A Pocket Information System for Farm Contractors (APIS)

Farm contractors have the necessity to quickly know if an agricultural operation request is convenient or not, using their agricultural machineries. Field dimension, shape and slope are key factors to determine operations costs. In addition, high machinery power and characteristics, spare parts, and energy consumption are main components difficult to quickly evaluate to understand the operation benefit or loss. The possibility to estimate such costs beforehand is a critical factor for strategic and tactical decision making. Nowadays there are few web-based mobile applications for agricultural machinery cost estimation to help farm contractors in their decision. Aim of this work is to present a quick and easy-to-use mobile web app, that allow the users to insert their machineries, the shape and the area of the field to evaluate the economic feasibility of a specific field operation. The app was built using the open-source Drupal framework with a module that use a cross-platform approach. Outputs of this app are multiple scenarios with combinations of tractors and equipment inserted by the users with a detailed cost and time analysis based on the requested field operation . The tool is free and does not require any installation on the end-users mobile devices.