Dr. T.

Okayasu
Summary
Agriculture is remarkably dependent on climate, weather, soil conditions, and crop
types. Therefore, farmers have tried to develop and improve their own cultivation
techniques and sense during the long-term experience so as to fit the peripheral field
environment. However, they will not always be successful even if they have a lot of
knowledge, technologies, and experience and sense on agriculture.
On the other hand, Information Communication Technology (ICT) is one of the
important technologies in our society. Among them, IoT (Internet of Things) based
on sensors and smart devices and cloud computing technologies and services are well
utilized to support our life. Needless to say, agriculture is no exception, there are
many kinds of ICT applications in agriculture such as environmental monitoring and
actuation, decision supporting and making and marketing.
Presenter and the colleagues have also developed an ICT agricultural support
system called Agri-eye to optimize and improve the production and management
skills. The system is composed of field environmental monitoring and acquisition,
crop growth diagnosis and quality evaluation, work history recording, data analysis
and visualization, and famers to consumers communication interface. Their
performance and validity have been verified by several feasibility studies, which were
performed with real small- and medium-scale farmers. In these studies, we have
considered well about how to reduce the development, installation and management
costs needed to use their applications and services. In this presentation, parts of their
trials on ICT application for typical small- and medium-scale farmers in Japan
agriculture will be introduced briefly.