Dairy Farm Simulator

A whole dairy farm simulator, driven by scientific crop and animal models

A demo video of the simulator can be downloaded at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4sioxu2pmakkews/jablus-demo.ogv?dl=0

Instructions

To get the simulator up and running:

1. Download the program at: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Cride5/jablus/master/dist/jablus-1.0.jar
2. Double click on jablus.jar to start the simulator
3. If it won't start, make sure the Java Runtime Environment is installed on your computer. It can be downloaded here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

Once the program is running you can:

• Manage Livestock
  1. Buy or sell them (market tab on left)
  2. Buy or sell feeds for the livestock (market tab)
  3. Assign feeds offered to cows – in kg/cow (livestock tab on left)
  4. Manage percentage of heifers and cows confined (livestock tab)
• Manage Crops 5. Sew grass, maize or wheat (right click over field) 6. Assign grass fields for grazing 7. Harvest grass for silage, or wheat/maize for fodder 8. Plough fields
• Move on to next month (Next button on bottom right)

These visualisations provide feedback on what's going on:

1. Stores of cattle, feeds and manure (top)
2. Map of fields (crop-type, expected yield, soil water, soil nitrates, nitrate leaching)
3. Weather graph and balance graph (right)
4. Balance Sheet (market tab)
5. Time - conspicuously hidden under the bottom left of the map!Dairy Farm Simulator

Improvements

There are a lot of things which could be improved upon with this simulator. These are a few things which come to mind:

• Help
  • Detailed web-based instructions
  • Initial pop-up to explain the scenario
  • Tool tips to explain buttons and visuals
• Livestock Management
  • A visualisation to show the herd in more detail, with info on the age of the animals and the lactation number/stage
  • Information on how much offered feed is being consumed to help in choosing an appropriate diet
• Crop Management
  • Ability buy/sell fertiliser and apply it to fields
  • Ability to apply manure to fields
  • Keys on the map visualisations
• Farm management
  • Ability to buy extra buildings (storage space)
  • Information on how well the farm is running
    • Pollution (Nitrate leaching, wasted manure)
    • Environmental Friendliness (set aside land, lower fertiliser use)
    • Productivity (animals, milk, crops)
    • Level of self sufficiency
• Market
  • Show graph of changing buying and sale prices of feeds, fertilisers, cattle and milk
  • how pop-up summarising financial performance at end of year
• Time
  • Time-line showing how far through the simulation we are and what year/month it is
• Weather
  • Instead of the graph given, a wee bar at the top showing a BBC-style 5-day forecast
• Decision-Making
  • Ability to input any number of decisions/reasons for each round

Building from Source

Instructions for linux build.

1. Install prerequisites

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
sudo apt-get install ant

2. Build the jar file and run

ant jar
java -jar dist/jablus-1.0.jar

License

GNU Public License Version 3

Author

Conrad Rider

Publications

• Methodology for eliciting, encoding and simulating human decision making behaviour