Recipient Organization
AgSquared LLC
PO Box 4943
Washington,DC 20008
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Consumers are now demanding more information about farm production processes and their resulting harvests. Harvest records, although difficult for farmers to capture, can contain rich product data such as grading information and macro and micronutrient content, allowing farmers to differentiate themselves from competitors and market their produce effectively, as in organic farming. Harvest records also play a key role in food safety and traceability as they are often at the top of a chain of records describing the inputs in multi-step food production processes that combine the products of many harvests into a single food product. By linking harvest information to crop production plans, one can obtain more in-depth information about the quality and safety of harvested produce, which in turn could improve food safety and traceability initiatives. Our solution to the problem of harvest record capture for vegetable growers is an online software module that enables growers to capture information about their harvests including a variety of information such as quantity, quality, and time to availability. This software solution will be integrated into AgSquared, our online software for farm production planning and management. AgSquared is designed to use a farm's crop production season plans as the basis for operations management and record keeping during the course of the growing season. This integrated approach vastly simplifies the process of keeping comprehensive, organized and meaningful farming records, and we anticipate that this benefit can be extended to the capture of information about harvests as well. AgSquare's software is available on a subscription basis and is already being used by a diverse group of U.S. farmers several thousand strong. The objective of this study is to identify the optimal approach for enabling farmers to collect, organize, and utilize detailed information about their vegetable crop harvests to enhance their marketing efforts. Our research will shed light on the specific harvest quantity and quality metrics that are of greatest business value to both growers and produce buyers. It will yield a prototype software module optimized to enable vegetable crop producers to effectively capture those metrics as part of their farm management processes. Our approach involves first researching the harvest attributes that are of greatest value to buyers and producers. Next, working with growers in a structured brainstorming process, we will develop prototype software interfaces that enable the capture of harvest information within the context of the existing farming workflow. Finally, we will integrate the resultant prototype software interfaces into AgSquared and test the new software for its efficacy in improving harvest information capture. The impact of this study will be the creation of a farmer-friendly harvest data collection system that seamlessly integrates valuable information from seed purchase, through farm operations, and harvest, all accessible through an online database. This will enhance the livelihood of U.S. specialty crop producers by expanding marketing opportunities and simplifying produce traceability.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The goal of this project is to research the problem of harvest information capture among specialty crop producers and to develop a prototype solution that enables growers to record extended information about their harvests. Harvest information is of great value to specialty crop producers in the management of their day-to-day operations, and to crop buyers and processors who rely on accurate information about upcoming harvest quantity and quality to plan sales and production. In addition, well-structured harvest records are a necessary component of an effective food safety and traceability infrastructure. By better understanding the challenges around the capture of information about harvests we can develop tools that help producers, buyers, and processers increase the efficiency of their businesses, diversify their marketing channels, and enhance their capacity to protect their businesses against food safety issues, thereby increasing the competitiveness of American specialty crop, organic producers, and processing businesses. This project has three main objectives: 1) Researching the harvest attributes that are of greatest value to buyers and producers; 2) Working with growers in a structured brainstorming process, develop prototype software interfaces that enable the capture of harvest information within the context of the existing farming workflow; 3) Integrating the resultant prototype software interfaces into AgSquared and testing the new software for its efficacy in improving harvest information capture The expected output of this research is the development of a prototype software interface that enables specialty crop producers to capture information related to their harvests, both quantitative and qualitative, in the context of AgSquared, a crop production planning and management online software package. This tool will simplify the collection of accurate and complete harvest records by producers, and will make those records available online where they can be integrated into a variety of downstream applications. This in turn will enable the creation of new opportunities for marketing and encourage specialty crop traceability from seed purchase through harvest.
Project Methods
Our farmer-driven approach to optimizing the capture of harvest information among specialty crop producers will employ a combination of methods including statistical data analysis, interviews, surveys, prototype tests and user observations. At each step in the project the results will be analyzed using an appropriate combination of the above methods and used to determine how best to proceed in the next phase. In Step 1, which has already been completed, we designed and built an online farm production planning and tracking system that can be extended to allow for the capture of harvest records. We will use descriptive statistics to analyze the data collected from AgSquared's many thousand users to identify which software features growers use most effectively. This will allow us to identify the basic characteristics of an optimal harvest data collection system. In Step 2, we will identify the harvest data that are most important to specialty crop buyers. Our partner on this project will be the largest real-time marketplace for buyer-producer matching. Using descriptive statistics, we plan to analyze the data obtained from their database of thousands of online buyers' searches, click-through data, sellers' profiles, and reported harvest attributes, to identify the characteristics and attributes that are common to successful buyer-producer matches. Based on this information, we will then assemble a panel of growers who could collect such data to assist in Step 3 of our approach. In Step 3 we use the data obtained from Step 2, and based on an understanding of what the most relevant harvest attributes are and why they matter, develop a software module that enables their capture in the context of AgSquared's online farm production planning and management software. This step will be carried out by using a well-known and proven technique for determination of user needs and rapid prototype development known as Joint Application Design (JAD) (Beynon-Davies and Holmes, 1998, Moeller, 2010) where we will work together with a diverse panel of growers to identify solutions to the harvest-recording problem. Throughout the process, we will survey the growers to measure their satisfaction with the tools developed. And using this iterative process, we will then improve upon initial designs, aiming for continuous improvement at each iteration. In Step 4, the prototype interfaces created in Step 3 will be made available to growers for use in the field. We will measure the difference between the completeness, and frequency of capture of growers' previous harvest data records and those captured through the new harvest data collection interfaces. In Step 5, the prototype interfaces developed in Step 4 will be refined further and will undergo usability testing to ensure their suitability for use by a wide range of growers. At that point we will also explore the development of a method to export AgSquared harvest record information and integrate AgSquared harvest records with other online software applications. Subsequent steps will involve commercialization of AgSquared's farm production planning and management software and new harvest information recording module.