Development and field testing of a data acquisition system to assess the quality of spraying in fruit orchards

A system for managing and monitoring agricultural operations at farm level, was developed and tested in an agrochemical application. The system is an integration of an electronics box mounted on the tractor, and a software that acquires and analyzes data from the application task. The electronics box holds a microcontroller, a Global Positioning System (GPS), complementary sensors, a keyboard, a memory SD (Secure Disk) storage, and a Liquid Cristal Display (LCD). The device is able to store in the SD memory, the data of the position, the instantaneous speed of the tractor, the applied rate, the wind speed, the wind direction, the temperature, and the relative humidity. In addition, the system can alert of unfavorable weather conditions for the application of agro-chemicals. The interface to the user is a software that allows generating a job file, which identifies the operator name, the tractor, the spraying equipment, the pesticide, the rate, and the sector of application. The software also provides output data in graphical form, generating maps of speed, applied volume, and rate. The map of the route is also drawn on Google Earth, for a better spatial visualization. The acquired data is used to verify if the weather conditions, apt for the application of pesticide, were fulfilled, along with checking the variability of the rate, occurrence of row skipping, and indices of performance of the operator. The system was tested in two vineyards of Chile with promissory results.

► We designed and tested an automated system for pesticide application traceability.
► We implemented a software to unfold the data gathered in field testing.
► Displaying of the acquired data demonstrated the utility of the system to check the quality of the pesticide application.