Analysis of Farm Management Information Systems: Opportunities and Pathways for Future Value

Managing and operating an agribusiness involves numerous complex processes, which facilitates activities from the farm fields to selling the harvest. The desire to support core farm processes using information systems is growing among the farmers. This paper evaluates 184 software systems from 130 vendors to make a comprehensive assessment of the availability and opportunities of the core farm business processes. The paper provides nine clusters of business processes and analyses how commercial farm management information systems (FMIS) support those processes. Using an archival analysis to identify the farm processes, we systematically analyzed a wealth of both crop and livestock FMIS to discover the breadth and depth of software features and their relevance in facilitating core agribusiness processes