BIOENERGY FARM PROJECT: ECONOMIC AND ENERGY ANALYSIS OF BIOMASS BY WEB APPLICATION

摘要

Agriculture faces new and rapidly changes: increasing cost of technical means for production, newmachinery and new crops (e.g. biomass crops), new low-input techniques, EU policies and contribution. On the otherhand new information is requested by the market or by public agencies: energy balance and life cycle analysis of cropcultivation, labor budget, etc. This situation challenges the farmers, which need standard data and procedures in orderto compare the cultivation systems, and to make all the requested assessment. The aim of the research is contributingto knowledge which can be exploited in designing and evaluating biomass production system, within a standardizedsystem approach. An IEE project, named Bioenergy Farm (IEE Contract N°: IEE/09/637 SI2.558213), has beenfinanced with this aim. The proposed WEB application, developed with ASP.NET? technology with a SQL serverdatabase within the frame of the IEE Project Bioenergy Farm allow the user, in anonymous way, to compute its owncrop cultivation costs, including the use of machinery, manpower, and production factors in order to comparedifferent biomass production systems. In this way a single farmer or a consultant could compare crop performance indifferent situation, farmer performance from one year to the next and so on. The application represents a step towardthe standardization of data and calculation procedures for working time, energy balance and operation costsassessment. The comparison can be carried out among farmers in different EU states. The interface to the applicationis provided in English, Italian, Polish, German, Nederland, Estonian and French languages. The data provided aregeneral (to allow comparison of scenarios between biomass production processes within the EU) but there is also alocal dataset that allows the user to do calculation with country specific data (e.g. yield range, fuel cost, energycoefficients and so on). The application also allows detailing the type of field where the cultivation takes place(different yield, irrigation type, field shapes and distances). In this way the user could compute average or fieldspecific performance of its farming activities. The short rotation forestry and the forestry activities are integrated intothe web application as well.