• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
• /
• v.21 no.4
• /
• pp.474-481
• /
• 1996

Farm mechanization has been rapidly progressed in rice farming since the 1980's, in Korea. The mechanization has been achieved up to 95-97% in the year of 1995, except irrigation and drying process. However, rice production cost remains much more expensive than the cost of other rice farming countries. Since labor cost shares a major portion of the production costs, it is essential to save labor cost with automation and more sophisticated mechanization. However, it requires great capital investment which causes farm management worse. Therefore, the computer program was developed which can select machines to minimize the management and maintenance cost by analyzing available working days in different areas, machinery to purchase, farming size, total farming size in a village, number of machines and custom fee.