Changing systems for supporting farmers’ decisions: problems, paradigms, and prospects

All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact. The rest of us must painstakingly and fallibly tease out the consequences of our assumptions. (Herbert Simon in ‘The Sciences of the Artificial’, p.15) Decision support systems (DSS), like other information systems (IS) before them, were designed to serve functions deemed by ‘management scientists ’ to be potentially useful to managers. But the unwelcome fact is that the use of agricultural DSSs by managers of farms has been low. This paper probes possible reasons for this through interpretation of agricultural DSS case histories and several strands of relevant social theory. From nine cases of DSS development effort and 14 products interpreted comparatively, a number of generalisations are made that serve as reference points in the following search for explanation in theory. First, the nature of management practice of family farms is explored and differences between the internal structure governing personal action and the scientific approach to practice are contrasted. Next, the interaction between the nature of the particular action/practice and the nature of theDSS is explored. ADSS designed to provide integrated, optimal recommendations for management typifies the DSS as a proxy for a manager’s decision process. Examples of elaborate expert systems that simplywere not used dramatically illustrate the resistance of family farmers to have their decision processes by-passed. On the other hand, theDSS designed to serve as a tool in a modified decision process is shown to have experienced higher use, by deriving and exploiting ‘deep, ’ abstract information about the system, by introducing a powerful ‘logic, ’ or a combination of both