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Cell phone app for farm fuel budget
Farmers can use a new Farm Fuel Budget cellphone app to plan their farm fuel budget and use for the next year or more.
Farmers can use a new Farm Fuel Budget cellphone app to plan their farm fuel
budget and use for the next year or more.
John Nowatzki, North Dakota State University Extension Service agricultural
machine systems specialist, developed the Android cellphone app for crop
producers to compare projected fuel costs and use for their farming operation
based on alternate crop acreages, tillage systems and crop rotations.
The app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store, which is accessible from
the market app on Android cellphones.
Users select the number of acres they intend to plant each year and acreage for
each crop, then select the field operations they will use for each crop. The app
estimates the fuel cost by year.
The amount of fuel budgeted for each field operation is based on the machinery
cost estimates published annually by the University of Minnesota Extension.
These fuel consumption estimates are based on the assumption of 0.044 gallon of
diesel fuel per power takeoff horsepower-hour, on average, for each implement
type.
Users can select the number of acres allocated to each crop to compare total
farm fuel use based on the same number of acres.
"This feature is intended to help crop producers quickly see the difference in
fuel consumption on their farm by changing the number of acres allocated to each
crop," Nowatzki says. "Because field operations vary significantly for each type
of crop, changing the number of acres of each crop grown impacts the total fuel
cost for the farm."
By choosing the field operations on each crop, users can use the Farm Fuel
Budget app to evaluate the effects of various tillage systems on fuel use.
Because each field operation requires
a different amount of fuel per acre, users quickly can see the impact on fuel
costs by eliminating or adding specific field operations for each crop.
The last user input for the app is to enter the projected fuel cost per gallon.
Crop producers can use this feature to see the effect of projected fuel prices
on their total fuel budget.
Users are encouraged to evaluate the Farm Fuel Budget app on the Google Play
website at https://play.google.com and search for Farm Fuel Budget.
