Abstract

Global Positioning System (GPS) has made a great evolution in different aspects of modern agricultural sectors. Today, a growing number of crop producers are using GPS and other modern electronic and computer equipments to practice Site Specific Management (SSM) and precision agriculture. This technology has the potential in agricultural mechanization by providing farmers with a sophisticated tool to measure yield on much smaller scales as well as precisely determination and automatic storing of variables such as field time, working area, machine travel distance and speed, fuel consumption and yield information. This study focuses on how to interpret and process raw GPS data for operational analysis of farm machinery. Exact determinations of field activities using GPS data along with accurate measurements and records of yield provide an integrated tool to calculate field efficiency and field machine index which in turn increases machine productivity and labor saving. The results can also provide graphical tools for visualizing machine operator

Keywords:

Field efficiency, field machine index, GPS, precision agriculture,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.