Farm management information systems: Current situation and future perspectives

Abstract

Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) in agriculture have evolved from simple farm recordkeeping into sophisticated and complex systems to support production management. The purpose of current FMIS is to meet the increased demands to reduce production costs, comply with agricultural standards, and maintain high product quality and safety. This paper presents current advancements in the functionality of academic and commercial FMIS. The study focuses on open-field crop production and centeres on farm managers as the primary users and decision makers. Core system architectures and application domains, adoption and profitability, and FMIS solutions for precision agriculture as the most information-intensive application area were analyzed. Our review of commercial solutions involved the analysis of 141 international software packages, categorized into 11 functions. Cluster analysis was used to group current commercial FMIS as well as examine possible avenues for further development. Academic FMIS involved more sophisticated systems covering compliance to standards applications, automated data capture as well as interoperability between different software packages. Conversely, commercial FMIS applications targeted everyday farm office tasks related to budgeting and finance, such as recordkeeping, machinery management, and documentation, with emerging trends showing new functions related to traceability, quality assurance and sales.