Harnessing Information Technology (IT) for Use in Production Agriculture

Internet based, Information Technology (IT) offers opportunities to agricultural scientists to share information important to production agriculture. We offer an objective view for how IT can be used to manipulate data, information, and knowledge. The application of these technologies in other domains serves as a lesson to how they might be used to benefit production agriculture. We discuss three related technologies that have the potential to improve information flow among agricultural stakeholders and identify a number of trends (increased robustness, standardization of data formats, and reduced cost of implementation) that make them impor- tant tools for production agriculture.