Abstract
Energy consumption in primary food production systems that are intended to be used in food industry is very high because of the increased use of machinery equipment. The calculation of the energy inputs in such systems is complicated due to the number and quality of the data background that are required, which are not always available. Energy reduction to produce 1 kg of any agri-food product is very significant in terms of environmental protection and natural resources management but also in better promotion of the product under a “green” label. In this work, a decision support system is presented in terms of the energy assessment of crop fertilization operation. For the demonstration of the system, two crops were selected, namely industrial tomato and Arundo donax. The energy inputs of fertilization that were extracted were based on farmers’ data and other scientific data. According to the results, the total annual energy consumption for the total field area (about 28 ha) of the presented crops was up to 227.50 GJ for Arundo donax while in terms of tomato was up to 468.71 GJ. This high distribution in energy consumption shows the significant necessity in better field operations’ process management and use of agricultural machinery for optimization of the total energy cost of the system.
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Rodias, E., Evangelou, E., Lampridi, M., Bochtis, D. (2022). A Decision Support System for Green Crop Fertilization Planning. In: Bochtis, D.D., Sørensen, C.G., Fountas, S., Moysiadis, V., Pardalos, P.M. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies for Agriculture—Theme III: Decision. Springer Optimization and Its Applications, vol 184. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84152-2_13
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