ISHS Acta Horticulturae 148: III International Symposium on Energy in Protected Cultivation
CROP MANAGEMENT BY INTELLIGENT COMPUTER SYSTEMS |
| Authors: | T. Takakura, H. Shono, T. Hojo |
| Abstract:
In agriculture like medicine, there are many problems which are solved only by experience or intuition since living creatures with their ambiguities are involved. This is one of the reasons why some doctors are famous for their skills and some farmers are more efficient than others. One object of agricultural engineering is to create a reproducible system at the level of most efficient farmers. Our early work on direct digital control of plant growth had this in mind. However, the so- called "speaking plant technique" was developed on the basis of a plant reaction like photosynthesis to which these farmers do not pay any over attention at all. It is a suprising fact that there is a big difference among farmers in quality and quantity of crops produced. According to our survey, differences of five times exist among musk melon growers in the same district. Another very suprising is that in general the technical level of crop management at a public research station is more or less at the average of the individual growers in the district where the station is located. In order to solve these problems a consultation system applying knowledge engineering techniques has been developed. The recent development of computer sciences in both hardware and software have been applied in many fields. Some well known systems such as MYCIN and CASNET could raise the level of noted doctors in a specific area. As a preliminary test all crop management practices of expert tomato growers were recorded by words on a tape recorder and were photographed. They were processed and formulate a data base in the consultation system. Our system is written in Basic, but the development of powerful languages such as LISP and PROLOG will accelerate research of this kind. Our system should be revised and be verified experimentally, but it is not easy to enlist the cooperation of expert farmers because making their techniques public erodes their profit-making advantage in some sense. However, there is no doubt that with the accumulation of the know-how of expert growers on the computer data base, consultation systems could serve tremendously in extension works in Japan. | |
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