ICT for traceability of sugarcane harvesting operations in small farms

The purpose of our work is to analyze different harvesting solutions in different situations in order to provide players of the sugarcane sector viable solutions in the context of Réunion island. Two sugarcane harvesters, with different technologies have been instrumented in order to trace the various phases of work and better understand the operating conditions of machines in collective management. The embedded sensors could discriminate and localize the various stages of the harvest operations. The data collected were stored in a data logger on the machine and could be downloaded via a GPRS connection to a server. Data were daily recorded on the machine throughout the harvesting campaign (5 months). Once the data acquired, their processing with the R software and their linkage with other data (i.e. economic) collected during the harvest campaign give us different information that are integrated in a GIS. With the developed tools, we can produce references at different spatiotemporal scales: parcels / production areas, daily / annually.