Hi! I’m Johnny Sanchez and I’m a graduate student at the University of Maine. My advisor and I have been working on a project funded by the Northeastern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (NESARE) program to evaluate the potential of inexpensive GPS devices to track on-farm labor. Our experimental design was quite simple as we were hoping to prove the concept and answer the question of whether or not this caliber of device could be useful to collect this type of data, which would hopefully be able to be integrated into an existing farm tracking software like farmOS.
We raised a small farm and collected data by tracking the spatial movements of participants carrying out farm tasks while wearing Garmin GPS watches and then conducting an analysis in GIS. While our study suggests that, because of the inherent amount of error (about 10 ft) associated with commercially available GPS receivers, this system may not be viable or may only work at certain scales due to overlapping labor tracks (Figure 1).
Using multi-frequency positioning receivers that are becoming more common may circumvent the limitations and the concept could possibly be adapted to a mobile app on a smartphone, capable of using multiple frequencies at once, and importing directly into a farm tracking system.
The goal would be to create a system that could acquire labor data, that could then be stored, reported, and analyzed in a system like farmOS, quickly and easily. We realize that using GPS technology may be over-thinking things a bit and it might be possible to accomplish this goal in a simpler manner.
Currently, we are reaching out to people who possess the coding skills that we do not to see if anyone would want to adopt our concept. If anybody here has any interest in this project, I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Best,
Johnny Sanchez
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Johnny Sanchez
Graduate Student, School of Food and Agriculture
University of Maine
Johnny.sanchez@maine.edu
(He/Him/His)
Thanks for posting this here @Johnny - it was great to chat with you the other day on Zoom!
I love this concept, and I think it fits very nicely with some of the asset/log time tracking and reporting we are developing in farmOS. The kid of data this technology would collect (time spent in a particular geometry) could help to automate what would normally be a manual data input event - or at least get it started for you! Very excited to see where this goes!
As I outlined on the call, I see this as 4 distinct problems:
Mapping of the areas of interest. This can be accomplished in farmOS already by drawing your locations on the map and tracking activities against them.
Tracking location of workers and assets via GPS. This is possible now, but as you pointed out the accuracy of consumer grade devices isn’t perfect yet - the multifrequency stuff sounds very interesting! Apart from that, I see this as a problem that will be solved eventually, as technology improves and prices come down. We’ll be ready for it!
Correlating tracked location to the areas of interest. This is the process of taking the pathways and “time spent” and saying “this applied to these areas/assets in farmOS” - to get an idea for exactly how much time is invested in a particular asset. This is easier with better GPS data, but even with current data I’m sure a smart data person would be able to code an algorithm that smoothed out the GPS outliers to give you relatively good confidence. So this is a problem that could probably be solved now with some ingenuity.
Recording and reporting of the data so that it can become actionable information.
farmOS can play a role in solving #1 and #4. With the help of a data algorithm wizard, #3 is also achievable in farmOS. We would essentially just need to package up whatever algorithm was written into a farmOS module, in a way that it could be used with the data stored in farmOS. I could also see this starting out as a third-party API solution - if someone wanted to build a business model around it and offer a farmOS module that connected to it. #2 is outside our scope, obviously, but we can continue to follow and benefit from improvements to GPS technology!
Excited to see what the future brings! Thanks again for sharing these ideas!
