Expert Systems and Farm Management

We have found that expert system technology is suitable to solving problems in farm management, for example, the fertilizer problem, because of several important features. First, the incremental development process is exploratory by nature, and hence it aids in the formalization of ill-structured and poorly understood problems. Second, explicit representation schemes make it easy to understand and modify knowledge; thus, it is much easier to make changes to a developing system. Third, through the use of extensive domain knowledge, an expert system considers only relevant information and is able to reduce difficult problems down to a manageable size. Finally, the ability of an expert system to provide explanations and justification for its recommendations decreases user scepticism and makes it possible to ensure that a system's results are accurate. The construction of the FSA prototype has demonstrated the feasibility of applying expert system technology and techniques to a single farm management task. It is our estimation that this approach to increasing access to decision support resources in agriculture will continue on as a trend in the future.