pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

neshura wrote:

> ButterflyNet technology might be useful for this; it's the beginnings
> of a tool for contextual logging out in the field. Just saw the link a
> day or two ago on Worldchanging.
> http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003827.html


I just looked at that and it looks really promising especially when they add 
audio
to the notebook data plus digital camera imagery. It would be a good thing to 
be able to
incorporate measurements of land features, i.e. shape (verbally described, as 
in a small
orchard or other specialized planting in the midle of a cropped area with 
well defined layout, i.e.
30' X 200' area containing beds 4' wide separated by 2' furrows/walking paths. Random features that you might find in an 
edge zone might be defined according to shape, slope, area, length and width according to cardinal directions. This 
would be useful to indicate growing conditions for crops existing therein. If you're planning planting and harvesting 
schedules and yield estimates this would be useful info to have logged into a database or spreadsheet. Entering all this 
data about discrete planting areas on the farm with GIS coordinates would prove useful especially if you kept a data log 
for all your planted areas throughout the growing season. Coordinating plant information gathered in the field plus 
information about proposed plantings with information gleaned from the PIW database would enrich the decision-making 
process regarding cropping schemes for each season. Successes and failures of individual crop varieties could be logged 
along with GIS coordinates for locations where they were planted, when and with which other plants, along with PIW data 
about the plant species and specific varieties, should that exist in the database. The farmer could always submit plant 
variety information to the PIW database describing performance, yield, disease resistance, hardiness and 
positive-negative aspects of close, succession and companion cropping. An example of this might be when a particular 
variety is observed to grow in a robust way with high yields, _part_ of the reason might be that it hosts a certain 
array of beneficial microflora on its leaves, stems or roots or in the soil surrounding the roots. It would be important 
to log this information especially if other crops growing in close proximity to this variety seem to grow more robustly 
than expected and if they grow less robustly the further away they are from the other variety. Measurements should be 
made and entered into the datalogs associated with each crop plant.

Another cool thing would be to cut and paste info from your multimedia field notes on your laptop screen into an email 
message sent to your farm's mail/web server to be processed there (using filtering by procmail) and stored in a flatfile 
database [hypermail webarchive]. Of course could leave could store copies of each email in Inbox, a specific folder or 
folders and some other location determined by the software or script used to process it. How easy could it become for 
each farm to have its own server with email processing and post processing [procmail + hypermail or any other tools such 
as those you have in mind for converting the PC list message archives] and web server [a temporary farm site/intranet 
used for authoring and updating the farm's main .com on the Web-at-large]?

More later.