Farm Management Information Systems: Current situation and future perspectives

Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) in agriculture have evolved from simple farm record-keeping into sophisticated and complex systems to support production management and meet the increased demands to reduce production costs, comply with agricultural standards, and maintain high product quality and safety. This paper presents advancements in FMIS functionality from both academic and commercial perspectives. The study focuses on open field crop production and centres 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 analysed. Our review of commercial solutions involved the analysis of 141 international software packages, categorizing them into 11 functions. Cluster analysis was used to group current commercial FMIS and examine possible avenues of development according to research outcome. Academic FMIS involved more sophisticated systems covering complying 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.