AMACA: Agricultural Machine Application Cost Analysis

Today users want to be connected to useful information at any time and place. For this reason, the use of mobile technology is growing rapidly, but despite the growth of usage of mobile technology, the agricultural sector is slower in its adoption when compared to other types of business. Machinery and equipments are major cost items in farm 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.There is not an unique rule to determine machine costs and the most accurate method of determining them is the complete records of the actual costs incurred: unfortunately this method is not usable for prompt forecast purposes. 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. A web mobile app called AMACA (Agricultural Machine App Cost Analysis), which allows the analysis of traction costs and operation costs, was studied and developed. This paper describes this app AMACA, created using the HTML language for the content, the JavaScript for the logic part and the CSS as a presentation style. To accelerate the development, the jQuery Mobile (JQM, a touch-optimized JavaScript library) was used. The discussion is made applying AMACA to a case studio and comparing it with the results produced by other online applications. The tool is readily available, and at no cost, without the need for any installation on the end users’ devices.