Current Issue : July - September Volume : 2016 Issue Number : 3 Articles : 6 Articles
Usually, agricultural tractor investments are assessed using traditional economic techniques that only involve financial attributes, resulting in reductionist evaluations. However, tractors have qualitative and quantitative attributes that must be simultaneously integrated into the evaluation process. This article reports a hybrid and multi-attribute approach to assessing a set of agricultural tractors based on AHP-TOPSIS. To identify the attributes in the model, a survey including eighteen attributes was given to agricultural machinery salesmen and farmers for determining their importance. The list of attributes was presented to a decision group for a case of study, and their importance was estimated using AHP and integrated into the TOPSIS technique. In this case, one tractor was selected from a set of six alternatives, integrating six attributes in the model: initial cost, annual maintenance cost, liters of diesel per hour, safety of the operator, maintainability and after-sale customer service offered by the supplier. Based on the results obtained, the model can be considered easy to apply and to have good acceptance among farmers and salesmen, as there are no special software requirements for the application....
Organic horticulture producers rank weeds as one of their most troublesome,\ntime-consuming, and costly production problems. With the increasing significance of organic\nhorticulture, the need for new bioherbicides to control weeds has grown. Potential bioherbicides may\nbe developed from pathogens, natural products, and extracts of natural materials. Fungal and bacteria\npathogens are two important types of microbial agents that have potential to be used as bioherbicides.\nThe byproducts of natural sources such as dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS), corn gluten\nmeal (CGM), and mustard seed meals (MSMs) have shown herbicidal activities in controlling many\nweed species. Some essential oil extracts have shown bioherbicide potential as well. The efficacy of a\nbioherbicide is the main limiting factor for its application, and it may be affected by environmental\nfactors such as humidity and moisture, the application method, the spectrum of the bioherbicide,\nand the type of formulation. In addition to efficacy, costs and concerns about potential human health\nthreats are also limitations to bioherbicide use. As the integration of bioherbicide technology into\ncurrent weed management systems may help manage herbicide resistance, reduce production costs,\nand increase crop yields, future research should involve the development of more cost-effective and\nefficient bioherbicides for control of weeds, as well as the optimization of production methods and\ncultural practices with use of candidate bioherbicides....
Rice is becoming increasingly an important crop in Ethiopia. Owed to the post harvest losses, evaluation and demonstration of an imported pedal thresher was conducted. In addition, a proto type was developed using reverse engineering. Data was collected using structured data sheet and analyzed using descriptive statistics and parametric tests. Duncan and Tukey mean tests showed the absence of significant mean threshing output difference between the pedal type (127.5kg/hr) and the modified (120kg/hr) one. The result showed statistically different threshing output using these technologies as compared to the traditional method (92kg/hr). The financial analysis showed that an average Fogera farmer (0.35ha rice land) could thresh his annual rice yield within 9.25hrs and 8.68hrs using modified and pedal threshers with a cost reduction of ETB 320.58 compared to the traditional system. The low awareness of the farmers on the consequences and advantages of threshing on quality of rice and subsequently on preference and marketing resulted in low priority for adoption. Hence, large scale awareness creation activities should be done and the technology ought to be promoted widely in order to contribute for the government�s aim as a millennium crop and benefit from the market opportunity reassuring in the country....
Assessment of irregularly bound areas across the fields is often carried out by agricultural officers in villages. The more reliable method used for this assessment is Simpson and Trapezoidal rules which are described here. The calculations involved in the assessment are complex, confusing, time consuming and not easily reproducible. Spreadsheet is a computer application in which data are arranged in rows and columns of a grid and can be manipulated and used in calculations. In today’s era of smart phones, tablet PCs and notebooks, where a spreadsheet program in the form of Microsoft Excel is readily accessible by most agricultural officers, it is be possible to adapt the various laborious steps involved in the said method to a spreadsheet program by writing simple logical codes in the spreadsheets to do the calculations in a simple, clear, faster, reproducible, accurate and user-friendly manner. This article describes a spreadsheet program (IrregArea Calc) to calculate the irregularly bound areas across the fields....
Assessment of open channel elements across the agricultural channels is often carried out by agricultural officers in villages. The more reliable method used for this assessment is conventional manning’s rules which are described here. The calculations involved in the assessment are complex, confusing, time consuming and not easily reproducible. Spreadsheet is a computer application in which data are arranged in rows and columns of a grid and can be manipulated and used in calculations. In today’s era of smart phones, tablet PCs and notebooks, where a spreadsheet program in the form of microsoft excel is readily accessible by most agricultural officers, it should be possible to adapt the various laborious steps involved in the said method to a spreadsheet program by writing simple logical codes in the spreadsheets to do the calculations in a simple, clear, faster, reproducible, accurate and user‑friendly manner. This article describes a spreadsheet program (Open Channel Elements Calc) to calculate the open channel elements across the fields....
Automatic recognition of mature fruits in a complex agricultural environment is still a\nchallenge for an autonomous harvesting robot due to various disturbances existing in the background\nof the image. The bottleneck to robust fruit recognition is reducing influence from two main\ndisturbances: illumination and overlapping. In order to recognize the tomato in the tree canopy\nusing a low-cost camera, a robust tomato recognition algorithm based on multiple feature images and\nimage fusion was studied in this paper. Firstly, two novel feature images, the a*-component image\nand the I-component image, were extracted from the L*a*b* color space and luminance, in-phase,\nquadrature-phase (YIQ) color space, respectively. Secondly, wavelet transformation was adopted to\nfuse the two feature images at the pixel level, which combined the feature information of the two\nsource images. Thirdly, in order to segment the target tomato from the background, an adaptive\nthreshold algorithm was used to get the optimal threshold. The final segmentation result was\nprocessed by morphology operation to reduce a small amount of noise. In the detection tests, 93%\ntarget tomatoes were recognized out of 200 overall samples. It indicates that the proposed tomato\nrecognition method is available for robotic tomato harvesting in the uncontrolled environment with\nlow cost....
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