Abstract
Abstract Mechanisation is a key input in modern agriculture, while it accounts for a large part of crop production costs, it can bring considerable farm benefits if well managed. Models for simulated machinery costs, may not replace actual cost measurements but the information obtained through them can replace a farm’s existing records, becoming more valuable to decision makers. MACHoice, a decision support system (DSS) presented in this paper, is a farm machinery cost estimator and break-even analyzer of alternatives for agricultural operations, developed using user-driven expectations and in close collaboration with agronomists and computer engineers. It integrates an innovative algorithm developed for projections of machinery costs under different rates of annual machine use and work capacity processing, which is crucial to decisions on break-even machinery alternatives. A case study based on the comparison of multiple alternatives for grape harvesting operations is presented to demonstrate the typical results that can be expected from MACHoice, and to identify its capabilities and limitations. This DSS offers an integrated and flexible analysis environment with a user-friendly graphical interface as well as a high level of automation of processing chains. The DSS-output consists of charts and tables, evidencing the differences related to costs and carbon emissions between the options inserted by the user for the different intensity of yearly work proceeded. MACHoice is an interactive web-based tool that can be accessed freely for non-commercial use by every known browser.
Highlights
Agricultural practices and technological trends, settling requirements of agronomics, and ergonomics and environmental aspects, have resulted in specialized, more complex and expensive machines being made available (Bochtis et al 2014; Fountas et al 2015; Søgaard and Sørensen 2004)
These tools are often based on formulas published by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers ASAE (2003a and 2003b) to calculate the machine costs, but they use different approaches to integrate this economic information at farm level, according the variation of the volume of work to be performed
The main goal of this paper is to present the functionalities of MACHoice, an interactive web-based tool for agricultural machinery management
Summary
Agricultural practices and technological trends, settling requirements of agronomics, and ergonomics and environmental aspects, have resulted in specialized, more complex and expensive machines being made available (Bochtis et al 2014; Fountas et al 2015; Søgaard and Sørensen 2004). During the last two decades several software tools have been developed for agricultural machine cost estimates such as Mecacost (CRA-W, 2016), Machcost (Montana 2016), AMACA (Sopegno et al 2016), Manitoba (PAMI, 2014), Estimating Farm Machinery Costs (Edwards 2009), Machinery Operating Costs Calculator (Metrics 2009), Machdata (Lazarus 2008), AgMach (Huhnke 2008), Farm Machinery Cost Calculator (Nibourg 2008), Equipment Life Cycle Cost (iSolutions 2007), Machinery Cost Calculator (Gamble 2001), Farmdoc (Schnitkey 2000), Idaho Machinery Cost Calculator (Smathers et al 1994) and Maqcontrol (Piacentini et al 2012) These tools are often based on formulas published by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers ASAE (2003a and 2003b) to calculate the machine costs, but they use different approaches to integrate this economic information at farm level, according the variation of the volume of work to be performed. The tools University of Idaho Machinery Cost Analysis (Smathers et al 1994), AgMach (Huhnke 2008), Maqcontrol (Piacentini et al 2012) and (Patel et al 2012) are based on applications, which require the Windows
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