Developing and evaluating a telemetry system to monitor pesticides practies.

In the last years the sustainability, traceability and more generally, the precision agriculture approach, are embracing by farm companies. Many are the technological and available solutions ranging from cheapest and simple sensor to complex satellite systems. Inside these “Smart Systems”, the telemetry appears an emergent and useful technology that could improves the efficiency of farms management. In this study, a preliminary implementation in a wine farm, was done. The overall objective was the monitoring and optimization the entire wine chain from vineyard to the bottle. In particular this paper focuses on the pesticide practices stages. The study performed examines the telemetry as tool to monitoring, in real time, the farm vehicles and equipments in the working day, in order to make available data to the technical management. Two were the main elements of the system: a farm tractor coupled with a pneumatic sprayer and a Web- GIS server platform. The hardware was made of sensors to detect the signals coming from the tractor and the sprayer, a GPRS receiver to locate the position and data sending remotely. The trackable tractor parameters were related to operative condition such as forward speed, P.T.O. status, working times, three point hitch level and vehicle inclination. About the sprayer instead, two were the main checks i.e. the liquid flow rate and the properly functioning of the single hydraulic plant sections (open-close).The achieved data related to position, routes and activities performed by farm vehicles were stored in a the Web-GIS platform Agrisystema. The latter provides an identification and permanent recording of desired query related to field or winery. All this data and their own information, can be viewed constantly through a CAD-GIS dashboard Agròs where the main productive process indexes were outlined. The preliminary results showed the feasibility of this system and the usefulness as decision support system for the farm management.