Integration of an automatic agricultural and livestock production management system and an agriculture and food traceability system based on the Internet of Things technology

Abstract

In Taiwan, small-scale farming is very common. Most farmers cultivate their crops based on their experience; therefore, pesticide over-spraying and over-fertilization often occur. In addition, stock farming with enterprise management strategies sometimes leads to antibiotic or other harmful chemical residuals on the carcass of animals and poultry due to improper food additives in fodders, thus causing food security problems. Recently, due to the emerging of agricultural product security problems, consumers are paying more and more attention to food safety. To achieve the goal of sustainable agriculture, the government in Taiwan has established a product traceability system. With the traceable marks, all agricultural products' information can be inquired through farmers' records on the production and sales via the Taiwan agricultural products security traceability information network. On behalf of the government, certified organizations come to the production site to confirm whether the production records are in compliance with the requirements. These certified organizations inspect agricultural products by sampling the products, and every inspected batch will be recorded and made traceable under the supervision. Currently, Taiwan has been promoting the agricultural product traceability system, and hopes that farmers will use the system voluntarily. However, since no mandatory requirements have been imposed, many farmers do not use the product traceability system. Moreover, the traceability system itself may cause inconveniences that prevent it from being accepted by all farmers. For example, farmers must prepare cultivation records and upload the records to a specified website established by the Council of Agriculture. This might run into two problems. First, most farmers are elderly citizens, and it might be difficult to teach them to use computers. Second, the product traceability records are created through manual inputs, the correctness cannot be ensured. Therefore, the study develops a farm production traceability system bases on the technology of Internet of Things that enables the system itself to create real-time production records and farmers can concentrate on their cultivation work.