A Web-Based Information System for Agricultural Machinery Use Cost Analysis

Agricultural machinery has the highest resources cost contribution in farm businesses. Moreover, in the last years high in power and size machines, new technologies, higher prices for spare parts, and energy consumption contributed to the rising of the machinery direct and indirect cost. The potential of having an estimation of such cost beforehand is a critical factor for strategic and tactical decision making. However, available web-based applications for agricultural machinery cost estimation are lacking of a mobile application module. The aim of this work is to present the development of an easy-to-se mobile app, to determine the actual machinery cost in different field operations and makes them available via web mobile application using a cross-platform approach. The web mobile app was built 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. The web mobile app allows the analysis of traction costs and operation costs. The tool is free, readily available and does not require any installation on the end-users mobile devices.