Obstacles and features of Farm Management Information Systems : A systematic literature review

Various Farm Management Information Systems (FMISs) have been developed to support the management of the farm businesses. These FMISs typically support the different domains of the agricultural sector, such as arable and dairy farming; and include different set of features, such as crop, field, and financial management. These FMISs also have to deal with diverse obstacles during their development and adoption, such as lack of standardized data, cost and usability. Though several papers have been published in the past several years on this topic, there has been no explicit attempt to systematically review these papers to identify and characterize the features and obstacles. The objective of this study is to identify and describe the state-of-the-art of FMISs and as such pave the way for further research and development of FMISs. We applied a systematic literature review protocol in which we included the literature published from 2008 to 2018. We found 1048 papers of which 38 papers were selected as primary studies that we analyzed further in detail. From the detailed analysis, we identified 81 unique FMIS features and 51 unique obstacles of FMISs. We have systematically ranked the identified features and obstacles and describe the key associated aspects. These aspects include the agricultural domains, modeling approaches, delivery models, and identified stakeholders.