This summer, Nick Mowry presented his Master’s project that focused on designing and implementing an inexpensive hardware and software system that allows small farmers to track labor costs across farming small plots. The core system idea is to track a farm worker who wears a GPS device such as a sport watch and analyze the resulting trajectories based on how much time the worker spent on different plots on the farm. This information can be correlated to the crops grown in these areas of the farm, and thus, labor cost can be calculated. Now, farmers can determine the overall cost of growing a crop compared to the current market prices for this crop.
Nick built a prototype of the system using Garmin watches, MySQL, Google Maps and MS Visual Studio. A demo of the system is available via the link below.
Geosensor Networks Lab 