There are three tasks in the first quarter of this project, the main task is user needs identification. It is now going to reach the first milestone, which is a comprehensive user requirement report. The agricultural experts from Velcourt Limited is leading this work. We are doing user needs identification with the farms and farming data from China. In the past three months, we’ve worked closely to collect as much data as possible and investigate the user requirements for the project.
Based on what we learned from the farms cooperated with our Chinese partners, we set two survey objectives, one is the managers or advisors of farming cooperatives, they are the decision-makers who has the power to decide almost everything on the their farms; and the other is the farmers who implement the decisions, but they may also make some decisions on actual operations based on their own experience and special working situation.
For the farm managers and advisors, uur agricultural experts designed a questionnaire for them (they come from 4 identified farms in China Bozhou, Anhui), to collect the professional farming information and historical data. We arranged interviews to get farming information from managers and advisors directly. And we collected useful data (used in farming activities) from farms’ records and official online resources. For another objective, the farmers, a simple questionnaire was designed with less than 15 questions for farmers who working for the farm managers. We translated the questionnaire, and deployed it on a Chinese online questionnaire survey system.
The other two works, one is the design of initial system prototype, AD has started this work from May 2021; another one is the first item of working package 4, the algorithms development, the research team in University of Sheffield is doing this work as planned.