Agriculture: Some Facts
- Agriculture is an essential activity for human survival.
- It provides us food, clothing, biofuel, and medicine.
- A farm can be considered as a system of production in which there are many interactions between soil-plant-atmosphere.
- Some of the inputs required in the system are water, fertilizers, and solar radiation.
- Not all the inputs are renewable, such as fertilizers. This implies that scarcer the source more expensive it is.
- Sustainability is an important issue in agriculture. To achieve a sustainable production, the production system should provide benefits for the economy, society, and environment. Wisely use of inputs in the system aids to a more sustainable agriculture.
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App: Fieldprint Graph
- The Fieldprint Graph is an app that plots a variety of sustainable indicators that summarizes a production system performance in comparison with an average production system.
- The app was based on a pre-existent webtool called Field to Market. The idea was to adapt this tool to Brazil.
- The sustainable indicators are: energy consumption, soil conservation, emissions, biodiversity, water use, land use, and resource consumption.
- The app helps farmers to identify where they could prioritize investments to improve their production system.
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How the App Works
- So far, the user needs to input the indexes for each one of the sustainable indicators. The indexes calculations will be developed in the future based on raw information.
- The graph is rendered according to the user input.
- Higher the sustainable indexes the better. If an indicator is below the average (red dotted line), it should be given priority to be improved.
Access: - The app at:http://adityade.shinyapps.io/plot/ - ui.R - server.R - radar.R
Note: even though the app uses the user inputs, there are calculations in the function built to plot the graph.
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How it Looks
source("radar.R")
values <- data.frame(0.4, 0.7, 0.7, 0.8, 0.2, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5)
names(values) = c("Energy","Soil","Emmissions","Biodiversity","Water","Land","Resource","Ecotoxity")
webplot(values, col="darkgreen")
