There have been many developments in technology, such as Precision Agriculture, as well as an evolution in the relationship between the farm and its environment (administration, advisers, suppliers, etc ...). All this now makes a review of the Information System of the farm necessary. In order to better understand the new environment of the farm and to better meet the new information demand from end-users, we have tried to define an up-dated general Information System for farming. This general Information System is based on a central module, to which are connected several peripheral thematic modules. One of these peripheral modules was designed for crop production, taking into account the needs of Precision Farming. Compatibility of this Information System with ISO standards for EDI in agriculture was tested, and a review of the critical points was carried out. More...

There is a growing body of measured evidence indicating the benefit derived from adoption of various Information Technology (IT) applications in agricultural production. Despite this benefit potential there is further evidence that these proven applications are not necessarily adopted or even accepted by farmers. In effect reality does not reflect the potential benefit. A quantitative example is a EUNITA project estimate, based on an eight country, 9 year software-adoption time series. It demonstrates a fundamental discrepancy between European farmer's actual adoption of available software and adoption potential. The first question is whether understanding and eliminating such discrepancies is important and of public concern. The Fifth Framework call for research proposals under the EU CAP leaves no doubt regarding their importance, relevance and public concern. The second question is - why is there such a discrepancy? The list of explanatory adoption-requirement variables is long but in many cases the explanations are insufficient. One explanation, which can be substantiated, relates to Decision Support Systems (DSS). The discrepancy is explained by the availability and adoption of equal or better risk management tools based e.g. on each farmer's perception of their personal experience. To accept this explanation such farmer differentiation-capability between IT tool's benefit-potential must be supported by empirical evidence. Two dairy and field crop examples demonstrate cases where farmers adopted innovative IT and identified specific DSS as better risk management tools. Realization of this benefit-potential explicitly motivated a high adoption rate and established farmer's willingness to finance improvement of current DSS versions. Both cases provide a basis for a formally measured first approximation explanation of the adoption/potential ratio. They clarify a critical factor explaining different adoption rates of other IT applications and suggest ways to increase this rate. More...

The paper presents the simulator SEPATOU that can reproduce the day-to-day dynamics of two interactive systems: the decision system representing the dairy farmer's management behavior and the biophysical system that encompasses the herbage production, consumption and transformation into milk. The activities to be managed concern the type and amount of conserved feed, where to fertilize and how much, the choice of fields to cut and, most importantly, what field to graze next. Typically, SEPATOU is designed to be used by extension services and farming system scientists. It provides a flexible environment through which learning about a satisfying management strategy of a given dairy production system can take place by iterating simulation and evaluation of tentative ones. More...

The past decade is characterized by major changes in the Information Technology (IT) environment in agriculture - e.g. from batch processing of management data at service centers to adoption of multiple, on-farm, IT installations. An 11 country survey identified nonstructured and variable adoption patterns with a wide range of IT specifics. Software development facilitated these changes. A time-series software-installation count provided a usefull indicator of which, how many, how fast and when software were adopted. Study of Internet implementation for agricultural extension provided additional insight and explanations of IT adoption processes. More...

The paper describes the general concepts and examples of the use of various IT tools in the classroom and in projects. More specifically, the use of GOSSYM, a cotton crop growth simulation model, as a tool to increase cotton production efficiency and minimize environmental problems is outlined. Also the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Position Systems (GPS) and expert systems in decision making is stressed in the classroom and in practice. A model class-system is presented for agricultural education and training in higher level, post-secondary Institutions and centers of education and training. The evaluation submitted by the students indicated that extensive use of IT is highly desirable and is more effective in understanding concepts and development of management strategies and decision making in agricultural production and it is also a desirable job market requirement. More...

This paper describes a method to support agricultural developers in the production of usable DSS. It has been suggested (Parker, 1997) that adopting a user-centred design approach is the only way to increase the use of DSS in agriculture. Agricultural DSS developers have specific needs for support when attempting to employ user-centred design which aren't met by existing mainstream methodologies. The aim of this paper is to describe the developers requirements for a development method and outline an approach, currently being developed in the UK, which meets there requirements. More...

Simulating greenhouses is a powerful method of testing possible structure designs. DAMOCIA-Sim is a general greenhouse simulation tool, which uses formal definitions of structures (generated by DAMOCIA-Design) in order to analyze them as radiation captors. This tool is composed by a set of independent and sometimes alternative submodels, which are related to specific physical models of given parts of the global simulation process, as the sun radiation model, cover optical behavior, solid elements shadows, etc. In this work, we present mainly a set of alternative submodels for the simulation of the effect of the greenhouse inside, as the vegetal canopy. More...

Policy management comprises three intertwined processes: the political process which produces legislation, the administrative process which enforces policy measures, and the evaluation process which leads to the adaptation of existing measures or the design of new ones. The latter processes set technical and functional constraints on information systems, whereas the former mainly determines delays. The paper describes an information system architecture meeting these requirements with five components: data management, data transmission, an application frame, a querying subsystem and a development environment. More...

The changes in society related to environmental concerns and product quality lead to higher demands. New legislation related to product liability and food safety will be a fact. Farmers are forced to prove the production quality. Farm certification is a good tool to communicate this to the consumer. In a 2-step project, the Dutch Farmers Organization, LTO-Nederland, has taken the initiative to developp an information infrastructure for the arable farming sector, aiming at flexible data collection at farm level for use in the agricultural chains. The result is a infrastructure based on a data warehouse with an Internet user interface. As a second step, it has developed an offensive policy towards farm certification. This policy consists of a low end label as a starter for the biggest group of farms. At the high end, a green label (called "Milieukeur") is available and suitable for consumer communication due to high environmental demands (based on ISO 14000). Based on his recorded data, each farmer will receive feed back on his performance. The information provided can help the farmer to analyze his strengths and weaknesses and to improve this performance. More...

The specialised information system for the sectors food, agriculture and forestry in Germany has its origin in the 50s and 60s. After many years of negotiations, the committee representing the ministries for agriculture of the various Federal States of Germany together with the Federal Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Forestry decided to set up a central administration system to become effective from January 1, 1984. The specialised information system, known in Germany as the "FIS-ELF-Verbund" (a partnership between the IT system administration and the government sectors for food, agriculture and forestry) is an important tool for the information and service sectors approaching the next millennium for information, communication and co-ordination among the government, scientific research institutions, the economy and society at large. Its international and European orientation will be further enhanced. More...

The Rural Business Network (RBN) in the UK was established in 1996 and was described in some detail at the first EFITA conference in Copenhagen in 1997. The system has proved moderately successful but has not achieved the number of users that the owners had hoped for. It has therefore been decided to re-launch the service, packaged in a different way. This paper takes an honest look at the successes and failures with the RBN and uses recent survey data explain the rationale for the new RBN service content. More...

This paper highlights the important role that information technology now plays in the operation and management of agricultural extension services (AES). The early use of computerised business management services in the 1960s to the present day use of Internet and Intranet services is reviewed along with examples of information technology (IT) applications from advisory and extension services around the world. The impact of reducing government expenditure on advisory services has led to the widescale adoption of IT by AES in an effort to contain or even reduce costs. The need to commercialise AES has also resulted in the development of IT-based products in order to offer services that are attractive to the clients of AES. The need for capital expenditure initially and in the longer term needs to be based on clear business objectives and supported by robust business plans. Most AES have adopted IT in two main areas of activity. Firstly to support the advisory and extension processes in working with farmers and agribusiness. This includes the development of a wide range of applications software covering such areas as business management, animal nutrition and breeding, crop husbandry, irrigation, buildings, drainage and farm waste systems design, marketing and investment appraisal. In addition, much emphasis has been placed on information collection and dissemination of time critical information such as weather, markets, pests and diseases etc. The electronic storage and retrieval of information has also been a long term goal of AES which has met with mixed success but new Internet style technologies and reducing hardware costs seem to have overcome previous obstacles in this area. Secondly, AES have used IT to improve the management of their operations by investing in a range of management information systems covering the areas of finance, staff, clients and work programmes. This has enabled AES to become more responsive to clients and at the same time more accountable to their funders. The future potential for use of IT by AES is also reviewed and consideration to such areas as modelling, decision support systems, pattern recognition and satellite-based systems is given. The pressures on agriculture to reduce its impact on the environment, improve its record on food safety and utilise more animal-friendly production systems will push extension services into the development and adoption of IT systems to assist farmers to meet these challenges. Finally, a few comments are offered on the role of IT in support of emerging extension services in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC). More...

Faced with increasing uncertainty as to the future, many farmers need, in order to make optimum choices, a regular evaluation of their farm's performances. To cope with a more and more uncertain environment, the farmer needs to evaluate the economic situation of his farm regularly, i.e. set up an economic diagnosis. For ten years, several advisory centres which are in charge in France of farm management diagnosis, use expert system to computerise such a diagnosis. They have found that the diagnosis quality mainly relies on quality of information used. And specially for a type of specific information: references. This was the aim of a study leaded at the E.N.I.T.A. with these advisory centres. The goal was to formalize a reference approach in order to build a new software, linked with an expert system, for producing automatically references adapted to the farm diagnosis, but also other uses of references in an advisory centre. Such a reference approach is presented in this paper, then the steps for building a reference software is presented. More...

This paper presents a spatial multi-agent programming model which has been developed for assessing policy options in the diffusion of innovations and resource use changes. Unlike conventional simulation models used in agricultural economics, the model presented here applies a cellular automata approach and starts from the bottom by using autonomously acting farms and capturing the interactions among them endogenously. The individual choice of the farmer among available production, consumption, investment and marketing alternatives is represented in recursive linear programming models. Adoption constraints are introduced in form of network-threshold values that reflect the cumulative effects of experience and observation of peers' experiences. The simulation runs of the model are carried out using a stylized data set which has been derived from empirical data of an agricultural region in Chile. Simulation results show that cellular automata modelling constitutes a powerful approach to better understand processes of land use change. More...

The paper describes the training processes, the results obtained, and the ongoing efforts in the framework of two co-operative Italian programs concerning information technology and communication. The aim of both programs was to enhance the active participation of the researchers in the emerging information world in order to exploit the information potential of the 23 Institutes of Agricultural Research Experimentation belonging to the Italian Ministry of Agricultural and Food Policy (MiPA). More...