1. BHR
— box harvest rate per picker, expressed as number
of boxes (90 lb/box by weight) of fruit harvested
per hr or boxes/hr.
2. H
— tree height, ft.
3. NHR — number harvest rate per picker, expressed as
number of fruit harvested per hr or fruit/hr.
4. PBHR — predicted box harvest rate per picker, expressed
as the number of boxes (90 lb/box by weight) of
fruit harvested per hr or boxes/hr.
5. PNHR — predicted number harvest rate per picker, expressed as number of fruit harvested per hr or
fruit/hr.
6. S
— fruit size, expressed as number of fruit per 90-lb
box, and was calculated by dividing 90 by the
average fruit weight in lb from the fruit samples.
7. Y
— fruit yield per unit area, expressed as boxes/acre.
8. Number cropping efficiency is the average number of fruit
per unit canopy volume expressed as fruit/ft3.
9. Weight cropping efficiency is the weight of fruit per unit
canopy volume expressed as lb/ft3.
Reprinted from
Proc. Fla. State Hort. Soc. 108:118-121. 1995.
CITRUS PRODUCTION DECISIONS MAY BE AIDED BY NETWORK RESOURCES1
J. DAVID M ARTSOLF
University of Florida, IFAS
Horticultural Sciences Dept.
Gainesville, FL 32611
Additional index words. Email, e-mail, E-mail, electronic mail,
telecommunications, Internet, networks, DISC.
Abstract. A series of experiences with electronic mail [e-mail]
as a replacement for conventional mail, telephone communications and commuting to meetings is described with the intent that readers will be encouraged to choose e-mail more
frequently and use it more effectively. E-mail was used extensively to put together a research proposal involving a team
with members at remote locations which was presented to the
Florida Citrus Production Research Advisory Council
[FCPRAC]. The proposal described the flow of weather information through existing communication networks and into
models of the activity of weather sensitive pests and stresses
of Citrus. Although the proposal was not funded, the effectiveness of e-mail in fostering such collaborative efforts led to the
contemplation of a Citrus Production Model which features a
weather information front end and an interpretive back end
with the middle a stack of weather sensitive pest and stress
1
Florida Agricultural Experiment Station Journal Series No. N-01232. Mr. Peter
D. Spyke, is gratefully acknowledged for the concept and inspiration underlying the
Citrus Production Model. Dr. Robert M. Peart is gratefully acknowledged for many
of the modeling and artificial intelligence aspects of that model. Mr. Norman Todd
and Dr. L. K. Jackson played key roles in the deliberations about the FSHS and the
NWS. Mr. Daniel L. Smith, Mr. Charles Paxton, and Mr. Ira Brenner, all of the
NWS, have responded faithfully and effectively to e-mail inquiries regarding the
Agricultural Weather Program. Dr. C. Terry Morrow, Professor, The Pennsylvania
State University, provided encouragement and technical information via e-mail in
response to inquiries over the past decade. The author’s e-mail address is
[email protected]. Mention of commercial products implies no endorsement by
either the author or the institution for which he works.
118
models. The purpose of the back end is to protect the user
from being overwhelmed with the information that is expected
to flow from such models. It is hoped that the model will be
able to learn things about the user that will make it more efficient. The remaining experiences have to do with the introduction of e-mail into the FSHS Board of Directors
communications, and a possibility of its use to interface members of the Board with advisors in the Horticultural Industries
in regard to the selection of papers. The selection of papers of
higher industry interest is expected to make it easier to attract
both new members and better papers.
The purpose of this report is to describe several situations in
which electronic mail [e-mail] played a productive role in deliberations that impact citrus production decisions and decisions within
the Florida State Horticultural Society [FSHS]. It is hoped that
these experiences inspire some readers to experiment with e-mail
in their communications with FSHS, other growers and perhaps
with sources of weather information. The intention is to convince
the reader to become more proficient with this means of communication by using it.
Experience confirms that effective use of the communications
method increases with use (Elmer-DeWitt, 1995; Pike, 1995).
There are more users every day and this increases the opportunity
to substitute e-mail for telephone, FAX, or snail mail [as the e-mail
enthusiasts refer to conventional mail] (Swerdlow et al., 1995;
Rogers, 1995). Increased use of the network is forecasted rather
convincingly by leaders in the microcomputer revolution (ElmerDeWitt, 1995). One reason is that it is friction free (Gates, 1995).
Last year a delightful experience with the use of e-mail in distance education was described to the Society (Martsolf, 1994a).
That experience occurred in conjunction with several experiences
described here and all of these grew from experiences over the past
15 years with the networking of weather information, and especially satellite images (Martsolf, 1994b).
Proc. Fla. State Hort. Soc. 108: 1995.
Materials and Methods
E-mail: A conventional personal computer [microcomputer]
with either an internal or external modulator-demodulator [modem] and the software that permits the computer to interface with
another modem via a telephone line is all that the user sees of the
system (Fig. 1). There are numerous books available to help one set
up an e-mail system and troubleshoot it (e.g., Pike, 1995).
Another method is encouragement by a person who has accumulated experience through having a number of students imitate
the methods and materials found in his experience to be user
friendly. A combination of these two methods has been productive
for this author. It is very nice to have an experienced colleague
whom one can contact by e-mail who seems to be delighted to get
back quickly with sound advice and encouragement. The term guru
is used for such experts. In this case, Dr. C. Terry Morrow, The
Pennsylvania State University, has responded to a lot of interrogation from this worker over the years, mostly in the past decade by
e-mail. But there are times when meeting face to face is more effective. Several of these meetings occurred in which new methods
were demonstrated and troubleshooting tips were exchanged.
Weather Services: The University of Florida and what is now
known as the National Weather Service [NWS] have had a cooperative agreement in place since 1935 which has provided joint
support for the Federal-State Frost Warning Service, later broadened to the Agricultural Weather Service [AWS]. The Florida
State Horticultural Society [FSHS] played a key role in the initiation of that service. For several decades the AWS portion of the
NWS budget has been a target in the budget cutting negotiations
but has been always reinstated, often at the last minute, by Congress. This time the likelihood is that AWS will not be replaced in
the budget. Not only is the Federal State Frost Warning Service
provided out of the NWS facility in Ruskin ending on April 1,
1996, but also services supplied by the Agricultural Weather Service Center [AWSC] located in Auburn will cease on that date as
well.
The only viable long range solution is a process called privatization in which the private sector with profit motives provide
services to those who value them sufficiently to purchase them
Figure 1. E-mail involves a network link [often via Internet] through which
computer users communicate by sending and receiving messages using their PCs.
Enclosures and attachments of files are becoming more commonplace. A modem
permits the computer to link to a phone line and through it to a provider of Internet
access. AOL® [America Online] and CompuServe® are but two examples of such
agents or providers of services.
Proc. Fla. State Hort. Soc. 108: 1995.
from any number of competitors who are in or expected to enter the
market place.
Interim possibilities are not as clear. Mr. John L. Jackson
called a meeting of interested growers and IFAS workers on March
19, 1996, in Tavares. A number of possibilities were discussed at
length and many of them included strategies that would continue
both the services from Ruskin and those from Auburn that are dedicated to agriculture. None of those plans was successful. As of
April 1, 1996, NWS is out of the Agricultural Weather Service.
Weather Advisory Committee: The Federal-State Frost Warning Service and more recently the broader Agricultural Weather
Service provided by the Forecasters at the Tampa Bay Weather
Service Office in Ruskin, have listened to an Advisory Committee
from the agricultural industries served. One of these long time advisors has been Mr. Norman Todd [[email protected]], now
with Bob Paul, Inc., La Belle. More recently Mr. Peter Spyke [[email protected]], Arapaho Citrus Management, Inc., agreed to
serve on that committee as well. He and Mr. Todd met with the
NWS forecasters at Ruskin on October 20, 1994. Other advisors
such as Dr. Larry K. Jackson, Mr. John L. Jackson, and Mr. Thomas W. Oswalt sent their suggestions via e-mail [they are lkj, jljj,
two, all of these @gnv.ifas.ufl.edu]. During that meeting Mr.
Spyke described a need by the industry for the outputs from weather sensitive models, such as Dr. Peter W Timmer’s Melanose Model. Mr. Spyke asked 1] if the forecasters could run such models and
2] if there was appropriate output, could it be incorporated into
their agricultural weather advisories. The idea was received with
enthusiasm by the forecasters. They have the necessary computer
skills and could visualize that this process would make their service of greater value to agriculture. This author agreed to organize
a proposal to the Florida Production Research Advisory Council
[FCPRAC] before the deadline in January of 1995. E-mail was
used to facilitate that proposal development. The proposal was
submitted and defended, but failed to attract funding. During the
Summer of 1995, it became increasingly apparent that NWS would
no longer be permitted to provide specialized services to agriculture and perhaps to other special interest groups as well (Martsolf,
1995b).
The Florida State Horticultural Society: During their annual
meeting in October of 1994, members of the Board of the Directors
of FSHS requested that this author accept a nomination for Secretary. In the process he was asked to use his experience in network
use (Martsolf, 1994a) to aid FSHS in its desire to facilitate communications over long distances. The election of a secretary who resides in Gainesville, several hours by car from where the FSHS
Headquarters [HQ] exists near Orlando, places a lot of pressure on
getting the HQ a link to Internet. Experiments with several possibilities in early 1995 resulted in a link of the FSHS HQ ([email protected]) with America Online® [AOL] in mid 1995.
When Mr. Chet Townsend ([email protected]) set up the
Ultimate Citrus Page on Internet (http://members.aol.com/chettown/citrus/organizations.html) he included a paragraph on the
FSHS under Citrus Organizations. In that paragraph he set up “hot”
e-mail addresses to the FSHS HQ, to the President, to the Secretary, the Treasurer, and to the Vice President of the Citrus Section.
During the writing of this manuscript, a draft was sent as an attachment to an e-mail message to Mr. Townsend in the hope that he
would review the manuscript and make a copy for Mr. Norman
Todd who lives nearby. Mr. Townsend asked permission to place
a draft of this manuscript on the Internet with a hot link to it from
this reference to the FSHS in the Ultimate Citrus Page. The counter
on that on the Ultimate Citrus Page was reading 1,031 when this
author visited the page on January 23, 1996.
119
Results and Discussion
Citrus Production Model [CPM]: Figure 2 depicts the model
that developed from discussions which took place largely by email. The model is a direct outgrowth of the advice that Mr. Spyke
gave to the weather forecasters at Ruskin in October of 1994 and
modified by extensive discussions between Mr. Spyke, Dr. Robert
M. Peart, Dr. Pete Timmer and to some extent by this author. It was
the primary concept proposed to the FCPRAC during their deliberations in the Spring of 1995. Although the Council did not fund the
effort there has been encouragement from other quarters, much of
it moved by e-mail.
E-mail was used to set up two meeting. The first occurred during the FSHS/FACTS meetings in Orlando in October of 1994. Mr.
Spyke made arrangement for a number of Citrus Horticulturists
and Engineers from Lake Alfred to meet with a few workers from
Gainesville in the laboratory of Dr. James Ragusa at the University
of Central Florida. Dr. Ragusa was previously a NASA employee
and is in the process of completing a 3-year grant funded by NASA
in which he has used knowledge engineering and expert systems
effectively. He led a discussion [12 attended] of how these tools
may benefit the Citrus Industry and proposed to put together a
workshop at a later date in which the knowledge engineers and domain experts could gain experience in how decision making tools
are developed. On hearing about this interest, Vice President James
M. Davidson invited Mr. Spyke to view the knowledge engineering efforts taking place within the Agricultural Engineering Department of IFAS in Gainesville. Mr. Spyke accepted the invitation
and asked if he could also invite several of those around the industry and within IFAS to view the demonstrations with him. Dr. Otto
J. Loewer, Chairman of the Department, set up a two day meeting
on 19-20 February 1996, which was attended by 40 growers and
workers. The arrangements and invitations were handled by e-mail
and much of the discussion since that meeting has also occurred
over the internet. The participants voted to call the effort from that
point forward DISC for Decision Information System for Citrus.
Mr. Chet Townsend placed an early draft of this paper on the network as a homepage [http://members.aol.com/chettown/fshs/
martsolf.html] and developed a home page for DISC by the end of
the second day of that meeting, i.e. 20 February [http://members.aol.com/chettown/disc/disc.html]. Arrangements are being
made by e-mail for the group of interested workers to meet in Lake
Alfred for a day near the end of April, 1996.
FSHS Membership Crisis: E-mail has played a part in documenting the membership of FSHS. In a letter [dated 13 September
1995] to the Officers and Board of Directors of FSHS and FACTS,
Figure 2. A simplification of the model that developed from discussions that
took place largely over the network by e-mail. The front end and back ends are highly dependent on techniques involving artificial intelligence.
120
Dr. Adair Wheaton included a graph of the member counts reported in the Proceedings since 1962. These data were used to support
an argument that FSHS and FACTS should merge their annual
meetings and how the responsibility for the meeting agendas
should be divided between the two organizations.
When contacted by e-mail regarding the source of the figures,
Dr. Wheaton verified that they came from the summaries of the
minutes of the FSHS Board of Directors and sent the list back by
e-mail. Those data were copied from the e-mail message to a charting program from which Figure 3 was developed, first for the
Board of Directors meeting and then shown to the membership attending the Annual Business Meeting on October 24, 1995, in Orlando. The actual member numbers for the period from 1989
through 1995 were obtained from the membership data base and
plotted as the short record the graph shows in Fig. 3. FSHS holds a
member on the list even when his/her dues have not been updated
for the current year, i.e., the assumption seems to be that the member will likely pay those dues. When the membership was increasing the assumption that all of those who were a year behind in their
payments would eventually pay was better than it is when membership is decreasing. The Board has been encouraged to use the actual membership numbers in their deliberations and especially in
regard to how many copies of the proceedings they should have
printed. The point here is that e-mail was used effectively to exchange data between Dr. Wheaton, the Clerk of FSHS, and this author and from those communications these data became available
and were published.
Advisory committees and e-mail: In Dr. Wheaton’s letter [unpublished] he recommended that the relationship between FACTS
and FSHS place the responsibility for the Trade Show with FACTS
and for the educational program with FSHS. The FSHS Vice Presidents who serve the Society by soliciting papers for their section
are reporting to the Board that this activity is getting more and
more difficult. Before the selection of papers for the 1995 Citrus
Section, then Vice President Dr. David Calvert agreed to contact
Mr. Norman Todd in regard to a method that had worked well
when Mr. Todd was VP of the Citrus Section. The key feature was
that Mr. Todd contacted a number of members from the Citrus Industry with a general question as to what they would like to hear
presented at the Annual Meeting and read about later in the proceedings. As a program theme began to develop from these contacts, he took the opportunity to describe what was developing and
asked them if they found the possibilities attractive.
Figure 3. The longer record is the membership as published in the summaries of
the minutes for the years 1962 through 1995 [from Wheaton’s letter]. The shorter
record depicts the actual membership from 1989 through 1995.
Proc. Fla. State Hort. Soc. 108: 1995.
Dr. Calvert used the advisory committee technique to solicit
papers that his committee indicated would be attractive to members of the industry. In reviewing the success of this method with
Dr. Calvert and with the VP Elect of the Citrus Section, Dr. Larry
Parsons, the scheme depicted in Fig. 4 developed. The major problems with convening advisory committees is the search for a time
and place when the committee can meet and the travel time in getting there. E-mail was shown to be a solution to such problems in
regard to students who would otherwise have to commute to
Gainesville twice a week [Martsolf, 1994a] and may serve to be a
way through which a VP of FSHS could interface efficiently with
an advisory committee. This would put the Vice Presidents in a
stronger position to effectively handle their educational responsibility, if FACTS and FSHS should elect to combine their annual
meetings in the future [as they did in 1995]. Dr. Wheaton’s advice
[in the letter previously mentioned] would hold the FSHS VP responsible for both the FSHS and the FACTS educational programs. Two advantages to the use of Advisory Committees
become apparent:
1] The advisory committee communicates to the FSHS Vice
President what the current areas of interest are, i.e., what papers are
most likely to draw members to the annual meeting and readers to
the proceedings.
2] The advisory committee upon making a suggestion that a
particular author report cause pressure to be brought to bear upon
the prospective author to go to the trouble and expense of preparing
and delivering the report. Most authors are more receptive to demands from a group than they are to those from individuals, especially when members of that group may be in position to make
judgments about the value of contributions of the author to the industry.
Electronic Publishing: During 1995, deliberations took place
in which bids were received from three firms for the contract to
publish the FSHS Proceedings. In the process, it became apparent
that many of the communications that were occurring between the
Editor and the Publisher, and between the Associate Editors and
the authors could take place by e-mail and in the process cut not
only the time it takes these to occur but also the expense. While the
implementation of many of the possibilities have yet to take place
there is at least one that can be held up at this point as an example
of how e-mail is being used by FSHS. The Editor, Dr. Norman
Childers, who has not been supplied with a computer by IFAS as
yet, indicated that he was willing to try out the method so that his
communication with the publisher [Jeffrey B. Johnston, [email protected]] can be facilitated. The publisher has indicated a
very strong desire to discuss a number of ways in which the submission of papers to the proceedings can be made more efficient
through the use of the network, resulting in savings in both time
and money.
The experiment that was described at the close of a previous
section on Methods and Materials in which Mr. Chet Townsend
placed a copy of this manuscript on a server so that it could be accessed with Internet browsers demonstrates one of the methods
that may be used to move written reports to readers quite rapidly.
The text survived the conversion in perfect shape but there remains
some work to be done so that the figures are reproduced faithfully.
Summary
Experiences with e-mail in the development of a team approach to a Citrus Production Model development, and to three areas of concern within the FSHS, i.e., membership number
decrease, solicitation of papers for the proceedings, and their publication electronically, have been described with the intent of encouraging readers of this report [Holland, 1995] to develop e-mail
capability if they do not already have it and for those who have it
to utilize it more effectively and efficiently.
Literature Cited
Elmer-DeWitt, Philip. 1995. Bill Gates, A billionaire genius, he strove to turn the
info superhighway into a virtual marketplace. Time 146(26):100-101.
Engst, Adam C. 1993. Internet Starter Kit. Hayden Books, Indianapolis, IN, 641 pp.
[email protected].
Gates, Bill. 1995. The Road Ahead. Viking Penguin, USA. 286 pp.
Holland, Mariann. 1995. Editorial. Citrus Industry 76(10):8.
Martsolf, J. David. 1994a. Distance Learning Citrus. Proc. Fla. State Hort. Soc.
107:51-54.
Martsolf, J. D. 1994b. Transferring GOES Image Technology to Potential Users in
Agriculture. Preprint Vol. 7th Conf. on Satellite Meteorol. and Oceanography,
Amer. Meteorol. Soc., Boston, Mass. pages 459-462.
Martsolf, J. David. 1995a. Using Internet in distance education. HortScience
30(4):900.
Martsolf, J. David. 1995b. The end of the agricultural weather service. Citrus Industry 76(10):14.
Pike, Mary Ann. 1995. Using the Internet with your Mac. Que Corp. 927 pp.
Rogers, Steven. 1995. Farmers on the Internet: a vital resource for sustaining our
future food supply. Citrus Industry 76(9):36-40.
Swerdlow, Joel L., Louie Psihoyos, and Allen Carroll. 1995. Information revolution. Natl. Geographic 188(4):5-37.
Figure 4. Diagram of proposed scheme through which FSHS Sectional Vice
Presidents would communicate with a Sectional Advisory Committee without having to call a meeting involving a lot of travel time and scheduling problems.
Proc. Fla. State Hort. Soc. 108: 1995.
121