TOWARDS A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR FRUIT GROWERS: THE FRUITY PROJECT.

ISHS Acta Horticulturae 184: I International Symposium on Computer Modelling in Fruit Research and Orchard Management

TOWARDS A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR FRUIT GROWERS: THE FRUITY PROJECT.

Authors:	A.J. Boshuizen, P.C. Boshuizen jr
Abstract: In the beginning of 1985 two private firms started the development of a decision support system to be used by fruit growers. This system is considered to be a logical follow up of the manual "firm registration" being promoted by the Dutch fruitgrowers organisation (NFO). In order to set up a useful and applicable system a lot of factors should be taken into account. Therefore it's necessary to integrate horticultural, extension and computer knowledge. This paper deals with the approach that is followed in the Fruity project. The basic element of this approach are: horticultural concept: A fruit grower should be offered a simple, but profitable system. The system starts by making gross-margin calculations for the different production units at the fruit farm. Emphasis is laid on the expected difficulties of data collection during the harvest time. extensional concept: Automation is coming quickly over our society. Therefore a lot of attention should be given to keep everyone informed of the new possibilities of microcomputers. The growers is offered a growpath starting at manual firm registration, followed by in service data processing and a microcomputer system with expansion possibilities. computer concept: hardware: The configuration consists of an IBM-PC-compatible machine with a hard disk, software: the software development is carried out with the prototyping method, the registrated data are stored in a database.
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