New Thinking About Farmer Decision Makers

In the late 1970s, agricultural scientists embarked on the exciting new adventure to make decision support systems for farmers. Two decades later, with my colleagues, Peter Carberry and Zvi Hochman, I set out to understand why farmers have not valued these products more. We began by visiting developers of some of the major decision support systems (DSSs) in the USA and Australia and hearing their stories of development and delivery. This effort led to the publication by some of these key players of their experiences and learnings in a Special Issue of Agricultural Systems (Vol. 74, No. 1, 2002), entitled ‘Probing the Enigma of the Decision Support System for Farmers.’ Beyond our interest in documenting significant DSS projects while key participants were still accessible, we felt that stimulation of critical reflection on the DSS experience could be valuable to a research community that by and large interpreted any past DSS ‘failure’ as a good idea being ‘ahead of its time’—ahead of farmers’ readiness for this technology. Controversially, the Special Issue openly confronted the possibility that the DSS for farming may be an idea ‘whose future is past’ (Ackoff, 1979; McCown, 2002b).