Shapira, David, Extension Service, Ministry of Agriculture, Israel;

Esquira, Itzhak, Extension Service, Ministry of Agriculture, Israel;

Edan, Yael, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

The traceability of food, feed and food-producing animals that is incorporated into a food or feed, should
be established at all stages of production, processing and distribution (regulation (EC) no 178/2002 of the
European parliament and of the council of 28 January 2002). All international supply chains are forced to
comply with these requirements. In practice, the partners involved along the chain of information towards
the retailer end have assimilated the trend. Yet, the producer end, at the starting point of the information
chain has only partially accomplished the assimilation. The main obstacle in carrying out traceability of
agricultural products and keeping transparent production is the difficulty to acquire and record the
required information in the complex farm environment of open fields or non-uniform farm structures of
varying plot size and space, product aging and susceptible to ambient, non-structured environment, and
unskilled workers. Modern packing houses and large enterprises have conformed to the traceability
requirements: they assimilated production protocols and software for data handling, thus becoming
capable to provide the tracing information when required. The problem of data collection is acute,
especially in small and medium size enterprises, particularly in developing countries. Data should be
acquired and recorded either in real time or at regular intervals. Means for data collection are bound to be
simple to operate and maintain, inexpensive, available, persistent, and unrestricted by language and
culture barriers.
The objective of this work was to incorporate worker identity, plots, yield and production inputs into a
unified database to provide means for upstream tracing and management tools for the grower.
In this work, the worker and plot were identified using barcodes. The production was measured either in
the field or in the packing house. The production's quality was evaluated along the sorting lines. As the
result of the processes' documentation and the employees' exposure to the results, we observed shifts in
production and quality.
Plot yield and quality helped to improve the decision's quality especially in fresh spices farms with short
growth cycle (about 30 days), thus, maximizing the profit per unit of area. Nevertheless, this technique
does not provide information on efficiency and working hours of an individual worker. For this purpose
we developed personal data collection systems. We examined terminals and palm-top computers,
examined methods to overcome language and culture barriers.