A Website for Delivering Key Date Information to Farmers in Support of Legal Compliance

A DSS designed to support farmers participating in the Rural Environment Protection Scheme to remain compliant with legal requirements is described. There are 38 universal critical dates (e.g. “March 1st Bird nesting, hedgerow maintenance prohibited”) and many farm plan specific dates (e.g. “shed painted by end of May 2009”). Framers can incur financial penalties for non-compliance with key dates. Farmers register through a web site and provide farm plan specific information to the system. Thereafter the farmer receives reminders by SMS to a mobile phone on or before the key date. Some key dates have multiple messages delivered at various different stages warning of forthcoming events. The system also provides calculation explanation for targets set out in the farm plan and links to legislation documents that govern the scheme. This paper describes the dynamic web based system development and deployment. After trials with sample users of the system, it was concluded that there was a need, a demand and a place in the Irish farming community for such decision support systems. As implemented the DSS uses technology already adopted by the farming community, which was key to the successful deployment.