THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SPATIAL RECORDING AND REPORTING SYSTEM FOR PRODUCTIVITY SERVICE PROVIDERS

THE PRODUCTIVITY service providers in the Mackay and Burdekin regions had recorded and reported relevant productivity information in custom developed Microsoft Access applications. These applications had allowed the various parties to capture data about: source of plant cane and planting details, pest and disease inspections and fertiliser, herbicide and pesticide treatments. The Access applications did not include any capability to easily define the area of cane against which the information was being recorded and allowed only limited analysis of the data to be performed because of changes in farm and paddock identification through time. It was recognised that a spatially based system needed to be developed to provide this capability. All of the mills in the Mackay and Burdekin regions were already users of Agtrix’s FarmMap and (in some cases) CHOMP mapping and harvest management applications and therefore already possessed the base data on which to build a spatially based cane productivity recording application. The addition of the spatial component facilitated a more advanced data analysis than was possible with straight textual reports.