Ecofert: An Android application for the optimization of fertilizer cost in fertigation

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. In the agriculture sector, the efficient management of fertilizers is reflected into a saving of money and time. Many software developments are found in the scientific literature and in the market that optimize the performance and use of fertilizers for specific crops. Most of them do not take into account the current price of fertilizers; and others show a high computational cost, which means high time to solve scenarios with medium-high number of fertilizers to select and high power consumption, being not suitable for mobile devices. In this work Ecofert is presented as a simple and powerful software application developed for Android O.S. that calculates the best combination of fertilizers to obtain the desired nutrient solution for different crops, taking into account the current price of fertilizers in the market. The main novelties of Ecofert is, on the one hand, that it solves the fertilization selection by modeling this as a Linear Programming problem, and using specific mathematical libraries to solve it. On the other hand, Ecofert works with a list of commercial fertilizers hosted in a Data Base in the Cloud, where the composition and price (in Euro) is updated daily. Moreover Ecofert shows a low computational cost, even for large number of fertilizers (>20). Its simplicity permits Ecofert to be executed in mobile devices, giving farmers and agriculture technicians a powerful tool to support agricultural tasks in situ.