Feed Calculator for Small Farms

Client

Bradley Marshall, the Piggery
Email: brad@thepiggery.net
Telephone: (607) 342-0551
You can use text messages to contact the client.

Background

The client is one of the owners of the Piggery (http://www.thepiggery.net), which runs a family-owned butcher shop in Ithaca and a farm in Trumansburg, NY.

Project Requirements

Small farms, such as the Piggery, face a continuing challenge in determining what food mixture is best for the animals they raise. Given the various feed stuffs that are available they have to ensure a correct mix of nutrients while minimizing the cost. The overall objective of this project is to provide a program or suite of programs that small farms can use to make these decisions. The client envisages a web based system that is a community resource available to other farmers.

Here are some of the proposed features of the system:

• Database of nutrient contents of standard feed stuffs.
• Feed mixture calculator that calculates the nutritional values for a set of feed stuffs.
• Price optimization calculator that minimizes the cost of feed given nutritional constraints. (This can be formulated as a linear programming problem.)
• A database that allows each farm to input cost and nutritional data for the feed that is available.

Technical considerations

The client has a technical background and expects to maintain the system himself. He is most familiar with PHP, Python, and SQL.

Many of the small farmers who will use this system do not have a technical background and the system will need to be easy to use by them.