Industry Leaders solve compliance issue
with QALink
Perth based agribusiness
companies, Fairport Technologies and Computronics Corporation Ltd
have announced plans to
launch QALink, a system that delivers verified spray application
data in an industry-approved format.
QALink was jointly developed
by Computronics Corporation, the company behind Farmscan Spraycontrollers
and Fairport
Technologies who developed PAM Ausvit, PAM Ultracrop and
PAM QA Plus farm management software.
The joint project
has solved compatibility issues between machine controller hardware
and farm management software
to provide a low cost record keeping system that requires
minimal input from operators.
QALink provides the same Spray
Diary features as PAM Ausvit farm management software programs already
used by corporate
wineries and will be distributed free of charge to all
growers. An optional add-on viticultural specific chemical
database/knowledgebase module (produced and upgraded annually
by the CRC of Viticulture) will be available for grape
producers at a small cost.
The QALink Spray Diary will
run on Windows 95/98/NT and XP operating systems and can be used
either as a manual
record keeping system or can be updated automatically with
verified data from Farmscan spray rate controllers.
When
used with a Farmscan spray controller, the operator scrolls through
job selections by block name/number and
the spray rate is automatically set and controlled according
to ground speed and number of sections activated.
A data
card in the controller records job date, start and finish times,
rate applied, average speed, area covered
and distance travelled for a virtually unlimited number
of stored jobs which can be updated into the QALink record
keeping program at any time.
Weather conditions and chemical
batch numbers are manually recorded by the operator and can be fed
back to the office
on a run sheet. It is envisaged that those inputs will
be automated in future as suitable technology becomes available.
Delivery
of grower’s QA Link data to wineries can
be achieved in any one of three ways: via data export from
QA Link to Fairport’s PAM QA AusVit MultiClient program,
uploading to a web based data viewing platform or by faxing
printouts of QA Link’s AWRI compliant reports. Web
based delivery of QALink data to wineries will be introduced
using existing infrastructure already established by Fairport
Technologies.
QALink has undergone extensive field-testing
over the past year and will be officially launched for
free download
from the Internet on January 1st 2005. Registered users
will be updated as new developments are released.
QALink
can be previewed at the Viticulture 04 Conference in Mildura on October
26th to 28th. For further information,
contact Fairport Technologies on 08 93675814 or Stefan
Lombardo at Computronics on 08 9470 1177.
|
