Agriculture

Company

Agricost is a company with integral capital private founded in 1994 under the name of TCE 3 Brazi, specialized in agricol production, livestock, processing of animal and vegetable products and wood. These activity areas define the holding’s organizational chart and assure an efficient production’s integration, each department having final products which are nationally and internationally competitive.

Challenge

In 2012, TCE 3 Brazi management decided to acquire an information integrated system to manage the financial-accounting activity of the company, but mostly the agriculture and livestock activity. TCE 3 Brazi turnover in 2012 was over 100 million EURO while the employees’ number increased to 910. The acquired system had to be efficient and simplify, through a complete computerization, the programming activities, planning and management of the materials, equipment and operations specific to an agricultural year (ploughing, ground management, sprayers and harvesting). Charisma for Agriculture was chosen due to flexibility to adapt to a farmer’s specific needs.

One of the particular needs was the possibility to integrate the cadastral map in Charisma and to view the plots in the information system interface. The graphical representation of the form and size of the sole farm in cadastral coordinates, according to the national standard (Stereo 70) and the withdrawal of each calculation error and reporting to the state authorities were the main requests.

In addition, another request was that the software solution allow the management of the Livestock activity and reproduction.

Solution

The software solution provided by TotalSoft is supporting in a single informatics system all the resources of the company and group (financial, human, materials, as well as the specific ones, vegetal and animal production). For the vegetal production activity, the most important functionality was the graphical interface for internal reporting and towards authorities with with land map controls.

Thus, Charisma for Agriculture allows to import certain files in a vector geospatial data format (shapefile) generated by GIS applications to establish the geographical coordinates. After saving the files in the database, Charisma users can view the maps in the system interface and can perform the annual planning of crops. Therefore, the crops saved in the map are saved as layers in the initial map, enabling to report and save the technological operations performed on each sole.

Charisma allows to post the reports on APIA’s web site (Agency of Payments and Intervention for Agriculture), and the accuracy is not altered by any human error.

Any operation registered in Charisma has traceability in the production module so that the reports regarding the actual resource consumption are done automatically (what equipment was used, who worked a certain surface, oil consumption)

After the benefits of the software solution could be observed, the next step involved the implementation of a module dedicated to the livestock management (animal breeding and reproduction). A special requirement was that Charisma could track all the movements done with an animal, from its birth to slaughter, and to report the data to NAIRS (National Animal Identification and Registration System).

The Livestock module in Charisma tracks the animal identification process in farms in detail, providing individual passports for cattle and horses with unique bar codes inserted in each animal’s ear tag. The passport is identical with the one imposed by the European legislation and contains data regarding the breed, parents, date of birth, the farm where the animal was born, exploitation, all the events occurred during its life (illnesses, treatments etc.)

The module also enables to record the daily food rations, based on methodologies with standard production recipes, as well as documents regarding the crossbreeding tracking.

For the dairy animals, there are automatic milking systems with a program that registers the milk production of each animal, in quality and quantity parameters. These systems will be integrated with Charisma to automatically transmit the data. The milk stock will be completed with all the related data (the time when it was collected, the animal, fat concentration etc.). Moreover, the production life of a cow will be tracked much easier, the system providing the production history with milk parameters of a certain animal.

Results

The solution allows Agricost to report the crops and the technological operations performed during an agricultural year, on a certain sole, in the context of cadastral map;

The inconsistencies between the company’s reports and the official data of The National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Publicity obtained via satellite were removed;

Based on the measurements made on each sole and the cadastral maps, the surfaces for the company paying rent to the state could be compared with the exploited surfaces. Thus, the real rent of the administered surfaces could be paid to the State Domains Agency.

The registration mode of crops and their position on the map was corrected so that the reports to APIA correspond with the photos (maps) taken by this institution via satellite. Thus, after removing these small differences between TCE 3 Brazi reports and the photos taken via satellite, the company could obtain the state subsidies;

The costs of the resources spent for each agricultural operation were reduced, and the control increased;

A better administrative (identification and registration), technical and financial monitoring of livestock in the farm;

Ensures the traceability of livestock during the livestock flow and automates the specific activities ( identification, registration, animal movement);

Integrates the financial-accounting data with production data;

Automatically sends the mandatory data to state authorities, directly from Charisma, by interfacing with NAIRS, NAAR and NSVFSA websites.