile app AMACA (Agricultural Machine App Cost Analysis) created by the authors using HTML language for the content, JavaScript for the logic part and CSS as a presentation style. To accelerate the development, the jQuery Mobile (JQM), a touch-optimized JavaScript library, was used. AMACA allows the analysis of traction costs and operation costs. The tool is free, readily available and does not need any installation on the end users devices. The tool was presented at service companies in agriculture, and people liked its features (mobile availability, easy of use, email parameters and results, easy cost calculation).