Development and Applications of Mobile Farming Information System for Food Traceability in Health Management

Abstract As the food supply chain globalization became inevitable, concerns for food safety, agro-processing, and the environmental and ecological impact of food production have been exacerbated. Transparency in the way agriculture was grown and handled throughout the supply chain process resulted in an important issue of “traceability” in global food trade and safety for health management. Traceability in agriculture is faced with technological challenges including food product label and identification, activity/process characterization, information systems for data capture, analysis, storage, and the integration of the overall traceable data for the supply chain, that is, from farm to table. Application of information technologies (IT) for the food processing industry in the fields of smart packaging and materials, automation and control technology, standards and their application scenarios, and production management principles were widely studied. Although some field data can be automatically acquired and transmitted by sensor networking, most agricultural activity information was recorded by manual handwriting for the traceability information systems. Documentation or data collection in traceability system is necessary for production history tracing. A farming data collection system to automatically record the agricultural activities information for farmers is essential and yet still missing. System architecture, operation scenarios, and the implementation examples for the mobile farming information system are proposed in this research. An end-to-end mobile application system that records the farming activities by using mobile handheld devices to capture information of farming operations is developed. The farming information for farming activities is coded in two-dimensional labels of quick response (QR) codes. By scanning the proper operation labels, the corresponding farming data can be captured and uploaded simultaneously to the back-end web server. The prototype system is implemented in the traceability of mango exporting in Taiwan. A collaborative research project for the traceability of white gourd planting in Tianjin was also performed. Applications of this mobile farming information system show that the complicated manual traceability data recording can be significantly reduced for the farmers. The system can be implemented for public traceability system data collection and importing, as well as playing the roles of a private traceability system. The consumers’ confidence for healthy food choices with clear food traceability can be improved.